For any browser-based application, it makes sense to load into the web page just the content that is immediately required and avoid whole-page refreshes whenever possible. Ajax technology and JSON makes this partial-rendering easy. It is, however, worth considering ASP.NET's own partial-rendering techniques, returning HTML. It requires less client-logic and is quicker to implement.… Read more
Pre-existing databases can pose some difficulties for software developers using an ORM. To demonstrate ways of circumventing them, Jon Smith builds an ASP.NET MVC application with Entity Framework (EF) to provide a user interface to Microsoft's AdventureWorks sample SQL database. He shares his design approach for displaying and updating this data with real examples from the test web application he built.… Read more
If you find yourself doing routine work repeatedly in ASP.NET MVC, it is worth exploring the possibilities that come from modifying or creating Editor Templates in Visual Studio. Templates can save you a lot of time when creating views or other default content. Nick Harrison explains.… Read more
Responsive Web Design is devised to help you render your website or web-based application appropriately on different sizes and aspect ratios of browser windows. Adopting it as a solution comes at a cost: It can't help to render a particular design on a specific device such as a model of smartphone. It also can require considerable refactoring of an existing site design, its navigation and testing. It has to be done right.… Read more
When we see a grid with some interesting data in it in an MVC application we, as users, expect to be able to download it as an Excel spreadsheet. If your application can't do it, it is no use telling the user that it is too difficult, because it isn't, as Nick Harrison explains.… Read more
One of the more important aspects of the scalability of an ASP.NET site is caching. To do this effectively, one must understand the relative permanence and importance of the data that is presented to the user, and work out which of the four major aspects of caching should be used. There is always a compromise, but in most cases it is an easy compromise to make considering its effects in a heavily-loaded production system… Read more
Scalability remains an exasperatingly vague term, even though there are well-established ways of ensuring that a web-based application reacts well to wide variations in usage. Dino cuts through the mystique to pin down what it is, what it isn't, and how to achieve it.… Read more
There are some aspects of tables in SQL Server that a lot of people get wrong, purely because they seem so obvious that one feels embarrassed about asking questions. Robert Sheldon reckons that no questions about SQL Tables are off-limits, and deserve frank answers. … Read more
An increasing number of applications are being designed to be configurable by the user to display content in a one of a number of alternative languages, currencies, date formats and other cultural aspects. It is better and easier to make such localization support intrinsic to the design rather than to retro-fit it. So what is the best way of doing so in ASP.NET MVC?… Read more
ASP.NET MVC gives you more options in the way that you handle exceptions. Error handling isn't intrinsically exciting, but there are many ways of avoiding the classic yellow page of death, even getting ELMAH to manage error handling for you.… Read more
It isn't every web application where one would want visitors to identify themselves via their Twitter, Facebook, Google or LinkedIn account. However, where it is essential to allow comments or other social interaction on your site, then ASP.NET MVC makes a 'social login' like this remarkably simple to do.… Read more
Database administrators tend to rely more on science than intuition, and may therefore seem exasperatingly cautious to other IT people. A relational database is a complex machine, however, that is asked to deal with intricate problems. When things go wrong, it usually takes knowledge, deduction and a systematic approach to track down the root core of problems and to determine the best fix.… Read more
Just because you're using Web Forms, it doesn't mean that you are stuck in a technical time-warp. If you want to liven up a site with new features using Ajax and libraries such as jQuery, Bootstrap or Knockout.JS, then you can always integrate a Web API layer into a Web Forms application. Dino Esposito shows how to give your Web Forms application a new lease of life.… Read more
It is natural for the user to want to browse through data within an application. Until recently, the interfaces with data sources have been ill-equipped to support this. OData, at last, takes the legwork away with some well-considered support for the paging of data, without imposing any particular conventions on the application. Dino explains how to use it.… Read more
Razor is now the dominant markup language for ASP.NET MVC applications, since it is terse and produces more readable markup than the ASPX syntax. Now with conditional nuggets and URL auto-completion, it is the obvious choice, as Dino explains.… Read more
There are some aspects to application programming, such as logging, tracing, profiling, authentication and authorization that cut across the business objects. These are difficult to deal with in an object-oriented paradigm without resorting to code-injection, code-duplication or interdependencies. In ASP.NET MVC, you can use attributes in the form of action filters to provide a neater way of implementing these cross-cutting concerns.… Read more
When you're instrumenting an ASP.NET MVC or Web API application to monitor its performance while it is running, it makes sense to use custom performance counters.There are plenty of tools available that read performance counter data, report on it and create alerts based on it. You can then plot application metrics against all sorts of server and workstation metrics.This way, there will always be the right data to guide your tuning efforts.… Read more
By introducing R libraries into an ASP.NET MVC application, it is possible to broaden its analytical and visualization power immensely. To illustrate this, Sergei shows an example of how to use the R libraries Lattice and GoogleVis to detect poorly-performing product categories, the quantity sold and the profit from them, and estimate their demand over time.… Read more
Attribute routing solves a lot of the problems of classic ASP.NET routing, which can get ungainly when there are many route handlers, or you have several REST services. Dino shows how to enable and use attribute routing in ASP.NET MVC… Read more
Continuing the project to build a Business Intelligence (BI) application using R, Visual Studio 2012 and Twitter Bootstrap, Sergei introduces drill-down via jQuery and jQuery UI, simplifies the R coding with the PLYR and GGPLOT2 libraries, and shows how to generate reports simultaneously with a batch f… Read more
