ASP.NET

Often developers ask how to add polling, scheduled tasks and so on to ASP.NET web applications. There are many ways how to do it and there are even more reasons why not to do it. Let’s see what are the problems and how to build services for your web applications wherever they run.

With Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft also announced online version of Visual Studio for Windows Azure Web Sites. When I first saw SharePoint Napa tools and “powered by Vsiual Studio” slogan then I knew that soon Visual Studio is on cloud. Now Microsoft made their next step. Let’s see what Visual Studio Online with codename “Monaco” is and what you can do with it.

I have paged results class that I am using to display paged data to users. I had problem with getting names of returned result properties to table headers in views. It works automatically if model implements IEnumerable but not if your IEnumerable is property of model. Here is the solution I found from Stack Overflow with little improvement.

Enterprise applications need good architecture to survive ever-changing demands of customers. At same time these systems must be stable, convenient and easy to use which leads us to need of good architecting skills. Some customers need desktop applications while others need web-based and mobile applications. Making good architectural decisions is not easy and this is where brilliant book Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello comes in. (more…)

I’m building a web based hybrid system that can run on-premises and on cloud. On development machine I want NLog to write logs on disk. When system is deployed to cloud I want NLog to write logs to Windows Azure Table storage. In this posting I will show you how to use web.config transforms with NLog configuration.

Before going on with my other posts I want to introduce you claims-based authentication that makes is way to almost all Microsoft web-based platforms around. It is more complex than old username-password method but also more secure and general. In this posting I will give you short and not very technical overview about claims-based authentication.

Visual Studio 2013 has good surprise for web developers who need to test their applications on different browsers. The new feature called Browser Link helps developers to refresh application in all opened browsers using just one icon click on Visual Studio toolbar.

In my last post about ASP.NET MVC checkbox list I came up with solution that makes it easy to update values in collection based on what was selected by user. I made some more progress meanwhile and here you can find improved version of collection update that breaks base class dependencies intoduced by previous solution. (more…)

Yesterday Visual Studio 2013 CTP was released and now it’s time to play with it. First thing I noticed was the new way how to create web applications. For all web applications there is generic dialog where you can set all important options for your new web application before it is created. Let’s see how it works. Also let’s take a look at new blue theme of Visual Studio 2013.

Some sites need simple WYSIWYG editor just to provide some simple formatting options for some texts. I needed editor like this on one of my ASP.NET MVC projects. Although there are lot of editors and it is not hard to build your own simple editor I took Aloha Editor. Let’s see why.