In that short time I got a good understanding about the technology and actually I participated with Magnolia team to find an issue and report it to be fixed in next release, and actually in latest Magnolia version release note they recognized me as one of those who helped in making Magnolia better.

Below is a link for Magnolia public release note along with my name (Mina Labib) in first section.

http://documentation.magnolia-cms.com/releases/4-4-2.html

I am so happy to be able to help Magnolia in their job and to get  a good understanding for a new technology in short period.

Also VS 2010 comes by default with MVC 2.0 version and editor tools.

Here is an early review I have built while it was still in Beta version.

You will find a good list of what is new and enhancements in our beloved ScuttGo blog post.

Photo from Visual studio official website.

The main idea here is all processes and work flow should go through a Controller and an Action method inside that controller, so if any exception or error happened in any step of the work flow (DAl, BL, action, model, server side validation, etc … ) it should end up at the Controller/Action level, ASP.NET MVC provide a nice technique with OnException even handler which can be overridden in your controller, and thus all exception that is bubbled up to the action will be caught and handled in this method.

Ok, enough talk let’s code, I have a base controller that all my controllers inherit from and I believe it good practice:

public class ApplicationControllerBase : Controller

and inside that base controller I override the OnException event handler

protected override void OnException(ExceptionContext filterContext)
{
    base.OnException(filterContext);
    // TODO: Handle exception
    // Log in file or database for example
    ArrayList TempArrayList = new ArrayList();
    TempArrayList.AddRange(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["ToBeViewed"].Split(‘,’));
    // to pass a toggle that tells
    // the view to show the exception message or not.
    if (TempArrayList.Contains(filterContext.Exception.GetType().Name))
        filterContext.Exception.Data.Add("IsViewable", true);
    else
        filterContext.Exception.Data.Add("IsViewable", false);
     // to tell .NET framework the exception is
    // handled and does not show yellow exception page.
   filterContext.ExceptionHandled = true;
    // to direct to the error view,
    // passing the exception as a model.
    this.View("Error", filterContext.Exception).ExecuteResult(this.ControllerContext);
}

In the method we should handle exception according to our needs (log the exception for example), and then tells the framework that the exception is handled and not to show the ugly yellow exception page of .NET by using (filterContext.ExceptionHandled = true; ).

Also I built a comma separated list of exception names in the web.config file, and if the caught exception is one of these specified exceptions, system will send a flag to the error page to show the exception message or not.

And then the context will redirect to the error view (by default in MVC this page is generated Views/Shared/Error.aspx), I edited this view to accept System.Exception as model and view the error message according to toggle preset in the exception object:

<%@PageLanguage="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<System.Exception>"%>
<asp:ContentID="errorTitle"ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent"runat="server">
   Error Page      
</asp:Content>
<asp:ContentID="errorContent"ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent"runat="server">
    <h2>
   Sorry, an error occurred while processing your request. 
    </h2>
   <% if ((bool)Model.Data["IsViewable"]){ %>
    <div>
       <%=Model.Message %>
    </div>
   <% } %>
</asp:Content>

Thanks for this post for help in that.

• ASP.NET MVC web applications do not use server control, which will make us lose the advantage of localize controls implicitly.
• Resources can’t be used outside the web application (I am talking about the Global resources here)

So I did some search and I found some approaches and following is the one I liked the most.

• Create a new class library project in you solution which will have all resources (Global and/or Local) files needed.
• Add resource file to the project (i.e. Global.resx) and any other languages versions of this file.
• Open the properties window for that file (right click the file –> Properties); you will find this by default its Build Action is Embedded Resource.
• Change Custom Tool property to PublicResXFileCodeGenerator instead of ResXFileCodeGenerator, you can do that by opening the resource file in the editor and change the Access Modifier drop down list to Public.
  
• add your Custom Tool Namespace property to whatever namespace you like to use (i.e. MyResources)
  
• Include a reference for this project and enjoy the strongly typed resources objects (i.e. MyResources.Global.string1).

By having custom namespace you can build your own structure for resources files; (MyResources.Global, MyResources.Views.About, MyResources.ValidationMessages, etc…)

Also it does not break .NET native localization, so you still can add App_GlobalResources and App_LocalResources folder and add resources files and use them as discussed here.

Thanks for this post

Local Resources vs. Global Resources:

Local resource files are located in App_LocalResources folder and accessed only by the pages it is assigned to, and it can be implicitly accessed by the asp server controls properties as following:

<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Label" meta:resourcekey="Label1"></asp:Label>

This meta:resourcekey attributes till the server control to grab it is details strings from the page resource file implicitly which should have the following name convention

<pagename>.aspx.[<language>-<culture>].resx

and for default language file which used for fallback

<pagename>.aspx.resx

These files can have entry for each server control’s attribute (Label1.Text,Label1.ToolTip, etc…).

Global resource files are located in App_GlobalResources folder and it is accessed by any code in the web application, the file name does not have any strict convention – except for the .resx extension of course –, and also ASP.NET generates a strongly typed object that gives you a simple way to access programmatically the global resources.

