Ryan Lanciaux

Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 available on Amazon

ryan — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:37:00 -0800

I know I've been quiet for a little bit here but wanted to point out some great news. Simone Chiaretta and Keyvan Nayyeri's book Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is available for purchase in the US on Amazon. Both Simone and Keyvan have a wealth of knowledge about the framework, so I'm really looking forward to the book. For more information check out

Are you a Control Freak?

ryan — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:04:00 -0800

No Controls?
Since the very early ASP.NET MVC previews, the most common argument I've heard against using the framework is the lack of user controls. In my opinion, this is a mixed blessing, however, for some, this is a show stopper. What can you do to provide a rich user interface with the MVC framework, while not reinventing the wheel?

jQuery
Now you could go ahead and program a full fledged data grid or WYSIWYG editor, however, unless you have a bit of time to spare this is not the ideal solution. As most may realize, jQuery fits very nicely to fill in the gaps left by the absence of user controls. For the most part, the controls are not going to let you just drag-and-drop, type in a dataset and profit but a lot of the pain is kept to a minimum.

Examples
Ingrid

If you're looking for a data grid there are a number of options available pictured above is Ingrid. Flexigrid is another good one that people have used with the MVC framework, however, their site appears to be down at the moment.

Treeviews are available

Radio Buttons / Check Boxes

Check out the jQuery plugin database.

Getting Started
So, if you've decided you want to look more into using jQuery plugins -- a couple of tips that may make the transition a little easier:

Obviously, familiarize yourself with jQuery. Some of the plugins will work with almost 0 configuration but it's much better to actually know what's going on. View more info on getting started with jQuery

The JsonResult is your friend -- learn it well.

Read up on what people using different languages are doing. I'm not saying that you should necessarily go out and learn Rails or CakePHP/CodeIgniter (although, it is beneficial). but at least look at the techniques that programmers from that realm of things are doing -- see how they are implementing their controls.

What tips do you have for creating robust user interfaces with the MVC framework?

Findlay .NET UserGroup Recap

ryan — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:48:00 -0800

I had a great time tonight at the Findlay .NET User group! Thanks everyone that battled the weather to come out and hear me talk about the ASP.NET MVC Framework. As promised, I have posted the route constraint to allow only alphabetical values to be accepted as valid input for the display named message.

 
routes.MapRoute("Message",

                 "Message/{action}/name/{Name}/",

                 new { controller = "Message", action = "HelloWorld", name = "" },

                 new {name="[a-zA-Z]+"}

  );

I apologize about the lapse in memory -- The regular expression needed a + at the end to signify that it was more than one character whoops :) For more information on Routes check out Justin Etheredge's post on routing

MVC Framework Talk : Findlay .NET User Group

ryan — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:58:00 -0800

I will be giving a talk on the ASP.NET MVC Framework at the Findlay .NET User Group on Tuesday, January 27th (5:30pm - 7:30pm). If you're in NW Ohio and want to learn more about the MVC framework and how to get up and running with it you might be interested. The talk is taking place at the Marathon building downtown -- 539 S. Main St., Findlay, OH - Room 106M. More information is available at the User Group site. Hope to see you there!

Do you suffer from this condition?

ryan — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:40:00 -0800

Oxitis [oks - ahy - tis]
-Noun

Acute or chronic anxiety toward sharing code online; this anxiety is usually caused by fear of public ridicule or excessive criticism regarding imperfections in code.

Origin:
2008, Josh Schwartzberg (n.); Oxitephobia; avoidance of placing imperfect code online; initially referring to Microsoft Oxite

What Constitutes Ethical SEO?

ryan — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:45:00 -0800

"nice post!!thanks for the info..that's great and cool"
-Random Spammer

As a web developer / someone who has a blog, I understand dealing with spam is one of the necessary evils of having a comments enabled on my site. For the most part, my site has remained far enough under the radar that most spammers do not waste their time. More recently, however, there has been a gradual influx of comment spam with a title something along the lines of "[Company Name] SEO Test." There is worse spam for sure but it was definitely annoying.

A quick Google search pointed me to a Web Development and Search Engine Optimization company hosting an SEO competition. I checked the rules and sure enough, there was a rule stating that only Ethical SEO Techniques would be permitted. Quickly, I emailed the organization one of the comments (with url, ip, email, etc) exepecting the offending parties would be removed from the competition, eliminating additional garbage comments. I was shocked to receive their reply.

Unfortunately this is not against the rules of the competition – I would encourage you to remove the spamming links for your website to discourage this behaviour but as I said I can’t actually penalise this person for making posts on other peoples websites.

Sorry about the spam.

