This is very basic presentation on how Web 2.0 and MVC can work together.  The actual source code for this presentation is located at: 

• http://www.codeplex.com/buggd
• Updated ManagedFusion.dll Source

Tags: philly.net, Presentation, Public Speaking

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I will be presenting September 17, 2008 at Philly .NET User Group Meeting.  My talk will be on:

Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor.  My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation.

The group will be meeting at the Microsoft Malvern Campus, located at 45 Liberty Blvd, Malvern, PA 19355.

If you think you might attended the meeting please make sure to register, so that Bill has an accurate count for the food order.

User Group News * Please distribute this notice throughout your development community! We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site. September 17 ASP.NET Dynamic Data, MVC & Web 2.0 Wednesday Malvern, PA Our monthly meeting will be held at the Microsoft Greater PA Office in Malvern, PA on Wednesday, September 17 from 5:30-8:30. Refreshments are provided courtesy of Vovéo Marketing Group. Please register on our web site. Detailed directions are on the Microsoft Greater PA web site. 5:30 Rachel Appel, Appel Consulting An Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data If you are tired of the same old ASP.NET webforms, GridViews, and ADO.NET data access code that make up your current applications, then you’ll want to take a closer look at ASP.NET Dynamic Data.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data is Microsoft’s new technology that provides a template infrastructure for your application, page and fields based on your application’s data model. In this session you will learn concepts and use of application templates to create ASP.NET dynamic data web application. We’ll then create customizations at the application and page levels showing how easy website maintenance is when using ASP.NET Dynamic Data. We’ll also cover field level customizations by supplying data display formats, custom field types, and data validation based on the application’s data model. Rachel Appel lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania and is the senior technology consultant at Appel Consulting. Rachel is an MVP and a member of ASPInsiders, and holds the MCT MCAD & MCSD certifications.  She has been working as an instructor, software developer, architect and DBA for a wide variety of organizations. She is the Vice President and a regular speaker of the dotNetValley user’s group, as well as an active member in other local user groups of Northeastern Pennsylvania and the tri-state area.  Rachel’s expertise lies within developing solutions that align business and technology using the Microsoft .NET family of products. 6:45 Q&A Rob Keiser & Dani Diaz, philly.net co-leaders, ask questions, get answers from your peers! 7:00 Break Meet your peers. Refreshments and drinks courtesy of Vovéo Marketing Group. 7:15 Nicholas Berardi, Vovéo Marketing Group MVC & Web 2.0 Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor.  My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation. Nicholas Berardi works for Vovéo Marketing Group in Malvern, PA as a Software Architect.  He is the co-author of ASP.NET MVC Website Programming, Problem, Design, Solution published by Wrox and will be released early 2009.  He received his BS in Information Science and Technology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2003.  Nick has been using C# and the .NET framework since its beta and has over 10 years of experience in web development and related technologies. He helped to develope one the first websites on the internet to use the ASP.NET MVC framework, in a production environment, at http://www.ideapipe.com.  He blogs at http://www.coderjournal.com. 8:30 Closing & Raffle! Books, software, and other goodies!

Tags: Microsoft, MVC, philly.net, Web 2.0

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When we first came up with the idea for IdeaPipe (no pun intended), we saw a need to fill a void in the social networking landscape. There are countless sites dedicated to connecting friends, classmates and business associates, sites that provide opinions and commentary around a specific topic and even sites that simply point to other sites, but there were few if any that enabled individuals or groups to share their ideas for the purposes of gathering feedback, collaborating or simply being heard.

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
-Victor Hugo

For decades, corporations have relied on costly market research initiatives to gather opinions and insights as a means of measuring customer satisfaction and developing product road maps. Each day, we see politicians like Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain floating their ideas in the form of trial balloons only to wait on daily polls to determine voter’s reactions. By building upon this concept and giving everyone a voice, not just large corporations, we’ve created a platform that empowers individuals to have their ideas and opinions heard AND measured on everything from politics to their favorite products.

With your ideas, in concert with the collaboration of others, innovation will flourish. In fact, the world as we know it was built upon the unique ideas of individuals and it is exactly that which we hope to promote. Let’s face it… the solution to the energy crisis, global warming, and every other problem that plagues mankind, exists deep within the minds of individuals and it is our goal to assist in getting them out.

Ok, enough of the Mom and apple pie! IdeaPipe was created as a free service where individuals and/or groups can post their ideas on a variety of topics. Once posted, others will give your idea either a hype (i.e. “thumbs up”) or gripe (i.e. “thumbs down”) vote and optionally comment on the idea. For more specific information on how it works, visit our page on how it works! Sharing your ideas on IdeaPipe is a great way to:

• Gain valuable insight into how others perceive your ideas
• Meet and collaborate with other likeminded individuals
• Gain customer feedback
• Improve customer loyalty
• Impress your friends!

