Introduction

People often ask me if I use MVC or WebForms for my Microsoft ASP.NET projects.  I always tell them MVC, but I don’t use it in the classic way that most others do.  That is to say, I emit no html from my views, and for that matter really don’t even use views (with the exception of one view which is essentially my entire app.   People often refer to this as a SPA or Single-Page-Application. What this basically means is that my entire view is built with JavaScript (in my case Sencha’s ExtJS) and the only interaction with the server is to simply bring down Json results.

In this post, I’m going to build a simple app following this principle. It’s purpose will be to take a big pile of text, chop it up into words, then output it in some c# friendly manner.  My motivation for doing this is I happen to need that functionality right now and instead of creating a little awk script to do it, I’m going to right a web site!

So, Here is what we will build.  A handy formatter! (and you can run it at:   http://reformatter.peterkellner.net/ )

Part I, The Visual Studio Project

Let’s first create the Visual Studio project.  My development these days is actually using the latest Windows 8 Consumer build with the beta of Visual Studio 2011 running on it.  The nice thing about this is because Microsoft added “Round Tripping” to VS2011, I can now use VS2011 to create the project and you, my happy readers, can download the project and open it in Visual Studio 2010.  This has been long in coming and Microsoft has finally done it for the newest version of Visual Studio.  Thank you Microsoft!

And with an Internet Application with Razor (though I really don’t need all that extra stuff, it does not hurt)

The structure created is as as shown below with a Controller and Views folder and all the proper routing setup.

Because I want to make a very simple MVC app that only emits Json, Let’s create our own empty controller called ReformatterController.  We do that by right clicking on the Controller folder and pressing “Add Controller”, then “Add Empty Controller”.

Now, let’s create a very very simple controller with just one method that returns a JSON Result.  I’m returning the data in a friendly format to  Sencha’s ExtJS (or SenchaTouch for that matter).  JQuery would be similar.  Here is our new controller class (I’m sure my little tokenizer, line maker could be improved, but I’m just doing this to show some real work.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace MvcLiteApp.Controllers
{
    public class ReformatterController : Controller
    {

        public JsonResult ConvertTextToFriendlyText(string inputText)
        {
            const int maxCharactersInLine = 30;
            bool success;
            string messageReturn;
            var outputDataList = new List<string>();

            try
            {
                var words = inputText.Split(' ').ToList();
                var newLine = new StringBuilder();
                foreach (var word in words)
                {
                    if (newLine.Length + word.Length < maxCharactersInLine &&
                        word.Length < maxCharactersInLine)
                    {
                        newLine.Append(" ");
                        newLine.Append(word);
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        outputDataList.Add(newLine.ToString().Trim());
                        newLine = new StringBuilder();
                        newLine.Append(word);
                    }
                }
                success = true;
                messageReturn = "";
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                messageReturn = e.ToString();
                success = false;
            }

            return Json(new
            {
                Success = success,
                Data = outputDataList,
                message = messageReturn
            }, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
        }

    }
}

Now, let’s feed it a URL and see what happens.  Here is a sample URL:

http://localhost:3600/Reformatter/ConvertTextToFriendlyText?inputText=Romeo%20Montague%20and%20Juliet%20Capulet%20meet%20and%20fall%20in%20love%20in%20Shakespeare’s%20lyrical%20tale%20of%20%22star-cross’d%22%20lovers.

I actually pasted the sentence in to the the browser’s URL line and it added the nice encoded spaces for me.  The output is as follows:

{"Success":true,"Data":["Romeo Montague and Juliet","Capulet meet and fall in love","in Shakespeare\u0027s lyrical tale"],"message":""}

Notice that it created the nice lines formatted as a JavaScript array!

Next step, let’s make a real JavaScript program out of this.

Part 2, Our SPA (Single Page App) That Does Real Work

I’m only going to explain here the part of the Sencha Program that actually consumes the data but first, let’s add a little “properness” to our controller so it responds only to POST.  That is, we add an attribute to the top of the method and we change the behavior attribute on the bottom to say to not allow get.

        [HttpPost]
        public JsonResult ConvertTextToFriendlyText(string inputText)
        {
            .......
            return Json(new
            {
                Success = success,
                Data = outputDataList,
                message = messageReturn
            }, JsonRequestBehavior.DenyGet);
        }

And, the JavaScript in the SPA is very straight forward and is here:

var beforeTextAreaComponent = Ext.getCmp('BeforeFormatTextAreaId');
textBefore = beforeTextAreaComponent.getValue();

// how to not pollute global name space here?
var stringbuildervalue = Ext.getCmp('stringbuilderid').getValue();
var javascriptarrayvalue = Ext.getCmp('javascriptarrayid').getValue();
var noformattingvalue = Ext.getCmp('noformattingid').getValue();
var outputwidthvalue = Ext.getCmp('outputwidthid').getValue();