Gaming the System
In my opinion, Search Engine Optimization should be about perfecting a website and the website's content; not tricking google into thinking more people find your content useful than actuality. Optimizing tags and titles is one thing but gaming the system to garner search ranking is wrong and is detrimental to the web as a whole. Just because commenting is legal and allowable does not make it ethical. Unfortunately, this practice will continue to exist as long as it gets results and organizations act as enablers to those who would use these tactics for financial gain (not to mention increased search engine ranking for the enabling organizations).

Link Spam is Digital Graffiti

Imagine for a second if companies condoned this practice outside of the Web -- what if McDonalds or Nike paid for their logos to be spray painted on other's property? To make matters worse what if after receiving numerous complaints they held a press conference and said "soap and water removes the paint" or "just hire some guards and the problem will go away."? I think it's safe to assume that practice would not be received so kindly (h/t Matt Braun on the graffiti analogy)! Fortunately a link is not as hard to remove as paint but the concept is similar.

Solutions anyone?
Social networks such as Digg, DotNetKicks and DZone have always been plagued by those who would try to circumvent the rules for personal gain. Where honeypots and captcha systems would traditionally help against bots, an increasing number of spammers seem to be actual people. The administrators of these social networks are constantly coming up with more sophisticated ways to combat spam but what should small blogs and websites do?

Currently, there are a number of methodologies for preventing blog spam that work with varying degrees of effectiveness but none are ideal. Obviously, you can moderate comments -- this works okay but is painful if you are getting a lot of spam or a lot of comments. Also, make sure your comment links have a rel="nofollow" attribute (h/t Simone Chiaretta). Google does not take nofollow links into account when calculating page rank. Although this does not reward the spammer, it does not prevent spam.

What I would like to see is a centralized comment system like Disqus or IntenseDebate that lets a user login with OpenID, Google Friend Connect, Microsoft LiveID, Facebook Connect (whichever the user wants). There would be a standard vote up / down vote for every comment a user makes where the overall votes across all sites would determine the users rating. Casting a down vote would remove a minimal amount of points from the voter to prevent someone from going on a down vote rampage (exactly how StackOverflow works). Site owners could set restrictions that would prevent users with a rating less than a specified number from posting on their site. This may be idealistic and introduce a new realm of privacy concerns but if done properly, I think it would help eliminate a great deal of spam.

Wrapping things up
Although there are many less-than ethical tactics to increasing a site's ranking, site structure and site content are the best methods of SEO. I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and any suggestions you have in eliminating link spam.

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MVC HtmlHelper for Gravatar

ryan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:44:00 -0800

Based on a great suggestion from Ben Scheirman and Simone Chiaretta I have converted the Gravatar URL helper class into a HtmlHelper extension method. This was my first stab at making a HtmlHelper extension but it seems to be working nicely and helps me keep my code a lot cleaner. Instead saving the URL (which I would highly advise against) or doing some weird method calling acrobatics in the Controller, I can simply say <%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com") %> inside the view.

I've added a couple different method definitions for various parameters. You can pass in just an e-mail address, an e-mail and gravatar parameters (see here for more info on gravatar parameters) or an e-mail address, gravatar parameters and html attributes. A quick usage summary is listed below (I'm using my brother Joel's gravatar in the examples)

<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com") %> Base Gravatar Helper
<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com", new { s = "128", r = "pg" })%> Gravatar helper with optional Gravatar Parameters
<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com", null, new { style = "border:5px solid" })%> Helper with HTML attributes. Please note, this is still expecting the Gravatar parameters -- you can pass in null if you want to just grab the default image with no additional properties.
<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com", new { s = "128", r = "pg" }, new { style="border:5px solid;"})%> Helper with both Gravatar parameters and HTML attributes

Anyways, I've posted the class file below. Hopefully you find it useful -- I would love to hear what your thoughts are or of any changes you would like to see.
GravatarHelper.cs (2.72 kb)

Gravatar on ASP.NET MVC

ryan — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:56:00 -0800

UPDATE: See here

In the near future, I have a web project coming out that I've been working on for the past month or so. I'm not going to give too much detail on that just yet, however, in working on this project, I had to come up with a way for users to have profile images. I would rather not host these images on my server, I decided to leverage Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatars).

