This is a continuation of my Introduction to ASP.NET MVC series.  As I outlined before this is in an effort to write the book and keep blogging, I decided to write/blog the last chapter, Chapter 2.  I am doing this so I can receive feedback on this chapter as early as possible.  Because this chapter, in my opinion, is probably the most critical of the book, it defines the context around ASP.NET MVC and how it differs from ASP.NET Web Forms, as well as giving a historical perspective of the MVC pattern.

In the next several posts we will cover the following parts of Chapter 2 from the book:

• The Model-View-Controller Pattern
• ASP.NET MVC vs. ASP.NET Web Forms
• The Model
• The View
• The Controller

ASP.NET MVC vs. ASP.NET Web Forms

As you have seen, in the previous section, and can probably imagine MVC is going to be an architectural pattern that is going to be around for the foreseeable future, especially on the web.  So it is very important to internalize and understand the major differences between ASP.NET MVC and the older ASP.NET Web Forms.

ASP.NET Web Forms

Starting with the .NET Framework Version 1.0, in January 2002, Web Forms was Microsoft’s first real attempt to provide a first class web application layer that was both robust and flexible enough to meet the demands of the web at that time.  ASP.NET Web Forms has proven to be a mature technology that runs small and large scale websites alike.  Web Forms, was built around the Windows Form construction, where you had a declarative syntax with an event driven model.  This allowed visual designers to take full advantage of the drag and drop, WYSIWYG, interface that they had become accustom to under Windows Forms development in Visual Studio 6.0.  In that they only needed to drop controls onto the ASP.NET page and then wire up the events, as was common in Visual Basic 6.0 development at the time. This made Web Forms a natural choice for Windows Forms developers, because the learning curve was low and the need to understand HTML and many of the web centric technologies almost zero.  Web Forms have many strengths and weaknesses:

Strengths

• Mature technology
• Provides very good RAD development capabilities
• Great WYSIWYG designer support in Visual Studio
• Easy state management
• Rich control libraries from Microsoft and third party vendors
• Abstracts the need to understand HTTP, HTML, CSS, and in some cases JavaScript
• ViewState and PostBack model
• A familiar feel to Windows Forms development

Web Forms has grown so much since 2002 because it has the ability to do great things that are often much harder to accomplish in other frameworks.

Weaknesses

• Display logic coupled with code, through code-behind files
• Harder to unit test application logic, because of the coupled code-behind files
• ViewState and PostBack model
• State management of controls leads to very large and often unnecessary page sizes

Web Forms is not all roses and buttercups, there are some serious setbacks that usually show up when you are trying to optimize your code for scalability, the biggest problems are the ViewState and PostBack model.  ViewState is a way to store the state of the controls, such as data, selections, etc, which is needed to preserve the Windows Form like development habits of the developers.  ViewState was necessary, because the web is a stateless environment meaning that when a request comes in to the server it has no recollection of the previous request.  So in order to give state to a stateless environment you need to communicate the previous state back to the server, in Web Forms this was accomplished using hidden <input /> fields that can become ridiculously large. This increased size becomes apparent when server controls such as GridView are added to the page.  PostBack was another creation to facilitate the Windows Form development feel, it renders JavaScript for every subscribed event, which leaves web developer less control over how the browser communicates with the server.

ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET was often overlooked as a viable platform for modern highly interactive websites that required a very granular control over the output of the HTML, because of the lack of control over the rendered HTML.  This granularity of control was sacrificed in Web Forms to make if more like Windows Forms development, in other words easier for the drag and drop developers.  This lack of control over the HTML rendering forced developers to move the platforms such as PHP and Ruby on Rails, which offered the level of control they required and the MVC programming model that provided a necessary separation of concerns for their highly complex web applications.