Ext.Ajax.request({
    url: 'ReFormatter/ConvertTextToFriendlyText',
    params: {
        inputText: textBefore,
        stringbuilder: stringbuildervalue,
        javascriptarray: javascriptarrayvalue,
        noformatting: noformattingvalue,
        outputwidth: outputwidthvalue
    },
    success: function(response){
        var localData = Ext.JSON.decode(response.responseText).Data;
        var numberRows = localData.length;
        var newData = '';
        for (var i=0;i<numberRows;i++) {
            newData += localData[i] + '\n';
        }

        var afterTextAreaComponent = Ext.getCmp('AfterFormatTextAreaId');
        afterTextAreaComponent.setValue(newData);

    },
    failure: function(error) {
        alert('error');
    }

});

Now, in reality, I’ve added some useful stuff to the controller (and put the project here for your review, comments and suggestions).

Hope you can make it.  Details are here:

http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-ExtJS-Meetup-Group/events/28760211/

Something that may not be obvious is if are creating an asp.net WebForms project and you put a datasource such as SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource for example on the page, how can you prevent the SqlSelect associated with that datasource from being triggered.

The answer is to set the control’s visible property to false.  That’s it!

The Why

The reason you might want to do this is for a case where you have a public facing web page that might be easily subjected to a denial of service attach.  If that web page is always causing some SqlDataSource to fire, you could easily find your SqlServer overloaded.  At least by checking to see a user is logged in before firing the sql statement, you buy yourself a little bit of protection.

The Code

<%@ Page Language="C#" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<script runat="server">

    protected void
        GridView1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }

    protected void Page_Init(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (!Context.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
        {
            GridView1.Visible = false;
        }
    }
</script>

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        <asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server"
            ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:CodeCampSV06 %>"
            SelectCommand=
            "SELECT [Id], [Username], [Email] FROM [Attendees] ORDER BY [Id] DESC">
            </asp:SqlDataSource>
        <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False"
            DataKeyNames="Id" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1"
            onselectedindexchanged="GridView1_SelectedIndexChanged">
            <Columns>
                <asp:BoundField DataField="Id" HeaderText="Id" InsertVisible="False"
                    ReadOnly="True" SortExpression="Id" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="Username" HeaderText="Username"
                    SortExpression="Username" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="Email" HeaderText="Email"
                SortExpression="Email" />
            </Columns>
        </asp:GridView>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

The Presentation was broken down into three parts. 

Part 1

Created a windows razor project that cached in image on a web site using best practices for threading and locking.  The code and project to do this are below:

var downloadByteArray = HttpContext.Current.Cache[cacheName] as byte[]; if (downloadByteArray == null) {     // make sure multiple requestors are not filling up the cache     lock (LockVal)     {         downloadByteArray = HttpContext.Current.Cache[cacheName] as byte[];         if (downloadByteArray == null)         {             Thread.Sleep(sleep * 1000);

             string imageLocation = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~") + imageUrl;

             downloadByteArray = File.ReadAllBytes(imageLocation);             if (cacheExpiresSeconds > 0)             {                 HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(cacheName, downloadByteArray,                                                  null,                                                  DateTime.Now.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, cacheExpiresSeconds)),                                                  TimeSpan.Zero, CacheItemPriority.NotRemovable, null);                 CacheInsertCounter = 9999; // any touch of this increments the global counter             }         }     } }

Part 2

Tips from Steve Souders

Part 3

Sprite Library from Microsoft Example: 

Error during serialization or deserialization using the JSON JavaScriptSerializer. The length of the string exceeds the value set on the maxJsonLength property.

I then tried to set the web.config property that everyone seems to reference on the web as follows:

<system.web.extensions>
    <scripting>
        <webServices>
            <jsonSerialization maxJsonLength="2147483645" recursionLimit="100">
            </jsonSerialization>
        </webServices>
        </scripting>
</system.web.extensions>

However, I kept getting the same error over and over.  So, I used the technique suggested in this article

http://thoughtfulcode.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/custom-jsonresult-class-for-asp-net-mvc-to-avoid-maxjsonlength-exceeded-exception/

by Brian Reiter to create an override of the JsonResult class.  That actually worked for me, however unfortunately, it does not show the shape of the data that is currently being returned by MVC3.  That is, MVC3 currently returns a JsonResult as follows:

return Json(new
{
    total = blobs.Count,
    data = blobs.ToList()
}, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

return new LargeJsonResult() { Data = output, MaxJsonLength = int.MaxValue };

return
   new LargeJsonResult
       {
           MaxJsonLength = 20000000,
           JsonRequestBehavior = JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet,
           Data = new
                      {
                          total = blobs.Count,
                          data = blobs.ToList()
                      }
       };

First step, is to go to the NuGet.org web site and click on Install.

Accept the default:

Run Visual Studio 2010 again, then go into Tool/Extension Manager and select “Automatically check for updates to installed extensions” as follows:

Then, go to View / Other Windows / Package Manager and you will get the Nu-Get prompt.

Now, you’ have the NuGet prompt as follows.

