Javier G. Lozano

aspConf - The Virtual ASP.NET Conference

Javier G. Lozano — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 15:24:26 GMT

This year we're evolving mvcConf into something bigger and better. After many discussions and planning around everyone's busy schedules, we came up with aspConf - The Virtual ASP.NET Conference.

As the main site states:

aspConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: showcasing the ASP.NET stack as the platform for great web applications.

We've revamped the popular mvcConf conference to serve all of ASP.NET, Windows Azure, the MS Web Platform and the community as a whole. If you're a developer interested in taking our platform to the next level, aspConf is the conference you don't want miss.

There's one thing know about this new conference, it's going to be out of this world! We have over 60 session from the ASP.NET team, community influencers, and a keynote from both Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman.

Here's what you need to know:

When: July 17th & 18th 2012
Where: http://www.aspconf.net
Cost: Free!

Pretty awesome, huh? Please go register and help us make this a great event!

Just like last year, the sessions will be recorded and posted on Channel 9. Thanks to you, we had over 750,000 views on the sessions! If you want to see what to expect, checkout last year's sessions from mvcConf and get your learn on!

MvcConf 2– February 8th, 2011

Javier G. Lozano — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:38:49 GMT

We’re getting ready for the next version of MvcConf on Tuesday, 2/8/2011 from 8AM-5PM CST!

What is MvcConf?

MvcConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: writing awesome applications on top of the ASP.Net MVC framework. Your brain will explode from taking in so much hard core technical sessions. Sounds fun eh? This is a community event and we want the best and brightest sharing what they know.

We intend to record each session and make them available online for viewing. We intend to make the videos available free of charge, depending on conference sponsorships.

Why should I care?

If you’re interested in learning more about development with ASP.NET MVC, why not attend a free event (or session) that will aide that cause? Not only do we have community leaders on MVC but also members of the ASP.NET team, including Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack and Jon Galloway!

You really have nothing to lose with this conference, well, except for some bandwidth since this conference is virtual and broadcast through Live Meeting. :P

Conference Details

When: Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 8AM – 5PM CST

Cost: FREE

Where: Virtual (Live Meeting)

We’re still working through the final sessions, so the schedule will be posted in a few days. Please bare with us as we coordinate these logistics :)

I’ll see you at MvcConf 2!

Fall 2010 DevConnections Wrap Up

Javier G. Lozano — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 21:03:02 GMT

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting at DevConnections at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV. I had a total blast interacting with attendees, fellow speakers and checking out the vendor hall. The logistics for the conference were remarkable given there was approximately 2,800 people in attendance!

For those of you that attended my presentations, thank you! I hope you were able to get something out of them; I had a blast presenting and interacting with you in each of them. Also, I had a great time with the open spaces sessions. There was lots of good interaction from the people in the ones I participated in.

As a recap, I’ve mentioned that my presentation material is out on Github, so you can download both slides and demos very easily. If you didn’t get a chance to write the location, please use the links below:

Again, thanks for checking out my session and I hope that you too had much of a blast as I did! If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to ping me.

Happy Coding!

Extending MVC Views with DynamicObject

Javier G. Lozano — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 05:45:44 GMT

The other day I was working on some features for MVC Turbine when I got a random idea about how we can use a new feature that comes with the Razor view engine (VE). This blog post hopefully will help out some of you in your development or least get your creative juices going.

@View with Razor Views

One of the new features that ships with the Razor VE is the ability to set ViewDataDictionary values through the use of a DynamicObject property. The following code shows how to do this:

The ViewModel.Message call is the equivalent of ViewData[“Message”], all which is done via the magic of DynamicObject. Internally, the controller uses an instance of the internal type DynamicViewDataDictionary in order to handle the get/set for values. This same instance is used to set the value of the View property for the WebViewPage type, the base type for all Razor-based views. Taking this simple approach we will implement something that will allows our views to tap into common services without dealing with the specifics of service resolution.

@Service Extension Point

Let’s first start by looking at the DynamicObject property that will wire things up for us. What we need here is a way to link a property name to an object instance that will satisfy the method call:

We need to translate the @Service.MessageService.GetWelcomeMessage() piece into a method call. We do this by taking the convention of @Service.ServiceContract.Method() and providing a way to enforce it. We do this via the DynamicLocator class:

As you can see, the DynamicLocator is a type that inherits DynamicObject and uses StructureMap to do the heavy lifting of service resolution. Since we’re treating every property as the service contract, we need to override the TryGetMember method to get the instance of the type that implements said contract. If the name doesn’t match a registered type, we need to throw an exception to inform the invalid service type. From here what we need to do is wire this type into the view, more specifically we need to wire this to the Service property of the view. We can do this by providing our own base view class:

This DynamicPage type exposes a Service which, as you can see, is a dynamic object; a DynamicLocator type to be more specific. Now, we all need to do is tell the Razor view engine to use this as the base type for the views it generates. We do this by modifying the Web.config within the Views folder:

Now we run things and see the following output:

Wrap Up

I hope this blog post can help some of you out, or at least get your creative juices flowing. As you can see, it’s pretty simple to build your own conventions and flow once you get to grok the pieces that make up the framework. As always, check out the source and feel free to leave any comments!

Happy Coding!

Dependency Injection for Filters in MVC3

Javier G. Lozano — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:37:39 GMT

One of the new features of the Dependency Inject (DI) components from MVC3 is something called a IFilterProvider. The purpose of this component is to provide a simpler way for MVC applications to interact with filters (action, exception, result, etc.). In the previous versions, trying to achieve something like providing DI support to filters was doable, it just required deeper integration into the MVC runtime. The IFilterProvider interface is defined as:

As you can see, it’s a pretty simple interface that can enable lots of opportunities if used in the right context. The MVC bits ship with an implementation named FilterAttributeFilterProvider that parses the attributes defined on actions and controllers and returns an aggregated list for the runtime to process. So, how can we leverage this class to provide DI to these attributes? Let’s take a look :)

Injecting Dependencies into Attributes

For this sample, I will use Ninject as the DI container to inject, via properties, dependencies into the attributes. The dependency is a simple IMessageService:

And it’s consumed by the MessageAttribute class:

The MessageAttribute class is using Ninject’s Inject attribute to inform the container that IMessageService needs to be injected as a property; in other words, inject after the creation of the attribute. From this point, all we need to allow for the injection to happen – this is where FilterAttributeFilterProvider comes into play with a few minor tweaks:

By overriding the GetFilters method and using the IKernel instance that has the IMessageService (or any other) registration, all of the work can be contained within the InjectableFilterProvider class. This allows us to easily re-use this provider within any MVC3 application (that uses Ninject of course!) and provide DI support to any attributes for any controller. From here, all we need to do is register the filter and pass it the correct container instance:

As you can see these new DI features within MVC3 make things that used to be hard (or awkward) pretty straightforward with minimal work. Feel free to check out the full sample out on Github and leave any questions as comments!

Happy Coding!