Archives
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MVC's Html.DropDownList and "There is no ViewData item of type 'IEnumerable<SelectListItem>' that has the key '...'
ASP.NET MVC's HtmlHelper extension methods take out a lot of the HTML-by-hand drudgery to which MVC re-introduced us former WebForms programmers. Another thing to which MVC re-introduced us is poor documentation, after the excellent documentation for most of the rest of ASP.NET and the .NET Framework which I now realize I'd taken for granted.
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How to create a new WCF/MVC/jQuery application from scratch
As a corporate developer by trade, I don't get much opportunity to create from-the-ground-up web sites; usually it's tweaks, fixes, and new functionality to existing sites. And with hobby sites, I often don't find the challenges I run into with enterprise systems; usually it's starting from Visual Studio's boilerplate project and adding whatever functionality I want to play around with, rarely deploying outside my own machine. So my experience creating a new enterprise-level site was a bit dated, and the technologies to do so have come a long way, and are much more ready to go out of the box. My intention with this post isn't so much to provide any groundbreaking insights, but to just tie together a lot of information in one place to make it easy to create a new site from scratch.
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Oracle 64-bit assembly throws BadImageFormatException when running unit tests
We recently upgraded to the 64-bit Oracle client. Since then, Visual Studio 2010 unit tests that hit the database (I know, unit tests shouldn't hit the database--they're not perfect) all fail with this error message:
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MVC 4 and the App_Start folder
I've been delving into ASP.NET MVC 4 a little since its release last month. One thing I was chomping at the bit to explore was its bundling and minification functionality, for which I'd previously used Cassette, and been fairly happy with it. MVC 4's functionality seems very similar to Cassette's; the latter's CassetteConfiguration class matches the former's BundleConfig class, specified in a new directory called App_Start.
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Unity throws SynchronizationLockException while debugging
I've found Unity to be a great resource for writing unit-testable code, and tests targeting it. Sadly, not all those unit tests work perfectly the first time (TDD notwithstanding), and sometimes it's not even immediately apparent why they're failing. So I use Visual Studio's debugger. I then see SynchronizationLockExceptions thrown by Unity calls, when I never did while running the code without debugging. I hit F5 to continue past these distractions, the line that had the exception appears to have completed normally, and I continue on to what I was trying to debug in the first place.
In settings where Unity isn't used extensively, this is just one amongst a handful of annoyances in a tool (Visual Studio) that overall makes my work life much, much easier and more enjoyable. But in larger projects, it can be maddening. Finally it bugged me enough where it was worth researching it.