Joe Stevens' Blog

MongoDB Sorting and Indexes

Joe — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:17:42 +0000

I’ve been looking at some of my MongoDB queries and trying to optimise them. I had one query that did a few ‘in’ statement and then sorted on a field called CreatedTime in descending order to give me the latest documents first. My index looked something like: { “Field1″ : 1, “Field2″ : 1, “Field3″ [...]

A MongoDB Tutorial using C# and ASP.NET MVC

Joe — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 05:46:54 +0000

In this post I’m going to create a simple ASP.NET MVC website for a simple blog that uses MongoDB and the offical 10gen C# driver. MongoDB is no NOSQL database that stores information as Binary JSON (BSON) in documents. I have been working with it now for around 6 months on an enterprise application and [...]

ASP.NET MVC 2 client side validation for dynamic fields added with ajax

Joe — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 23:43:10 +0000

It’s quite common to add fields to a form dynamically using ajax, for example you may have a list of phone numbers for a user, and they could have many different phone numbers. Using MVC you can easily add fields to a form by making an ajax call to an action that returns the rendered [...]

Extract content from HTML and split words into an array using C#

Joe — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 02:24:23 +0000

The other day I was messing around with Full Text Search with MongoDB (which I’ll probably write about in the future), and wanted to take some HTML content and remove all the HTML tags, extract the actual content, then split up the words into an array. I wrote the following extension method that seems to [...]

Model Binding MongoDB ObjectId with ASP.NET MVC

Joe — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 06:27:57 +0000

If you’re using the MongoDB C# driver with ASP.NET MVC and have a property of type ObjectId in your model you will get the following error when trying to bind back to the model. The parameter conversion from type ‘System.String’ to type ‘MongoDB.Bson.ObjectId’ failed because no type converter can convert between these types. This can [...]

Creating strongly typed wrappers around untyped dictionaries in ASP.NET using the Castle DictionaryAdapter

Joe — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:02:20 +0000

Often when writing web applications you find yourself writing strongly typed wrapper classes around untyped dictionaries, such as Session, QueryString or even Web.Config Application Settings. This is quite a tedious task, but using the Castle DictionaryAdapter this is all wrapped up nicely, and all you need to do is create an interface. Download source Lets [...]

MongoDB windows service won’t start

Joe — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 02:16:32 +0000

A couple of times now my MongoDB windows service won’t start after rebooting my machine. If you look at it in the services list it flicks between Starting and Started states but never really startsm and there doesn’t seem to be a way to get it to stop. To fix this delete the mongod.lock file [...]

Editing and binding nested lists with ASP.NET MVC 2

Joe — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:36:28 +0000

Dynamically editing lists of data and binding back to the model with MVC is a little complicated as the id’s of the form elements need to all tie up for binding to succeed. Recently I had a model, which contained a list of an object, which in turn contained another nested list. Getting this to easily [...]

How to register and get all instances that implement an interface using Autofac

Joe — Mon, 30 May 2011 04:50:36 +0000

I’ve just started using Autofac, where I’ve previously used Ninject and StructureMap. UPDATE (09/06/2001): Although this post is about registering all instances that implement a specific interface, my reason for doing so was to create a bootstrapper task. I’ve recently found AutoFac has an IStartable interface which basically does the same thing. I have an [...]

ASP.NET MVC simple server-side ajax paging using jQuery

Joe — Mon, 30 May 2011 00:12:18 +0000

It’s always important to page your data on the server side so that you are only hitting the database to get the page you currently need, rather than getting all the results and paging on the client. In this post I’ll explain how to perform simple ajax paging on the server side using ASP.NET MVC [...]

Looking for .NET Developers at Community Engine on the Northern Beaches in Sydney

Joe — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:43:04 +0000

I haven’t blogged for a while as I’ve been really busy in my new role as Platform Lead at Community Engine where we are currently looking to expand our team. We’re doing some awesome stuff here to create a cutting edge product platform that will host our future client websites. The team is probably the [...]

Using the jQuery UI Datepicker with Fancybox

Joe — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:27:52 +0000

I just wasted what seems to be far too much of my life (about 30 minutes), trying to figure out why the jQuery UI Datapicker wouldn’t work when it was applied to a text box within a Fancybox. It turns out it was working, but it was being placed behind the Fancybox which had it’s [...]

