First things first – oh no they don’t J But it can look like a bug if you’re not used to MVC, so I thought it worth calling out. Scenario Imagine we have a pair of controller actions like this; [ HttpGet ] public ActionResult Index() ...

Why do you write JavaScript? It's probably for one of two major reasons – Responsiveness or Richness. Richness we know about – it's the flying, sliding, flashing, and sometimes annoying UI features we see J But Responsiveness is much less tangible...

If you write a lot of JavaScript, you really should consider adopting Progressive Enhancement as the standard way that you work. This is basically whereby you write a web site without script, and then enhance it with script. The result is a site that...

Recently I've spoken with a few customers that have asked what a Lambda Expression is, which surprised me. It seems that a second wave of developers are now starting to use Lambdas (i.e. those that didn't adopt C# 3.0 immediately) and need some pointers...

Recently I've been coordinating and authoring some JavaScript best practice documentation, and one area that came up which I thought was interesting was the reason for using prototypes instead of constructors to define JavaScript class members. Thanks...

I can't avoid shouting about this – it's some top news! Check out Scott's post on what is in the box and where to get it.

I've been consulting with various customers of late to help them understand how they can prepare for "the cloud" (specifically Windows Azure), and what elements of their system might need work in order to work well there. This blog post is so that I have...

This week I hosted an interactive session at the Architect Insight Conference with my colleague Josh Twist ... if you were there thanks for being so interactive! We really enjoyed it and found it useful so I hope you did too. One concept that I mentioned...

It's been a busy period for announcements, so if you've not heard check these two out; 1. ASP.NET MVC 2 was released late last week! See Scott's post. 2. We've announced that we're investing heavily in (by contributing to) jQuery as the JavaScript...

I've just posted a very simple walkthrough of the different ways to handle errors when you're using jQuery's ".load" function to do partial rendering... it's on our team blog so check it out here; http://blogs.msdn.com/ukadc/archive/2010/02/12/handling...

I've been asked this a few times by people thinking about integrating the Bing Maps platform into their apps. Disclaimer : Consult the documentation as the authority, not my blog! Links inline... So the answer is – "it could be free for you" . In...

Windows Identity Foundation has been around for a while now, and "Claims Based Security" is the cool kid that everyone wants to be friends with. The problem is that everyone (except Zulfiqar who speaks SAML natively) seems to think this stuff is impenetrably...

Something I get asked by most customers starting out with ASP.NET MVC is how they should package, group, factor, and reuse their UI components. We're all used to thinking about User Controls, Custom Controls, and other Web Forms approaches. But rest assured...

A topic of discussion I've heard a few times when using Routing in ASP.NET concerns whether you should use the default generic route pattern for most of your controllers, or whether you should specify individual routes for every action. (this applies...

Q : Should I have a view Model in my ASP.NET MVC architecture? A : Yes. Well, that was a short post! J Being more serious, this is an interesting topic that the advisors and p&p team discussed a few times while they were building the Reference...

If you've not come across the Web Client Guidance that patterns & practices have been working on, now is the time to head on over to their CodePlex site; http://webclientguidance.codeplex.com/ The team have been really busy pulling together...

Ryan Simpson is one of my colleagues in the UK ADC team... and he has recently blogged a great little post about some of the tools we use with customers when we have them in Reading for a scalability or performance lab. Make sure you check it out here;...

You can tell it's the first day back after a 2 week vacation/holiday/beer-and-food-fuelled-break when it takes you an hour to work out why something like this isn't working... but on reflection, I decided that this was actually very tricky to spot once...

You might have seen some JavaScript is wrapped up in funny looking functions, such as this screen shot, and wondered why – even parts of the Microsoft Ajax Framework previews use such an approach. At first it can seem very strange, but don't worry – it...

I was working on a Proof of Concept recently that needed to support loosely coupled Ajax components. The idea is a common one – components need to be able to hook into an existing page without detailed knowledge of how the page works, and immediately...

I keep looking for the URL’s to get Microsoft Ajax, jQuery, the MVC Ajax libraries and more from our new shiny CDN (check here if you’ve not heard of it)... and I can never remember where they are. So this post is for my benefit, not yours J The...

On the ASP.NET ScriptManager control there is a useful little property that very few people have heard of called “LoadScriptsBeforeUI”. What does it do? Well, simply put... · When “true” (the default) it will render <script> tags for each...

I had a fun day debugging some ASP.NET plus jQuery this week, and came across something I’ve known is possible for some time, but that I’ve never actually needed to do... and that was to ensure a bit of JavaScript ran once an UpdatePanel had refreshed...

Then tell us what you need! Blaine has blogged a link to a survey that patterns & practices will use to help them understand what challenges that are affecting you the most... so that they can choose the right areas to focus effort in providing guidance...

Recently I was working on diagnosing a performance issue with a customer’s web site with a colleague (this is one of our favourite engagement types so if you need some help let me know J ), and we found that items were being trimmed very regularly from...