Yeah, it's one of those posts, sorry. First, the mildly depressing: the most popular post on this blog this year with 47,000 hits was a post from last year about a fix to a bug in ASP.NET . A content-less post except for that link to the KB article that people should have found by going directly to the support site in the first place. Then, the really depressing: the second most popular post this year with 34,000 hits was a post from 2005 about how to display message boxes on a web page . I mean come on. This was kind of fun five years ago and it did solve one of the most common n00b mistakes VB programmers trying to move to the web were making. But come on, we've traveled about 4.7 billion miles around the Earth since then. Do people...

It’s the end of the year and it’s time for the annual year in review blog post. I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry, you remembered to turn off the stove before leaving. You’re also probably thinking, “do we really need an end of year blog post from everyone?”. I asked on Quora , and the answer is a definitive no, we don’t. This is my absolutely unnecessary self indulgent end of year blog post. I wouldn’t have it any other way, would you? I didn’t want to settle with an ordinary “Ho hum bore you to tears 2010 Year in Review Blog Post”. Mainly because I hate to see you cry. Really. Please stop. What I wanted was nothing short of nuclear supernova fireworks, dancing panda bears, and double rainbow fish that shoot sparks out their butts...

This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: Introducing Razor (July 2nd) New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (Dec 16th) Layouts and Sections with Razor (Today) In today’s post I’m going to go into more details about how Layout pages work with Razor.  In particular, I’m going to cover how you can have multiple, non-contiguous, replaceable “sections” within a layout file – and enable views based on layouts to optionally “fill in” these different sections at runtime.  The Razor syntax for doing this is clean and concise...

My personal blog still runs on Orchard 0.5, because the theme that I used to build it is not yet available for more recent versions, but it is still very important for me to know that I can migrate all my content and comments to a new version at any time. Fortunately, Nick Mayne has been consistently shipping a BlogML module a few days after each of the Orchard versions shipped. Because the module gallery for each version is behind a different URL and is kept alive even after a new one shipped, it is very easy to install the module for both versions. Step 0: Setting up the migration environment In order to do the migration, I made a local copy of the production site on my laptop (data included: I'm using SQL CE) and I also created a new...

A lot has been written about how to get ASP.NET MVC running on IIS 6 with extensionless URLs. Up until now, the story hasn’t been very pretty. When running ASP.NET MVC on ASP.NET 4, it gets a lot easier. To be fair, the part that makes it easier has nothing to do with ASP.NET MVC 3 and everything to do with a little known new feature of ASP.NET 4 creatively called the ASP.NET 4 Extensionless URL feature . ASP.NET MVC 3 requires ASP.NET 4 so it naturally benefits from this new feature. If you have a server running IIS 6, ASP.NET 4, and ASP.NET MVC 3 (or even ASP.NET MVC 2. I haven’t tried ASP.NET MVC 1.0), your website should just work with the default extensionless URLs generated by ASP.NET MVC applications. No need to configure wildcard mappings...

Along with James Senior , I’ll be speaking at a couple of free Web Camps events in South America in March 2011. Buenos Aires, Argentina – March 14-15, 2011 São Paulo, Brazil – March 18-19, 2011 The registration links are not yet available, but I’ll update this blog post once they are. For a list of all upcoming Web Camps events, see the events list . If you’re not familiar with Web Camps, the website provides the following description, emphasis mine: Microsoft's 2 day Web Camps are events that allow you to learn and build websites using ASP.NET MVC , WebMatrix, OData and more. Register today at a location near you! These events will cover all 3 topics and will have presentations on day 1 with hands on development on day 2. They will be available...

We could have done better. That’s the thought that goes through my mind when looking back on this past year and reflecting on NuGet. Overall, I think we did pretty well with the product. Nobody died from using it, we received a lot of positive feedback, and users seem genuinely happy to use the product. So why start off with a negative review? It’s just my way. If you can’t look back on every project you do and say to yourself “I could have done better”, then you weren’t paying attention and you weren’t learning. For example, why stop at double rainbows when we could have gone for triple? When starting out on NuGet, we hoped to accomplish even more in our first full release. Like many projects, we have iteration milestones which each culminate...

Modern ASP.NET web applications take full advantage of client-side JavaScript to provide better interactivity and responsiveness. If you are building an ASP.NET application in the right way, you quickly end up with lots and lots of JavaScript code. When writing server code, you should be writing unit tests. One big advantage of unit tests is that they provide you with a safety net that enable you to safely modify your existing code – for example, fix bugs, add new features, and make performance enhancements -- without breaking your existing code. Every time you modify your code, you can execute your unit tests to verify that you have not broken anything. For the same reason that you should write unit tests for your server code, you should write...

Scott sits down with open source developer Benjamin van der Veen to talk about his C# Web Server, Kayak, as well as OWIN , Open Source Web Servers and his thoughts on where server-side web development is going. Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show OWIN on Github Kayak - Lightweight HTTP server+framework written in C# NOTE: If you want to download our complete archives as a feed - that's all 244 shows, subscribe to the Complete MP3 Feed here . Also, please do take a moment and review the show on iTunes . Subscribe: or or Zune Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts , a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show. Telerik is our sponsor for this show. Building quality software...

At some point, everybody and every team makes a mistake they regret and wish they could take back. During our regular status meetings, I sometimes make the mistake of saying something like “if I could go back in time, I’d tell myself not to make that decision.” Image from the greenhead . That tees it up for our lead developer who’s so smart even his ass is smart. You might say he’s a smart ass. His response is usually “Really? I can think of a lot better things I would do with a time machine.” Which got me thinking. Hypothetically speaking of course, if I did have a time machine, how exactly would I maximize my profit? Often, time travel questions fixate on boring topics such as if you could meet anyone in history, who would it be? Lincoln?...