Confessions of a Professional Developer

I've seen a few posts on forums like Stack Overflow recently regarding issues when upgrading from an MVC3 to an MVC4 site regarding Web Pages version configuration. Whilst I haven't experienced the problem myself it revolves around web.configs Presumably this is meant to be replaced by a version number but in some cases isn't and so the whole entry looks like so: <section...

In my previous few blog posts I've been talking about my experience with www.EmpireAvenue.com . In effort to record and indeed share the experience I've created this post! EAv (Empire Avenue) is part game, part social media, part marketing tool, bear with me and Ill try to explain as much as I know as simply as possible. The Game The game is based around a stock market idea but...

In my previous blog post I was looking at Dapper - basic insert and select operations versus an raw ADO.NET. In order to perform some basic speed tests (and compare lines of code written) I added a new page to my project called Benchmark.aspx with a single PlaceHolder control (called Container) to hold the results. The code and results below demonstrate that for large queries using...

I posted my first question on StackOverflow the othe dayr. A question regarding best practise for high speed raw data access (Follow the link for the full blown version). In short however it centred around whether there was a faster way to access the data than executing a stored procedure and loading a DataTable with the ExecuteReader results. At first most respondents (some...

So I happened across Empire Avenue yesterday - some two years after it went live (where have I been)?! After getting slight addicted to it yesterday and scratching the surface of some of its features I thought I'd write up some findings! The purpose is evidently to "have fun" after all its a game. People "buy" stocks in your and you in others - depending on your Social Network reach...

{EAV:d546ce401f8dfec8} This is a verification blog post for Empire Avenue - an exciting and interesting new take on Social Networking; I only joined today and Im quite smitten - Ill write a proper post all about it when I've got to grips with it a bit mor...

Whilst doing my usual round of research I have discovered that within the Developer Preview release of ASP.NET MVC 4 they have included two interesting features. Firstly Adaptive Rendering by Browser and the Mobile Application project type. The first of these allows the developer to provide different Views depending on the relevant (mobile) browser. The Mobile project type is specifically...

For a while now I've been using Visual Studio 2012 and investigating it's new features (which are many) as well as looking at the new project types and other offerings such as the new project templates and new technologies like Signal R. I decided that the best way to get a handle on all of this was to create a sample solution using as much of it all together as possible. My idea was...

I took over a project the other day which had cause to use video in WebM format. Cassini (bless it) flatly refused to do anything at all with the file and one of the requirements was to take some action after the video finished playing. Not wanting to code this "blind" I decided it was about time to upgrade to IIS Express (I already had Visual Studio sp1 installed but not from the...

Sometimes when using ASP.NET MVC 3 / 4 with Entity Framework it can be difficult to see exactly which property is causing issues when db.SaveChanges() is called. If you wrap the db.SaveChanges() in an appropriate try {} catch {} block whilst debugging (see below) each property in conflict will be written to your debug console which is much more helpful in finding and resolving the...

Generating routing links is extremely easy in MVC 3 using @Html.ActionLink(linkText,action,controller) when you're using Razor views this is great. However sometimes you need to generate the link within the controller - at which point you do not have direct access to the Html helper. In these instances such as creating links for a wysiwyg editor or adding a link into an email it is...

I've been tinkering with MVC 3 for a while now and I have to say I'm extremely impressed - it is a joy to work with as are its supporting technologies Entity Framework, ASP.NET Routing and Razor view engines to name a few. However I've been working on WebForms for so long that I'm finding more than a few stumbling blocks as I grapple my way up the learning curve. One such hurdle was...

Hello again! I've been following Microsoft development for years now and the advent of twitter gave me a brilliant insight into Microsoft developers thoughts and keeps me abreast of current feeling about technology by those developing it. For years i used Google Reader and added blogs and such forth to achieve the same result but it was...

Just a quick one today! This has probably been around for a while now but yesterday I had good cause to use this handy piece of functionality! The location tag within the web config file of your asp.net 4 website allows you to specify a location tag with a path attribute and set "web.config" style setting for just that single location! This is particularly handy if you need to set...

Whilst working on a simple data access layer using Sql Ce 4, POCO C# and using the Repository Pattern it occurred to me that when implementing a SaveChanges method that there was no real effective way to prevent a subsequent developer coming along and instantiating a new instasnce of some entity, directly setting the Id property and calling SaveChanges! I thought about nesting the...

I'd like to share this little technique I've been using for quite a while, especially to receive feedback and validation on whether or not this is a good idea! I've used this technique with great success in the past in production systems which require a a "grid" of check-boxes and a single "update" button. This kind of thing usually occurs when you have any X can be related to...

Having not made a new years resolution at the time I have decided that it should be "use my blog more often". I'm doing quite well this year so far but to be honest its quite tricky fitting it in "out of hours" what with the twins, learning guitar and Skyrim being released but we can but try! This post centres around the ease with which I managed to sign up for and integrate...

Having bought Kodak Camera's for both myself and my mother in law I decided to give the following printer a try when it came time to replace an older Epson model that got damaged in a house move a while ago. I have to say it is astounding for the price. B&W printing is both fast and sharp whilst the colour prints are beautiful even on normal paper! Let alone its excellent Wi-Fi...