Dan Miser

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC

Dan Miser — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:00:21 GMT

Telerik just released an extremely impressive library of components (Grid, Menu, TabStrip, and MenuBar), written for MVC. They are truly first-class, from the architecture, to the development experience, to the finished screens that your user sees. They released them as open-source, and even better, these controls are written from the ground up to support ASP.NET MVC.

Be sure to check out this awesome write up on how to Use the grid in a CRUD scenario. Very nicely done.

I'm not a fan of the whole "Edit/Delete" action column. I'd much rather just have a link on the column to take me to the detail screen. Here's the way I solved that:

 <%
Html.Telerik().Grid(Model) .Name("Grid") .PrefixUrlParameters(false) .Columns(columns
=> { columns.Add(o => o.CollectionDate).Template(c => { %> <%= Html.ActionLink(c.CollectionDate.ToShortDateString(),
"View", new { Id = c.Id })%> <% }).Width(40); columns.Add(o => o.Location.Name).Width(40);
}) .Scrollable() .Sortable() .Pageable() .Filterable() .Render(); %>

ASP.NET MVC on the iPhone

Dan Miser — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:44:02 GMT

I've never been happier that I chose a technology after today. I have a production web application built using ASP.NET MVC, and it has been working with almost no issues for over a year now. As a matter of fact, it is the cornerstone used to run our business. I've had the default blue skin in use since day 1 (ya, ya, I know, I know. I've been so lazy, I haven't even switched out to pre-built templates), and we run the app on the iPhone. It works, but there's always pinching, zooming and scrolling going on. I finally bit the bullet after thinking to myself "Why not create a view tailored to the iPhone to enhance the experience?" one too many times. About 12 hours later, the entire application was done with an auto-detected, optimized look and feel for the iPhone. I am now convinced that I've just been paid back with the technical dividends for investing in ASP.NET MVC. :)

To help the next guy out who walks down this path, here are all of the links that I used during this process:

Aaron Lerch's seminal article on using iUI
iUI project home page (Be sure to use 0.31. It is lightning fast!)
Scott Hanselman's article that introduced the auto-detect view engine
CW Zachary's article that gives some extensions to iUI (like tables, load/unload, and script/css execution)
Joe Hewitt's introductory video. Nice presentation, and the _replace nugget was worth the 15 minutes to watch it.

I'm back

Dan Miser — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:01:22 GMT

It looks like the blog shut down on 10/20/09. The problem turned out to be that I had exceeded the quota for the user account that hosts dasBlog. I bumped up the quota for that user, and now we should be good to go again. Until the next post...

LINQ GroupBy requires object equality

Dan Miser — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:14:18 GMT

Given a collection of players that were constructed like this:

 private
static IList<Player> LoadPlayers() { Player favre = new Player { Id = 1, Name
= "Favre", Team = new Team { Id = 1, Name = "Vikings" } }; Player peterson = new Player
{ Id = 2, Name = "Peterson", Team = new Team { Id = 1, Name = "Vikings" } }; Player
rodgers = new Player { Id = 3, Name = "Rodgers", Team = new Team { Id = 2, Name =
"Packers" } }; Player driver = new Player { Id = 4, Name = "Driver", Team = new Team
{ Id = 2, Name = "Packers" } }; List<Player> players = new List<Player>
{favre, peterson, rodgers, driver}; return players; }

And the following LINQ query:

 var query = from p in LoadPlayers() group
p by p.Team into g select g;

We will see the following output:

 Vikings Vikings Packers Packers

The reason this is happening is that we created new Team objects for each and every Player, and when LINQ tries to group, it does so based on object equality. The solution to this is to override the Equals() and GetHashCode() methods in the Team class. After doing that, the LINQ query will be able to group the objects up properly and just display each team name once. Resharper has a nice code generation template to create solid implementations of these methods (press Alt+Ins to bring up the code generation menu).

The example here is obviously contrived. We could create each team object once, and then use the same instance during the property assignment, and if we did that, things would work just fine. However, I ran into a more generalized version of this problem when using WCF and a lot of custom code generation. The underlying lesson is still the same: LINQ and GroupBy need to have object equality defined properly in order to make things work as you would expect.

