In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you thirty-second in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." BlogSvc.NET - The AtomPub Server for WCF and .NET Much respect to people who not only release Open Source Software, but also take the time to get a nice, clean logo for their project as BlogSvc.NET did. It's written by Jarrett Vance and the code is up on CodePlex with Documentation and details on the main BlogSvc.NET site . It also appears that the site at http://www.blogsvc.net is also the Demo Site for BlogSvc itself ! Actually, if you download the source, you're downloading the complete implementation of the BlogSvc.net website. Booyachaka. Much respect...(read more)

David Kean announces FxCop 1.36 Release Here are a few of the goodness from David's blog: 200+ bug fixes that reduce noise, missing analysis and rule crashes Support for analyzing anonymous methods and lambda expressions New option for skipping analysis over tool generated code Spell checker libraries now ship in the box Changes in the way references are resolved and located Better support for C++/CLI and the Compact Framework Language 'friendly' API names in the UI and resolutions (ie Visual Basic syntax if running over a Visual Basic binary) New globalization, design and usage rules New rule for targeting specific versions of the Framework (I'll talk about this in a future post) Performance improvements that cut analysis by...(read more)

In this tip, I explain how you can use the NHaml view engine as the view engine for an ASP.NET MVC application. I demonstrate how to create NHaml views that display both static content and database records. I also discuss how you can use master pages and user controls with the NHaml view engine. In this tip, I explain how you can use the NHaml view engine when building an ASP.NET MVC application. The NHaml view engine is an alternative view engine to the default Web Forms view engine. NHaml is a port of the popular RAILS Haml view engine for the .NET framework. Why use NHaml? NHaml enables you to overcome the verbosity of XHTML. What JSON is to XML, NHaml is to XHTML. XHTML is an extremely verbose language. You need to do a lot of typing to...(read more)

Have you checked out the MSDN site for ASP.NET lately?  It is full of useful information.  You can find it at the ASP.NET Developer Center .  My favorite things to check out are the “How Do I” videos.  They can be really helpful and can get you started on a specific topic.  Check them out, “How Do I” videos – ASP.NET . I’ suggest checking back to that site from time to time to look for updates.  There are a lot of useful things that show up on that page, including some interesting blog postings and all kinds of updates around ASP.NET. Another interesting link is to the forum talking about ASP.NET Futures .  This is really cool stuff if you haven’t heard about it, stuff like: ASP.NET AJAX Extensions Dynamic...(read more)

Kevin Frie, development lead for core parts of the CLR recently posted about what CLR updates that come in 3.5 SP1 ....   NGen infrastructure rewrite :  the new infrastructure uses less memory, produces less fragmented NGen images with much better locality, and does so in dramatically less time.  What this means to you:  Installing or servicing an NGen image is much faster, and cold startup time of your NGen’ed code is better. Framework Startup Performance Improvements :  The framework is now better optimized for startup.  Better OS citizenship :  We’ve modified NGen to produce images that are ASLR capable, in an effort to decrease potential security attack surface area.  Better 32-bit code...(read more)

In this tip, I demonstrate how you can dispose of a DataContext within an ASP.NET MVC controller. Next, I argue that there is no compelling reason to do this. Several people have emailed me recently with the same question about whether or not it is important to call Dispose() on the DataContext object. In all of the code samples that I write, I create an instance of a DataContext object, but I never properly dispose of it. Is this wrong? The DataContext class implements the IDisposable interface. In general, if a class implements the IDisposable interface, then that is good evidence that you should call Dispose(). But keep reading. Classes that implement the IDisposable interface typically use resources that cannot be cleaned up by the .NET...(read more)

So I wanted to post a little bit about my adventure with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 .  I have a virtual machine that has Visual Studio 2008 installed on it.  But it only has about 2 GB of free hard drive space on it.  So when I went to install this service pack, it gave me an error because it didn’t have enough hard drive space. So thus began my adventure to try to get enough disk space to install the service pack. Extending the drive My first thought was that I could just allocate more space for my .vhd file and allow it to grow.  Everything was going great with that, I was able to make it larger and when I booted up the VM, I saw the additional space in Computer Management.  But when I tried to “Extend Volume” on the hard...(read more)

