ASP.NET

Public non-action methods in ASP.NET MVC controllers are source of problems because they can be called by user when not handled carefully. Same time you may need public methods on controllers for some other reasons (some UI framework, testability problems, things you cannot change etc). In this posting I will show you how to handle controller methods properly.

Selecting things from dialogs and data represented as trees are very common things we see in business applications. In this posting I will show you how to use ASP.NET TreeView control and jQuery UI dialog component to build picker dialog that hosts tree data.

Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) provides us with simple and dummy STS application we can use to develop our system with no actual STS in place. In this posting I will show you how to add STS support to your existing application and how to generate dummy application that plays you real STS.

ASP.NET offers very easy way to serialize objects to JSON format. Also it is easy to deserialize JSON objects using same library. In this posting I will show you how to serialize and deserialize JSON objects in ASP.NET.

I am building ASP.NET MVC application that uses external services to authenticate users. For ASP.NET users are fully authenticated when they are redirected back from external service. In system they are logically authenticated when they have created user profiles. In this posting I will show you how to force ASP.NET MVC controller actions to demand existence of custom user profiles.

If you are using AppFabric Access Control Services to authenticate users when they log in to your community site using Live ID, Google or some other popular identity provider, you need more than AuthorizeAttribute to make sure that users can access the content that is there for authenticated users only. In this posting I will show you hot to extend the AuthorizeAttribute so users must also have user profile filled.

When developing cloud applications it is still useful to build them so they can run also on local machine without network connection. One thing you use from CDN when in cloud and from app folder when not connected are common JavaScript libraries. In this posting I will show you how to add support for local and CDN script stores to your ASP.NET MVC web application.

In my last posting about AppFabric Labs Access Control Service I described how to get your ASP.NET MVC application to work with ACS. In this posting I will dig deeper into tokens and claims and provide you with some helper methods that you may find useful when authenticating users using AppFabric ACS. Also I will explain you little dirty secret of Windows Live ID. (more…)

I had Windows Azure training this week and I tried out how easy or hard it is to get Access Control Service to work with my ASP.NET MVC 3 application. It is easy now but it was not very easy to get there. In this posting I will describe you what I did to get ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to work with Access Control Service (ACS). I will show you also some code you may find useful.

One new feature that comes with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta is support for deployment references. Deployment reference means that you can include all necessary DLL-s to deployment package so your application has all assemblies it needs to run with it in deployment package. In this posting I will show you how to use deployment dependencies.