The ASP.NET MVC Team has released an refresh of MVC. To all those that are interested the new Preview Release is posted at:

http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=13792

The new release contains many new features over the 2nd Preview Release and the Interim Release from a month a half ago. In this post I am going to outline the features that are new from the Interim Release to Preview Release 3.

Action Method and Result Changes

As you remember from the previous release, you are now required to return an ActionResult. Many of the ActionResults were renamed to the following types:

• ViewResult: Renders the specified view to the response.
• EmptyResult: Does nothing. Returned if the action method must return a null result.
• RedirectResult: Performs an HTTP redirect to the specified URL.
• RedirectToRouteResult: Given some routing values, uses the routing API to determine the URL and then redirects to that URL.
• JsonResult: Serializes the specified ViewData object to JSON format.
• ContentResult: Writes the specified text content to the response.

There were also new helper methods added to the Controller class for these new ActionResult types.

• View: Returns a ViewResult instance.
• Redirect: Redirects to the specified URL. Returns a RedirectResult instance.
• RedirectToAction: Accepts an action (and optionally a controller) and redirects to another controller action. Returns a RedirectToRouteResult instance.
• RedirectToRoute: Redirects to a URL that is determined by the routing API. For example, this method lets you specify a named route. Returns a RedirectToRouteResult instance.
• Json: Returns a JsonResult instance.
• Content: Sends text content to the response. Returns a ContentResult instance.

One of the more interesting ActionResults is the JsonResult which returns a serialized form of your ViewData object using the JavaScriptSerializer class. I don’t know why they didn’t use the DataContractJsonSerializer, but the team probably had their reasons.

View Data Changes

There is also the addition of implicit conversion for Action methods that return anything other than an ActionResult.

If an action method returns null (or has a return type of void), the action invoker implicitly provides an EmptyResult instance, which does nothing. If an action method returns anything other than an ActionResult instance, the action invoker calls ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) on the instance and then wraps the return value with a ContentResult object, which writes the content to the response.

A Model property was added to ViewDataDictionary. For ViewDataDictionary, the type of this property is System.Object. For ViewDataDictionary<T>, the type of this property is T.

The ViewData property of ViewPage<T> is no longer replaced by T. In Preview 2, the MVC framework replaced the ViewData property with the specified strongly typed view data (that is, the T in ViewPage<T>). In Preview 3, the Model property of ViewData is set to the instance of type T.

Route Changes

An IRouteConstraint interface was added.

If a constraint value is specified as a string, the string is interpreted as a regular expression. If the constraint value is specified as an instance of IRouteConstraint, route processing calls the Match method of IRouteConstraint.

A new HttpMethodConstraint type was added, which changes the way you constrain routes on the HTTP method. Unlike previous versions of ASP.NET routing, in this release, the constraint name “httpMethod” is no longer special. Instead, use the HttpMethodConstraint to add a constraint based on HTTP verbs. The following example shows how to use the HttpMethodConstraint type.

routes.MapRoute(
    "route-name",
    "{controller}/update",
    new {action = "update"},
    new {httpMethod = new HttpMethodConstraint("PUT", "POST")}
);

Other Changes

The versions of the System.Web.Abstractions and System.Web.Routing assemblies that are included with the MVC project template have been changed to version 0.0.0.0. The versions that are included in the Preview 3 release are newer than those that ship in the .NET Framework version 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta. Therefore, they were assigned a private version number so that no conflict occurs between the assemblies in this release and the assemblies installed by the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta release.

And a ton of bug fixes

So in conclusion the ASP.NET MVC team has released another great release. Many of the new features have been on the request list of many of the active MVC developers. I still have to try out a couple of my requests to see if they are included, but I will make sure to provide a new post with those details.

Update: ScottGu has just released his notes on the MVC Preview Release 3, which I must admit are more in depth than my own.

Update 2: I have also updated IdeaPipe to reflect the latest PR3 changes. It took me about an hour to go through all my code and then test it. I am pleased to report the default page is now working, so that you don’t need the Default.aspx page anymore.

Tags: IdeaPipe, MVC

Posted in ASP.NET, C#, Programming, Review | | | View blog reactions | 2 Comments »

Microsoft just released a tool called Microsoft Source Analysis for C#. Apparently it is a tool they use internally to make sure all their souce code looks the same and is easily readable by all those who use it. According to the blog post that announced this:

Source Analysis comes with a set of default rules analyzers covering approximately 200 best practice rules. These rules are full compatible with the default layout settings in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.

