Code Monkey Labs

Weekly Web Nuggets #84

John Clayton — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:42:00 GMT

Pick of the week: Why Do Big Companies Suck?

General

SQL Server 2008 R2 - What Is StreamInsight Used For: Greg Low shares a simple explanation of what the upcoming StreamInsight product is.
Lazy(T, TMetadata) Class in System.ComponentModel.Composition: David Hayden looks at how you can include metadata along with your lazily-loaded types.
Overloading Dynamic: Justin Etheredge takes a close look at the behavior of the dynamic types in C# 4.0.
Database Capabilities in a High-Volume Environment: Tim Ellis at Digg.com explains the different types of databases available today and what makes each unique. A great reference of the different technologies and the needs they address.
My Java Experience: Oren Eini writes about his experience of learning Java for the sake of learning Java.
Expressing Your Passion: Reinvigorated from CodeMash 2010, Ken Robertson shares how a developer's passion can be their strongest quality.

Web Development

How SparkFun (and 800.com) and Small Commerce or Startup Websites Can Scale: Scott Hanselman lists some of the fundamental techniques for scaling any website.
ASP.NET MVC 2 - Strongly Typed Html Helpers: Scott Guthrie highlights the new strongly typed helpers that have been added to ASP.NET MVC 2. I sure hope they've addressed the performance issues now that it is in the core product.
Web Security - Are You Part of the Problem: Christian Heilmann details the top vulnerabilities on the web and how to address them. A must read for any web developer!
jQuery 1.4 Released: Kicking off the 14 Days of jQuery is none other than the official release of 1.4!
[Required] Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does: On the surface this is a good explanation of what exactly the [Required] attribute does in ASP.NET MVC, but be sure to read the comments where a great design discussion is brewing.
Editable Routes: Phil Haack shows how you can easily change your routes without recompiling the application.

Weekly Web Nuggets #83

John Clayton — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:33:00 GMT

Pick of the week: Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

General

Micro Optimization Decision Process: Oren Eini walks us through his process of identifying and addressing micro optimizations.
Thoughts On EF vs. NHibernate Redux: Rob Conery shares his thoughts on the ongoing debate of which flavor ORM is better. (hint: it doesn't matter!)
Understanding Perceived Performance: Howard Dierking writes about users' perceived performance, which can be more critical than if you can squeak another 10ms off your response time.
The Common Principles Behind The NOSQL Alternatives: Nati Shalom discusses the common patterns behind the various NOSQL options available and shows how they address specific issues of database scalability.
What Is The Difference Between An IoC Container And MEF: Jak Charlton explains the fundamental differences between an IoC container and MEF.
.NET Serialization Performance Comparison: James Newton-King posts the results of some performance testing from the development of Json.NET - the results are quite impressive!
11 Strategies To Rock Your Startup's Scalability In 2010: 11 fantastic tips on how to scale your application this year.

Web Development

ASP.NET MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010: Phil Haack explains why ASP.NET MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010 have continued to be out of sync.
Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths: Rick Strahl has posted a fantastic reference of all the path information available in the current request.
Dynamic Types and ASP.NET MVC: Hadi Hariri has a quick and dirty walkthrough on how to use dynamic types as your view model in ASP.NET MVC.
Walkthrough Using Autofac As Your IoC Container In An ASP.NET MVC Application: Darren Neimke shows how easy it is to use Autofac as an IoC container in you ASP.NET MVC application.

Speed Up The ASP.NET Development Server

John Clayton — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:20:03 GMT

Visual Studio has had a built-in web server for years, but I'm apparently one of the few developers that still prefers IIS. Why? It's certainly not more convenient - you have to setup a virtual directory, file system permissions, and change the debugging options. It's because on a modern Windows OS (Vista or newer) it is so slooooooooow!