This led Microsoft to announce in the Fall of 2007 that they were going to create a platform based off of the core of ASP.NET that would compete against these other popular MVC web centric platforms.  Microsoft implemented ASP.NET MVC to be a modern web development platform that gives a ‘closer to the metal’ experience to the developers that program with it, by providing full control and testability over the output that is returned to the browser.  This is the main and most important different between Web Forms and MVC, in my opinion.  MVC has many strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• Provides fine control over rendered HTML
• Cleaner generation of HTML (well as clean as you keep it)
• Clear separation of concerns
• Provides application layer unit testing
• Can support multiple view engines, such as Brail, NHaml, NVelocity, XSLT, etc.
• Easy integration with JavaScript frameworks like jQuery or Yahoo UI frameworks
• Ability to map URLs logically and dynamically, depending on your use
• RESTful interfaces are used by default (this helps out with SEO)
• No ViewState and PostBack model
• Supports all the core ASP.NET features, such as authentication, caching, membership, etc.
• Size of the pages generated typically much smaller because of the lack of the ViewState

Weaknesses

• Not event driven by the framework, so it maybe more difficult for ASP.NET Web Form developers to understand
• Requires the need to understand, at least at the basic level, HTTP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Third party library support is not as strong
• No direct upgrade path from Web Forms
• No ViewState and PostBack model (makes it more difficult to preserve state)

As you can see the pros and cons of MVC have to be weighed just as much as Web Forms, and MVC is not always the logical choice.

How do I choose?

It’s up to you to decide and you choice needs to be weighted with a number of other factors, such as team and application requirements, when deciding which ASP.NET technology to implement.  I have developed the following worksheet that will hopefully help you decide, when you need to make this decision.

The Worksheet

This worksheet is meant to be a guide for when you are trying to choose between Web Forms and MVC.  The values in the Value column are representations of how easy it would be to accomplish the requirement in either MVC or Web Forms.

The values range from 0 to 30, zero being no effort to implement and 30 requiring a great amount of effort to implement.  If the value is positive then it is an advantage to MVC, if the value is negative then it is an advantage to Web Forms.  For example if the value is, +4, then the requirement is more suited for MVC, and it would take a little work to get it to work as easily in Web Forms.  Alternatively, if the value is, -25, then the requirement is definitely suited for Web Forms, and it would take a lot of work to get the requirement to work with MVC.

So after you make your selection and add up all the values, you should end up with a number representing your project.  Check that number against the table below, and you should have your answer as to which technology, MVC or Web Forms, is best for your project and team.

I want to mention one last thing if you have want to do new development in MVC, but you have to maintain some legacy Web Form pages, you can mix MVC and Web Forms in the same application. You just need to be aware of the differences between the two, and that you probably will not be able to share any of the Web Form front end code with MVC, such as Themes, Master Pages, and User Controls.

As you probably can guess by the name of this book, The Beer House application landed well in to the MVC side of the worksheet.  Which probably doesn’t surprise you if you are reading this book!

Feel free to use the above decision table and modify it for your own teams’ decision process.  The information provided above however should arm you with most of the important information that you need to know when deciding which way your project should go technology wise.

This post is licensed under a different license than the rest of my site. Copyright © Wiley Publishing Inc 2009

Tags: ASP.NET, asp.net mvc, Book, C#, Chapter 2, Wrox

Posted in ASP.NET, C#, Personal | | | View blog reactions | 9 Comments »

This post is a reminder to myself in case I ever need to troubleshoot this setup process again, but I thought I would post it just in case it is useful to somebody else.

A couple days ago I ordered myself a Linksys WRT150N to replace my aging Linksys WRT54G wireless router. I wanted to update my wireless capabilities to the latest 802.11 Draft N standard, so that I could take advantage of the speed boost when working wirelessly.  However I had one problem the WRT150N will not run the Tomato Firmware.  And I didn’t want to switch to DD-WRT for a couple of reasons, the most important being that I really like the Tomato user experience and it would be a pain to setup the router with all my custom configurations again.  So I decided to try and have the best of both worlds and keep my WRT54G (old router running Tomato Firmware) as my gateway and turn the WRT150N (new router running DD-WRT) in to an access point on my network.