At the PM prompt, to install scaffolding, start typing the following:

Install-Package mvc  {then press tab for auto expansion}

You’ll get a list of all packages that begin with mvc as follows:

I choose MvcScaffolding, press enter and.. you’ll get the error that you need to have a project open.  Of course, because it wants to add it to your project.

Now, let me add a real project with a simple class called MyTeam

public class MyTeam    {

        [Key]        public int ID { get; set; }

        [Required]        public string Name { get; set; }        public string City { get; set; }        public DateTime Founded { get; set; }    }

Now, when I re-run the last command, I get all my Controllers and Views.

Hope this helps, I have a lot more to learn now.

My Research

My research first started with Google/Bing type searches.  That really leads me to many choices.  Actually too many.  Next, I go to my friend network.  The first obvious person I turn to is Scott Cate because he seems to always have the best advice on this kind of thing. The guy is plugged into everything!

Scott give me a very strong recommendation to look at Umbraco.  He says he is personally involved in writing code for that CMS, it’s very extensible, has a great admin UI and bottom line, is just good stuff.  So, Off I go to http://umbraco.org.

What I Find

I discover Umbraco is an open source project hosted at http://www.codeplex.com.  I find that it’s available in Microsoft Web Platform Installer.  It’s not obvious to me that it includes forum, wiki or shopping cart software.  I don’t really expect the shopping cart, but I was hoping for wiki and forums software integrated.  At this point, I’m sure none are integrated but it seems there are add-ins that might help me.

Forums Software

After searching the web, I find http://uforum.codeplex.com/ which has lots of downloads but not no checkins since June last year (not very active).  I also find, what appears to be the treasure chest of addins at http://our.umbraco.org/projects.  I do find uForum listed here, and it does say it is what is used with Umbraco so I’ll probably go with that. 

There is another forum mentioned quite a bit called YAF (http://www.yetanotherforum.net/).  It seems much more active than uForum so I should probably give that some thought.  I did see another post on configuring it that looked complex.

Ecommerce Software

For Ecommerce, they list Commerce for Umbraco.  They give a link to a site using it ( http://orders.homaxproducts.com/ ) which is a dead link.  The primary site is http://commerce4umbraco.codeplex.com/.  There seems to be some controversy on the net about dashCommerce.net. 

Clearly there is history here and it seems some issues around licensing and open source but I don’t quite follow all the threads.  It would be nice if someone clarified this so I would know the story and could decide if I’m comfortable with what is going on there.

Wiki Software

Here I draw a big zero.  When I search for “Umbraco Wiki Integration” I don’t find anything obvious for what wiki to use.  Umbraco has a wiki on their main site, but I can’t tell which one it is and how they integrated it.  Another worry is I posted a question to the forums about which wiki/forums software they use and still don’t have answer after about 18 hours.  Seems like this is a trivial answer making me think the forums are not very active.  Here is a link to my thread.  Maybe by the time you read this, someone will have answered it.  http://our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/questions-about-runway-and-modules/10554-which-forum-and-wiki-sw-is-Umbracoorg-using. 

Also, just a side note.  The forum software is not so easy to find.  From http://umbraco.org, you have to chose the Documentation link, then 5 subcategories down is a forum link.  Ultimately, you end up here:  http://our.umbraco.org/forum.

Installation Of Umbraco Experience

Preamble

Finally, the meat of this post.  My installation experience.  I typically don’t blog everything I install, but in this case, I had a special request from @paulsterling.  I had tweeted “Just Installed umbraco on my local win7 box with iis7.  web pi failed. recreated web site with iis worked.  Lots of complaints posted”.  Paul tweets back “do you have link to your feedback from your #epbi @umbraco install experience? always looking to improve”.

Well Paul, I’m a sucker for the “always looking to improve” which is what motivated this post.

To make sure I’m reasonably fair, I’ve created a VM with just Windows 7 Ultimate loaded. No Visual Studio, No Db. I’m going to install from there and document the steps in as much detail as I can.  The first time I did this (OK, the first several times) it did not work.  Let’s see what happens now.

Step By Step Experience

Go to the Windows Platform Installer Site, choose “Download It Now” and Choose Umbarco under the CMS category

Then, PI figures out lots of dependencies of which I just accept and say install (about 100 meg).

I then get prompted for a whether I want mixed mode or integrated authentication with SqlExpress.  I say Integrated because I’m running everything on my local vm and that is good enough.  In my earlier tests, I was doing this with SqlServer 2008 on my real development so this is a little different than what I did previously which failed.  Let’s see what happens here.

And now, we are off for the install.  It says it’s installing lots of components.

About 5 minutes later I get this screen where I fill in MyUmbracoApp and press continue.

Then, I get a screen where I leave the defaults including “Create a New Database” and fill in a password for sqlexpress (I just make that up since it’s going to create a sqlexpress database for me).

I forget to scroll down and see the rest of the page so I get a warning.  I then scroll down, fill in the below with the same password (which probably could be different) and press continue.