Specifically, these rules cover the following, in no particular order:

• Layout of elements, statements, expressions, and query clauses
• Placement of curly brackets, parenthesis, square brackets, etc
• Spacing around keywords and operator symbols
• Line spacing
• Placement of method parameters within method declarations or method calls
• Standard ordering of elements within a class
• Formatting of documentation within element headers and file headers
• Naming of elements, fields and variables
• Use of the built-in types
• Use of access modifiers
• Allowed contents of files
• Debugging text

So being a neat freak about my code I had to download this tool and give it a shot. I was very excited about the tool and had great hopes for it. However when I actually tried the tool, there was no configuration for turnning off some of the rules that you didn’t agree with, like there is in the code analysis analyics tool.

I got literlly over 1000 messages about using spaces instead of tabs, in 3 files, because they felt it nessisary to alert me about every single line of code in my files. They also suggest I put the using statements inside of my namespace. I don’t know about you, but I hate the look of that, because stuff should be logically packed together. Only the classes show up in the namespace when you are referencing them, and the using statements are just a compiler indicator, not actual code. It did alert me about a couple of things that I found useful, such as when some of my XML comments weren’t long enough and or missing, and other nicities that I can agree with.

However, I am one of those strange developers, according to Microsoft, that likes to use tabs and have my declartion of using statements outside of my namespace. If I were to take this tool seriously I would have to be shunned from the Microsoft Campus and shammed in to never coding again. I guess I should start including the Rob Conery SupressMessage on my code:

[System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.SuppressMessage("Microsoft.Design", "1000:YouShouldntBeCoding", MessageId = "1#",
Justification="That's not very nice... but I'm used to it :p")]

Of course I am joking about this, and I think these rules from Microsoft are totally wrong and out of wack with most C# developers. Mostly for the fact that the rules are not fully compatible with Microsofts own defaults they ship. First of all when you create a new class in C# the using statements are outside of the class you create. Second I find that using spaces just forces me to resync my code formatting more often because the spaces tend to get out of wack when you are developing software. Plus you are creating 400% more bytes in your file by using spaces over tabs. I know harddisk space doesn’t cost that much, but if you are using a system like TFS it just adds unnessisary bloat to your SQL Server database.

I would have probably agreed with a good 95% of their over 200 rules, if I could get past the 3 files with over 1000 messages about using spaces instead of tabs. I really feel one alert is good enough. It still has many usability and configuration issues to overcome before it will be widely accepted by non-Microsoft developers. Plus all that being said above, I am just stubborn and like my coding style.

Posted in C#, Rant | | | View blog reactions | 9 Comments »

Today I had the need to create a custom event using jQuery, in order to launch a customized form validation event from a global submit event. I did this so I could focus in on the first form field that had an error. My event from the global.js script, that is included on every page of IdeaPipe, looks like this:

$("form").submit(function () {
	var valid = $(this).validate();

	// if the form didn't validate then focus the input on the first error
	if (!valid)
		$(this).find(":input[error]:first").focus();

	return valid;
});

This is pretty standard jQuery. What this code above does is set a custom function for the submit event for any <form /> tag on the page. The submit event will only be allowed to continue if a return value of true is returned from the function.

I was able to create this custom jQuery event with the following code:

jQuery.fn.extend({
	validate: function (fn) {
		if (fn) {
			return jQuery.event.add(this[0], "validate", fn, null);
		} else {
			var ret = jQuery.event.trigger("validate", null, this[0], false, null);

			// if there was no return value then the even validated correctly
			if (ret === undefined)
				ret = true;

			return ret;
		}
	}
});

There are two different states to this method. Primarily because in JavaScript all parameters are optional for functions. So the two states of this function are:

• validate(fn) – sets the event
• validate() – fires the event

An example of setting the event is:

$("form.user-login").validate(function () {
	var userNameValid = ValidateLoginUserName();
	var passwordValid = ValidateLoginPassword();

	return userNameValid && passwordValid;
});

In this example the form is valid if both the login user name and password validate.

An example of using the event is the same as the method above.

$("form").submit(function () {
	var valid = $(this).validate();
	// do some stuff
	return valid;
});

This may not be the standard bind() and trigger() that most jQuery programmers are use to, but I needed an event that would return a value of true or false, so that I my submit event handler knows if it should focus on errors or continue the submit process.

Hope everybody finds this useful.

Tags: IdeaPipe, JavaScript, jQuery

Posted in How To, JavaScript | | | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

Recently for IdeaPipe I have been looking for ways to deliver my content more quickly and reduce unnecessary bandwidth use.