Before I started I made sure to disable the Wireless Radio on my WRT54G in preparation for the Wireless Access Point (WAP).  This is important so that the wireless signals and SID (Wireless Name) doesn’t conflict when you are done.

Step 1 - Upgrade to DD-WRT

The first step I had to do was get rid of the crappy Linksys Firmware and upgrade the WRT150N to the latest stable version of DD-WRT.  DD-WRT may not have the user experience that Tomato has, but it is still miles ahead of the Linksys Firmware.  So in the case where I cannot use Tomato, DD-WRT serves as a great alternative to me. The process of installing the DD-WRT firmware is pretty straight forward.  Download the mini generic .bin file and browse to the firmware upgrade page for the router and install.  You can find more indepth information at this blog post.

Step 2 - Turn DHCP Off

I turned off the DHCP on the router for my WAP.

If you do not turn off DHCP, when you plug your router into the network (after configuration), your WAP may provide IP addresses to clients on the wired network, and this may be inappropriate. Tracking down problems caused by multiple DHCP servers can be time-consuming and difficult.

Step 3 - Add A Start Up Script

This part took me the better part of a day to perfect, because like many UNIX commands it is a convoluted syntax of piped commands flowing over each other in order to massage the data for the desired results.

ln -s /sbin/rc /tmp/udhcpc
udhcpc -i br0 -p /var/run/udhcpc.pid -s /tmp/udhcpc -H `nvram get router_name`
if test `ifconfig br0 | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'` != `nvram get lan_ipaddr`; then
    nvram set lan_ipaddr=`ifconfig br0 | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'`;
    nvram commit;
fi

This startup script runs whenever the router is booted or rebooted, and the purpose of it is to request an IP Address from the DHCP server and set the Local IP Address (or LAN IP Address). There is no option available through the interface for this type of request because normally the LAN IP Address is the routers static local address (most cases 192.168.1.1) that acts as the constant in your network. The 192.168.1.1 acts as the main gateway to the internet, and if that wasn’t static, the LAN traffic wouldn’t be able to get out to the internet. This behavior is, however, undesirable for a Wireless Access Point, the WAP needs to pass through the wireless connections to the real router and needs to act as a client of the LAN instead of the master of the LAN.

Step 4 - Connect LAN to LAN

To complete the link between the two routers, I connected a LAN port on my main router, to a LAN port on the WRT150N (to be used as my WAP).

You may need a crossover cable to do this, although many modern routers have an automatic polarity sensing. To test this, connect a standard Ethernet cable between the two routers. If the LAN light comes on, the router has automatically switched the polarity and a crossover cable is not required.

Step 5 - Power On & Test

The last step required is to power on (or reboot) the router acting as the WAP.  After I powered on the WRT150N I was able to connect to my network through my new WAP.

So that is the process, it took a lot of hunting around on the internet.  But I think I finally got my setup to a state that I can deal with, until Tomato starts supporting the Linksys WRT 150N.

Tags: DD-WRT, How To, Linksys, Tomato, WRT150N, WRT54G

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About a month and a half ago I announced that I am writing a book, I was really overwhelmed by the amount of support that I received from this announcement.  Both myself and Al are really looking forward to the day when this book ships, and we start receiving real feedback on all our hard work.  However, both of us would like to start receiving feedback as soon as possible, so…

In an effort to write the book and keep blogging, I decided to write/blog the last chapter, Chapter 2.  I am doing this so I can receive feedback on this chapter as early as possible.  Because this chapter, in my opinion, is probably the most critical of the book, it defines the context around ASP.NET MVC and how it differs from ASP.NET Web Forms, as well as giving a historical perspective of the MVC pattern.

