Asp.net MVC 4.0 Beta launched

Finally a long awaited update of Asp.net MVC 4 enters into Beta mode.

Some new features at a glance

• Templates for Mobile Application, Web API and Single Page Application
• Support for Web API
• New strongly Typed HTTP Object model
• Content Negotiation
• Bundling by Default
  My favorite feature minified and bundle Css and Javascript on the go

Scot Guthrie on Asp.net MVC 4.0 beta at TechDays

 

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDays/Techdays-2012-the-Netherlands/2364/player?w=956&h=484

you can read more on Jon Galloway’s blog

Detecting Long running/Blocking queries in SQL Server

There are times when SQL query blocks or delays operation in an environment and makes it very difficult to track them, there is a query mentioned on Brent’s Blog  that may help in Identifying long running blocking queries.

initially I mentioned query here along reference to Brent’s Blog, but on his suggestion I have modified the post.

Using Open Source technologies along Microsoft Stack

Lately I am getting more in love with Open Source technologies especially those which are ported to .Net or can be directly used with .Net.

Please Microsoft don’t consider me a REBEL, I am proudly Microsoft Tech Person. The reason is simple we (Tech persons) are open enough to embrace any products or trend which provides performance and stability (and ma cost-effective too).

Generally I am supporting discussion about “Alternate technologies should be explored” while sticking with technological boundaries which in my case are Microsoft one. We all are aware of the fact that looking at better code and concepts can make us better programmer/Developer, reason being clear enough I would say “Look at those good Open Source products if you learn accept it, if you haven’t that means you know better than suggest it”.

Microsoft is also supporting and getting benefits from this CodePlex is biggest example, Microsoft has placed many of it’s packages at CodePlex which gets used and reviewed by community and later become part of different Microsoft Frameworks.

Look at StackoverFlow they are part of Microsoft Bizspark program, even they earned Microsoft Stack Badge on use of Microsoft Products: OS, Database, C#, Visual Studio, and ASP .NET MVC.
But they too are blending with Open Source flavor now:

• Cruise Control .NET
• WMD - Open Source. (contributed by Stackoverflow)
• Mercurial (after a switch from Subversion) – Open Source (Source control)
• HAProxy
• Cacti
• MarkdownSharp
• Nginx

I used “memcached” as caching layer to cut huge load from SQL Server, it greatly improved response time.

In upcoming articles I will be discussing following Open Source products along their pro and cons:

1. Lucene – Open Source full text search engine framework
2. SOLR – Open Source search engine with support for Facet search and a lot more
3. Redis Server
4. memcached (a windows based port is also available)

the list may increase with time depending on my personal findings and inputs.

@Ajax.ActionLink doing a postback (MVC)

lately I was doing some MVC3 hands on, I have seen that Microsoft has introduced an Ajax helper “@Ajax” which allows you to utilitze Ajax based calls without writing extra JavaScript (great isn’t it?)

so place following code in our View (be aware that I am using Razor as my view engine)

@Ajax.ActionLink("Click here to make javascript call", "Home/Read", new AjaxOptions { HttpMethod="Get
   , InsertionMode=InsertionMode.Replace, UpdateTargetId=”div5”})

Nice and clean… upon click the above link will do a call back to Read method of our Home controller and will replace the result from that method in Div5.

Hit F5 and this will be rendered into your browser let’s inspect the resulting HTML

<a data-ajax=”true” data-ajax-method=”Get” data-ajax-mode=”replace” data-ajax-update=”#div34″ href=”/Home/Home/Read”>
Click here to make javascript call</a>

notice that behind the scene it’s using HTML5 style annotations… now click on the link and you will find that instead of doing Callback the link is simply doing a post back…. wow… what has gone wrong…. doing a little google on this suggest that we should include MicrosoftAjax.js and MicrosoftMvcAjax.js in our view but this doesn’t solves the problem… after some research I had figured that out you need to include mainly “jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js” and it will work like a charm

"jquery-1.5.1.min.js"
"jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js"

Android vs Windows Phone 7

i just read this case study on Windows Phone 7 VS Android

http://bit.ly/hcwEXx

Adobe Illustrator to Html 5 Canvas tool

At Mix a new tool was introduced that converts Adobe Illustrator files to HTML5 canvas elements that can be rendered to any browser that supports the canvas element like IE9.  They even have a Windows and OS X version of the tool. 

Find out more at http://visitmix.com/labs/ai2canvas/

and they have a introductory video at http://visitmix.com/labs/ai2canvas/introduction.html

Migration to WordPress

Today when i visited my Live Blog, i was surprised to see the partnership b/w Microsoft and WordPress. i must say it was a good surprise,  i was planning to move to wordpress but laziness always gets in the way

i was tired of Spam comments on Windows Live Blog and eventually had to turn them off.