IdeaPipe is available to anyone who has a thought or idea. On top of that; within the coming few weeks, we’ll be rolling out new functionality that will enable you to even create your own public or private group. Individuals or companies large and small will even be able to create their own IdeaPipe and linked to it from, Facebook, MySpace or any other web site. And yes, we’re even going to eat our own dog food! Let us know what you think the future of IdeaPipe should look like by posting your ideas about what functionality you would like to see in the future!

So create an account and get started today. Time is wasting to get your ideas heard.

Tags: IdeaPipe, Voveo

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I have been working on this new social networking website that is based around the collaboration and sharing of ideas. I have talked about this project in the past, in very vague details, but today I have decided to open the curtains and give everybody a look.

http://www.ideapipe.com

Currently there are a couple websites out there that are doing the same thing, but in a more focused way for their specific business. One of the examples of these focused websites for sharing of ideas is Dell Idea Storm. In the case of Dell each of the users go to their website and submit ideas on how they can improve Dell’s products. The platform has worked really well for Dell, they seem to be getting a positive response from their community of users. It has led to them introducing a couple of products that they probably wouldn’t have, such as Ubuntu as an alternate to Microsoft Windows, if there wasn’t such an overwhelming support for this install option.

Idea Pipe was born about 7 months ago, when I realized that this type of platform would be useful to businesses, projects, and people of all shapes and sizes. Especially the ones that wouldn’t be able to pay the Salesforce.com Tax. Idea Pipe has actually been released for about a month now, however I was waiting to announce it officially until we had support for groups. Groups are a way that anybody, with an Idea Pipe account, can create their own personalized Idea Pipe, that provides all the same features and functionality as Dell’s Idea Storm, but at no charge to the group owners.

To kick off this announcement I created a group so that my readers can share and collaborate on ideas for me to post about in the future, on this blog, that will interest you my readers: http://www.ideapipe.com/groups/coder-journal

This site is still new and like any new site you will probably have suggestions on how to improve the site or the architecture, so please submit them to: http://www.ideapipe.com/groups/pipeline

If you happen to find any bugs, please send them to bugs@ideapipe.com.

Tags: IdeaPipe

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Today I decided to release a toolkit that I have been building over the past couple of months. Most of the code in the toolkit is related to MVC. Here is a list of the features:

ActionFilterAttribute’s

• HttpPostOnlyAttribute
  Only allows POST to be made against the action.
• CacheAttribute
  Sets the action’s response as cacheable.
• CompressAttribute
  Compresses the action’s response using GZip or Deflate encoding.
• ServiceAttribute
  Marks an action as able to provide the ViewData as JSON, XML, or JSONP.
• ServiceOnlyAttribute
  Marks an action as only able to provide the ViewData as JSON, XML, or JSONP, that means no HTML.
• ExceptionHandlerAttribute
  Handles any exceptions thrown from an action, and redirects it to another page, or another action.
• CaptchaAttribute
  I did a whole post on providing a CAPTCHA for your MVC action.
• AllowedHttpMethodsAttribute
  Only the HTTP methods entered in to this filter are allowed for your action. Available HTTP methods are OPTIONS, GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, and CONNECT.

ViewEngines’s

• ServiceViewEngine
  This view engine provides the serialization of the ViewData to JSON, XML, or JSONP. It is set when one of the following is requested from the ServiceAttribute above.

Route’s

• LowercaseRoute
  I did a whole post on why I needed this in my toolkit. Mostly because of my obsessions to have all URL’s in lowercase.

Method Extensions

• Redirect extends HttpResponse
  I have had a long standing discontent with the Redirect method of the ASP.NET. I have talked about good use of HTTP Status Codes before. There are at least 3 status codes that you want to consider before choosing a response status code of 302. Just to reiterate my post on the subject use 303 to redirect from a form POST, use 307 when you want to redirect to a page that is going to change with each request, use 301 if you want to permanently redirect one URL to another.I created the, Redirect, extension method on HttpResponse so that the status code could be set for the redirect.

View Source: Coder Journal MVC Toolkit Source
Download Binary: Coder Journal MVC Toolkit Binary

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ASP.NET, IdeaPipe, MVC

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Common courtesy is very important for all application developers to follow especially when they are dealing with users settings. Especially for common file formats, where the user has probably already set up their preferences how they like. And most importantly to not piss off your install base.

As you might have gathered from the title Apple has screwed up in this area yet again. In their never ending battle to try and forcibly get an install base, from some of their crappiest application. The Apple developers must taken the same “Our shit doesn’t stink”-attitude as many of their users, and started taking over the preferences on the users machine with out asking.

