For the past couple years, .net developers have been embracing various content preprocessors as they become more accessible. For the same couple of years, we’ve been trying to keep up. The dotLess port of the popular .less CSS extension has been getti…

For the unfortunate souls not in the know (or is it the fortunate souls using one of the myriad alternatives?), SquishIt is a library used to optimize content delivery at runtime in ASP.net applications. It combines and minifies javascript files, and a…

One of the projects I have been working on is a system for managing content on our network of websites. One of our requirements is that changes don’t take effect immediately, but on a separate preview network where our customer can look to see that her…

A common pattern that I use in creating ajaxy applications is to return a small HTML fragment from the request, and then inject this fragment into the DOM in the callback executed after a successful request. This tends to be a bit simpler than returnin…

In my previous post I mentioned that I was looking for an answer to the age-old question of how to manage common CSS and JavaScript across multiple projects (specifically ASP.Net projects). Using T4 templates, I was able to not only create a common location for CSS files, but to take it a step farther and use Less in ordr to simplify that common CSS even further.

For the past few months, I have been looking for a way to define some JS and CSS files that would be shared between multiple projects in an ASP.Net solution. The intent is to define common scripts and CSS in one place instead of trying to keep multiple copies of it in sync or implementing an internal CDN with a versioning scheme. The challenge is finding a way to do this with a minimum of impact on the development, deployment, and production processes.

So I’ve been working on a practice site using WebMatrix. The basic premise was that I would create a site that had some similar functionality to Delicious to help me track the various articles, podcasts, books, and so on. This would also give me something practical to work on as I try to get a handle on this whole WebMatrix thing.

Several weeks ago I started digging into WebMatrix. Over the course of a weekend I was able to put together a quick, functioning website, pick up some basics of working with WebMatrix and the deployment tool, and play with a few other technologies as well. Then I stepped back and realized I was only using a percentage of it’s capabilities.

In order to simplify saving some entities, I recently changed some mappings in my application to use the inverse attribute. In less cryptic terms, this means that the collection item is responsible for maintaining the relationship to the collection own…

For someone that is just interested in trying out Unit Testing the number of topics out there can seem overwhelming. From passionate articles about using TDD, to deeply technical articles around the differences in mocking frameworks, to complete sidetracks into architecture theory and how to make code more testable…just learning enough to get started and try out Unit Testing can seem like you need weeks of classes.