And, I get this error:

I say “no” because likely bad things will happen.  Now, I go backwards a little and try to install it to a SqlServer Instance running externally.  I do know that I will be able to make this work, but here is where the experience kind of sucks.  I don’t know that most people who have not spend years like I have messing around with sqlserver and asp.net would figure it out.

As a little bit of a disclaimer and possible reason why things did not work, I have to admit I have almost no experience with SqlExpress.  I use SqlServer on all my projects.  Maybe I did not answer a question as well as I could of had I known SqlExpress better.

So, now I update my screen to point to a SqlServer on a system named W500 (that’s the main computer the VM is running on with it’s firewall open to SqlServer port 1433.  I rename the database to umbracofirst hoping it will create this as well as the user umbracouser.  Let’s see.

Up comes this screen after I press Continue which is encouraging.

A few minutes go by and then I get some good news.

I press Finish and am brought back to the the PI screen.

Now, time to see what happened.  A completion dialog with “what’s next might have been nice as opposed to just a “Finished and Congratulations” message.

Time to Snoop Around for What Happened

My first guess is it installed an IIS web site.  So, let’s run IIS Manager as follows to see.

Sure enough, here is the site it created.

To run the default.aspx page, I do this:

Http 404 just means not found.

Things Did Not Work! Time for a Fix

After trolling the internet for a while, I find someone who says try removing and re-adding the web site in IIS Manager.  I do that as follows:

Then, do re-add it.

which leads to the following where I’ve name the site “MyUmbracoWeb” and added the physical path to where the app was installed by PI.

I get the following warning

which means I’ve created another web site (in addition to the one there originally named “Default” that is running on port 80.  If I try to run the new web site, something bad will happen because I’ve asked for two sites to run on port 80.  So, I say Yes.  Now, it shows me that Default Web Site is running and MyEmbracoWeb is not.

So, I need to stop “Default Web Site” and start “MyUmbracoWeb”.  I do that as follows:

Then,

which gives me just MyUmbraco running.

So, now to run the default page again.

and Presto! now I’m back on track.

Continuing With Step By Step

So, now we are back on track, let’s finish the setup.

The screen above has a “Next” button on the bottom right (a little out of site). Press that.

We get Step1/5, Accept License.

Next, Confirm Defaults (nothing to change)

Confirm leads to and error:

This means we can’t write to the directory where the web site lives.  So, let’s add permissions to that as follows:

goes to:

chose Edit and then full control for the IIS_IUSRS user.

Press OK (Apply happens automatically)

For some reason, I lost my IE session so I had to back and re-run Default.aspx from IIS again, then go through first two wizard steps which takes me to the second step successfully completing.

Moving on to by pressing Install button.

Feeling like I went to step 3, but still happy because I’m getting good messages.  After pressing Next gain I get:

It tells me my permissions are Perfect!  Now, really starting to feel good, pressing next gives me:

I put in a password for my umbraco admin account and press “Change Password” button. I get another success!

Pressing Next again I get:

Clearly, I’m not an expert so I chose “Add Runway” and I do actually watch the video.  It’s quite good IMHO.

Pressing next again, I get the following where I now chose Standard top Navigation and Contact Form.

I press “Install Selected Modules” button and get  a success install message:

]

Pressing Next asks me to Register with umbarco (which I do), the press the hyperlink “Launch Umbraco”.

Now, I get the admin screen for umbraco!

If I go back and now run http://localhost I get:

Everything is working!!! Hurray!!

Conclusions

Kind of early for conclusions, but I’d say that the installation is clearly a work in progress.  My personal preference would not to have this installer since it is obviously still a work in progress.  Again, my personal opinion is that in this case less is more.  Unless the experience with the wizard is near perfect, don’t do one. It just gets people (like me) frustrated.

On a happier note, I’ve been playing with Umbraco now for about 2 or 3 hours and am really impressed with it’s potential.  I am going to continue down the path of evaluating (and hopefully using) umbraco for my CMS,Forums,Wiki and Ecommerce solutions.

Wish me luck!

and,… HTH’s.

* I’m adding this comment after the post has been written to let anyone coming here know of another great post that goes further to explain no only what I’ve done here, but also two other ways including Mock and using Json Serialization.  The Post is written by Ashic Mahtab, aka “HeartattacK” on the forums.  His well written and informative article is here:  ASP.NET MVC – Unit Testing JsonResult Returning Anonymous Types.

This post will show how to return a simple Json result from an ASP.NET MVC 2.0 web project.  It will show how to test that result inside a unit test and essentially pick apart the Json, just like a JavaScript (or other client) would do.  It seems like it should be very simple (and indeed, once you see the answer it is), however there are lots of length discussions on the forums about this with all kinds of positives and negatives.  The one I based my solution on is from Stack Overflow and is here..  My personal length discussion that did not really yield a satisfactory answer is here.

If you follow my method, you’ll be able to unit test a JsonResult created by an MVC asp.net web application.