Like any good .NET developer I had the XML file format being opened by Visual Studio, it has a nice viewing, and editing interface that is hard to beat. Today I saw their was a QuickTime update while watching the Facebook Conferences presentation in anticipation of my previous post today. So as I decided to do the update, what a nightmare that has turned out to be. First of all it was 70 MB download, because Apple also decided that iTunes and Safari needed to be downloaded with Quicktime, and bundled them all together. Then it decides to take over all my documents in my system, including HTML, XML, and a bunch of other web related documents. See below.

Then to boot their XML “Rendering” sucks.

Hey news flash Steve Jobs this is how a real browser renders XML, and does a damn fine job at it.

At least if you are going to take over my system, and forcibly put your software on my computer, the very least you could do is not make it suck. Is that too much to ask.

Steve Jobs has to learn that Windows users don’t put up with the same amount of shit as Apples users do, because one we don’t bow down at the alter of Steve Jobs, and two we have other options. I am not going to let Steve Jobs take a steaming pile of shit on my PC, change all the settings, install one of the worst browsers on earth, and then forgive him. He is going to have to do something grand with Safari to get it back on my PC.

I am really pissed that I now have to uninstall a program that I never wanted installed in the first place, and then go through the registry and clean up after an Apple Developer that couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag.

Maybe they should spend less time trying to achieve an ACID3 milestone that won’t be standard for another couple of years and work on the basics that IE for the better part of a decade now.

Tags: Apple, IE, iTunes, QuickTime, Safari, XML

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Well I have officially seen everything now, it should be a sad point in my life, but I was cracking up during this whole rap video. This video is of a computer science rapper, which sort of out does the web standards rapper that I posted last week. What is even more amazing is that he uses the famous, computer science book, The Mythical Man Month in his rap. So I definitely think he is an actual computer science student at Stanford where this video was shot. Enjoy!

Update: Here are the Lyrics for Kill Dash Nine. This is my favorite quote:

You’re the tertiary storage; I’m the L1 cache.
I’m a web crawling spider; you [sic] an Internet mosquito;
You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.
You’re a dialup connection; I’m a gigabit LAN.
I last a mythical man-month; you a one-minute man.

Tags: Computer Science, Rapper

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I have upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. It is a very nice piece of software that the WordPress development team has done a great job on. Some of the new features include:

1. Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
2. Dashboard Widgets
3. Multi-file upload with progress bar
4. Bonus: EXIF extraction
5. Search posts and pages
6. Tag management
7. Password strength meter
8. Concurrent editing protection
9. Few-click plugin upgrades
10. Friendlier visual post editor
11. Built-in galleries

The upgrade this weekend turned up a Cookie bug in my URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy software, that I use to host WordPress on my Windows 2003 server. There will be an updating to the URL Rewriter coming soon to MSDN Code and Codeplex as well as a release on my companies website.

Tags: URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy, wordpress

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Today Apple had their big iPhone SDK press release. They opened up the phone and added a bunch of Enterprise features that many small to large corporate customers have been asking for. But they still haven’t implemented the features I am looking for in a smart phone, and until they do, they will not see my money.

1. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push
2. Tethering
3. 3G Network (I currently use Verizon)

I know #2 will be coming, if not through Apple somebody else will do it, since Apple has unlocked the iPhone to developers.  However #3 is the one that I may have to wait for Verizon to switch to GSM in the distant future.  Other than my last 2 requirements I am sold on the iPhone.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, News, Verizon, Windows Mobile

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So today it was brought to my attention that the design of my blog needed work. Since good design is a very subjective term, much like good programming:

your program (n): a maze of non-sequiturs littered with clever-clever tricks and irrelevant comments. Compare MY PROGRAM.

my program (n): a gem of algorithmic precision, offering the most sublime balance between compact, efficient coding on the one hand, and fully commented legibility for posterity on the other. Compare YOUR PROGRAM.

Please tell me your impressions, of my blog, in the comments below. I would like to see constructive actionable comments, that I can work toward implementing, around the ease of reading, layout, and usability.  That is what I am really interested in hearing about.

You can tell me what you think of the colors but honestly much like personal tastes in cars, food, and everything else, it is usually very superficial and relies on personal preferences more than industry recognized usability problems.  My personal preferences, since it is my blog, is to use strong colors right next to each other to show strong lines, instead of gradients, because strong lines give the sense of strength and professionalism.

Honestly, if I was to break it down, I just like the look of a Orange, Blue, and Brown, I believe they provide nice contrast to each other and have an almost academic look.  If I was to sum up my style I would say the Power Point Theme Median, as seen below, is the closest I have ever seen to My Personal Style Tastes.

So please let me here your comments, about my blog, on:

1. Ease of Reading
2. Layout
3. Usability

I will take them all very seriously.

Tags: Blog, Coder Journal

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