Take a look at the following Firebug stats:

There is literally no content on this page yet. I've got two static resources coming from the site, and I'm using the Google AJAX loader to pull in jQuery and the Maps API. Yet while even the slowest resource from Google takes a scant 144ms to load, the page and resources I'm pulling from my local machine are each taking just over a second!

Further testing showed that where Firefox and Chrome both exhibit this behavior, IE8 did not (or at least not by my seat-of-the-pants testing - the IE developer tools still don't have a network profiler). Even stranger is that if I connect using 127.0.0.1 or localhost. (notice the trailing .) things improved!

Something isn't right here.

The Culprit: IPv6 and DNS

With Windows Vista, Microsoft included the IPv6 networking stack by default. Under Windows 7 (and probably Vista) they've apparently left resolution of localhost up to DNS. As far as I can tell the slowness isn't the browsers' fault, but rather the system trying to resolve localhost using IPv6.

Fortunately the fix is easy. Fire up Notepad (or your text editor of choice) as an Administrator, and open up your system's hosts file (typically C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts). You should see that all entries are commented out. Simply uncomment (remove the #) from the IPv4 localhost entry only, save the file, and restart your browser.

Once this is done, things look much, much better when using Visual Studio's development server. As we'd expect, the local resources are significantly faster than the external ones.

Weekly Web Nuggets #82

John Clayton — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:37:00 GMT

Pick of the week: Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway

General

Disk Based Data Structures: Mikael Svenson writes about utilizing memory-mapped files to access extremely large data structures.
Lessons Learned (Part 2: Performance Testing and Garbage Collection): Patric Fornasier continues his series of posts about performance tuning with a good nugget about garbage collection.
What Every Developer Should Know About Character Encoding: David T. explains the essential details of character encoding.
PDC 2009 Videos: Didn't make it to PDC this year? No problem.the sessions are available to download or viewing online!
ReSharper Is Amazing, Take N: Ayende Rahien found a slick feature in the upcoming ReSharper 5.0.automatic pulling in the .NET Framework source code!
The High Cost Of Losing a Developer: Dave Laribee points out how expensive it is to loose your best talent.
I Just Cloned, Why Did Git Change My Files: Tim Barcz explains an important, but subtle, concept in Git that can be frustrating if you aren't aware of it.
Graffiti CMS Is Now Open Source: Telligent has done the right thing and Open Sourced Graffiti CMS!
Git's Guts - Branches, HEAD, and Fast-Forwards: James Gregory takes an in-depth look at branches in Git and how they are different from other popular VCS systems. He follows up with another post about merging and rebasing.

Web Development

ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released: Phil Haack announces the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 beta. It's loaded with a bunch of new features and a go-live license, but unfortunately isn't compatible with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (curses!).
Silverlight 4 Beta - A Guide To The New Features: Tim Heuer has a massive post covering the major new features of Silverlight 4 (didn't we just get Silverlight 3?).
Developing and Managing Services with Windows Server AppFabric: Cliff Simpkins outlines some details of AppFabric, which offers technologies to help your IIS-based applications scale.
PDC09 - ASP.NET MVC 2 - Ninjas Still On Fire Black Belt Tips: Watch Scott Hanselman's presentation from PDC on ASP.NET MVC. He also links to some solutions to automate downloading all of the available PDC session videos!
Useful Tips Every Web Designer Should Know About SEO: A great list of SEO tips from Antonio Fullone.
What's The First Thing To Learn About ASP.NET MVC: If you're just now making the switch to MVC from WebForms, K. Scott Allen highly recommends the simple, but powerful, HTML form.
Faster Apps For A Faster Web - Introducing Speed Tracer: A sweet new tool from Google that gives you insight into how your web sites appear and perform as seen through the eyes of your browser.