I got an email with some questions around application domains, application pools and unhandled exceptions from a developer that was frequently seeing his website crash, and also had some related issues with session loss in his application. I have written before about unhandled exceptions and session loss due to appdomain restarts but I thought his questions would serve as a nice refresher. From what i read, my understanding is that a website has an app pool associated with it. This app pool leads to the creation of a w3wp.exe process. Inside this app pool/w3wp.exe process, an application domain is created. Tess: This is correct. In IIS you can create different application pools that have different healthmonitoring settings, run under different...(read more)

I know I'm a little late in the game, but I decided that after vacation it was finally time for me to install Windows 2008 on my Vista box and play around with some of the IIS 7 features like Failed Request Tracing (known as FRT or FREB) and the appcmd tool. I wanted to show you an alternative way of troubleshooting Lab 1 (hang scenario) from my Debugging Lab series using Failed Request Tracing and appcmd so here are some things I will go through in this post Setting up failed request tracing Listing executing requests with appcmd Using Page.Trace with failed request tracing Setting up different FREB rules and looking at the differences between them Short notes about failed request tracing Failed request tracing comes with IIS7. It works...(read more)

we've just released the latest Preview of Dynamic Data Wizard on the CodePlex website that requires that Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is installed. This release is primarily for supporting updating from the Beta to the RTM release of .NET 3.5 SP1. For more information, check out the Release Changes page on Code Plex. Direct link to the download page: http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14474 Installing steps to get the latest Blinq: 1) Upgrade SP1 from the Beta to the RTM release 2) Run the Blinq 0806 Install.cmd from a VS 2008 command prompt. Warning : if you have the previous version of Blinq, 07-18 release, do not run the Uninstal.cmd after upgrading the SP1 from the Beta to the RTM release; otherwise, your...(read more)

Patrick Smacchia , of NDepend fame, has done a detailed, low level look at exactly what changed in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.   Some data he lists: # Assemblies    112 # Namespaces    919 to 935       (+16   +1.7%) # Types    39 988 to 40 513       (+525   +1.3%) # Methods    387 421 to 386 790       (-631   -0.2%) # Fields    241 567 to 246 795       (+5 228   +2.2%) # IL instructions    8 598 933 to 8 620 940       (+22 007   +0.3%) Overall, for the amount of new functionality...(read more)

What row of numbers comes next? 1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 13112221 Read More......(read more)

In this tip, I demonstrate how to unit test the LINQ to SQL DataContext object by creating a Fake DataContext. You can perform standard LINQ to SQL inserts, updates, deletes and LINQ queries against the Fake DataContext. I’ve struggled for the past couple of months with different methods of unit testing MVC controllers that return and update database data. I want an easy way of unit testing the database access code in my ASP.NET MVC applications. I almost gave up until Rob Conery stopped by my office and showed me an easy method of performing LINQ to SQL queries against a standard collection. Once I made it over that hurdle, the rest of the process of building the FakeDataContext class was straightforward (thanks Rob!). In this tip, I...(read more)

Krys and I just finished writing the update to the framework design guidelines and you are can already get the "Rough Cuts"!   That is right, in today's instant information world why wait for copy editing, printing and shipping time!  Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reuseable .NET Libraries on Rough Cuts Expect it in on Amazon and in book stores late this year.  Read More......(read more)

In this series of blog entries, I build an entire ASP.NET MVC application from start to finish. I create a Family Video Website that you can use to host home videos and photographs. In the previous blog entry, we took our first steps in our Family Video Website project. We managed to complete the following two tasks: · Enable users to upload pictures to the application · Display all uploaded pictures Today, I want to add a database to the Family Videos website. There are two reasons for the database. First, I want to track information about each upload in a database table. That way, a user can add a description for each picture (or video or sound clip) that the user uploads. Also, I’m worried about situations in which two people...(read more)