ASP.NET Debugging : MVC

Logging modules for ASP.NET (MVC) and also for Windows Azure

Tom — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:07:20 GMT

I was just reading through Scott Hanselman’s post about ELMAH and this sounds like a great idea. Getting a easy to consume report of all of your exceptions is a wonderful thing, especially when you add in that you can get it as an RSS feed, an email or a web site. You can check out ELMAH or read through his post to get a lot of details on it.

The web site looks like this:

This also got me thinking about Windows Azure and some of the logging that has been done already for that. So I wanted to highlight one of the projects here and talk about what it does. It is called Azure Application Monitor.

This allows you to see how much time and memory your instance is using. After you integrate this into your application, you will get a report like:

It is easy to add this to your application.

Download the application
Add the following line to your code. If you are adding it to a WebRole, add it in the Page_PreRender() function. Or in the Start() of a WorkerRole, changing it to WorkerRole below:
```
Neudesic.Azure.AzureMonitor.Start("AppName", "WebRole");
```
Be sure you have the TableStorageEndpoint configuration setting configured.
Create a PerfCounterUpdateInterval configuration setting and set the value (the value is in ticks (1000 ticks = 1 second)
Test and deploy your application

To view the data, you need to configure the AzureMonitor so that it points to your TableStorageEndpoint

As for what all it tracks, here is the list:

Application Name (you supply this in your code)

Role Name (you supply this in your code)

Machine Name

Process ID

Thread count

Handle count

Total processor time

User processor time

Private memory size

Non-paged memory size

Paged memory size

Paged system memory size

Peak paged memory size

Peak virtual memory size

Peak working set

Page file usage

Peak page file usage

Non-paged Pool Usage

Local machine time

Process local start time

It is rather easy to add more stuff to this as the code is available from the projects location.

One a side-note, if you want to see what data you have in your Blobs, Queues and Tables, there is an updated version of Azure Storage Explorer available now. From that site:

The most current release of Azure Storage Explorer, version 2.0, has several improvements over the original version:

The UI is WPF-based and has Outlook-style navigation.
Multiple storage accounts are supported, and you can change your storage account details directly in the tool.
In addition to text and byte views of items, blob items that are pictures can be viewed as images.

Azure Storage Explorer 2.0 does not presently allow you to act on storage items. This capability is being considered for a future update.

Let me know what you think or if you use any other tools for ASP.NET or Windows Azure.

ASP.NET MVC and JSON and when do you use Async

Tom — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

I wanted to post somewhat of a discussion starter around some of the new technologies that ASP.NET has recently released.

ASP.NET MVC

This technology has one huge benefit of allowing you to do unit testing on your site. But there are also a number of other advantages to it, for example, you can have a web page call commands inside a controller. This allows multiple pages to call the same command which helps keep things clean. It also does a pretty good job of separating the code from the presentation layer. But I did find myself doing a lot of coding like I used to with classic ASP or even IDC where we loop through results and have <%= %> snippets all over the aspx page.

JSON/AJAX

These technologies have really opened the door to a lot more asynchronous commands on the web. They allow you to do lots of small submissions and updates without the need to submit and refresh the whole page.

jQuery

This is a really interesting new functionality in that it really isn’t anything new but just a way of collecting things in a cleaner way. The way it is designed really gives us an ability to do things that you generally don’t consider doing. For example, you can make images clickable without having any link code in the html. It can also give some interesting ways to hide some of your IP (although they can always see it using something like netmon).

Silverlight

I think with Silverlight 3, we have really raised the bar for making Silverlight a choice for developing an application. Especially if you combine it with RIA, there are a lot of great applications of Silverlight that before would be much harder to create. I know Silverlight 3 is just in developer beta, but I have been using it quite a bit lately and I think it is really going to change things. The deep linking and search engine optimization functionality really help make this a good solution as well.

So when would you use which?

That is what I’d like to hear from everyone. If you have a page, when do you decide that you should do something async? When do you decide that you should just submit the entire page? Have you considered using Silverlight yet? What functionality makes it attractive to you? Is it the off-line functionality?

My take

I wanted to give some of my thoughts on these things, but remember that they are just thoughts as a lot of these technologies I haven’t used enough to know which is best for what situation.

I think that most of these technologies allow for very fast creation of a site. I think a lot of it boils down to what you are comfortable with or what you have available. If you have designers at your disposal, Silverlight is a great choice as they can create the Xaml to make your application look amazing.

I think one of the powerful things about MVC is that you can combine it with AJAX, jQuery, JSON to get a bunch of these things in the same application. But it still is a question as to when to use what. For me, I really like using jQuery to control the UI and then have it call commands through AJAX/JSON. It also allows you to update a page with new content without having to refresh the page. Which makes the user experience a lot cleaner.

As for Silverlight, in general I think it is a wildcard out of the bunch. You can do all the same things you can with these other technologies but within the same framework. So I think if you want to have the best of all worlds and learn the smallest amount, this may be a good way to go.

So what are your thoughts? And do you have any other functionality that you would like that see that isn’t available yet?

ASP.NET Troubleshooting

Tom — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:31:03 GMT

So with how long ASP.NET has been out for now, I am really curious to know how people go about tracking down issues in their project.