Weekly Web Nuggets #81

John Clayton — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:51:00 GMT

Pick of the week: Figuring Out What Your Company Is All About

General

Hello Tekpub: Rob Conery announces TekPub.com, a new site he's launched with James Avery providing screencasts with content provided by the topic experts themselves.
WPF 4 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series): Scott Guthrie shows off a bunch of new enhancements and features coming to WPF in .NET 4.0.
Selective Unit Testing - Costs and Benefits: Steve Sanderson examines the different kinds of code that benefit from unit tests and the costs involved in unit testing.
It's All About The Delivery: Hadi Hariri breaks down dependency injection to the bare essentials.
It's Okay To Write Unit Tests: Justin Etheredge shares seven steps to writing better unit tests.

Web Development

ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0: Rick Strahl explains the new ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0 that lets you give your WebForm controls fixed IDs rather than the default munged ones.
Revisiting "The Fold": Jeff Atwood questions whether the age old rule about keeping content above the fold is still valid.
Couple Neat Windows Azure Storage Related Announcements: Jim Nakashima passes along two Azure announcements - the Windows Azure CDN and custom storage domain names.
Unit Testing ASP.NET MVC Routes: Thomas Weller demonstrates a way to unit test your ASP.NET MVC routes.
ASP.NET MVC Wins With Simplicity, Not Features: Jeffrey Palermo concludes that ASP.NET MVC's simplicity is why users, not Microsoft, are shouting its praises from the mountain tops - and as a user, I couldn't agree more!

Weekly Web Nuggets #80

John Clayton — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:50:00 GMT

Pick of the week: Understanding Public Clouds: IaaS, Paas, & SaaS

General

VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2: Scott Guthrie announces the highly anticipated Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. In additional to all the great new stuff coming in 4.0, Beta 2 includes a go-live license!
Mapping From IDataReader/IDataRecord with AutoMapper: Jan Van Ryswyck shows how you can use AutoMapper to help alleviate a lot of the tedious, repetitive code typically needed with straight ADO.NET.
Treating User Myopia: Jeff Atwood offers some excellent UI design advice about how your users more than likely see your application.
LinqLite: Jason Allor has put together a library to help with writing your own Linq providers.
Using a Personal Kanban Board: Peter Microserf tells us how using a personal kanban board has helped him get organized and get things done.

Web Development

VS 2010 Beta 2 From an ASP.NET MVC Perspective: Phil Haack focuses on what VS 2010 means to ASP.NET MVC developers.
Using Visual Studio 2010 for Silverlight Development: Tim Heuer writes about how to develop Silverlight applications using Visual Studio 2010.
The Minutes On 9 - Channel 9 Video Interviews with the ASP.NET 4 Team: Scott Hanselman interviews a bunch of ASP.NET team members about what's awesome in ASP.NET 4.
Using the New Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Stephen Walther demonstrates how to make use of the Microsoft Ajax Minifier.
ASP.NET MVC View Model Patterns: Steve Michelotti shares the pros and cons of the various ways you can build your view models.
MVC 2 Areas and Containers: K. Scott Allen shows an effective way of combining your favorite IoC container with the default controller factory in ASP.NET MVC 2.
Modern CSS Layouts - The Essential Characteristics: Smashing Magazine examines key concepts for creating successful CSS layouts using the latest technologies, like CSS 3 and HTML 5, that are starting to be more and more supported by browsers.
ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0: Rick Strahl gets into the nitty-gritty details on what the new client ID mode is in ASP.NET 4.0 and how to use it.
MVC Web Testing Strategies - Verifying Content: Jimmy Bogard investigates the challenges of testing rendered content and shows one possible approach.
HTML 5, A 3 Minute Guide: Curious what all the fuss is over HTML 5? Check out this simple introduction to some key differences.

Weekly Web Nuggets #79

John Clayton — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:06:00 GMT

Pick of the week: Software Externalities

General

Through the Eyes of Expression Blend: Check out these excellent step-by-step guides on using Expression Blend.
Git# - First Public Release: Miguel de Icaza announces the first public release of Git#, a managed library for working with Git repositories.
Technical Debt Quadrant: Martin Fowler explains the subtle, but important, differences between the many things we often classify as technical debt.

