The ASP.NET MVC pattern tends to lead itself into a more simplified and "true" HTTP experience by re-introducing  patterns that have been lost, or at least, not followed in many years. One such pattern is the Post, Redirect, Get (PRG) pattern in which it is "to help avoid duplicate form submissions and allow web applications to behave more intuitively with browser bookmarks and the reload button" (Read More...)

Recently, we've been converting over a lot of our ASP.NET Web Form pages to use ASP.NET MVC. While this is no small feat by itself, the underlying problem of having a new Url structure in the site while still supporting legacy Url's was necessary. The idea, is that you hit a page that no longer exists, and you get redirected to the appropriate controller & action within MVC.

Workflow

1. A legacy Url is requested from your site. For example, http://www.server.com/Users/Login.aspx
2. ASP.NET routing intercepts the request and matches a route from your route collection
3. Instead of using the MvcRouteHandler, a LegacyRouteHandler is invoked.
4. Using the LegacyRouteHandler, it'll use the route redirection name you specified, generate the MVC Url, and issue a HTTP 301 with the location of http://www.server.com/site/login.

Read more...

I'm thoroughly enjoying the new ActionResult feature the ASP.NET team introduced into the "refresh" of the Preview 2 bits... or whatever they're calling it now :) Introducing this has increased productivity regarding testing the results of a controller's action. Here's a quick summary of the different types... Read More

Just a note for anyone still subscribing, I'm moving my blog to my own host. You can continue reading at http://blog.eworldui.net or if you'd like to update your feed, point it towards http://feeds.feedburner.com/eworldui. I'm going to start blogging again, it's been too long! I've got some exciting news coming up that I can't wait to share, so stay tuned for my announcement!

Update: I wanted stats for my feeds, so I changed my feed URL to use FeedBurner.

Version 2.0.6 of Excentrics World Server Controls, targeting the .NET 3.5 framework has just been released. This is purely a re-compilation against .NET 3.5 framework including the basic binaries and Microsoft Ajax.

This version can be downloaded by visiting http://www.eworldui.net/Download.aspx and choosing "3.5" as your framework version. The official build number for this release is the same (2.0.6.2393).

My hosting company installed Microsoft AJAX 1.0 RTM this evening and broke my website temporarily. I've since then rebuild my website against the RTM bits myself, however have noticed in certain areas you may need to delete your cache (or do a shift+refresh) to get the download form to work. Sorry for any inconvenience this caused, but it was out of my hands!

Version 2.0.6 of Excentrics World Server Controls has just been released targeting Microsoft AJAX Extensions, RTM (didn't know it was released, visit ScottGu's blog post announcing it!) to ensure continued full compatibility as well as a few bug fixes. It should be noted with this release, the control set's compatibility layer will no longer be compatible with any prior versions of Microsoft AJAX Extensions. A breaking change from 2.0.5 to 2.0.6 is that the compatibility layer no longer includes validation controls, following suit with Microsoft AJAX.

The items that were fixed are:

• Fixed issue where the culture, if not set, was pulling from CurrentUICulture instead of CurrentCulture for the CalendarPopup and TimePicker.
• Fixed issue where if the culture set for the CalendarPopup or TimePicker was a neutral culture, that it would attempt to resolve a specific culture for parsing of the date & time.
• Fixed an issue where pasting into the NumericBox in IE with valid text that had whitespace surrounding it would fail.

The updated version can be downloaded by visiting http://www.eworldui.net/Download.aspx. The official build number for this release is 2.0.6.2393.

I've been keeping this under wraps for about 6 months now, but since the book has been finally published & I just received my copy, I'm happy to promote the book Windows Developer Power Tools.I was asked by James Avery and Jim Holmes to be a contributor writing about Unleash It. Check out the book as it has a ton of awesome free & open source tools, and read my section (12.8) starting on page 650. Yay!

Ohh, just in time for the holidays, Enterprise Library 3.0 has just had it's first CTP released. Might have to give it a whirl to see what I can use from it versus the current 2.0 version I'm using. Some of the new features look interesting, especially the new Validation Application Block & Application Block Software Factory. Good thing I'm leaving my computer behind, otherwise I think my wife would divorce me. Check out the new site on CodePlex.