And after it has gone through the design process, usability groups, your corporate intigration team, and any Tom, Dick, or Harry that wants to put their finger print on the project to get credit.  You end up with something like this:

At least it looks pretty, and functions once as intended. However every time the door opens after that it fails to work as the user would assume, and gives a false sense of security.

This is a major security flaw and these are the exact situations, as programmers, we are hired to prevent. I am not talking about chain locks on a door, but programs that were suppose to serve simple processes, but after going through the design and review machines it came out looking like some Frankin-program.

This is why as developers, we must create unit tests based off requirements and not based off of the program we have created. It is usually easier to get a unit test to pass after we have programmed something, but often times that leads to a false sense of security for both us as developers and the users who rely on the program. If the second, pretty-looking-lock, was properly unit tested based off the requirements of the first lock, it would have never made it’s way in to the high priced Le Meridian hotel in Paris.

Be sure to unit test to provide both a sense of security for you as the developer and an expected experience for your users.

• Front Cover
• Table of Contents
• First Pages
• Index
• Back Cover
• Surprise Me!
• Search Inside This Book:

Download: Binary Release
View: Source Code
Discuss: Forum
Issues: Report

Release Notes

If you would like to find out more about the past releases please visit us at http://www.managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/release-notes.aspx

Version 3.0

• Breaking Change Configuration in the web.config has been reorganized.
• Major rewrite to the URL Rewriter to provide better performance and more reliable logging.
• Major update to the proxy handler, it is much faster, and provides an exact duplication of headers from the proxied server.
• Fixed many issues with the chunked encoding, so you are now able to proxy web based services, such as SVN.
• Full rewrite of the rule, condition, and flag handling system to provide better performance and more flexibility for developers.
• More extensibility points have been created for developers interested in creating their own handlers for rules, conditions, and flags.
• More extensive testing of internal mechanics of the rewriter.
• Added thread safety to the Apache rule set refresh.
• Added initial support for Microsoft UrlRewriter IIS 7 module, this will provided a starting point for extension of the Microsoft configuration to support proxying and other more advanced Apache features.

Featured at PDC 2008

How do I change the view location in MVC?

But what they really mean to say is:

How do I create a new ViewEngine that uses the view locations of my choosing?

It is actually very simple to do, and once you see it, I think you will agree with my assessment.  The first thing we are going to do to create our custom ViewEngine, is define the paths that we want to use for our master pages, view pages, and shared pages.  I have taken the liberty to define the following paths, you can customize them however you wish:

• Master Pages:
  ~/Templates
  it use to be ~/Views/Shared or the controllers view
• View Pages:
  ~/Views
• Shared Pages:
  ~/Common
  it use to be ~/Views/Shared

The next thing we need to do is create a new class for our ViewEngine, for this example we are going to call it SimpleViewEngine.

public class SimpleViewEngine : VirtualPathProviderViewEngine
{
}

As you might have noticed from above our SimpleViewEngine inherits from VirtualPathProviderViewEngine, this is the root ViewEngine that uses the VirtualPathProvider (VPP). The VPP provides a way for web applications to read files off the file system in their local web application, so it is perfect for what we are doing. If you don’t want a file system based ViewEngine, and maybe want a ViewEngine based from the database, you can use the IViewEngine interface to create your own custom ViewEngine that fits your needs. (MVC is very flexible, by design)

The next thing we need to do is code our paths in to our SimpleViewEngine. We will do this in the constructor, so that they only have to be initialized once for the entire life span of our SimpleViewEngine.

public SimpleViewEngine ()
{
	/* {0} = view name or master page name
	 * {1} = controller name
	 */

	// create our master page location
	MasterLocationFormats = new[] {
		"~/Templates/{0}.master"
	};

	// create our views and common shared locations
	ViewLocationFormats = new[] {
		"~/Views/{1}/{0}.aspx",
		"~/Common/{0}.aspx",
	};

	// create our partial views and common shared locations
	PartialViewLocationFormats = new[] {
		"~/Views/{1}/{0}.ascx",
		"~/Common/{0}.ascx"
	};
}

As you can see the format is pretty straight forward. We create a string[] array with the paths of where our master pages, views, and common views are located. The only thing that we need to do is set place holders in our path so the the VirtualPathProviderViewEngine can replace the master name, view name, and controller name to construct our appropriate path.

• {0}: is the view name or master page name.
• {1}: is the controller name.

