Scott's Blog

Windows Azure recently introduced their “Websites” concept which allows quick and easy deployment of ASPNET, Node.js and PHP web-sites to the Azure cloud.  One of the most exciting developments was the ability to deploy to web-sites rapidly using “Git Publishing,” meaning if you are using Git you just need to add a new remote and do “git push azure” to deploy your code on demand.

Many git users may not be aware that you can setup git aliases for either providing shortcuts to existing commands (like typing ‘git co’ instead of ‘git checkout’) or even for creating entirely new commands (‘git hist’ for printing your git history formatted how you like it).  Git aliases can be local to a single repository, or (more commonly) global.

Now that I have my source code being checked into GitHub and have TeamCity doing automatic builds (and running tests), I thought it was about time to take the last big step and automatically deploy the latest version of an application to a live site (either for testing or just straight to production, it’s up to you) whenever a successful build has taken place.

Last week I gave a presentations to the 2011 UC Davis IT Security Symposium that covered input validation features in HTML5.  I mostly discussed the following three topics:

One great benefit of having a Continuous Integration server like TeamCity (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/) building your code is that you can hook into the build process to have it also handle tedious or time-consuming tasks for you, such as running all of your unit tests, code coverage analyses, etc.

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).

ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a new unobtrusive validation strategy that utilizes HTML5 data-* attributes to decorate form elements.  Using a combination of jQuery validation and an unobtrusive validation adapter script that comes with MVC 3, those attributes are then turned into client side validation rules.

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.