Web Development

Implementing RESTful Routes & Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 2.0: Ben Scheirman shows how to easily implement RESTful APIs using the next version of ASP.NET MVC.
ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Preview 2 - Areas and Routes: K. Scott Allen takes a look the ins and outs of the new areas functionality in ASP.NET MVC 2.0.
Common Web.config Transformations with Visual Studio 2010: Scott Kirkland shares some examples of the new web.config transformations in Visual Studio 2010.
CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8: A good reference to all the quirks we have to deal with when targeting the browser we love to hate.
Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6) and the Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Scott Guthrie rolls out the preview of some really neat new ASP.NET AJAX components, including a client script loader and a script minifier.
How the Script Loader in the Microsoft Ajax Library Will Make Your Life Wonderful: James Senior reveals much more awesomeness than I had originally expected in the new Script Loader.
10 Features Why ASP.NET 4.0 is Better For Public Website: Ronald Widha lists 10 new features that make ASP.NET 4.0 a great platform for public sites.

Weekly Web Nuggets #78

John Clayton — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:51:45 GMT

Pick of the week: An Engineer's Guide to Bandwidth

General

Prefer Dependency Injection to Service Location: Steven Harman explains the difference between two common practices for using Inversion of Control containers and shares his opinion why one is better than the other.
Make BDD Your BFF: Rob Conery has a great step-by-step guide to understanding Behavior Driven Design.
Make It Easy to Refactor: Jak Charlton shares some thoughts on making your code easy to refactor.
Understanding T4 - Preprocessed Text Templates: Oleg Sych explains T4 templates.
Lazy<T> - On Demand Construction in .NET 4.0: Bill Wagner shows off lazy object instantiation in .NET 4.0; not only is it easy to use, it's also dead simple to make thread safe.
How to Code Better using AutoMapper: Maciej Gren demonstrates how AutoMapper can be a huge help when coding by automagically translating values between classes.

Web Development

HTML Encoding Code Blocks With ASP.NET 4.0: Phil Haack highlights a great new feature coming in ASP.NET 4.0 - a new code block syntax for automatically HTML encoding output.
Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program: Scott Guthrie announces WebsiteSpark, a new program for web development professionals that includes a lot of software to get up and running.
Mutli-Browser or Cross-Browser Testing and Deconstructing Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview: Scott Hanselman compares different ways to test your site in various browsers and shows off some really cool stuff you can do using Expression Web SuperPreview.
ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Preview 2: Phil Haack announces the release of the second preview of ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and highlights a few of the major changes.
Web Deployment Tool 1.0 Has Shipped: The Microsoft Web Deployment Team announces the 1.0 release of the Web Deployment Tool.
JavaScript and Its Love For Zeroes: Sergio Pereira explains the intricacies of parsing strings into integers using JavaScript and provides a real-world example of where this could cause massive headaches.
Unit Testing with jQuery using FireUnit & QUnit: Elijah Manor takes a look at unit testing your JavaScript code.
Leveraging ASP.NET MVC 2 Futures "ViewState": Maarten Balliauw shows how you can introduce ViewState-like functionality in you ASP.NET MVC 2 application (gasp!). The first real comment asks the obvious question, "Why???".

Weekly Web Nuggets #77

John Clayton — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:27:00 GMT

Pick of the week: Programming - AKA: Paint By Number

General

Two Strikes, and You Are Out: Ayenda Rahien explains how seeing repeated bugs often indicates a fragile design, which is a pretty dire situation to be in.
MonoTouch 1.0 Goes Live: Miguel de Icaza announces the 1.0 release of MonoTouch, a commercial product that allows you to write iPhone & iPod Touch applications using C#.
AOP Can Save You Tons of Repetitive Code: Thomas Weller demonstrates how using Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) can significantly reduce the amount of repetitive code you'll need to write.
S#arp Architecture has Moved to GitHub (This Ain't Yo Momma's SCM): Billy McCafferty writes about S#arp's transition from SVN to GitHub and provides some good resources for others looking to make the same transition.
Getting to Know .NET Build Tools: Garren pits NAnt against Rake + IronRuby for .NET build supremacy.