After we have done the hard part, which honestly wasn’t that hard, of creating the constructor with the paths, we just need to return the view objects from the constructed partial paths. Since we are using the standard ASP.NET Web Form (ASPX/ASCX) rendering engine. We are able to leverage the work already done by the MVC team and just return a new instance of the WebFormView object.

protected override IView CreatePartialView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialPath)
{
	return new WebFormView(partialPath, null);
}

protected override IView CreateView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewPath, string masterPath)
{
	return new WebFormView(viewPath, masterPath);
}

Nothing really earth shattering here, just simply filling out the constructor with the proper parameters from our method, and then returning the newly created view. If you wanted to create a view based out of the database, or off your own syntax (meaning not ASP.NET syntax) then you would have to create your own view based off of the IView interface. But for this example we are only concerned with changing where our views are located.

There is one more thing that we need to do, and that is register our new SimpleViewEngine for use in the framework. The registration of view engines is done in the Global.asax, similar to the same way we register new routes.

public static void RegisterViewEngines(ViewEngineCollection viewEngines)
{
	viewEngines.Clear();
	viewEngines.Add(new SimpleViewEngine());
}

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { ... }

protected void Application_Start()
{
	RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
	RegisterViewEngines(ViewEngines.Engines);
}

So we are now done. You have created a new view engines, defined your own routes, and registered this view engine with the MVC framework. Some other types of paths you may want to consider trying for your applications, using a custom ViewEngine, are special folders for your mobile or Facebook versions of your website.

• Mobile: ~/Views/{1}/Mobile/{0}.aspx
• Facebook: ~/Views/{1}/Facebook/{0}.aspx

I told you it was simple and straight forward, and I hope you agree that the MVC team has done an awesome job at providing a very flexible framework for us to tweak and customize it so it fits our applications.

However, this requires a lot of active participation of the person searching and trying to find the right website where everybody of a particular interest meets, and then you need to find somebody locally who is willing to meet up for dinner or a gathering of some kind.  This is a lot of work to find people who are interested in the same stuff as you are.  And it is no wonder so many people just give up.  Now imagine that barrier is removed and finding people with similar interests, hobbies, and ambitions is a passive activity.  Where you are automatically alerted to a new person or group in your area that shares your interests, sort of like Google Alerts for real life.

I would really like to start working on this problem with a small group of developers and people that share a similiar passion to physically connect people in a meaningful way with other people that share their interests.

It’s Microsofts fault that Windows blue screens every time I try to play a game on my graphics card.

What this uneducated user doesn’t understand is that Microsoft isn’t really at fault, it is the fault of the hardware manufacurer that poorly developed the drivers.  But up until Windows 7 a poorly programmed driver would result in a blue screen and Windows would have no way of letting the user know what was going on until the operating system had been restarted.  Now in Windows 7 bad programming by hardware manufactures are caught in real time with out rebooting.  Windows 7 gracefully handles the error, and displays a “blame message” line the one listed below.

Windows 7 shows a small dialog explaining that something has happened and that it was able to recover from the error without effecting the user.  It even displays the name of the device that caused the error, so that users can better understand what has happened to their system.  I love this feature because it provides transparency to the user, so that they can blame the correct party for the failure of their computer.

I have cut down the actual video presentation to the segment that mentioned the Managed Fusion URL Rewriter. If you want to skip to the good parts in this segmented video, I recommend:

• 2:20 – Managed Fusion URL Rewriter is first mentioned
• 7:00 – An impressive video demonstration streaming through the rewriter

Clips comes from about 18:00 minutes in to http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES12/

If you are actually wondering why I am bringing this up now, and not 6 months ago when PDC 2008 was going on… Well it is because I just found out about it at the end of last month, 5 months after the fact. And to be totally honest the video presentation blew me away, because that is some serious bandwidth to show a video of that high of a quality. Especially because the ProxyHandler.cs code was suppose to handle at most small images and HTML being served from a remote server.

You can download the software seen in this presentation at:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Express
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/express/download
• Microsoft SQL Server Express w/ Tools
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/download

And Sara Ford’s best selling book on the subject, appropriately called Microsoft Visual Studio Tips.

And because she is such an awesome person all the royalties from the book are going to a scholarship fund to help pay for the the costs of sending Hurricane Katrina survivors to college. So if you are interested go pick up a copy.

Top 3 of my favorite tips from Sara Ford:

1. Did you know… You can create toolbar buttons to quickly toggle your favorite VS Settings? – #372
2. Did you know… how not to accidentally copy a blank line? – #050
3. Did you know… How to optimize Visual Studio for multi-monitors? – #381

After my presentation tomorrow on “Gooey GUI… Programming in Visual Studio”, I will be posting my presentation and links for everybody that couldn’t attend or did attend and wants a quick reference.

See you tomorrow.

Learn C#

Learn ASP.NET

Learn ASP.NET MVC

didn’t think I would leave my book out, did you?

Learn Java

Learn PHP

Learn RIA & Web 2.0

I beleive all these books are a nessisty in helping you improve your career.  You don’t have to understand or know all of this technology, but you should at least have one of these books on your shelf.