In the next several posts we will cover the following parts of Chapter 2 from the book:

• The Model-View-Controller Pattern
• ASP.NET MVC vs. ASP.NET Web Forms
• The Model
• The View
• The Controller

The Model-View-Controller Pattern

The Model-View-Controller architectural pattern has been around since 1978 and was first described by Trygve Reenskaug while working on a programming language called Smalltalk at Xerox PARC.  The implementation was first described in his now famous paper on the subject, titled Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80: How to use Model-View-Controller, published on December 1979, and has been popping its head up in many different ways and forms since the original paper was published.  Reenskaug maintains a page that explains MVC in his own words (http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html), and contains his publications on the subject; it is well worth the read and is only two pages long.

The MVC pattern has been implemented in most every programming language that is in use today, including ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, XML, and of course .NET.  In fact in November, 2002 the W3C, the main international standards body for the World Wide Web, voted to make the MVC pattern part of their XForms specification, which will be integrated directly into the XHTML 2.0 standard.

Reenskaug explains on this site that “The essential purpose of MVC is to bridge the gap between the human user’s mental model and the digital model that exists in the computer.”  As illustrated in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1

He goes on to explain that “The ideal MVC solution supports the user illusion of seeing and manipulating the domain information directly.  The structure is useful if the user needs to see the same model element simultaneously in different contexts and/or from different viewpoints.”  This is important because it puts the emphasis not on the application, but how the user perceives the data, the controller and view is only a means to the end of allowing the user to visualize the model in other words.

Reenskaug defines the Model-View-Controller in the following way.

• Model: Represents knowledge.  A model can be in the simplest case a single object in your application, or in a complex case combination of objects.  It should represent the world as seen by the developer for the application that is being developed, in other words your database or domain.
• View: Visual representation of the Model.  It should highlight the certain aspects of the model while minimizing the others where possible.  According to Reenskaug it should act as a presentation filter.  What he describes as a presentation filter is the notation of a contract created between the Model and the View that will provide the parts of the model requested for the presentation by the View.
• Controller: A controller provides a link between the user and the system.  It provides the user with actions that can be taken against the Model, which in other words creates a set of inputs that can be acted upon and represented to the user in one or more ways through a View.

Bringing MVC Down To Earth

The concepts and ideas behind MVC were honestly a little abstract for me when I was first getting started, it took me a while to understand how the Model, View, and Controller where suppose to work together to create an application.  Unfortunately at the time I didn’t have a great example that clearly defined the lines between the different parts of the Model, View, and Controller, so I had to learn the hard way.  Lucky for us Jeff Atwood, of codinghorror.com fame, provided an example that really struck a chord with me.  Figure 2-2 is a visual representation of his example.

Figure 2-2

This example almost perfectly represents MVC in a way that any web developer with only basic knowledge of HTML and CSS can understand.

• Model: The HTML is the “skeleton” or definition of the data to be displayed to the user.
• View: The CSS is the “skin” that gives the HTML a visual presentation.  The CSS can be swapped out to view the original content in a different manor, without altering the underlying Model.  They are relatively, but not completely, independent of each other.
• Controller: The browser is responsible for combining the CSS and HTML, into a final representation that is rendered out to the screen in the form of pixels.  It gathers input from users, but it is restricted to the input defined by the HTML in the form of input, select, textarea, and button DOM objects.

I find this to be an awesome acknowledgement to the success of the Model-View-Controller, because the browser is a natural interface for a computer user that wants to visualize the World Wide Web.  It successfully maps the Mental Model, from Figure 2-1, that a designer envisioned as an interface for the user to the Computer Model, which a developer coded for use on the World Wide Web.  So I hope this helped you visualize MVC in a way that helps you break out and understand the concepts behind the Model, View, and Controller.  If you would like to read Jeff’s full article it is available at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001112.html.

For the purpose of this book we are going to define MVC as the following:

• Model: The classes which are used to store and manipulate the state of the database, through our domain objects, combined with some business logic.
• View: The user interface parts, coded in HTML, necessary for rendering the Model to the user.  It may also render the Model as XML or JSON if needed programmatically by JavaScript.
• Controller: The application layer that will accept the input and save that information to the database through our Model.  It will also contain a small amount of business logic necessary for controlling and validating the inputs.  The controller will also decide which view to render, the HTML, XML, or JSON depending on the form that was requested by the browser.