According to Yahoo’s Performance Team more than half of the viewers of the Yahoo websites start with an empty cache, which means the browser has to download all the resources for the first time. This combined with a high traffic website and unneeded white space and comments can really add up to a significant bandwidth use. There are many popular ways to minify your static content tax on your bandwidth, using many popular tools, as described in this excerpt from Yahoo:

In terms of code minification, the most widely used tools to minify JavaScript code are Douglas Crockford’s JSMIN, the Dojo compressor and Dean Edwards’ Packer. Each of these tools, however, has drawbacks. JSMIN, for example, does not yield optimal savings (due to its simple algorithm, it must leave many line feed characters in the code in order not to introduce any new bugs).

The goal of JavaScript and CSS minification is always to preserve the operational qualities of the code while reducing its overall byte footprint (both in raw terms and after gzipping, as most JavaScript and CSS served from production web servers is gzipped as part of the HTTP protocol).

The cream of the crop seems to be a tool Yahoo developed to deliver its own static text content scripts and styles, the YUI Compressor:

The YUI Compressor is JavaScript minifier designed to be 100% safe and yield a higher compression ratio than most other tools. Tests on the YUI Library have shown savings of over 20% compared to JSMin (becoming 10% after HTTP compression). Starting with version 2.0, the YUI Compressor is also able to compress CSS files by using a port of Isaac Schlueter’s regular-expression-based CSS minifier.

The YUI Compressor is a Java JAR file that can be download from Julien Lecomte Blog.

The YUI Compressor yielded exceptional results, however it was missing one thing. Integration in to my build and deployment process. In IdeaPipe I use a MSBuild script to compile, manipulate, and prepare for publishing. So naturally I built a MSBuild Task to minimize my JavaScript and CSS files.

The magic actually happens by invoking Java in an external process for each file passed in to the task.

Process process = new Process();
process.StartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo {
	FileName = @"c:\program files\java\jdk1.6.0_06\bin\java.exe",
	Arguments = String.Format(
		@"-jar ""C:\development\tools\yuicompressor-2.3.5.jar"" --type {0} --charset utf8 {1} -o ""{2}"" ""{3}""",
		type,
		ShowWarnings ? "--verbose" : String.Empty,
		newFile,
		oldFile
		),
	UseShellExecute = false,
	CreateNoWindow = true,
	RedirectStandardOutput = true,
	RedirectStandardError = true
};
process.Start();
process.WaitForExit(5000);

Then I read the warning from the standard error output and send them back to Visual Studio as a compile warning if the ShowWarning property is true.

string[] warnings = process.StandardError.ReadToEnd()
	.Replace("\r", String.Empty)
	.Split(new string[] { "\n\n" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

foreach(string warning in warnings)
	Log.LogWarning(null, null, null, oldFile, 1, 1, 1, 1, FormatWarning(warning), null);

To integrate this in to my MSBuild script I had to first register my task:

<UsingTask TaskName="ManagedFusion.Build.YuiCompress" AssemblyFile="$(ProjectDir)..\ManagedFusion.Build\bin\$(ConfigurationName)\ManagedFusion.Build.dll"/>

Then setup my ItemGroup for the files:

<ItemGroup>
	<JavaScriptContent Include="$(SourceWebPhysicalPath)\**\*.js" />
	<CssContent Include="$(SourceWebPhysicalPath)\**\*.css" />
</ItemGroup>

Then finally I setup my task to perform the minimization against the JavaScript and CSS files seperately:

<Target Name="AfterBuild">
	<!-- do other stuff to prepare for publishing -->
	<YuiCompress Files="@(JavaScriptContent)" Type="JS" />
	<YuiCompress Files="@(CssContent)" Type="CSS" />
</Target>

You can easily incorporate this in to your own MSBuild scripts or even your Visual Studio Project which is just an MSBuild file for compiling your source code for the project. I have included my source code below:

Download: YUI Compressor MSBuild Task Source

Note: There are a couple of static paths to be on the look out for and modify as necessary for your own code. In my code the Java runtime is loaded at c:\program files\java\jdk1.6.0_06\bin\java.exe and the YUI JAR is located at C:\development\tools\yuicompressor-2.3.5.jar.

Update (2008-5-21): Thanks George, apparently IIS doesn’t like serving straight C# files. So I added the code to my Coder Journal Source Control, so that it can be downloaded from there.

Tags: CSS, Java, JavaScript, MSBuild, Yahoo, YUI

Posted in ASP.NET, How To, Programming | | | View blog reactions | 18 Comments »