Controller Side (Server)

Let’s get started. First thing we need to do is have a controller that return a JsonResult.  Below is the one I’m currently working on.  Let me show the code, then explain it.

public ActionResult Get(FormCollection form)       {           var query = new FolderPairQuery();           if (form["query"] != null)           {               query = form["query"].FromJson<FolderPairQuery>();           }

           if (form["start"] != null && form["limit"] != null)           {               query.Start = Convert.ToInt32(form["start"]);               query.Limit = Convert.ToInt32(form["limit"]);           }

           var results = FolderPairManager.I.Get(query);           return Json(new                           {                               success = true,                               rows = results,                               total = query.OutputTotal                           }, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);       }

This code is actually part of the file FolderPairController.cs.  It returns an ActionResult (which in this case is JsonResult that derives from ActionResult).  All the way to the return statement is just stuff that I do in my code to pull apart the passed in Request variables and process them.  I only leave them in for context.  It does not matter how you get your “results” and “total”, it just matters that you do. Then, the return statement is the part that is of interest.  It’s basically returning an anonymous class which is actually a JsonResult.  In System.Web.Mvc.Controller.cs, you will see that Json is defined as:

protected internal JsonResult Json(object data, JsonRequestBehavior behavior);

Unit Test Side (Client)

[TestMethod]public void InsertControllerTest(){    var pairName = string.Format("FolderPair {0}",         (new Random().Next(1, 10000)));    var folderPairResults =        new List<FolderPairResult>()            {                new FolderPairResult                    {                        ActionTypeId = 1,                        CheckFileContent = true,                        ActiveForRunAll = true,                        ExcludeHiddenFiles = true,                        ExcludeReadOnly = true,                        ExcludeSystemFiles = true,                        FolderPairName = pairName,                        LeftFolder = "left",                        RightFolder = "right",                        SaveOverWrittenRecycleBin = true,                        UsersId = 1                    }            };

    string jsonInsert = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(folderPairResults);

    var form =        new FormCollection            {                {"data", jsonInsert}            };

    using (var controller = new FolderPairController())    {

        controller.Insert(form);    }

    // verify it got inserted.    var queryObj = new FolderPairQuery { FolderPairName = pairName };    string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(queryObj);    var formGet =        new FormCollection()            {                {"query", json}            };

    using (var controller = new FolderPairController())    {        var jsonResult1 = controller.Get(formGet) as JsonResult;        Assert.IsNotNull(jsonResult1,"jsonResult1 is null which is bad");

            List<FolderPairResult> folderPairResults1 =                (List<FolderPairResult>)                (jsonResult1.Data.GetType().GetProperty("rows")).GetValue(jsonResult1.Data, null);            bool success =                (bool)                (jsonResult1.Data.GetType().GetProperty("success")).GetValue(jsonResult1.Data, null);            int total =                (int)                (jsonResult1.Data.GetType().GetProperty("total")).GetValue(jsonResult1.Data, null);

            Assert.IsTrue(folderPairResults1.Count == 1, "Not one item returned");            Assert.IsTrue(folderPairResults1[0].FolderPairName.Equals(pairName),                "Wrong pairname returned");    }}

The technology pairing I’ve chosen is Microsoft’s .Net platform with MVC on the server, and ExtJS on the client.  Though it’s possible to still use ExtJS with standard html/aspx pages, I’ve found the best combination is to use 100% JavaScript on the client (ExtJS) and have all the server side technology be 100% service based.  I’ve used LINQ2SQL extensively as well as Entity Framework in the latest Visual Studio 2010 release.

The learning curve was quite steep to actually be able to efficiently build highly flexible, highly scalable applications using these technologies, but now that I know it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m considering putting together a series of 4 Day Classes around the country (or even world) that would basically teach people the methods and patterns I’ve learned and essentially leap frog a development team into being able to quickly do what it has taken me years to figure out.  I’ve been fortunate enough to know the top 1% instructors and I’m sure with the right incentive, can get them to join me in both putting together these classes as well as teaching them.

So, my question is:

[poll id=2]

I really appreciate your feedback.  If I go down this path, it will be a lot of work and it would be nice to know if people are really interested.  I know for myself, I’ would have gone to something like this 2 years ago and it would have saved me a lot of time.

Thanks for your feedback.

In this post, we’ll take a straight forward procedure based set of code and convert it to LINQ using a ReSharper from JetBrains suggestion.   I’ve found that in general, when I do things with foreach syntax, there is often a better way in Linq to do this.  The better does not jump out at me sometimes, however with ReSharper, it is often a button click away.

The initial code is as follows:

int selectedIndex = 0;
foreach (var rec in codeCampStringDictionary)
{
    if (rec.Key == codeCampYear)
    {
        break;
    }
    selectedIndex++;
}

And, ReSharper is going to suggest turning it into:

int selectedIndex = codeCampStringDictionary.TakeWhile(rec => rec.Key != codeCampYear).Count();

Simply Amazing!  TakeWhile had not even occurred to me.

