Tag: General

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this point, I don’t know if it’s easy nor do I know what it takes to achieve this goal. I only have some assumtions on how CarTrackr can be converted to a cloud application. This post is part 1 of the series, in which I’ll describe the architecture of Windows Azure and what I think it takes to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. Other parts:

Just a quick recommendation note: One of my colleagues, Julien Hanssens, has started blogging on his experiences with the Entity Framework and LINQ. Here are some links to get you started: Entity Framework - ArgumentException on Connection “A common error while initialising an EntityModel from a WCF Service is the following message: ArgumentException was unhandled by user code - The specified named connection is either not found in the configuration, not intended to be used with the EntityClient provider, or not valid. ” Entity Framework and Stored Procedures

Just noticed there’s a new project on CodePlex related to the ASP.NET MVC framework: MVC XForms. MVC XForms is a simple UI framework for ASP.NET MVC based on the W3C XForms specification. It provides a set of form controls that allow updating of complex model objects. Picked these project goals from Jon Curtis’ blog:

A few days ago, I wrote I was doing a presentation on the DII workshop in Brussels together with Julien Chable. Apart from heavy traffic from Antwerp to Brussels (80km, almost 3 hours… sigh), I think the DII workshop was quite succesful! Lots of news around OpenXML and Office, lots of interesting ideas from other community members. It was also great to meet some people who I’ve been mailing with for 2 years in person. Slides of the Redmond DII session can be found here.

Nice to see that there’s a lot of activity going on related to PHPExcel! This weekend, I receievd my electronic copy of php|architect / November 2008 featuring an article on generating PDF and Excel files using PHP. Guess which library is being used in the second part of the article…

First things first: WTF is DII??? It’s the “Document Interoperability Initiative” that Microsoft launched. The workshop will be a day filled with presentations from a variety of people, including members of the Office product groups at Microsoft and developers and consultants from several other companies (basically like the one held in Redmond a few weeks ago).

When building an ASP.NET MVC application, chances are that you are using master pages. After working on the application for a while, it’s time to spice up some views with jQuery and partial updates. Let’s start with an example application which does not have any Ajax / jQuery. Our company’s website shows a list of all employees and provides a link to a details page containing a bio for that employee. In the current situation, this link is referring to a custom action method which is rendered on a separate page.

It has indeed been a long time since I blogged about OpenXML. However, this does not mean I’m completely doing nothing with it! PHPExcel still keeps eating a lot of evening hours as well as some other OpenXML-related projects.

When using Team Foundation Server 2008 and Team Build, chances are you are developing unit tests in Microsoft’s test framework which is integrated with Visual Studio 2008. This integration offers valuable data hen a build has been finished on the build server: test run results are published in the Team Foundation Server 2008 data warehouse and can be used to create detailed metrics on how your development team is performing and what the quality of the product being developed is.

You are right! This is indeed my third post on ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders. The first one focussed on creating a ModelBinder from scratch in an older preview release, the second post did something similar trying to do some dirty ViewState-like stuff. Good news! There’s more of this dirty stuff coming! How about this action method, using a Person class which is a Linq to SQL entity type: