RickAndMSFT on Azure & MVC

In Tom Dykstra’s terrific ASP.NET MVC EF tutorial, the following code is used to seed the student table. var students = new List < Student > { new Student { FirstMidName = "Carson" , LastName = "Alexander" , EnrollmentDate ...

Restarts for Web Roles Updated 17 Jan 2013:  Tracing in OnStop is not supported. An often neglected consideration in Windows Azure is how to handle restarts. It’s important to handle restarts correctly, so you don’t lose data or corrupt your persisted...

Tom Dykstra and I have just published an Azure multi-tier tutorial with the complete source. It has many valuable programming tips and best practices you can’t find anywhere else. Learn how to use Windows Azure Storage tables, queues, and blobs in a multi...

By default, Windows Azure Cloud Services Web Role applications, running in Windows Azure or the compute emulator, have the  HTTP Errors <httpErrors> element of the ApplicationHost.config file set to not display detailed error information. What...

Update November 2012 – See my new blog entry Debugging Azure HTTP 500 Errors . This blog no longer applies to Azure. Using the current Azure SDK and Visual Studio 2012, you may get a HTTP 500 internal error if there is something wrong with your Web.config...

This Azure Table Storage tutorial/sample/walkthrough will get you using Azure Table Storage from ASP.NET MVC in 15 minutes. Tom Dykstra (of MVC/EF fame ) and I are working on an Azure email service sample application. All the code was written by Tom....

31 October  2012 Update: The ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update includes the Fixed DisplayModes NuGet package in the new project templates.   You will still need to apply the Fixed DisplayModes NuGet package to projects created before you install the...

Adding bundling and minification (B/M) in a Web Pages site follows the same formula ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms use: Declare and register bundles. Consume bundles from within your views.  This blog entry describes the basics of using B/M in a Web Page...

The InitializeSimpleMembership Attribute ensures that before any membership (login/register) related functionality is run, that the membership database has been created. If the database is not yet created, the code will automatically create one. If the...

My   B/M tutorial provides a good introduction to benefits of Bundling and Minification. You should read it to become familiar with the bundling and minification. This blog will focus on using B/M with Web Forms, my B/M tutorial focused on ASP...

This blog post shows how to Install SQL Server Data Tools on Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer/2010. This MSDN article, also shows how to install Install SQL Server Data Tools. Launch WPI 4.0 ( Web Platform Installer ) Select All in the left...

I’m pleased to announce my new Bundling and Minification tutorial.  Bundling and Minification (B/M)  can significantly improve your first page hit download time – something that is very critical for mobile targeted applications. B/M was introduced...

The simplest way to upgrade from ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta to RC is to create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 RC project and copy all the views, controllers, code, and content files from the existing MVC 4 Beta project to the new project and then to update the assembly...

I’m pleased to announce two new asynchronous tutorials for ASP.NET 4.5: Using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET MVC 4 Using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET 4.5 The .NET Framework 4.5 builds on this asynchronous support with the await and async keywords...

2 March 2013 Update: Added security links 20 June 2012 Update: Cookieless Session and Authentication not supported in ASP.NET MVC.     Executive Overview You cannot use routing or web.config files to secure your MVC application. The only...

Update 28 November 2012 : HttpResponse.Clear is safe but not recommended since it is a violation of the MVC pattern.  If you’re calling Clear(), then by definition you started doing one thing (like setting headers, writing to the response, etc.)...

I recently used the DataContractJsonSerializer to serialize a class. I noticed that for a DateTime field, the deserialized result appeared identical to the original value, but the equals operator failed.  The following simple program reproduced the...

The most frequently posted question in the ASP.NET MVC forums is about how to use the DropDownList ( DDL ) helper. To address this question, I wrote the tutorial Using the DropDownList Helper with ASP.NET MVC , which covers most DropDownList scenarios...

I have written a simple sample showing how to implement cascading drop down lists in ASP.Net MVC.   In this sample the user is presented with a list of countries. Once a country is selected, a new drop down list is appears showing the states...

Update November 2012 – See my new blog entry Debugging Azure HTTP 500 Errors . This blog no longer applies to Azure. I was working on a lab using the Windows Azure SDK when I got 500 server error Not a descriptive error message. The Windows Azure Tools...

  Motivated by Rachel Appel’s terrific blog post Create user friendly date fields with ASP.NET MVC EditorTemplates & jQueryUI , I created a full featured article on the topic. You can find my article here .  In addition to the great information...

I’m pleased to introduce the new ASP.NET MVC Content Map . I’m calling this a dynamic map because I work on updating it weekly, and I plan to publish the new map monthly. If you go to the bottom of the page, it shows (as of this blog posting):                                ...

Update 28 November 2012: The combination of await, async, and the Task object makes it much easier for you to write asynchronous code in .NET 4.5.  Now that EF 6 is supporting Async Query and Save , you should take advantage of asynchronous programming...

Much has been written on the advantages of using a  Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver static content ( jQuery , images, CSS files, etc.). (If you’re not familiar with CDNs, read ScottGu’s blog post Announcing the Microsoft AJAX CDN  ...

Executive Overview You cannot use routing or web.config files to secure your MVC application. The only supported way to secure your MVC application is to apply the [ Authorize ] attribute to each controller and action method (except for the login/register...