ASP.NET MVC authorize attribute using action parameters with the ActionFilterAttribute

Joe — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 04:24:29 +0000

ASP.NET MVC provides the AuthorizeAttribute which ensures there is a logged in user. You can also provide parameters to restrict actions or controllers to only be accessible to certain roles or users. You can also create your own custom authorization attribute derived from AuthorizeAttribute to provide any custom authorization. In addition to this general authorization [...]

Linq lambda expression IEqualityComparer for IEnumerable.Distinct and Except

Joe — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:24:07 +0000

One of the things that annoys me with the IEnumerable.Distinct method is that it has no overload allowing you to give a lambda expression to specify a particular property to perform the distinction, you have to give an IEqualityComparer. I did a quick Google search and found this post. The guy here provides the following [...]

ASP.NET MVC Textbox with characters remaining HtmlHelper extension method

Joe — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:43:25 +0000

Here is a couple of HtmlHelper extension methods, CharactersRemainingTextBoxFor and CharactersRemainingTextAreaFor which render a textbox/textarea with a span tag that displays the number of characters remaining. They also include the JavaScript to make this work, and to limit the number of characters entered in the textarea. The maximum limit comes from the model by using [...]

WordPress automatic upgrade timeout

Joe — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:15:46 +0000

I was just trying to upgrade my wordpress blog to version 3 using the automatic upgrade but it kept stopping after 30 seconds while unpacking the update. I checked on my server and it hadn’t completed the unpacking. I loaded up the PHP.ini file and after a look around found the max_execution_time setting which was [...]

Dell Warranty Ripoff

Joe — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 03:40:06 +0000

About 15 months ago I bought a new Dell Studio 17; with the added options is cost me around $3,500. I thought I paid extra for an additional 12 month warranty on top of the standard 12 months but when I rang recently to get a faulty hard drive replaced it turned out my warranty [...]

How to convert a JSON date serialized by an ASMX web service to a JavaScript Date object

Joe — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:36:42 +0000

JSON doesn’t have a standard way to represent a date. You can read about the reasons behind this here. If you are using an ASMX web service returning JSON then you’ll find it serializes the DateTime object to a string that looks like this: /Date(1278943200000)/ The numer in this string is the number of milliseconds [...]

How to get the time difference between two DateTimes using C#

Joe — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 03:57:43 +0000

Here’s a quick an easy way to show the time difference between two DateTime objects using C#. The DateTime structure has an overridden subtract operator which return a TimeSpan object when subtracting two DateTimes: You can then use this TimeSpan to get the amount of time between each DateTime: In the above example I’m comparing [...]

Convert a comma separated string of numbers to an integer array using C#

Joe — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 05:51:35 +0000

Today I needed to convert a comma separated string of numbers in an integer array. Here is how you can do it in one line using Linq:

Running MSTest on your build server without Visual Studio

Joe — Tue, 25 May 2010 01:40:02 +0000

Recently I had a problem where I added a Visual Studio Test Project to a solution. As part of our CI, the build server failed to build as it didn’t contain the necessary files for the test framework. One option would have been to install Visual Studio Team System on the build server, but it seems [...]

Free training/labs on MVC, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, IIS in Sydney

Joe — Tue, 04 May 2010 05:05:15 +0000

Web Camps is free so there is no excuse not to go… http://www.webcamps.ms/#sydney_panel

Creating a Composite Server Control with ASP.NET

Joe — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:31:22 +0000

Download source When creating web applications with ASP.NET developers will usually create User Controls or Custom Server Controls. User Controls have the ASCX extension and allow developers to group together ASP.NET controls and functionality into a reusable control. Custom Controls are a bit more complex and require the developer to define the html that the [...]

How to select checkboxes in an ASP.NET CheckBoxList using jQuery

Joe — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:37:28 +0000

I came across a situation where I needed to make sure at least one checkbox in an ASP.NET CheckBoxList is checked before submitting the page. Looking at the source each checkbox element created shares the same client ID with a different number at the end, so I needed a way to select all checkboxes where [...]

Populate a select dropdown list using jQuery and Ajax

Joe — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:49:36 +0000

In this post I’ll explain how to populate a select dropdownlist using jQuery and Ajax. I am using an ASP.NET web application and page methods to perform the Ajax calls. Using page methods means that you do not need a seperate web service, which is good if the functionality is specifically for the page. The [...]