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Since my last release of the MVC toolkit some major changes have taken place in the MVC Framework. I am going to do a quick run through of how they changed the MVC CAPTCHA for the better. Originally in MVC Preview Release 1 for the MVC CAPTCHA many of you remember that the indicator for a valid CAPTCHA was passed through the parameters of the action method like so: [ControllerAction] [CaptchaValidation("captcha")] public void Register(bool captchaValid, string otherParameters) { // do stuff } However when Preview Release 2 came out the ability to pass the parameter through the action method was broken. So I had to create a hack around this: ...

Firefox 3.0 is going to be released today at 1:00 PM EST and 10:00 AM PST, other times can be found here. This is going to be a huge release where the Mozilla team is going for the Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in one day. I have included a schedule below of the events for today leading up to the actual release. When the even is completed it will be marked as such on the official Firefox 3.0 Release Wiki. ...

As anybody who has run a growing website or blog knows, response time is going to get worse with the more users you have visiting your site. The users come from all angles, RSS feeds, homepage visits, search engine visits, people sealing your static files that you host, and pretty much anything else that can be served over HTTP. The solution to this problem is to off load your static content on to a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDN providers cost a lot of money though, so it is nothing for us mere mortals with one server can afford. ...

Just recently I started experimenting with the ASP.NET MVC Framework and the Facebook Development Platform, it has been a very bumpy road, but I have ironed out some major issues that I would like to share with you today. I will start with a little history of what I am trying to do. For about a month and a half I have had one of my IdeaPipe interns, Dimitry, experimenting with creating a FBML (Facebook Meta Language) Application with MVC. MVC is an ideal platform for FBML because with MVC you have total control over your markup which is needed to have a lean FBML application. I am not going to go in to the differences of developing an FBML vs IFrame Facebook Application, because that information is easily found with a Google Search. What I am going to talk about is the hurdles I overcame and the custom software I had to develop to get MVC working smoothly with Facebook. ...

Scaling ASP.NET Application just got easier with a new technology that Microsoft has just released that they have dubbed codename “Velocity”. This product is still in the early stages of development, but it is meant as a direct competitor against memcached. If you are not familiar with memcached, here is how it is described in Wikipedia: memcached (pronunciation: mem-cache-dee) is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in memory to reduce the number of times the database must be read. Memcached is distributed under a permissive free software license. ...

The ASP.NET MVC Team has released an refresh of MVC. To all those that are interested the new Preview Release is posted at: http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=13792 The new release contains many new features over the 2nd Preview Release and the Interim Release from a month a half ago. In this post I am going to outline the features that are new from the Interim Release to Preview Release 3. Action Method and Result Changes As you remember from the previous release, you are now required to return an ActionResult. Many of the ActionResults were renamed to the following types: ...

Microsoft just released a tool called Microsoft Source Analysis for C#. Apparently it is a tool they use internally to make sure all their souce code looks the same and is easily readable by all those who use it. According to the blog post that announced this: Source Analysis comes with a set of default rules analyzers covering approximately 200 best practice rules. These rules are full compatible with the default layout settings in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. Specifically, these rules cover the following, in no particular order: ...

Today I had the need to create a custom event using jQuery, in order to launch a customized form validation event from a global submit event. I did this so I could focus in on the first form field that had an error. My event from the global.js script, that is included on every page of IdeaPipe, looks like this: $("form").submit(function () { var valid = $(this).validate(); // if the form didn't validate then focus the input on the first error if (!valid) $(this).find(":input[error]:first").focus(); return valid; }); This is pretty standard jQuery. What this code above does is set a custom function for the submit event for any tag on the page. The submit event will only be allowed to continue if a return value of true is returned from the function. ...

Recently for IdeaPipe I have been looking for ways to deliver my content more quickly and reduce unnecessary bandwidth use. According to Yahoo’s Performance Team more than half of the viewers of the Yahoo websites start with an empty cache, which means the browser has to download all the resources for the first time. This combined with a high traffic website and unneeded white space and comments can really add up to a significant bandwidth use. There are many popular ways to minify your static content tax on your bandwidth, using many popular tools, as described in this excerpt from Yahoo: ...

I was having a conversation with my best friend a few days ago and we got on the subject of our preferences for how URL’s are rendered for blogs. I fall on the side of lowercase letters and hyphens splitting the words: http://www.somesite.com/2008/05/my-url-preference-is-like-this/ He falls on the side of title case lettering and no hyphens splitting the words: http://www.somesite.com/2008/05/HisURLPreferenceIsLikeThis/ He has his reasons I have mine, I just think mine are more valid. Sorry Al that is my opinion. I am going to layout why I think mine are more valid, with an example from Celebrity Jeopardy. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this famous skit: ...