IliaJ on .NET

There is a list of .NET Dependency Injection Containers on the blog of Scott Hanselman.

Recently Microsoft released Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2008, which gives developers more control over the build process and can be used in advanced scenarios. The features remain generally the same as they were in the Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2005 and are described in this MSDN article. Some additional information can be found in the blog of the Visual Web Developer team.

The AJAX-enabled WCF Service template in Visual Studio 2008 creates a service class with an AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute. Unfortunately the MSDN description of this attribute is not as informative as it could be. The statement "ASP.NET compatibility mode allows WCF services to use ASP features such as identity impersonation" underestimates the possible impact of the attribute. Much better information sources are the MSDN description of the <serviceHostingEnvironment> element, the article "WCF Services and ASP.NET", which explain what the ASP.NET compatibility mode really does, and Wenlong Dong's blog.

In short, in this mode WCF requests are fully processed by the ASP.NET infrastructure like "native" ASP.NET requests, and WCF behaves identically to ASP.NET Web Services with regard to many ASP.NET features.

According to Microsoft, state management is commonly used as the primary reason for enabling the ASP.NET compatibility mode, though services should be designed stateless.

Json.NET looks pretty interesting and I'm going to try it. The library allows to read and write JSON with a single method call.

The downloads can be found here on Codeplex.

Microsoft p&p team released recently WCSF 2.0. With the upcoming release of the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework it is important to understand, how these two approaches differ.

The WCSF uses Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern, and this pattern does not map exactly to the ASP.NET MVC. Derek Greer has described the basic difference between MVP and MVC in this great article. And Simon Ince compared the Microsoft implementations in his blog:

In other words, the choice to force all requests through the Controller outlaws the post-back model. In contrast, one of the goals of the WCSF was to support standard ASP.NET functionality wherever possible, to maximize the speed at which developers could get going with it, and allow it to sit well with existing frameworks.

I believe this is the critical point. Those of us, who have large developer teams and cannot afford the investment now, have to use WCSF or stick to "classic" ASP.NET.

There is an important (especially for users of JavaScript) rollup of hotfixes for the Web Editor in Visual Studio 2008. The details of the rollup are described in MSDN KB 946581 and in the blog of Visual Web Developer team.

We use the excellent Ext JS JavaScript framework in the development of some ASP.NET Web Applications. Unfortunately the JavaScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2008 cannot work with the library. There were some possible workarounds like using a special .js file only for the IntelliSense (here is an example).

This week the Visual Web Developer team published a better workaround:

In a file that runs before ext-base.js, or on the first-line of ext-base.js itself, add the following code:

window.addEventListener = false;

geoffrey.mcgill wrote some important comments on the original post:

• The fix must be added to an external .js file. Adding the line of code to an inline script block does not work.
• The fix disables events from attaching in Firefox and Safari and should be a design-time only fix.
• It takes a while (10-30 seconds) until Ext shows up in IntelliSense the first time the page loads in Visual Studio.

The official fix for the problem will be available in the next Visual Studio service pack.

Visual SourceSafe 2005 is still the official source code management product for Visual Studio 2008. Sure, it is possible to use the Team Foundation Server 2008, but the TFS can be an overkill for some small projects.

It is important to install the latest rollup of hotfixes for Visual SourceSafe 2005 as described in MSDN KB 943847 to solve incompatibility problems with Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2008.

If you use LINQ you should check LINQPad here. Just download and run, and you can learn LINQ much easier and faster. There are 200 examples from the book C# 3.0 in a Nutshell preloaded. And you can evaluate Regular Expressions as well as other code snippets directly in the IDE.

LINQPaq is really cool!