Populating Date Ranges, part 2

Dan Miser — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:11:13 GMT

Since my last post, the date has changed from October 9th to October 12th. The reason this is important is that the functions that needed to calculate the date based on the current date are now coming through a different code path. Before, everything worked great. As of October 10th, not so much. The fix is simple - the getDate function was missing the parentheses to make it a method call. The fix is quite simple and is listed below:

 var
day = (now.getDate() < 10) ? "0" + now.getDate() : now.getDate();

Populating Date Ranges

Dan Miser — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:44:07 GMT

I have several reports in my ASP.NET MVC application that are date-oriented. I had start date and end date text boxes, and things worked fine. What I really wanted was something that would allow those date boxes to be populated with a variety of canned date ranges (e.g. Year to Date, Last Month, etc.). I found just what I was looking for in a pure JavaScript implementation here.

The one problem I found was that "Last Month" was being calculated incorrectly. Below is the simple fix. Thanks to epalla for the original code.

 // last month case "lastmo": // we need a new month variable for month-1,
also formatted correctly var lastmonth = ((month - 1) < 10) ? "0" + (month - 1)
: (month - 1); startbox.value = lastmonth + "/01/" + year; // now grab the last day
of the month (30, 31? we don't know!) var moend = new Date(year, (month - 1), 0);
endbox.value = lastmonth + "/" + moend.getDate() + "/" + year; break;

iPhone 3gs

Dan Miser — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:39:39 GMT

I posted about my iPhone experience in April, 2008. I just picked up a 3gs, and I have to say that I am incredibly pleased. Just about every complaint that I had in that original article has been addressed. In addition, the speed increase really is significant. It really is that noticeable. Add in the cool camera upgrades (better pixels, video, and cool touch to focus), and this is absolutely a winner.

The current complaints deal with lack of MMS and tethering, but that's hardly Apple's fault. (Nice workaround for tethering posted here.) The experience ordering business phones through AT&T sucked as bad as anything I've ever dealt with, so it's not shocking they don't care about their users enough to enable simple features such as these.

Now I just need to find an iPhone app to follow the Tour de France. Allez!

Why AJAX posts go to a new page instead of updating UpdateTargetId

Dan Miser — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:38:24 GMT

Given a set up like this (where ExpenseSummaryData returns some arbitrary HTML fragment) :

 <%using
(Ajax.BeginForm("ExpenseSummaryData", new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId = "result"
})) { %> <label for="startDate">Start Date:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("startDate")
%> <br /> <label for="endDate">End Date:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("endDate")%>
<br /> <input type="submit"/> <br /> <span id="result"/> <%
} %>

If that is all your page does, you will notice that you get taken to a new page when pressing Submit. The data on the new page is the HTML fragment returned by the AJAX call, but that's all it contains (e.g. no master page), and it's clearly not replacing the result span.

The reason for this is that I forgot to add the following lines to the <head> section in the original page:

 <script src='<%=ResolveUrl("~/Content/js/MicrosoftAjax.debug.js")%>'
type="text/javascript"></script> <script src='<%=ResolveUrl("~/Content/js/MicrosoftMvcAjax.debug.js")%>'
type="text/javascript"></script>

After adding those declarations in, the content in the span tag is properly updated and it looks like a real AJAX call.

Social networking

Dan Miser — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:08:10 GMT

I've been on Facebook for a while, and I just added Twitter to the mix. I'm trying to keep communications on those sites much more informal and fairly non-technical. If you want to follow me, search for dmiser@wi.rr.com on Facebook or danmiser on Twitter. Hope to see you over there.

Looking for work

Dan Miser — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:29:54 GMT

Are you looking for a strong developer/architect with a serious passion for all things technical and a unique blend of experience? If so, feel free to email me. My main focus over the past couple of years has been on things ALT.NET-ish (e.g. ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, Spring.NET, etc.) while I have delved into a variety of other technologies as well (e.g. Mindscape LightSpeed, LINQ, Dynamic Data, Delphi, etc.). If you know of an opening - contract or full-time - please keep me in mind. I'd prefer to remain in the Milwaukee area, but occasional travel wouldn't be the end of the world.

Until the next technical post here, take care and thanks in advance.