The above definition of MVC for our application, The Beer House, is an almost exact representation of MVC as defined by the ASP.NET MVC team.

This post is licensed under a different license than the rest of my site. Copyright © Wiley Publishing Inc 2009

Tags: ASP.NET, asp.net mvc, Book, C#, Chapter 2, Wrox

Posted in ASP.NET, C#, Personal | | | View blog reactions | 7 Comments »

Wow that is a long title. Recently I have been looking for quick posts that I can put out each day to keep my blog relevant and also so I don’t feel like I am slacking off too much. Today I want to post about a little known feature in my .NET URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy (aka. Managed Fusion URL Rewriter) that I have developed in my spare time, mostly out of necessity for this blog and other projects I have worked on.  Here is a quick run through of what it does.

Managed Fusion URL Rewriter is a powerful URL manipulation engine based on the Apache mod_rewrite extension. It is designed, from the ground up to bring all the features of Apache mod_rewrite to IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0. Managed Fusion Url Rewriter works with ASP.NET on Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0 and Mono XPS Server and is fully supported, for all languages, in IIS 7.0, including ASP.NET and PHP. Managed Fusion Url Rewriter gives you the freedom to go beyond the standard URL schemes and develop your own scheme.

But one feature that I added that is not part of the official Apache mod_rewrite documentation is the ability to add custom modules to extend the use of the URL rewriter in non-traditional ways.  One great example of this was born out of wanting to clean up the SEO mess I created in the early days of this blog.  I had to support the following different types of URL patterns:

1. http://www.coderjournal.com/?p=23
2. http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/03/14/some-post.html
3. http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/03/14/some-post

to transform them in to the URL pattern that I finally settled on today:

• http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/03/some-post

In the above list #2 and #3 were pretty easy to transform using the following rules:

RewriteRule ^(/[0-9]{4}/.*).html$    $1/ [NC,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{1,2}/)[0-9]{1,2}/(.*)$    $1$2 [R=301]

Because they contained all of the elements that make up my current URL.  As you can imagine problems arose when I had to support links that used #1’s syntax.  It contains zero elements that I can use to create my current URL.  Being a programmer who beleives that each part of a system should handle gracefully the domain it was designed to support, in this case a URL rewriter should be able to handle any senario that has to do with URL rewriting.  I added in support that allowed developers to naturally extend the URL rewriter to accomplish any type of URL rewriting task they could think of.

Setting Up the URL Rewriter Rules

In my case I needed to handle the following SQL query everytime I saw a URL that matched #1.

select concat('http://www.coderjournal.com/',year(post_date),'/',month(post_date),'/',post_name,'/') from wp_posts where ID = $1;

What this query does is query the WordPress database table that contains all the posts by the post ID and have it return the actual absolute path to the post, that should be displayed in the URL.  To do this I created a new directive for the mod_rewrite syntax called RewriteModule.  I also had to extend the RewriteRule and RewriteCond directives to support these new module extensions.  The RewriteModule, RewriteRule, and RewriteCond are defined by the following syntax:

RewriteModule <Reference Name> <Namespace>,<Assembly>
RewriteRule[([<Left Module>],[<Right Module>])] <Pattern> <Substitution>
RewriteCond[([<Left Module>],[<Right Module>])] <Test String> <Condition Pattern>

The parts in light blue parts above are optional to creating the rule.  In my case for this blog the rewriter directives looked like the following:

RewriteModule PostQueryString CoderJournal.Rewriter.Rules.PostQueryStringRuleAction, CoderJournal.Rewriter.Rules
RewriteRule(,PostQueryString)   ^/\?p=([0-9]+)$    "select guid from wp_posts where ID = $1;" [R=301]

I have highlighted in red the important parts of the syntax that indicate the custom module processor that should be used on the RewriteRule directive and how it relates back to the class defined in the RewriteModule. 

