Ben Griswold on January 7th, 2010

One may quickly build and deploy an ASP.NET web application via the Publish option in Visual Studio.  This option works great for most simple deployment scenarios but it won’t always cut it.  Let’s say you need to automate your deployments. Or you have environment-specific configuration settings. Or you need to execute pre/post build operations when [...]

Continue reading about Deploy ASP.NET Web Applications with Web Deployment Projects

Ben Griswold on January 5th, 2010

Some of the ASP.NET 4 improvements around SEO are neat.  The ASP.NET 4 Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties, for example, are a welcomed change.  There’s nothing earth-shattering going on here – you can now set these meta tags via your Master page’s code behind rather than relying on updates to your markup alone.  It isn’t difficult [...]

Continue reading about ASP.NET Meta Keywords and Description

A new ASP.NET MVC project includes preconfigured Membership, Profile and RoleManager providers right out of the box.  Try it yourself – create a ASP.NET MVC application, crack open the web.config file and have a look. 
First, you’ll find the ApplicationServices database connection:

<connectionStrings>
  <add name="ApplicationServices"
       connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true"
       providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>
</connectionStrings>

 
Notice the connection string [...]

Continue reading about Getting Started with ASP.NET Membership, Profile and RoleManager

Ben Griswold on December 22nd, 2009

Last Wednesday, I took a whopping 15 minutes out of my day and added ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) to my ASP.NET MVC application.  If you haven’t heard the news (I hadn’t until recently), ELMAH does a killer job of logging and reporting nearly all unhandled exceptions.  As for handled exceptions, I’ve been using [...]

Continue reading about ASP.NET MVC HandleError Attribute

Ben Griswold on April 7th, 2009

I am just going to come out and say it.  Occasionally I break the rules when it comes to conventions. Sometimes it is even on purpose.  In a recent peer code review, I was dinged on two counts of improper naming conventions:

The first charge was my use of ALL_CAPS_WITH_UNDERSCORES when naming C# constants. Sure, [...]

Continue reading about ASP.NET MVC – Where Convention Really Matters

Ben Griswold on April 1st, 2009

If you have been following along with ASP.NET MVC, you know testability is a big part of the story. This fact is really driven home when the option to create a test project immediately follows that of a ASP.NET MVC Web Application. This is all really cool – especially the flexible test project templates.
Out of [...]

Continue reading about ASP.NET MVC Test Template Project for NUnit and Moq