Lately I finished reading the famous patterns book by Martin Fowler - Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. This book introduces and describes design patterns you will usually see when building enterprise applications. There are also examples for patterns and although they are simple and primitive they give you the idea how to implement or use specific patterns. If you are working on enterprise applications every day you will find this book very useful and I’m sure you will use it as manual.

Today I worked out simple application side object locking solution for one server scenario. My motivation came from ASP.NET architecture forum thread How to solve concurrent site issue where one user asks for locking solution that works without changing database. Here is my simple and primitive solution that should help this guy out. I added also sample solution to this posting.

Today I tried out ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Helpers Toolkit by Dean Hume. Although browsers today support HTML5 partially it is time to start playing with it. As soon as HTML5 gets common standard in web you should be able to react fast. In this posting I will introduce you HTML5 Helpers Toolkit and some HTML5 field types.

Lately I blogged about HttpNotFoundResult and HttpStatusCodeResult action results that come with ASP.NET MVC 3. These results are ideal for controller tests as we don’t have to mess with HttpContext and Response objects anymore. In this posting I will show you how to use HttpNotFoundResult in controller tests to check if errors are given correctly to user.

ASP.NET MVC 3 brings us new view engine called Razor. Razor view engine was made available with WebMatrix first beta. Razor brings us new and very short syntax for writing views. In this posting I will introduce you shortly ASP.NET MVC Razor view engine. (more…)

ASP.NET MVC 3 supports global action filters. Global action filters are applied to all actions in web application. By example, you can use global action filters for common security checks. In this posting I will show you how to write dummy action filter, register it as global and test it.

One of nice features of ASP.NET MVC 3 is support for multiple view engines. There will be two out-of-box view engines: one for classic ASPX-based views and one for Razor-based views. In this posting I will show you this new feature and demonstrate how to use different view engine in same project.

My last posts described new action results in ASP.NET MVC 3 – HttpNotFoundResult and HttpStatusCodeResult. Unfortunately these result have no body to send to client but there are times we need it to inform our visitor about problems the way that we don’t go out of information context where visitor is. In this example I will show you how to write your own HttpStatusCodeResult that has also body.

ASP.NET MVC 3 also introduces new action result HttpStatusCodeResult. This action result provides you way how to specify HTTP status code and status description in your controllers. In this posting I will show you how to use HttpStatusCodeResult in your real-world applications providing meaningful status code for products that were online once but are now gone and we don’t expect them to be back in future.

ASP.NET MVC 3 introduces new ViewModel property of Controller that you can use to assign different properties to the model of your view. ViewModel is dynamic by type. In this posting I will show you how to use ViewModel property in your ASP.NET MVC applications.