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If you are using FeedBurner to manage your feed, and you love DotNetKicks as much as I do, you can now easily add a “Kick It” FeedFlare to it. This will automatically add a “Kick It” link below each post in your FeedBurner feed. To get started you will need to do the following: Login To FeedBurner Go to FeedBurner > Optimize > FeedFlare Go down to the Personal Flare box. Copy it and paste this URL in to the box:</images/2008/04/dotnetkicks-feedflare-link.xml> Press “Add New Flare”. Then check the two checkboxes next to the new entry. Click “Save” at the bottom of the page. After all the steps above are completed you should have a FeedFlare example that looks somewhat like this: ...

Today I decided to release a toolkit that I have been building over the past couple of months. Most of the code in the toolkit is related to MVC. Here is a list of the features: ActionFilterAttribute’s HttpPostOnlyAttribute Only allows POST to be made against the action. CacheAttribute Sets the action’s response as cacheable. CompressAttribute Compresses the action’s response using GZip or Deflate encoding. ServiceAttribute Marks an action as able to provide the ViewData as JSON, XML, or JSONP. ServiceOnlyAttribute Marks an action as only able to provide the ViewData as JSON, XML, or JSONP, that means no HTML. ExceptionHandlerAttribute Handles any exceptions thrown from an action, and redirects it to another page, or another action. CaptchaAttribute I did a whole post on providing a CAPTCHA for your MVC action. AllowedHttpMethodsAttribute Only the HTTP methods entered in to this filter are allowed for your action. Available HTTP methods are OPTIONS, GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, and CONNECT. ViewEngines’s ServiceViewEngine This view engine provides the serialization of the ViewData to JSON, XML, or JSONP. It is set when one of the following is requested from the ServiceAttribute above. Route’s LowercaseRoute I did a whole post on why I needed this in my toolkit. Mostly because of my obsessions to have all URL’s in lowercase. Method Extensions Redirect extends HttpResponse I have had a long standing discontent with the Redirect method of the ASP.NET. I have talked about good use of HTTP Status Codes before. There are at least 3 status codes that you want to consider before choosing a response status code of 302. Just to reiterate my post on the subject use 303 to redirect from a form POST, use 307 when you want to redirect to a page that is going to change with each request, use 301 if you want to permanently redirect one URL to another.I created the, Redirect, extension method on HttpResponse so that the status code could be set for the redirect. View Source: Coder Journal MVC Toolkit Source Download Binary: Coder Journal MVC Toolkit Binary ...

Common courtesy is very important for all application developers to follow especially when they are dealing with users settings. Especially for common file formats, where the user has probably already set up their preferences how they like. And most importantly to not piss off your install base. As you might have gathered from the title Apple has screwed up in this area yet again. In their never ending battle to try and forcibly get an install base, from some of their crappiest application. The Apple developers must taken the same “Our shit doesn’t stink”-attitude as many of their users, and started taking over the preferences on the users machine with out asking. ...

Facebook has been growing in popularity ever since it was released on February 4th 2004 at an almost unstoppable pace. Up until May 24th, 2007, it wasn’t much different than MySpace (or insert your favorite social network here), however on that day they rolled out a SDK that turned Facebook from a destination website to a platform that let any developer interact with their almost 71 million users. You can read more about the history of Facebook at Wikipedia. ...

One of the many recommendations that Yahoo makes on optimizing your web site for high amounts of traffic, and to make the response time speedier to your user is GZip encoding all your static content. I usually do this as a standard for setting up any of my Web Servers, in addition to setting expiration headers on my static content, to ensure that I am serving as little content as possible. ...

Well I have officially seen everything now, it should be a sad point in my life, but I was cracking up during this whole rap video. This video is of a computer science rapper, which sort of out does the web standards rapper that I posted last week. What is even more amazing is that he uses the famous, computer science book, The Mythical Man Month in his rap. So I definitely think he is an actual computer science student at Stanford where this video was shot. Enjoy! ...

Recently I have been working on a RESTful interface for a Web 2.0 project that I will be releasing very soon. And one of the self imposed requirements that I set out to achieve was to have the RESTful interface output the same structure JSON as XML. This way that any developer using the interface would feel comfortable using the JSON and XML interchangeably. But, I have been having a lot of trouble recently getting my JSON and XML to output the same structure when using the built in .NET methods. I have tried the following: ...

So one of my pet peeves in web development is mixed case URL’s. And I usually make sure that all my URL’s in my personal projects follow this standard. I also believe, contrary to my URL case standard, that my code should follow standards .NET naming techniques, such as Pascal casing for my method names. These two naming standards come in to conflict with MVC because the name of the action method in the controller is used in its native Pascal case. Which generates URL’s that look like this: ...

I got a kick out of this video I found on YouTube. Take a look:

I have upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. It is a very nice piece of software that the WordPress development team has done a great job on. Some of the new features include: Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard Dashboard Widgets Multi-file upload with progress bar Bonus: EXIF extraction Search posts and pages Tag management Password strength meter Concurrent editing protection Few-click plugin upgrades Friendlier visual post editor Built-in galleries The upgrade this weekend turned up a Cookie bug in my URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy software, that I use to host WordPress on my Windows 2003 server. There will be an updating to the URL Rewriter coming soon to MSDN Code and Codeplex as well as a release on my companies website.