Creating the Module

I have to warn you that I am not going to demonstrate and show all the properties and methods on the interface that are important for creating a custom module, but I am going to show you the actual meat of the module that is involved in the lookup of the URL from the database.

public Uri Execute(int logLevel, string logCategory, HttpContext context,
                   Pattern pattern, Uri url, string[] conditionValues,
                   IDictionary<string, string> flags)
{
	string inputUrl = url.GetComponents(UriComponents.PathAndQuery, UriFormat.UriEscaped);
	string sqlCommand = pattern.Replace(inputUrl, Text, conditionValues);
	string substituedUrl = String.Empty;

	using (MySqlConnection connection = new MySqlConnection(Properties.Settings.Default.DatabaseConnection)) {
		using (MySqlCommand command = connection.CreateCommand()) {
			command.CommandText = sqlCommand;
			command.CommandType = CommandType.Text;

			try {
				connection.Open();
				substituedUrl = command.ExecuteScalar() as string;
			} finally {
				connection.Close();
			}
		}
	}

	return new Uri(url, substituedUrl);
}

It may not be clear right away what is going on, but on line 6, I am replacing the defined value in the regular expression (^/\?p=([0-9]+)$) with the SQL query (from above) to produce a query that will be run against the database. So if the following URL came in to my server:

• http://www.coderjournal.com/?p=372

It would produce a SQL query that looked like this:

select concat('http://www.coderjournal.com/',year(post_date),'/',month(post_date),'/',post_name,'/') from wp_posts where ID = 372;

Notice that the ID, 372, shows up in both the URL and the query, that is because this is the part I am most interested in, in the URL, because it is the only part of the URL that I need to query the database to find the actual path of the post.

Now that we have the query we can execute it on the database, using lines 9 through 21, and create the resulting URL on line 23. The resulting URL is then passed back through the URL rewriter, and processed using the flags defined. In my case [R=301], actually indicates that I want to do a 301 Permanent Redirect on the URL, which tells the browser and search engines, a like, that they need to update their URL for this page.

You can test out the above conditions by using the following URL’s that all redirect back to this page:

1. http://www.coderjournal.com/?p=372
2. http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/12/9/creating-extension-module-net-url-rewriter-reverse-proxy.html
3. http://www.coderjournal.com/2008/12/9/creating-extension-module-net-url-rewriter-reverse-proxy/

The code as always is available on my SVN server at Google Code.

• The Module for Coder Journal
• The Rules File for Coder Journal

I hope this comes in handy to some of you developers that have to support legacy URL’s in your own product or a project that you are working on. As always if you have any questions or need anything clarified please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

Tags: Coder Journal, How To, Managed Fusion, MySQL, SEO, URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy

Posted in C#, How To, SEO, SQL | | | View blog reactions | 3 Comments »

Today IE6 really kicked my butt, I had the following code working in FireFox, IE7, etc, all except IE6:

ShowLoadingPanel();
// execute some code here
HideLoadingPanel();

The above code is really simple, it shows a full screen loading panel when I am executing some code in between the Show and Hide functions for the loading panel. It worked in every browser that I tried except for IE6. This seemed to occur because the execution of the JavaScript was happening in the same thread as the UI rendering of the screen, which would block all screen updates to the browser until the JavaScript was executed. By the time all the JavaScript is done rendering the UI is in it’s final visual state, so it looks like the loading graphic was never run. Note I don’t know for sure that this is what is really happening, but it definitely seems like the most likely possibility. But if this is true it really explains the lack of support for JavaScript Animation, which heavily relies on a progressive incremental rendering of the UI.

On my way back home from work after dealing with this for a while, a light bulb clicked on in my head and it occurred to me. That I might be able to use the setTimeout function to force the execution in to a different thread, which would free up the current thread to render the loading screen.