(All while getting the Silicon Valley Code Camp Site Ready for our V5 Event, October 9th and 10th, 2010)

So, to explain the problem a little better, on the Silicon Valley Code Camp web site (which, by the way is scheduled for October 9th and 10th, 2010 this year), we have an ASP.NET DropDownList in the upper right hand corner that the user can switch between different years. That is, say they want to see all the sessions in 2008’s code camp, they can simply change the dropdown and the site completely updates.  When they do this, we don’t want to re-read the data table that contains the code camp years, we simply want to process the data that has already been stored in the ViewState of the DropDownList and use that to figure out the key value of the table entry for the code camp year they selected.

OK, if you didn’t follow all that, it really doesn’t matter.  This blog post is simply about how clever ReSharper is and how much I enjoy what the tool does.  It’s nice to have a tool teach me things!

The complete commented code is below that includes some comments about how it actually works.  I’m looking forward to several people posting comments letting me know that there is even a simpler way to do this.   I love my job!

// Create a dictionary out of values in a DropDownList.  That is,// the DropDownList has a Key Value which is it's primary key// and a text value which is the Code Camp Year.Dictionary<int, string> codeCampStringDictionary =    DropDownListCodeCampYearID.Items.Cast<ListItem>().        OrderBy(a => a.Value).        ToDictionary(itemdd => Convert.ToInt32(itemdd.Value),                     itemdd => itemdd.Text);

// Then, loop through the values in the dictionary and figure out// the offset of a particular value.  That is, if there are 3 values// in the list of 2008,2009,2010 which have primary keys of 3,4,5// we want to know, that given codeCampYear is 4, then selectedIndex // is the second value and should be 2.int selectedIndex = codeCampStringDictionary.TakeWhile    (rec => rec.Key != codeCampYear).Count();

string dateString = Utils.GetCodeCampDateStringByCodeCampYearId(codeCampYear);DropDownListCodeCampYearID.SelectedIndex = selectedIndex;HeaderId1.Text = String.Format("Saturday and Sunday, {0}", dateString);

Let the comments roll!

This is probably something pretty simple, hardly worth blogging about, but it took me a little while (15 minutes)  to figure out how to open a file ReadOnly with StreamReader,  so hopefully, next person looking will hit my blog post right away and save themselves 14 minutes.  StreamReader can be very useful in C#.

Say you have a block of code like the following for simply reading all lines of a file:

StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader("myfile.txt")
string line;
  while ((line = streamReader.ReadLine()) != null)
  {
       // do something      
   }

When you run this, you will quickly find out that the file gets opened read/write.

To open the file ReadOnly, you have to add a little bit of extra information to the StreamReader constructor call.

That is:

StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(File.OpenRead(file));

Hope this helps!

Here are some pictures from my table.

(including, by twitter handles @Zannabanana and @EmilyF)

For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a project that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC for providing data to our pure JavaScript application.  That is, there are no web forms, no dynamic HTML generation, just 100% JavaScript running on the client.  I’m using a library called ExtJS which gives us high quality “forms like” user interactions and MVC for getting the data.  That is, the Application looks like this:

The data retrieval URL used by the JavaScript look like:

http://www.mycompany.com/data/Company/Get

And, the JSON that comes back using either FireBug or Fiddler looks like this:

Problem is that it’s hard to read the JSON data.  Firebug does a reasonable job of formatting, but it’s still not perfect.  Up until now, the way I always have formatted the data is to type into bing or Google “format json” and the first reasonable choice has been http://jsonformat.com/.  Cutting and pasting my data into it shows:

However, my new favorite JSON Formatter  makes the data look like this:

( http://www.bodurov.com/JsonFormatter/ )

(more information at: http://blog.bodurov.com/Formatter-and-colorer-of-raw-JSON-code)

And, it’s available as simple html you can run on your own server here at codeplex:

http://www.codeplex.com/QuickJsonFormatter/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10136

IMHO, much cleaner, shows me the data both before and after, as well as colorizes it which always makes me happy.

The conference is Tuesday through Friday.  On Monday, there are special invents, usually full day in nature.  I’ve been asked to participate in the Windows 7 Bootcamp on Monday showing some of the new technology that is available from Microsoft.

My little piece is to talk about the new Dynamic Data Feature built into asp.net.  Basically, what Dynamic Data gives you in a nut shell is the ability to easily make web apps easier for showing all kind of different data types.

For example, if you happen to have a picture stored with each user’s profile, Dynamic Data gives you a straight forward, easy to implement way of uploading and displaying that data in a standard ASP.NET control like GridView, ListView, DetailsView, etc.  Another example is that say you have a “State” field that is 2 characters long in your database.  Dynamic Data allows you to have validation for that with practically no code.

Dynamic Data is truly one of the most innovative developer technologies Microsoft has brought out IMHO.

Hope to see you there.

In my case this:

cmRateResult[] cmRateResults = TransiteUtils.MakeRateRequest(_cmRateRequest);

Then, I want to convert that into

List<cmRateResult]

We all know the foreach way of doing it, about 5 lines of code

var cmRateResultsList = new List<cmRateResult>(cmRateResults.Length);
 foreach (var r in cmRateResults)
 {
      cmRateResultsList.Add(r);
 }

Or, my preferred way is to use the LINQ for syntax as follows:

var recs = (from data in cmRateResults select data).ToList();

But, it’s nicer (IMHO) to do it with LINQ chaining, though exactly the same. here it is:

var recs = cmRateResults.Select(data => data)).ToList()

Hope this helps!

So, you have a GridView or DetailsView that has standard “Edit” “Update” “New” type command buttons on them.  The way they get there is by having the declaration something like this:

 <asp:DetailsView ID="DetailsView1" runat="server" Height="50px" Width="125px"
            AllowPaging="True" AutoGenerateRows="False" DataKeyNames="Id"
            DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1">
            <Fields>
                <asp:BoundField DataField="Id" HeaderText="Id" ReadOnly="True"
                    SortExpression="Id" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" SortExpression="Name" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="CampStartDate" HeaderText="CampStartDate"
                    SortExpression="CampStartDate" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="CampEndDate" HeaderText="CampEndDate"
                    SortExpression="CampEndDate" />
                <asp:CommandField ShowEditButton="True" ShowInsertButton="True" />
            </Fields>
</asp:DetailsView>

What you want is to say something like:

“I only want admin’s to be able to add new rows so  want to hide the “new” button based on that”

So, first thing is to convert the field to a template from the following menu.  You do this by using the little helper in the upper right hand corner of the detailsview (in design mode), chose Edit Fields, CommandField, then convert to template (as in the picture below).

Then, you will have something like this:

 <asp:DetailsView ID="DetailsView1" runat="server" Height="50px" Width="125px"
            AllowPaging="True" AutoGenerateRows="False" DataKeyNames="Id"
            DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1">
            <Fields>
                <asp:BoundField DataField="Id" HeaderText="Id" ReadOnly="True"
                    SortExpression="Id" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" SortExpression="Name" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="CampStartDate" HeaderText="CampStartDate"
                    SortExpression="CampStartDate" />
                <asp:BoundField DataField="CampEndDate" HeaderText="CampEndDate"
                    SortExpression="CampEndDate" />
                <asp:TemplateField ShowHeader="False">
                    <ItemTemplate>
                        <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" runat="server" CausesValidation="False"
                            CommandName="Edit" Text="Edit"></asp:LinkButton>
                        &nbsp;<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton2" runat="server" CausesValidation="False"
                            CommandName="New" Text="New"></asp:LinkButton>
                    </ItemTemplate>
                    <EditItemTemplate>
                        <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" runat="server" CausesValidation="True"
                            CommandName="Update" Text="Update"></asp:LinkButton>
                        &nbsp;<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton2" runat="server" CausesValidation="False"
                            CommandName="Cancel" Text="Cancel"></asp:LinkButton>
                    </EditItemTemplate>
                    <InsertItemTemplate>
                        <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" runat="server" CausesValidation="True"
                            CommandName="Insert" Text="Insert"></asp:LinkButton>
                        &nbsp;<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton2" runat="server" CausesValidation="False"
                            CommandName="Cancel" Text="Cancel"></asp:LinkButton>
                    </InsertItemTemplate>
                </asp:TemplateField>
            </Fields>
</asp:DetailsView>

Now, you have standard <asp:LinkButton> so you can call the visible property from your codebehind like this:

 <asp:TemplateField ShowHeader="False">
                     <ItemTemplate>
                         <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" runat="server" CausesValidation="False" Visible='<%# GetShowEditButton() %>'
                             CommandName="Edit" Text="Edit"></asp:LinkButton>
                         &nbsp;<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton2" runat="server" CausesValidation="False" Visible='<%# GetShowInsertButton() %>'
                             CommandName="New" Text="New"></asp:LinkButton>
                         &nbsp;<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton3" runat="server" CausesValidation="False"
                             CommandName="Delete" Text="Delete" Visible='<%# GetShowDeleteButton() %>'     ></asp:LinkButton>
                     </ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>

Then, in your codebehind, you have the following:

 protected bool GetShowEditButton()
    {
        return Roles.IsUserInRole("Admin");
    }

    protected bool GetShowInsertButton()
    {
        return Roles.IsUserInRole("Admin");
    }
    protected bool GetShowDeleteButton()
    {
        return Roles.IsUserInRole("Admin");
    }
}

Hope you find this before spending a bunch of time reading about more complicated solutions.

The company I’m now working at is small and we don’t have a lot of resources to maintain hardware and do operating system type support.  We do have a high load requirement so we need a very robust supported solution.  Before this, I’d always been in the under $50 per month type plan with ORCSWeb, but I decided I needed more servers and a higher level of support.  I really did not know what level of support to expect when signing up for the managed servers but decided to go for it anyway.

