Glenn Block recently did a great screen cast on the Managed Extensibility Framework.  Show #130 | 11/26/2008 Glenn Block on MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework Glenn Block shows you how to use MEF to allow a plugin architecture in your .NET applications. The framework is extensible enough to allow any type to be imported and exported as managed plugins, which are called parts. Read More...

All client-side template engines enable you to create HTML (fell free to go ‘duh’). What they don’t all allow is the creation of event handlers and components over the markup they generate. The general approach with those engines is to do a second pass of code over the markup to create handlers and components. This is quite unfortunate as this generally requires some knowledge of the markup (which plays against separation of concerns) or something like the introduction of marker CSS classes into the markup. For our own template engine, we wanted event handler creation and component instantiation to be first class scenarios, and we wanted both to be possible from imperative code as well as declarative code. Imperative code blocks Let’s start...

Download: VSSpellChecker.msi What's new in version 2.2: Spell checker now fully supports VS 2008 SP1 Content of <code>, <abbr> and <address> elements is ignored Setup no longer requires COM registration, it uses VS AddIn registration in XML file List of words to ignore (SpellChecker.ignore file) was moved from AppData to AddIns folder Fixed bugs: Add To Dictionary may corrupt Word custom dictionary file dictionary file was not in Unicode Windows update to MSXML may cause "Ignore" and "Add To Dictionary" command to disappear After word was added to dictionary it may continue to be flagged as an error until VS is restarted Note : There is no v2.2 for VS 2005 or VS 2008 RTM. From now on updates will be...

How many of you out there who use Subtext host it on a hosting provider who does not have ASP.NET 3.5 available? I’d like to make the next version of Subtext 2 take a dependency on 3.5. Note that it wouldn’t have to take a dependency on SP1. Just ASP.NET 3.5 proper as I believe most hosting providers support it. If you’re stuck with a hosting provider who only supports ASP.NET 2.0 and not 3.5, do leave a comment. Note that we’re still in the planning stages for Subtext 3, which will be built on ASP.NET MVC. In the meantime, I still plan to update Subtext 2.*. In fact, much of the work we will do for Subtext 3 may be prototyped in 2.* and ported over. Tags: subtext Read More...

A Subtext user found a security flaw which opens up Subtext to potential XSS attacks via comment. This flaw was introduced in Subtext 2.0 by the feature which converts URLs to anchor tags. If you are still on 1.9.5b or before, you are not affected by this issue. If you upgraded to 2.0, then please update to 2.1 as soon as you can. Note that you can edit comments in the admin section of your blog to fix comments if someone attempts to abuse your comments. This release has several other bug fixes and usability improvements as well. I started to replace the use of UpdatePanel in some areas with straight up jQuery, which ends up reducing bandwidth usage. List of bug fixes and changes: Fixed Medium Trust issue by removing calls to UrlAuthorizationModule...

My TechEd presentation “Common Issues in ASP.NET and how to debug them with Windbg” is now up on channel 9, so if you want to watch it, here you go http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/MSDNSweden/Vanliga-fel-som-grs-med-ASPNET-och-hur-du-hittar-dem-med-WinDbg/ Have fun, Tess Read More...

First, let me remind you that in my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you thirty-seventh in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." I'm working on a side-project with Rob Conery , Dave Ward and others and I want to be able to do a search immediately as the user arrives on the site, using their location derived from their IP Address. I want to use " Geolocation " or Reverse IP Address Lookup, and take an IP like 127.0.0.1 and turn it into "New York, NY." There are lots of services and databases that you can buy that will let you make a web service call and get back a location. Some will include latitude and longitude, some include the...

T4 templates have been a pretty popular topic lately. If you have no idea what they are, don’t feel bad, I didn’t either only a couple weeks ago! In a nutshell, it’s a simple template processor that’s built into VS and allows for all kind of cool code generation scenario. For a bunch of information about them, check out the following two blogs: GarethJ’s blog Oleg Sych’s blog The basic idea is that you can drop a hello.tt file into a project, and it will generate a hello.cs (or hello.anything) file via its template. The template syntax of .tt files is very similar to ASP.NET’s <% … %> blocks, except that they use <# … #> instead. For a cool example of what you can do with T4, check out this post from Danny Simmons, which shares out...

I’ve seen a lot of reports where people have trouble getting ASP.NET MVC up and running on IIS 6. Sometimes the problem is a very minor misconfiguration, sometimes it’s a misunderstanding of how IIS 6 works. In this post, I want to provide a definitive guide to getting ASP.NET MVC running on IIS 6. I will walk through using the .mvc or .aspx file extension for URLs first, then I will walkthrough using extension-less URLs. If you’re running into problems with IIS 6 and ASP.NET MVC, I recommend trying to walk through all the steps in this post, even if you’re not interested in using the .mvc or .aspx mapping. Some of the lessons learned here have more to do with how ASP.NET itself works with IIS 6 than anything specific to ASP.NET MVC. Initial...

In VS 2005, you can drag and drop an extender control anywhere on the design surface. However, in VS 2008, you can drop an extender only on an ASP control which the extender can extend its functionality. When you drag an extender and hover it over a control...