Andy Butland

Having recently upgraded a couple of ASP.Net MVC 2 projects to MVC 3, I came across a couple of tools and techniques to simplify the process. ASP.Net MVC 3 requires .Net 4 and hence use of VS.Net 2010 (or express editions) are required. There's also an additional download of the MVC 3 framework required too. One of the simplifying changes of the upgrade is a slimmed down web. config file - but I found this meant an in-place upgrade of this and all the necessary references rather complicated. So instead I created a new, empty MVC 3 project and copied over all the controllers, models, views and necessary web. config settings into the new project. An important security update is to HTML encode all output by default, using the new <:= > syntax (as opposed to <%= %>). If you've been encoding output properly in previous versions any potentially insecure content would have been wrapped in Html.Encode methods. But updating all of these to the new syntax looks to be...

Linking to an article I've had published on Script Junkie: Ajax, ASP.Net MVC and Progressive Enhancement .

I've blogged previously about the validation methods I've used on ASP.Net MVC projects and have recently been adapting this for use with version 2 of the framework. One of the new features I wanted to make available was the use of data annotations for validation , where domain or view model classes can be decorated with attributes for validation of required fields, field lengths and range values. These can then be used for both server side and client side validation . I ran into a problem with this though when validating entities that had related items - for example in my case I was working on a project management tool, where an entity such as a project is related to others such as a client and an account manager . The client entity has required fields such as a name, but when validating before saving the project entity I didn't really care about that as I was only interested in the client ID to perform the update operation. The validation by default is set up to perfor...

Armed with a copy of the Pragmatic Programmer's book and a lot of Googling, have made a start recently on developing apps for the iPhone . Took a while to find my way around XCode, Interface Builder and to get to thinking again about things like memory management, but made some progress and have released an app for bass guitar players learning scales or modes . It's fairly straightforward - is based on a navigation controller app, and has a single table view for selecting the scale and then a custom view for displaying the scale itself. You can choose the mode, key and speed and then view the tablature for playing the scale as well as listening to it played and viewing the fingering positions. The only tricky bit really was the display of the scale and for this I needed to develop a custom UIView . By doing this you can draw directly to the canvas - which I needed to do for the tab lines (or strings) and for plotting the finger positions of the scale. Normally with a view ...

Having recently had to work on a client website where jquery wasn't available, it was really apparent just how useful this library is and how pleasureable it makes working with JavaScript. Having to resort back to getElementById and getElementsByClassName was painful in comparison. Today I discovered and made use of yet another useful feature - the trigger method which enables an action on one element to fire the functions associated with events on another. I had a simple accordion style user interface that looked like this: On clicking the cross on the right a panel below would expand and display the content. The mark-up looked like this:     1   < ul id ="list">     2      < li >     3          < div class ="head"> Title </ div >     4          < a href =""> + </ a > ...