The Backstory: I was thinking since the NuGet .NET package management site is starting to fill up that I should start looking for gems (no pun intended) in there. You know, really useful stuff that folks might otherwise not find. I'll look for mostly open source projects, ones I think are really useful. I'll look at how they built their NuGet packages, if there's anything interesting about the way the designed the out of the box experience (and anything they could do to make it better) as well as what the package itself does.  Today, it's imageresizer . Bertrand Le Roy has long been an advocate of doing image resizing correctly on .NET and particularly on ASP.NET. Last week he posted a great post on a new library to choose...

If you’re in the Reykjavik area on November 7th, come join me for a beer-up. A Beer-Up is basically a meet-up, but with lots of beer! When: November 7th, 2011 at 8:00 PM Where: The English Pub ( yes, I went all the way to Iceland for an English pub ) Why: To talk about ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, Software Development whatever geeky topics you want. And if we do our jobs right, by the end of the night we’ll discuss life, philosophy, and which direction is my hotel? Blue Lagoon in Iceland - Photo from sxc.hu I’ll be stopping overnight in Reykjavik on my way to Oredev 2011 . I’m pretty excited as I’ve always been fascinated by the natural beauty of such a geologically active place. I definitely plan to see the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa (pictured...

A few weeks ago at the Future of Web Apps London (great conference, by the way!), I gave a presentation about how to get the most out of a cloud platform. At the end of the talk, I showed a brief demo of http://twoenglishes.com (source on GitHub ), a Node.js app deployed in Windows Azure. The demo was interesting in a few ways: It’s kind of entertaining. It translates between American and British English. (Try typing “color” or “aluminum” on the left side, or type “colour” or “aluminium” on the right.) It’s deployed to two data centers (one in the US and one in Europe), and Traffic Manager routes incoming traffic to the nearest data center. This has a noticeable effect in terms of latency. The images (logo and flags) are served via the Windows...

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next releases of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you’ll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC – as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post is the third of three posts in the series that talk about the new Model Binding support coming to Web Forms.  Model Binding is an extension of the existing data-binding system in ASP.NET Web Forms, and provides a code-focused data-access paradigm.  It takes advantage of a bunch of model binding concepts we first introduced with ASP.NET MVC – and integrates them nicely with the Web Forms...

We made a recent change to make it easy to update the NuGet documentation . In this post, I’ll cover what the change was, why we made it, and how it makes it easier to contribute to our documentation. Our docs run as a simple ASP.NET Web Pages application that renders documentation written in the Markdown format. The Markdown text is not stored in a database, but live as files that are part of the application source code. That allows us to use source control to version our docs. We used to host the source for the docs site in Mercurial (hg) on CodePlex.com . Under the old system, it took the following to contribute docs. Install Mercurial (TortoiseHG for example) if you didn’t already have it. Fork our repository and clone it to your local machine...

I am playing more with the Windows Developer Preview and simply love the backward compatibility it has for applications that used to work in Windows 7. And one of the applications critical to my day-to-day life is Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 and ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools is my everyday requirement. Windows Developer Preview when installed from the MSDN Center has two flavors. One with the Developer Tools which I would assume, most of us developers would want and the other one, which is simply the Windows Developer Preview (without the Tools). And the Tools that it ships with has a version of VS11 Developer Preview which is just for building Metro Style applications. If you plan to use the same for web development (using MVC or Web Forms...

I'm in the process of moving the Orchard documentation site from ScrewTurn Wiki to a Mercurial + Markdown system, where revisions are managed through source control tools instead of a fully online wiki. We see quite a few advantages in doing that, but that's a story for another post. Today, I just want to post on that quick and dirty tool that I've built to translate the ScrewTurn Wiki markup into Markdown. It's not a masterpiece in any way, it's not exhaustive, but I thought it may be useful to others, so here it is… https://bitbucket.org/bleroy/screwturn2markdown/src Read More...

I just published https://github.com/smarx/packanddeploy , a simple scaffold for deploying an executable as a Windows Azure application. That code runs, as an example, mongoose (a web server). It uses the new ProgramEntryPoint in a worker role to launch a batch file, which then launches the executable. I did it this way because I wanted to pass the address and port as command line parameters (so environment variable expansion via a batch file was a good option). The project does not use Visual Studio. It simply uses the cspack and csrun commands from the Windows Azure SDK to package the app for local or cloud deployment and to run it locally. This should be a good starting point for people who just have an executable they want to get running...

Recently, a group of covert ninjas within my organization started to investigate what it would take to change our internal build and continuous integration systems (CI) to take advantage of NuGet for many of our products, and I need your input! Hmm, off by one error slays me again. -Image from Ask A Ninja. Click on the image to visit. Ok, they’re not really covert ninjas, that just sounds much cooler than a team of slightly pudgy software developers. Ok, they’ve told me to speak for myself, they’re in great shape! In response to popular demand, we changed our minds and decided to support Semantic Versioning (SemVer) as the means to specify pre-release packages for the next version of NuGet (1.6). In part, this is the cause of the delay for this...

I've written several times before about image resizing in .NET and how the various built-in solutions (GDI, WPF and WIC) compare in terms of quality, speed and size. I'll put the links to my previous articles at the end of this post for reference. Several readers have since pointed me to the imageresizer library, which is pure .NET and thus has no problems running in medium trust. Medium trust is an issue that has plagued existing options, preventing many people from using the best available approach. I was doubtful though that a purely managed library could come anywhere near the native Windows libraries in terms of performance. The best way to find out, of course, is to run a benchmark. Fortunately, I still had the code for my previous...