ShowLoadingPanel();
setTimeout(function() {
    // execute some code here
    HideLoadingPanel();
}, 500);

Basically what the above is doing is creating a slight delay in the execution of the code. Which releases the current thread to render the loading screen to the browser. After that is done the rest of the code, in the setTimeout, is executed in the background and locking up a different thread. The important thing to remember is to keep the method that hides the loading panel inside the setTimeout so that the hide panel method is executed in a different process and after the code that you want to execute.

So that is how you create a progressive queue in IE6 for JavaScript. Until next time I hope you found this useful.

Tags: IE6, Internet Explorer, JavaScript

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Recently I have been trying to squeak more speed out of my laptop by shutting down unnecessary services that seem to come with most every software and device driver.  To do this I started with a clean install of Windows Vista and installed the driver only option for my hardware and then got rid of many of the useless services that come with software like iTunes, VMware, and other stuff I find useful.

However with all that tweaking it still doesn’t create an optimal installation of Windows Vista, because Windows by default still runs a ton of unnessisary services.  For example, Microsoft thought it was nessisary to enabled Tablet PC Pen Input by default which I venture to say is useless to a vast majority of Windows Vista users.

Coincidentally while checking out the new HD feature available on YouTube I stubled across an interesting video describing a website called Speedy Vista.

Windows Vista has around 130 services. According many reports, Vista is very computer intensive, so it may take a couple tweaks to lighten it up a bit to suit your needs. The names are rather vague like ‘ReadyBoost’ and ‘SuperFetch’. How will you know which are safe to disable? Hopefully we can help. We have a full list of all Vista services and recommended settings for them. This site contains registry files for easily resetting your services settings back to factory in case you mess it up or just wish to have a good way to go back to factory.

The website offers a cheat sheet of services you can safely shut off, and if you are unsure what the service does, and don’t want to make a mistake, it has a description of what the services does.  But my favorite part of this website is that it provides a batch file and or a registry file that will shut off the unnessisary services automatically.

Windows Vista ‘Safe’ Settings reg bat - Use at your own risk. I’ve tried to weed out services that are obviously unnecessary to give you a good starting point to tweaking for your own needs/preference. Please e-mail me any problems, etc.

Windows Vista Tweaked Settings reg bat- Use at your own risk. Works for me for internet, Windows Update, DVD playing, most other things I want to do. May cause some software, etc. to stop working, but I would like to hope not. Please send me feedback on this file as well as safe if you have any issues running them. It assumes that you have your own Firewall software and Spyware software.

Windows Vista Minimal Settings reg bat - Use at your own risk. Works for me for internet, Windows Update, DVD playing, most other things I want to do. May cause some software, etc. to stop working, but I would like to hope not. Please send me feedback on this file as well as safe if you have any issues running them. It assumes that you have your own Firewall software and Spyware software.

Disclaimer: Use this site at your own risk. I am not responsible for damage to your computer, or anything else.

If none of these above options work for you, you can even use their wizard to turn on and off the services that you don’t want to use.  This allows you to create your own custom registry file to your own specifications.

I just wanted to post this interesting website since I haven’t posted in the past month, because of my book writing.  Which I am happy to say that I am starting my last chapter and I should be done by the end of the year so I can resume my normal posting schedule.

Tags: SpeedyVista, Tweaks, Windows Vista

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Download: Binary Release
Download: Source Code

Release Notes

If you would like to find out more about the past releases please visit us at http://www.managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/release-notes.aspx

Version 2.2

• Added support for RewriteCond backreferences: These are backreferences of the form %N (1 <= N <= 9), which provide access to the grouped parts (again, in parentheses) of the pattern, from the last matched RewriteCond in the current set of conditions.
• Updated the logging output to be more readable.

Tags: Managed Fusion URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy

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I am not going to sit here and tell you who to vote for.  But I do think it is important to get out and vote.  If you need help finding your local precinct check out http://maps.google.com/vote.

Tags: Election Day

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I woke up this morning, showered, and checked Stack Overflow. Like I do every morning except this morning was different, Stack Overflow is down.  What am I going to do to waste time on the computer today, now I really have to focus and have nothing to procrastinate on.  I guess I am going to get more of my book done today.

