The Coding Humanist

The last few days I have been digging into the Javascript history api and in the process built a jQuery plugin that I figured others might find useful. It is actually very simple. I will be blogging about the Javascript history api next week and this will be used in those, so you can consider this a teaser as well if you are interested in the topic.

There are a few new things that come with new projects build in ASP.NET MVC 4 along with the ones we are used to by now. These tools that you get are delivered via NuGet packages, so let's look at the packages that we already had in ASP.NET MVC 3 that are still in the box in ASP.NET MVC 4 preview.

Nothing I say here is recommended and it all may end up being a bunch of terrible ideas, but when has that stopped me before? Also, this is built on preview bits, so things are very likely going to change. Now, let's get funky with with the DisplayMode functionality in ASP.NET MVC 4 Preview.

As a developer who wants to be conscious of good client-side practices, I’m always looking for good ways to keep my Css separate from my Html. When there are page-specific css styles to apply, it is often tempting to add them to the page itself. It works, it's not evil but I wouldn’t recommend it. Here’s an easy trick I have used on several projects to make it easy to target page-specific design problems in a global css file without worrying about adversely affecting other pages.

So yesterday morning I finally got around to using AppHarbor. I figured out an app I would like to attempt to deploy there and see what I thought about it after messing around with it for a day or so.

The purpose of a ValueProvider is to provide values from a source of data. There are several types of value providers built into the framework. They pull values from form posts, query strings, route data, posted files and other things. They exist to pull data from various data sources to supply to the model binding system so you can get your values on your action methods. But if you are reading this blog post, you probably already know what value providers are in ASP.NET MVC. So we will move on to getting them hooked up with our StructureMapDependencyResolver.

As you can tell by now, I’m not one who feels he has to avoid long titles for blog posts. We are continuing our work on exploring our options for dependency injection in ASP.NET MVC 3, with StructureMap as our IoC tool of choice. In our first post we got started with IDependencyResolver, in the second post we setup model binders and in the third we setup non-global action filters. In this post we will discuss global filters and the normal caveat applies: I have seen no clear guidance on this so I am kinda making this up as I go along. It works, but that is about all that I can promise you.

Continuing on from the basics and model binding, and continuing to kinda make it up as I go along, here we will discuss how to hook up action filters with dependency injection using StructureMap and the new dependency injection hooks in ASP.NET MVC 3.

In our last post we setup the basic dependency resolver infrastructure for StructureMap. Our sample code is still hosted up on Github, so go get if you want to take a look at it. The same caveat to the last discussion still applies: since I know of no samples where StructureMap is used for a full implementation of the IoC hooks in ASP.NET MVC 3, I am kinda making it up as I go along. It is certainly working but time will tell how close my implementation ends up to being awesome. Now that this is out of the way, we need to push on because as is we are in little shape than we were in ASP.NET MVC 2 in terms of IoC support. So let’s start with getting dependency injection going for model binders.

I have become a big fan of the principle of dependency inversion over the last couple years. My tool of choice is StructureMap though I use Unity at work. It actually matters little which you use if you choose to use an IoC library. Much more important is your understanding of the principle and using that to make your software better. But this post is not here to discuss the meanings of these terms; its point is simple: How do you hook up StructureMap to ASP.NET MVC 3’s new IoC hooks?

So I've had validation in MVC 2 on the brain for the last few days. I've posted on it a few times over at http://www.howmvcworks.net, here, here and here. I came up with another idea last night. Just now I tried it out and liked it. Thought I would see what the world thinks.

Time to get this new year started! Today I am starting a new series on http://www.howmvcworks.net on models, view models and related issues. I few weeks ago I asked for suggestions on tutorials and both @jasona and @samdelagarza suggested material around validation and model binding. This series will cover both topics and more. If anyone has suggestions or requests, please let me know.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to do C4MVC's virtual presentation. It was my first virtual presentation and that's definitely a different experience, though still fun.

The slides for my presentation at the North Dallas .NET User Group (and for the Houston Tech Fest meeting...though they have changed slightly) are now posted and you can find them here.

I just posted a few new tutorials on ASP.NET MVC.

Because I don't have enough to do, I just launched a new site called How ASP.NET MVC Works.

I haven't tried upgrading an existing site yet, but new website creation works well. The only thing I've seen so far is that if you create a unit test project to go with your web app it won't compile. Luckily, all you have to do is include the proper namespace reference to your controllers at the top.