All  can say is WOW!!!  I am over the top impressed.

We currently have 3 virtual servers hosted at ORCSWeb.  One, we use as a development server, and the other two are in a webfarm configuration.  I’ve always believed that when you go into production with a web site it’s critical you start with 2 servers in a webfarm.  it’s really easy to go from 2 to 10, but can be very painful to go from 1 to 2.   That’s a topic for another post, but suffice it to say, 2 is the minimum.

So, why am I so impressed?  First, the support team they assigned to me is totally awesome.  They all are focussed and competent which is a total relief compared with most hosting companies I’ve dealt with.  Other companies always have good people, but it seems to be the bad ones that really give me cause to remember.  Second, because I paid extra for the full managed support options on our three servers, I’ve been able to ask the things like the following.  Almost all of them I could do myself, but I’m swamped with my technology role in the new company and really appreciate being able to hand stuff like this off.

• I’ve pointed my MX record at my .149 server.  Could you please set up email and create the following 7 accounts.
• Please Setup a secure ftp server at the following address with the following username and password (and make sure the user is locked down to the root)
• Setup DFS Replication between these two directories on .148 and .149
• Create a RoboCopy script that copies files from my dev server to the .149 mirrored directory
• Please set up web statistics for me on http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com
• Please figure out why SqlServer 2008 is not letting me access catalog MyStuff1 from user 3p1 and fix
• Please make a replicate of website MyWeb1.com including the sqlserver catalog’s and put it on MyWeb2.com on server .149
• Please replace the sqlserver catalog MyStuff3 on server .149 with the bak file I uploaded to my ftp server
• I could go on and on, but I think you are getting the idea.
• Always with a smile, 24×7, what else can I say.

By the way, if you want to see one of my sites hosted there, go to http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com

Thank you ORCSWeb for making things a lot easier for me.

public enum CompanyAddressType
    {
        Unknown = 0,
        Primary = 1,
        Warehouse = 2,
        Distribution_Center = 3,
        Cross_Dock = 4
    }

You want to iterate through the list and put the data into an asp.net dropdownlist.

Here is the simple code:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if (!IsPostBack)
            {
                string[] names = Enum.GetNames(typeof(CompanyAddressType));
                var values = (CompanyAddressType[])Enum.GetValues(typeof(CompanyAddressType));
                for (int i = 0; i < names.Length; i++)
                {
                    DropDownListCompanyAddressType.Items.Add(new ListItem(names[i], values.ToString()));
                }
            }
        }

There are probably easier ways to do it, but this works.

and…

HTH’s.

Here is the material for the first presentation:

Build Blazingly Fast ASP.NET Apps with 100% Clientside UI ExtJS

Intermediate

Need a web application that has the responsiveness and interactivity of a forms app but still looks and feels like a web? One of the best kept secrets (at least to the Microsoft community) is ExtJS. It’s a different paradigm then we are all use to, but the results are spectacular. Take a look at this url and you will see as well as learn how to do this yourself. The hardest part is shuttling the data back and forth. A lot of this session will be talking about how to do a real world app that does this. Once you go this way, you’ll be gone from serverside forms for almost ever.

Presentation Files Download

 

Building High Performance ASP.NET Web Applications

Intermediate

Topics will include appropriate use of Cache and Session State, as well as how and when to use them. Viewstate management and methods to minimize its use will be discussed. Code to pop up a warning when a threshold is met in development will be shown. When and how to take advantage of Server Farms will be discussed, as well as trouble shooting techniques to find problems. The evils of Server Affinity, as well as a common pattern for caching database queries will be shown to be wrong. Time permitting, we will talk about using Microsoft’s Ajax.asp.net with UpdatePanel and webservices and how these affect performance and scalability.

 

Presentation Files Download

http://aspnetextjsdemo.peterkellner.net/ExtJSProfileEditorEAddDeleteToolbar.html

For me, it was a long day.  I flew home from Chicago in the morning, went to work in the afternoon, and did the presentation that night.  I decided to upgrade the source to the prelease V3 on the airplane which turned out to be a mistake because some of the demos did not quit work as I expected.  That, combined with I had forgotten to plug my notebook in before the presentation and when I realized that (by almost running out of battery), I plugged my computer in and it immediately blue screened.  Arg. Not what you really want when you have all your windows open and in demo mode.  At least that was the end of m powerpoint screen.  Who needs that anyhow.

Several people asked for the example code I showed.  It’s not that well organized and it’s using a pre-release of ExtJS version 3.0. With those excuses pre-made, here is the code:

Finally, some more pictures…

Thanks to Bay.Net locally lead by Kim Greenlee for sponsoring the event, Thanks to JetBrains for providing free copies of IDEA for doing Great JavaScript editing, Thanks to the authors of “Learning ExtJS” for donating a couple free books, and thanks to ExtJS for giving a free developer license.