Many people combine all scripts (and style sheets) for the entire website into one bundle. The rationale behind this is the TCP connections limitation by browsers. Furthermore, once the bundle is downloaded, it gets cached by the browser and subsequent requests to the website are faster. This approach, however, works against the concept of modularity. Why changes in one file should invalidate the entire (potentially huge) bundle? Moreover, HTTP/2 removes the TCP connections limitation issue. Although, ASP.NET MVC provides a way to register resources separately, this build-in mechanism is not flexible enough. Continue Reading…
Category Archives: C#
C# 2.0/3.0/3.5
Model binding in ASP.NET MVC can be fun
Model binding is a technique that allows you to map data to your controller actions in ASP.NET MVC. In the old days one would manually call
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Request["param"] |
to get the value of а parameter, but this could quickly become annoying as you get many parameters (f.x., via form POST). Model binding abstracts away this tedious activity and allows us to focus on designing our controllers. The process itself looks like this:
A nice bonus is that we can map our models from any kind of request, for example a form POST or AJAX. Continue Reading…
HttpWebRequest keeps timing out
It has already happened to me a couple of times and every time I forget what the issue was and how to solve it. That’s why I decided to write a short post about it, so hopefully next time I will remember. 🙂 The problem arises when making a few (independent) HTTP requests using C#’s
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HttpWebRequest |
. At first it sounds like a very usual thing to do, but the mystical part of it is that the first few requests succeed and then at a certain point the others start timing out. You may be tempted to increase the
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Timeout |
first, but you will soon understand that it does not solve the problem. Continue Reading…
Double confirm identity with ASP.NET Identity
ASP.NET Identity brings the authentication and authorization to a new level. Based on the OWIN middleware, one can plug & play different authentication and authorization providers, f.x. OAuth, OpenID, simple forms authentication. The beauty of the new identity model is that it provides a unified interface to work with. One can write her own log-in providers that still rely on the same unified interface.
Besides the typical scenarios where a user logs in with her username and password, or Twitter/Facebook/Google, or maybe a two factor log-in with SMS/e-mail confirmation, there is another interesting one. In some cases you would want to enable users to log in with simple forms authentication to access a basic area of functionality, f.x. just reading data. On the contrary you would want to protect other areas of the web site where the user can edit sensitive information, f.x. his password. In this case you may want to require that the user logs in again – either with the same provider or with another one.
To solve this issue I decided to write a simple extension for ASP.NET Identity, which I called Double confirm identity. It provides a set of utility methods you can use to achieve the described scenario.
Integrate external web services with slow responses
Recently I have been working on a project, which involved communication with a lot of external systems. These systems were mainly web services and databases. During the development phase of the project I only had access to a test version of these systems, i.e. dealing with test data. One of these external systems was of a greater interest as it was designed to serve the main data the customer dealed with. It was a traditional SOAP web service (build on ASP.NET). The service contains a bunch of methods to retrieve and update data. Everything seems pretty normal so far. However, a few of these methods that fetch data happened to work very slow. By working slow I mean, that the external server took its time to do the necessary computations. The calls to these methods were sometimes so slow that users had to see a waiting screen for 10 minutes. And this is pretty annoying. And the customer realized it. The first solution was, of course, to ask the customer if it was possible to optimize this service. Unfortunately, the service itself is developed and maintained by another company and it could take some time until a better version was released. We didn’t have this time, so we had to work ourselves on this issue. Continue Reading…