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I really advocate folks reading as much source as they can because you become a better writer by reading as much as writing. That's the whole point of the Weekly Source Code - reading code to be a better developer. Reading code in Open Source projects is a good way to learn, especially if the project has been around a while and been successful, or if you already respect the team of people working on it. Less reliably, you can find snippets of code by searching and sharing code. David Ebbo is scary clever . You know someone is smart when they come up with something you don't think you yourself could come up with on your own, but you still kick yourself for not thinking of it in the first place. David's been experimenting with ways...

As web programmers, we use a lot of strings to move data around the web. Often we’ll use a string to represent a date or an integer or a boolean. Basically "1" in instead of 1, or "April 1, 2009" rather than a proper ISO-8601 formatted culture-invariant date. While these strings are flying around via HTTP it's not a huge deal, but sometimes this loose, even sloppy, use of strings can leak into our own code. We might find ourselves leaving the data times as strings longer and longer, or not even bothering to convert them to their proper type at all. This problem is made worse by the proliferation of JSON, and schema-less/namespace-less XML (that I've often called " angle-bracket delimited files " as they're...

Today is a pretty cool day. It's the culmination of a bunch of little stuff and a lot of hard work by some really nice dudes. Here's a few surprises. Rob, Phil, and I have been working on the ASP.NET MVC book for a while. One (poorly kept) surprise is the inclusion of ScottGu as an author on the book. Between the four of us, we got enough forehead space for like six guys. Here's where it gets cool. Free ASP.NET MVC eBook Today we're releasing the first 185 pages of the book as a FREE PDF download . Not only that, it's licensed as Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives . You can share, distribute, hand out, transmit it all you like. You can even include it in your own book if you'd like. ;) We worked really hard on...

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...

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-fifth in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." At the end of my crazy babies talk at PDC ( Tips on how I prepared here ) I had a big demo where I gave a URL to a Silverlight version of BabySmash that Grant and I built for the show. You can watch the presentation online if you like and fast forward to the end (around 60 minutes in) and see the big demo. Basically we had the Silverlight BabySmash talk via ADO.NET Data Services (I'll post in detail in the near future) to a SQL backend. Then I had an MVC reporting site that had some charts that would update as folks smashed. There...

Recently while talking to Jeff Atwood and his development team about StackOverflow he mentioned that he compresses the Cache or Session data in ASP.NET which enables him to store about 5-10x more data. They do it with some helper methods but I thought it'd be interesting to try it myself. There's a lot of options and thoughts and quasi-requirements on how to pull this off: I could create my own SessionStateModule, basically replacing the default Session state mechanism completely. I could create a number of extension methods to HttpSessionState. I could just use helper methods, but that means I have to remember to use them on the in and the out and it doesn't feel like the way I'd use it day to day. However, the benefit to this...

Remember last week when I mentioned the Microsoft Web Platform Installer ? It's an app that gets you setup for Web Developer, all in a single application. It'll setup IIS7, get you Visual Studio, SQL Server, .NET, etc. Cool. And there was much rejoicing (except XP folks, sorry.) Well, the team just released the Web Application Installer   (Beta) . Get it? First Platform, now Applications. What does it do? Well, how about a screenshot. Yes, that's Drupal in there. And PHPBB . And WordPress . Sweet. I've talked to the team, and they've promised that DasBlog is next in line to get in that list o' applications. It's a *ahem* gem of an application. Well, it's a great start. Open Source, baby, baby. The installer...

In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you thirty-second in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." BlogSvc.NET - The AtomPub Server for WCF and .NET Much respect to people who not only release Open Source Software, but also take the time to get a nice, clean logo for their project as BlogSvc.NET did. It's written by Jarrett Vance and the code is up on CodePlex with Documentation and details on the main BlogSvc.NET site . It also appears that the site at http://www.blogsvc.net is also the Demo Site for BlogSvc itself ! Actually, if you download the source, you're downloading the complete implementation of the BlogSvc.net website. Booyachaka. Much respect...

I've been getting more and more interested in how folks extend their applications using plugins and things. In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you thirtieth in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." Spark I'm really enjoying the extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC , but not as much as some people. Spark is a really promising ViewEngine from Louis DeJardin . You can download Spark here and join the mailing list here . Not only is it promising, it's also freaky. Freaky in that good, makes-you-think way. Louis says " The idea is to allow the html to dominate the flow and the code to fit seamlessly. " When he says HTML should dominate...

I've been getting more and more interested in how folks extend their applications using plugins and things. In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you twenty-eighth ( half a year! ) in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." The iPhone 2.0 was announced today and even though I am trying to come up with a better solution to show it off than Northwind , I was moved when I saw Aaron's "Rock the iPhone with ASP.NET MVC" post . I've had this same post in my "to blog" queue for at least two months, but now he's done it himself and beat us all to it. Kudos to Aaron. I'm primarily an ASP.NET developer and I browse on mobile devices...