Archives

Archives / 2011
  • Inflector for .NET

    I was writing conventions for FluentNHibernate the other day and I ran into the need to pluralize a given string and immediately thought of the ruby on rails Inflector.  It turns out there is a .NET library out there also capable of doing word inflection, originally written (I believe) by Andrew Peters, though the link I had no longer works.  The entire Inflector class is only a little over 200 lines long and can be easily included into any project, and contains the Pluralize() method along with a few other helpful methods (like Singularize(), Camelize(), Capitalize(), etc).

  • Introducing Data Annotations Extensions

    Validation of user input is integral to building a modern web application, and ASP.NET MVC offers us a way to enforce business rules on both the client and server using Model Validation.  The recent release of ASP.NET MVC 3 has improved these offerings on the client side by introducing an unobtrusive validation library built on top of jquery.validation.  Out of the box MVC comes with support for Data Annotations (that is, System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations) and can be extended to support other frameworks.  Data Annotations Validation is becoming more popular and is being baked in to many other Microsoft offerings, including Entity Framework, though with MVC it only contains four validators: Range, Required, StringLength and Regular Expression.  The Data Annotations Extensions project attempts to augment these validators with additional attributes while maintaining the clean integration Data Annotations provides.