Resources.<resource file name>.<resource item key>

you can use any combination of global and local resources, global resources are mainly used for shared resources between pages, and to access strongly typed resources programmatically.

The downsides I faced are those resources are not accessed within other project in the solution other than the web application project, and also in ASP.NET MVC it is not recommended to use server side controls so we do not buy anything from the implicit resources binding.

I will elaborate on a solution for ASP.NET MVC based application in this post.

Ok quick brief on the issue, NAnt 0.86 Beta 1 does not able to run its solution task to build Microsoft Visual Studio solutions against Visual Studio 2008 solution files, however it can build solution for .NET 3.5 Framework. so I found two solutions –till now-, both of them are using MSBuild tool to build my solution with two different ways; first one is to use NAntContrib as extension for NAnt and use its msbuild task to fire msbuild tool – I did not try that yet –, and the other one is to use NAnt exec task to call msbuild tool and throw to it my solution file as parameter; and while I am try that I found issue, I need to add /p:Platform=”Any CPU” as msbuild command switch but how to add double quote to task attributes, it fails if I wrote:

<exec program="${framework::get-framework-directory
      (framework::get-target-framework())}\msbuild.exe"
      commandline="mysolution.sln /p:Platform=”Any CPU”"/>

Fortunately, I found nice simple post to solve this issue by adding property to NAnt script with double quote as value and use it in my command as following:

<property name="dbl_quote" value='"'/>
<exec program="${framework::get-framework-directory
      (framework::get-target-framework())}\msbuild.exe"
      commandline="mysolution.sln
      /p:Platform=”${dbl_quote}Any CPU${dbl_quote}"/>

It is nice and quick solution.

Mainly it is focused in bug fixing, improving current features, and performance tuning and you can as usual read the release notes for more details. Mainly the focus in Beta and RC releases are in the validation, validation localization, HTML.RenderAction and HTML.Action, you will find more details in this post.

This version is for Visual Studio 2008 and should come in the RTM of Visual studio 2010 which should come out sometime in next March.

NAnt allows you to build a script (XML Script) configuring tasks and dependencies with reach NAnt functions, expressions, data types etc…

Alright, going back to this post purpose; here you are the steps to allow NAnt intellisense in VS 2008 (I believe for other VS versions too) in Windows operating systems.

• Download Nant binaries or source code from here, I will go with latest one NAnt 0.86 Beta 1.
• Extract the compressed folder and follow NAnt installation steps as explained here.
• Copy nant.xsd file from extracted folder (<Base installation directory>\schema\nant.xsd)
• Paste this file into XML schema folder in Visual Studio installation directory; it should be as following in x32 bit operating systems (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas) or (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas) in x64 bit operating systems.

You should be done now with those steps, do start new NAnt XML script and get use of Intellisense, create new XML file in VS 2008, and in the root node <project> add the attribute xmlns=” now you should see NAnt schema in the drop down list as bellow:

And now you have NAnt XML intellisense enabled in VS 2008 as bellow:

Microsoft IIS SEO toolkit helps you to identify violations and errors in your website, by crawling it and check every single page returning a handy report for website violations, content, performance, etc…

I used it for my first time today after reading about it in ScottGu blog post, and it amazed me with the good and useful details to help make my website more available for search engines.

To install IIS SEO toolkit you need to have IIS 7 in your machine but it is not required to have IIS 7 on your website server it works fine with IIS 5, IIS 6, IIS 7, IIS 7.5, and Apache web server on Linux.

You can use Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install IIS SEO toolkit, or by visiting IIS SEO toolkit webpage which I believe will direct you to Microsoft Web Platform Installer too.

Once you installed IIS SEO toolkit, you can use it through IIS 7 manager, you will find a shortcut for it as shown below

Then by opening this option you can start new website analysis as shown below

And insert analysis name and start URL as below (if you did not choose machine name node in IIS you will not see Start URL field)

Then by clicking Ok you should get a report for your website in a very helpful format just like the below image

You can also have details about each violation or error, I am still working on that to know more about that. I recommend to use IIS SEO or at least to try it, it should not take long time to try it and you will find a good usage from it for you website.

I was thinking about having a method to check and update the cache without rewriting that over and over again, but that means I have to know what is the data type of the data needed to be stored, that brings us to Generics and Extensions to build extension methods to check the Cache object and get or insert data.

I am using ASP.NET MVC 1.0 in this project, below is the extension method to get or insert into Cache object:

using System;
using System.Web.Caching;

namespace CacheExtensions
{
    public static class CasheExtension
    {
        public static T GetOrInsert<T>(this Cache Cache, string key, Func<T> generator)
        {
            var result = Cache[key];
            if (result != null)
                return (T)result;
            result = (generator != null) ? generator() : default(T);
            Cache.Insert(key, result);
            return (T)result;
        }
    }
}

now you can consume it easily by calling the extended method as following:

object o = HttpRuntime.Cache.GetOrInsert<object>("key1",GenObj);

supposing GenObj is a pointer  to a method to generate an instance of type object.

Actually I used the same technique to get or add data to the session object too.

References: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/445050/how-can-i-cache-objects-in-asp-net-mvc