There are a couple pre-existing options for dealing with gravatar in the .NET framework, however, I'm using the MVC framework -- standard ASP.NET controls are out of the question. After a brief look on the Gravatar site (specifically the page dealing with how the URL is constructed), it seemed like this would be a pretty easy task to write a class that I could use to get gravatar image paths. Below is the main part of the class I created to retrieve gravatar information based on an e-mail address:

        public static string GetGravatarURL(string email, string size)

        {

            return (string.Format("http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{0}?s={1}&r=PG", 

                EncryptMD5(email), size));

        }

        public static string GetGravatarURL(string email, string size, string defaultImagePath)

        {

            return GetGravatarURL(email, size) +  string.Format("&default={0}", defaultImagePath);

        }

        private static string EncryptMD5(string Value)

        {

            System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();

            byte[] valueArray = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Value);

            valueArray = md5.ComputeHash(valueArray);

            string encrypted = "";

            for (int i = 0; i < valueArray.Length; i++)

                encrypted += valueArray[i].ToString("x2").ToLower();

            return encrypted;

        }

All we're really doing is creating a URL based on the Gravatar path, an MD5 encrypted version of an e-mail address and some user specified parameters. For the methods, Size is how many pixels the image should be (up to 500) and defaultImagePath is the url to use as an alternate image if the user does not have a Gravatar image. There is a rating parameter also but for my site, I'm setting it to PG always.

This is not all that difficult but hopefully useful. I plan to continue writing examples as I make progress on the web application I mentioned.

What is your strategy for becoming a better developer?

ryan — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 11:59:00 -0800

Justin Etheredge recently posted a question for the community on his site. I think this is a good thing to think about because my definition of a good developer is one who continually tries to be better at their craft. My suggestions may be very similar to others but I would love to hear feedback.

Read : the first suggestion I have is a bit obvious. I like to read books and blogs on programming -- especially methodologies and architecture. Its hard to find good books becuase there seems to be an over saturation, many of which are not good. That being said, there are quite a few that I would still recommend : Head First Design Patterns, Don't Make Me Think (not really a programming book but important for anyone that writes applications with end-users) and Code Complete. Additionally I'm really looking foward to Beginning ASP.NET MVC by Simone and Keyvan. As for blogs, there are tons I subscribe to but a few I'll mention are Justin's, Jurgen Appelo's and Dustin Campbell's.

Share : I first started my site to help myself and hopefully others with programming topics. As I chose a subject to write about, I realized I did a lot more research than I would if it was just something I wanted to learn. Additionally, there was a lot of experience that I gained from the comments on the articles. Sharing information with a high level of transparency helps you become a better developer because you will get feedback on your work.

Set Goals : Set goals to learn new languages / techniques. I start off by reading blogs/books/articles then think of achievable pet project to use these new techniques on. The progress on the project can be used as the baseline for determining your progress. This is not saying you would be an expert in the new area but, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to learn.

There are tons of additional ways to become a better developer and I would love to hear your suggestions!

MVC Framework Talk

ryan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:23:00 -0800

Tonight I have the privilege to be giving a talk on the ASP.NET MVC Framework at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group! (6PM, at the HCR Manor Care building downtown)! If you interested in learning about some of the reasons for using the MVC framework along with creating a basic MVC application you might want to check it out :)

Theme Generator on Channel9!

ryan — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:36:00 -0800

Wow, the theme generator that my brother and I made is on Channel 9.

It's in the video at about 11:30. Thanks to Dan and team for mentioning it! View the channel 9 site here.

Business Cards

ryan — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:29:00 -0800

I like to have business cards so I can easily give people my contact information. My amazing wife designed this for me to kind of keep the cards with a programming look and feel.

Let me know what you think!

Visual Studio Theme Generator

ryan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:36:00 -0800

This is a really short post but I wanted to pass the word along. I just finished a fun little ASP.NET MVC Application to generate Visual Studio themes based off of 3 given colors. I have always felt that selecting every color to make a coherent theme is way too repetitive. This web application automatically chooses complements / contrasts based off your initial color selections (and uses jQuery to let you preview your theme before creating). I will be making another, more detailed post later that will explain how it all works but for now, check it out and let me know what you think.

View the application

Quick Tip: Generate Change Script for SQL Modifications

ryan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:04:00 -0800

This is probably another thing that many people know but it's new to me. In the Modify table window, you can generate a script to show the ALTER TABLE that Management Studio creates.

Make your change (add column / delete column / change a columns data type, etc.)

Click the 'Generate Change Script' button (this option is not at all hidden but was something I didn't take the time to use because I never needed it before).

View the dialog with the change script

Thanks to my friend Ross for pointing this out to me. He really needs to start blogging these tips :)

Add this to the Visual Studio wish list

ryan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:36:00 -0800

I really wish Visual Studio / SQL Server Management Studio had column editing support similar to text editors like Crimson Edit. I find myself using the column edit alot when running quick, one off SQL Queries or making the same change to multiple lines in VS. I know a lot of this functionality can be replicated with macros but it seems to be a lot faster to just hit column editing mode and type away.

View my demo of Crimson Editor's Column Edit Mode. (Wink seems to slow down and speed up certain parts of the recording -- especially when a dialog window is open.)