I’d like to know things like:

How do you know there is a problem
What tools do you use to confirm that the problem really is a problem
How do you gather data about the problem
How do you determine if the problem is your code or something else (like the network, hard drive failure, etc)
If the problem is your code, how do you ensure your fix resolves the problem (how do you test the fix)

If there are any others, I’d also like to hear them.

Also, if you do anything in the Cloud now, I’d love to hear how you troubleshoot that. And it can be from any cloud service provider.

And have any of these things changed with some of the new ways to program that have come out. For example, AJAX, MVC, Silverlight, IE8, jQuery, etc.

ASP.NET MVC and SharePoint

Tom — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:16:12 GMT

If you have tried to get these two to work together, then you are probably had to deal with a lot of the same issues that I had. A big help for getting these two to work with each other is the SharePointMVC project on CodePlex.

After downloading this sample, you have some steps that will allow you to get MVC to run underneath SharePoint.

Here is how it is setup:

A SharePoint Master Page contains all SharePoint styles and theme

A custom ASP.net page (MVCHostingPage) is based upon the SharePoint Master Page

MVCHostingPage contains a web control called RenderControl

RenderControl (and other internal classes) interrogates the current request and forwards it onto the ASP.NET MVC rendering engine.

A HttpHandler takes all requests to *.mvc and redirects them to the MvcHostingPage.aspx page.

A few things to keep in mind, the deployment instructions tell you to create a Virtual Directory for the project, if you make it an Application, you will get an error in SharePoint when you try to use the SharePoint master page because it is a cross Domain call.

I extended the HtmlHelper class to add a Pager and after doing these steps, the Pager didn’t work correctly. So watch out for that if you are doing this, like following the Create a Pager HTML Helper post.

There are some other ways to get this to work so if you have had success doing this, please let me know about it. There is also a question on stackoverflow around this with some other thoughts and suggestions.

New hotfix for problems with MVC and Visual Studio crashing

Tom — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:11:04 GMT

If you have experienced crashes in Visual Studio when opening view pages in design view or have had problems installing MVC, there is an update that may help resolve the issue:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=16827&wa=wsignin1.0

This is actually an update to the CLR (.NET Framework)

Please be sure to get the package that matches your system x64 or x86.

As a side-note, ASP.NET MVC just released RC2 which is mostly updates to the install experience. You can download that here.

Creating an Auto-complete textbox

Tom — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:00:00 GMT

It seems that auto-complete is very popular these days with different sites. So I wanted to show you how you can create your own Auto-complete textbox on your web sites. There are two ways that this can be accomplished depending on what you are using and what you want to use.

Ajax control toolkit

This method is described very well on the following blog post: ASP.NET MVC Tip #37 – Create an Auto-Complete Text Field. The best thing about this method is that you can use a webservice as the backend for what you call to get the data back. This enables you to have a database of possible results and populate the box as the person types. For example, if you were going to write a web site that allows someone to post a blog, you could have a Auto-Complete textbox for the tags on the post. Pulling down the list of tags they have used in the past.

JQuery

Another way to accomplish this is to use JQuery. With this javascript library, you can get this to work pretty easily. To see how, check out: UI/Autocomplete on JQuery.com. This also has some advantages, less code and easier to setup. But would take some more to make it more powerful, like adding Ajax to make a call to the server. But if you have a known list, this could be really nice and would be quick.

Silverlight

You can also use Silverlight to make an Auto-complete textbox. This method is described by Nikhil on his blog here: Silverlight AutoComplete.

I hope this gives you some options to add this useful method to your web sites. Feel free to post other methods here as well.

The PDC this year…

Tom — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Not sure how many people are planning on attending the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) this year, but it is going to be a fantastic conference.

We announced some huge announcements on the PDC web site. http://www.microsoftpdc.com/

We have a major lineup of executive keynote speakers representing most of the core Microsoft businesses.
We’ll have 20+ Windows 7 sessions, and we’ll be giving out the Win7 bits.
We also announced our in-depth symposia sessions including parallel computing and S+S.

If you have any questions about the PDC, feel free to check out the site listed above, or you can Ask the Brain.

The conference runs from October 27th to October 30th with the pre-conference on October 26th. You can see the full agenda here.

We have also just announced that all partners and customers attending the PDC will receive a very special gift this year: a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits! That is a very cool gift and very useful as well. I’d love to hear if anyone is going or thinking about going to the PDC!

Who is using MVC?

Tom — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

So MVC have been out now for a while, and I have seen a few things come by my way with it. I just wanted to see who all was using it and how it was working out for you.

I am really curious about things like:

Did you have to modify your project plans to fit MVC or did it do exactly what you wanted?
Have you run into any problems using MVC?
Are the documentation that explains when you use MVC clear?
How useful have you found the ability to use unit testing with your MVC site?

Look forward to hearing from everyone. Feel free to share other things as well. I’d like to hear any success or failures you have had with it.

MVC Information for ASP.NET

Tom — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:42:25 GMT

Since so many people mentioned MVC in my post asking about future updates that you are most looking forward to (here), I thought I would post some helpful information around MVC.

Of course, Scott's blog has some great information on it - here.

There is a great set of online videos found at An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC using VB.

And of course there is lots of useful information on the http://www.asp.net/mvc/ site and the wiki on there at http://wiki.asp.net/page.aspx/286/aspnet-mvc-framework/.

For a great example using MVC, check out this blog for a walk-through e-commerce store with full application lifecycle including agile and TDD design.:

http://blog.wekeroad.com/mvc-storefront/