Web Development

Shrinkr - URL Shrinking Service Developed With Entity Framework 4.0, Unity, ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery (Part 3): Kazi Manzur Rashid continues his series on building a URL shortening service using the next generation tools. In this installment he shows how to use compiled Entity Framework queries in a repository.
Let's Make the Web Faster: A list of tool recommendations from Google to help with the overall speed of your site.
Announcing the Microsoft AJAX CDN: Scott Guthrie announces the availability of a public CDN for jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX. Michael Schwarz responds with a few very valid points of criticism that potential users should be aware of.
Integrating OpenID in an ASP.NET MVC Application Using DotNetOpenAuth: Rick Strahl demonstrates how to integrate OpenID authentication in an ASP.NET MVC application.
Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet - How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs: Benjamin of Virtuosi Media has put together a great reference of how to work around hair-pulling bugs and issues in the browser we all love to hate so, so much.

Weekly Web Nuggets #76

John Clayton — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:31:00 GMT

Pick of the week: How to Contribute to Open Source Without Writing a Single Line of Code

General

Microsoft Creates the CodePlex Foundation: Scott Hanselman announces the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit organization created to help commercial software developers use Open Source software.
What the CodePlex Foundation Means to the .NET OSS Developer: Phil Haack shares his thoughts on how the CodePlex Foundation will be able to benefit .NET open source developers. He continues his thoughts in a follow-up post.
First Step In Troubleshooting Complex Issues - Define and Scope Your Issue Properly: Tess Ferrandez explains why the very first thing you should do when troubleshooting is to define exactly what the problem is. She also has good suggestions on how to zoom in on the issue.
SharpDevelop Now Creates Projects as 32-bit By Default: Daniel of the SharpDevelop team announces a seemingly backtracking change in SharpDevelop and has a good explanation of why it's actually a good idea.
A Fix We Really Need In MEF for .NET 4.0: Nothing is more frustrating than encountering an issue in the core .NET framework that you are unable to fix, extend, or workaround. Kathleen Dollard needs our help to get one of those fixes into .NET 4.0 before it gets locked down.
Your Unit Test May Smell If.: Derik Whittaker highlights one particular indication that your tests might be getting smelly.

Web Development

Looking to the Future with Cassandra: Ian of Digg.com writes about their experience pushing a NOSQL solution - Cassandra - into production. Want even more details? His co-worker Arin Sarkissian has a follow-up post with more in-depth details about Cassandra.
Building Scalable Databases - Denormalization, the NoSQL Movement and Digg: Dare Obasanjo responds to the Digg's post about using Cassandra by explaining at a high level what the NoSQL stuff is all about.
Shrinkr - URL Shrinking Service Developed with Entity Framework 4.0, Unity, ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery: Kazi Manzure Rashid is using the very latest tools to build a URL shortening service. Based on this first installment it looks like it'll be a great reference! Also check out part 2 of the project.
RSSCloud vs. PubSubHubbub - Why the Fat Pings Win: Josh Fraser explains the differences between the two technologies behind the emerging real-time web movement. Even though he is a contributor to PubSubHubbub, his arguments are pretty unbiased.
Get and Set Querystring Values in JavaScript: It's one of those things that really should be native but isn't. Rick Strahl shows us how to do it.
Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Refcard: Keyvan Nayyeri announces the availability of a nice little reference document for ASP.NET MVC written by himself and Simone Chiaretta.
ASP.NET MVC - Using RESTful Architecture: Srinu Tamada explains what RESTful architectures are and how you can build them using ASP.NET MVC.
The Technology Behind Tornado, FriendFeed's Web Server: Bret Taylor writes about the background of Tornado, FriendFeed's recently open sourced web server.