On All Things Web

C# – Mocking a method to return a different value when called a second time using Moq

The “My Adventures in Coding” blog had a great post on utilizing Moq to return different resultsets from one method call. Depending on the setup you need, there are a few options. Using a Queue was an excellent approach and worked great in a test I just did. Check out this post if you are using Moq.

In this post we are going to create a widget of sorts for document page navigation arrows that appear on the left and right sides of the screen. Ever go to a news site and see arrows on the side of the page that allow you to click between articles? Sometimes that is a useful feature to add to an app, so we are going to do so as a helper method defined as the following.

@GlobalHelpers.LeftArrow(…

The Kendo AutoComplete control has some limitations that a simple workaround can solve.

The Kendo AutoComplete control provides a great user interface for type ahead functionality. It works seamlessly with bound JSON data from an AJAX data source and provides a tidy, yet customizable, view of the data. Some of the functionality of the behavior is customizable, and it exposes a decent set of events. You can view the demo of the control here.

Even though the control has a decent…

My Time As a Microsoft MVP

In the early 2000’s, I was working for a State agency in Pennsylvania in a .NET development role.  I’ve always been fascinated by programming on many levels: I really liked to learn the nuts and bolts of the framework, as well as the ability to create something – albeit digitally.  I tried to learn as much as I possibly could; I’d read tech books, read web sites, and post on forums.  I was pretty…

AJAX File Uploads with HTML 5

I see on StackOverflow the question often how to upload a file via AJAX.  It turns out it is actually not that difficult. We utilize a solution using the Html 5 FileReader component. The idea is have the file reader read a PDF file contents, and transfer those contents to a hidden field (stored in the $hidden variable). A portion of the script we use is shown below.

$("#FileUpload").on('change',…

I recently found a bug in a plugin and so I figured that would be a good time to offer a public service announcement as to why you have to be careful with scoping in JavaScript.  The plugin I’m featuring is just a quick example of the problem.  Suppose your had the following HTML snippet:

First Button 0 Second Button 0 Third Button 0

Pretty simple. The idea of my plugin was to…

Database T4 Templating Tricks

I love T4 templates. It’s incredible how much canned code can be generated automatically for you. T4 can not only generate static code, but it can do much more like access the database through SMO. All you need to do is define the server and database like so:

lt;#@ import namespace="Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Common" #> <# var server = new Server("localhost"); var db =…

ASP.NET MVC And Client Side Lists with Kendo

In this post, I’m going to illustrate a very simple way to create client-side list-based UI’s in ASP.NET MVC. The idea with this example is to allow the ability to add a bulk number of list items that doesn’t require constantly posting back to add additional items. In this example, we’ll use Kendo UI Core framework templating capabilities, although any templating framework will do.

To start,…

Kendo MVVM Sample in ASP.NET MVC

Kendo MVVM is exciting in UI application development framework that binds a JavaScript model to an HTML view. At the core of the MVVM framework is a JavaScript model definition that defines members of the view model that the view will use. For instance, here is a simplified model:

var vm = kendo.observable({ Name: "" });

The idea here is that the model has a Name property that will be bound.…

Adding Security To Html Helpers

I know the new MVC 5 HTML tag attributes for rendering ASP.NET widgets is all the rage, but there are a lot of useful approaches to using the server-side HTML helpers.  One simple extension method we are going to look at is adding control level security.  Often within our applications, we have a means of providing UI security at the control level.  We may, for instance, hide a control if the user…

Kendo UI Core and DropDownListFor

Kendo UI Core supports data attribute initialization of its widgets. This initialization approach is largely created for it’s MVVM capabilities, but also can be used for server-side approaches too, which in turn can be used with ASP.NET MVC HTML helpers. The setup may be a little different than you are used to.

Please note: Although Telerik has MVC wrappers already created and ready for you to…

The nice thing about Entity Framework is that anytime you are using one of the entity template generation capabilities, they are pretty easily customizable. This, of course, means that you are NOT using the pure code-first API most likely (however, to an existing database defines a T4 template). In this blog post, we’re going to quickly update the T4 template to change the default rendering:

us…

If you have taken over an MVC application, you may have come across a dilemma like the following. Notice that in a view, within a form, you’ll see a group of hidden fields mixed in with a form like the following.

Html.HiddenFor(i => i.ContactID) Html.HiddenFor(i => i.ContactTypeID) Html.HiddenFor(i => i.ContactDescription) Html.HiddenFor(i => i.ContactTypeDescription) Html.HiddenFor(i =>…

Sometimes you may want to support view reuse, where a partial view displays a portion of the application in a reusable fashion. Suppose you had the following entity which has a bunch of properties.

public class Customer { public int CustomerID { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string AccountNumber { get; set; } . . }

One of the new features coming is the addition of Tag Helpers, which are server-side attributes that get interpreted and translated into a client-side attributes. This transforms the previous approach we used to use of the following:

@Html.ActionLink("Text", "Action", "Controller") @* OR *@ <a href="@Url.Action("Action", "Controller")">Text</a>

Both of the above examples translate to the…

I had a strange issue updating the Entity Framework model against a newly built SQL Server 2014 database.  For some reason, it was talking a REALLY long time, even hours to connect.  Using SQL Server Profiler, we saw some activity which never completed.  I couldn’t figure it out until someone helped me by sending me this link: https://entityframework.codeplex.com/workitem/2445

Other users had…

A lot of the game on the mobile market share characteristics with other games of the same type, and can thus be grouped together in a similar category.  Regardless of the type of game we are talking about building, one of the more useful features of the game is to provide some instruction at the beginning of the game.  There is usually an interactive explanation of the game’s mechanics that…