ASP.NET

A collection of 49 posts

ASP.NET

The ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit needs your help!

The ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit has been running as an open source project since August 2010. It contains a rich set of controls that you can use to build ASP.NET websites using HTML5. If you've never used it before, it can be a great way to take advantage

Programming

Convert JSON to a C# Class

As a web developer, I regularly write code to consume and create data in a JSON format. It's a simple and easy way to represent data as a string and if you work with JSON every day, you'll know how much easier it is to use than XML. If you

ASP.NET

What is the difference between Build and Rebuild in Visual Studio?

If you are a developer that uses Visual Studio as your IDE, you will be familiar with the Build and Rebuild tasks. I regularly write code in Visual Studio and am used to hitting the Build command when I am developing, but have often wondered what is actually happening under

Programming

Visual Studio - Why should I remove unused references?

When it comes to writing code, I like everything to be neat and follow a certain set of coding guidelines. I like to adhere to the principle that I always code as if the next person who ends up maintaining my code is a violent psychopath who knows where I

ASP.NET

Validating email addresses in .NET - Handy Tip

If you've ever written any code that sends emails before, I'm pretty sure that you've had to validate the email addresses that are entered by users. Email address validation can be tricky at the best of times and with international domain names in email addresses, almost anything is possible. In

ASP.NET

Extending System.Web.Optimization

The ASP.NET framework is packed with loads of great features and with each release it seems to get better and better. One of my favourite features is the bundling and minification classes that optimize JavaScript and CSS files in a website to reduce file size and improve page performance.

IIS

IIS - Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type application/x-font-woff

If you take a look at websites such as Medium, SquareSpace and Information Architects, it's clear that great typography can really enhance the look of a website. Web fonts are a great way to introduce typography to your website and can be added in a matter of minutes. Adding a

ASP.NET

Working with multiple Web.Config files

When dealing with multiple development environments, it can often be quite tricky to keep track of the different environment specific settings that you may have in place. Fortunately, Visual Studio has a handy feature that allows you to have more than one Web.Config file for different environments. I have

Book

Fast ASP.NET Websites Competition - Results

The results are in! Thank you to all the people who entered the competition and tweeted about the book. The competition closed on the night of the 22th October 2013, and the number of entries was fantastic. I can reveal that the following people were chosen at random using random.

Web Performance

A Simple HTML Minifier for ASP.NET

I have previously blogged about the importance of serving your users web pages with speedy load times. Poor web performance equals lost revenue and customers. As you continue to build and improve on the web performance of your site, you will need to look for ingenious ways to squeeze those

ASP.NET

Fast ASP.NET Websites Book Giveaway

Fast ASP.NET Websites has just been released, and if you haven't already gotten your hands on a copy, I have 3 free copies to give away. Fast ASP.NET Websites is a practical, hands-on guide to create faster, more efficient ASP.NET sites and applications. This book offers step-by-step

ASP.NET

Get the number of users that are online using SignalR

In a recent experiment, I was looking for a way to retrieve the number of online users in an ASP.NET application. There are a number of techniques that can be applied, such as incrementing based on ASP.NET session state, or using Google Analytics to keep track of active

Web Development

Fast ASP.NET Websites has been released!

A rather large and suspicious looking box arrived at my house yesterday. To my surprise, it was the first few copies of Fast ASP.NET websites. These have just rolled fresh off the press courtesy of Manning! If you aren't familiar with the contents of the book, it is a

ASP.NET

ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit Update - August 2013

There have been a number of major updates released with the latest version of the MVC HTML5 Toolkit. You, the community have been great, and the majority of the patches and enhancements have been added via the Codeplex site. If you aren't familiar with the MVC HTML5 Toolkit, it is

ASP.NET

ASP.NET Release Checklist

Whenever I work on side projects or make updates to this blog, I like to run a few simple checks to make sure that the site is ready before I release it. When working on side projects, you might not have the benefit of having someone else to help test,

Web Performance

WebP - Advanced image optimization using ASP.NET MVC

Most modern web pages contain a lot of images. These images often make up the bulk of a web page request. According to the HTTPArchive, images make up over 50% of the average web page and if you are looking to optimize on the performance of your web page, the

ASP.NET

Twitter bootstrap typeahead and ASP.NET MVC - Key/Value pairs

I suck at creating CSS. As a backend developer, I've always managed to get by with my CSS skills, but I've always been jealous of my front end developer colleagues when it comes to their ability to create beautiful web pages. Fortunately, the guys at Twitter have developed a great

ASP.NET

The Google PageSpeed API & MVC 4

I often use tools such as Yahoo! YSlow and Google PageSpeed to profile the performance of my websites. These tools offer useful performance suggestions that will improve the speed and performance of my sites if implemented correctly. They both plug into the browser and can be run at the click

Web Performance

I'm writing a book! Fast ASP.NET Websites

Ever since I first started writing code, I've always been interested in the performance of websites and making them faster. It's amazing how a slow website can be brought to life with a few simple tweaks to your website setup. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone use a

ASP.NET

.NET Caching - File Dependencies

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the built in support that .NET has for in-memory caching. It sits under the System.Runtime.Caching namespace and can be easily added to any application to give you a great improvement in performance. You can store any type of object in

ASP.NET

Visual Studio 2012 - A week in perspective

I am one of the lucky ones. Fortunately my company gives us a MSDN subscription and this goes a long way toward keeping up with the latest Microsoft Software. I have been eagerly awaiting the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 which came out last week. I was a little

ASP.NET

Hidden Gems inside .Net Classes

Surprisingly, there are loads of great data snippets hidden inside .Net classes. If you've ever found yourself adding localization to your website, you may have come across the CultureInfo Class in .Net. I know that sometimes I have needed to get a list of country ISO codes and have struggled

ASP.NET

MVC Asynchronous Controller : The Basics

When I first saw the Asynchronous Controllers introduced in MVC 2, I couldn't wait to start playing around. I thought that it would be a really easy to get up and running with a simple example, but after searching online for a few working examples - pretty much all of

ASP.NET

MVC and HTML5 Web Workers

HTML5 Web Workers are cool. As a developer that spends most of his time working with server side code, I like to think of Web Workers as .net's System.Threading for the front end. Basically, Web Workers allow you to run client side scripts without interrupting the page or any

ASP.NET

Web.config Transformation Features in Visual Studio 2010

When developing applications in Visual Studio, I normally pay a lot of attention to my Solution Explorer. However, I recently spotted something that I didn't notice before. Well, at least something that I haven't paid attention to! In Visual Studio 2010, if you click on the Web.config file and