The weird thing I observed durring this rare outage is something the team probably wants to look in to.  But I received the Yellow Screen of Death for my Firefox and Chrome browsers and their cute kitten for my IE browser.  No matter how many times I refereshed and on how many different computers the same breakdown always happened.  I have included a couple screen shots below to demonstrate.

Well I hope Jeff and team gets the site back up and working soon, also if you have any ideas about what would be causing these different error messages that seem to be browser specific please feel free to speculate below.

Tags: Stackoverflow

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Lately I have been neglecting my blog and not posting as often as I would have liked.  I have had some very exciting things start up, at the begining of the summer, in my life that 6 months ago I would have said “no way is that going to happen.”  These new adventures are the growing popularity of my blog, public speaking engagements, and a new book I was asked to write on ASP.NET MVC. Many of you picked up on the fact that I was writing a book based on my profile on the Philly.NET website, but I had officially announced it until this post.  Many of my friends and family don’t even known I am writing a book so feel lucky in knowning you guys are some of the first people to know.

As you can imagine writing a book is about the same as writing a detailed blog post only 10,000% harder, because a two page post now needs to be extended out in to a 600 page book that needs to flow just as easily as the 2 page post did.  Luckily for me my best friend, Al Katawazi who I have known since 9th grade, is also a pretty decent programmer from the Rochester, NY area and he agreed to help me get this book out the door by the end of the year to align with the ASP.NET MVC release.

The book is titled ASP.NET MVC Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution, and can currently be found at the following places for pre-order:

• Wiley (or Wrox)
• Amazon

Sorry about the lack of a book picture, I haven’t had the time to go out and get a professional photo taken of me for the cover.  That will be coming pretty soon.

The current description of the book according to the Wiley site is, which also pretty well sums up the book as a whole in my opinion:

The utility of this book will be a nuts and bolts how-to guide on creating a website using MVC.  It will solve some of the most common problems that programmers run into when creating their first application or when trying to upgrade a current application to this new technology.

The book, much like the first one, will break each section down into 3 parts: the Problem, the Design, and the Solution.  For the most part, the chapter outline will be mostly the same, because the majority of the chapters are still just as important now to web developers as they were when the book was originally written. However, this edition includes MVC updates within these chapters.

Some of the site features covered in the book and provided in the TheBeerHouse example/framework code are:

• registration and membership system and user-selectable themes
• content management system for articles and photos
• polls, mailing lists, and forums
• e-commerce store, shopping cart, order management with real-time credit-card processing
• localization

In building and working with these features the site developer will learn:

• Master pages, themes, membership, and profiles
• Server-side UI controls
• Compilation, deployment, instrumentation, error handling and logging
• Data access
• The MVC (model view controller) approach to separation of the site UI and presentation layer from the pluggable data access layer and business logic layer

The code for the book will be published to CodePlex probably this weekend, that is if you want a sneak peak at what has taken me away from posting on my blog for the past couple of months.

http://www.codeplex.com/TheBeerHouse

If you want to wait for the book I totally understand, because who wants to spoil Christmas by peaking at the presents.  I am just kidding, I don’t think my code can be compared to Christmas morning, but maybe the 3rd Tuesday morning of October.

All kidding aside I really have to thank Scott Guthrie, Phil Haack and the whole ASP.NET MVC, because with out the great support for this product and the fore sight of Microsoft to actually create a product that ALT.NET developers like my self have been crying out for. I wouldn’t be in this place in my life.  I never thought that an interest in a small alpha release of a product back in December 2007 would lead me to writing a book, but it has been a great ride and I only hope it continues.

I am going to continue to try and post content that is useful to other developers like myself as much as I can, but please bear with me until the end of the year when all my chapters will be written and the book will be getting ready for the presses.

Tags: ASP.NET, asp.net mvc, Book, MVC, Wrox

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