Dynamic resource registration in ASP.NET MVC

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…

Ode to versioning

Unless you keep your programs only for yourself, you would want to give them a version. Versioning is a popular technique where a unique version number is assigned to a program to denote a specific state of the code of that program at a specific time. A version number is used as a reference to what the program, as a deliverable, includes in terms of functionality. This reference is expressed in words that your users would understand. Furthermore, if your users experience a problem, you could try to reproduce it on that same state of the code.

There are many versioning schemes that dictate how to generate new version numbers. When trying to implement continuous integration (and delivery), though, you may face some challenges. In this blog post I will try to explain some of these challenges and what options there are.

Continue Reading…

Load balancers can much more

Load balancing is a popular technique when you need to be able to serve thousands and more concurrent requests in a reliable manner. Load balancers distribute incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers (a.k.a. server pool or server farm) to increase throughput. Although many people associate load balancing primarily with the higher throughput, this technique can be used in other important scenarios as well.

Load balancing

Continue Reading…

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

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:

Model binding mechanism

A nice bonus is that we can map our models from any kind of request, for example a form POST or AJAX. Continue Reading…

React vs. Angular components – Part 4

This is a series of posts about comparison between components in Angular and React. The idea of these posts is not to judge which one is best, bur rather to show how these two cope with some typical problems and how we, developers, can use them. In the first three parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) I talked about the starting points – how to create a component, how to attach a template to it, how to do data binding. In this fourth part I am going to deep a bit more into the lifecycle of these components. I will discuss what opportunities and points of extensibility one can find in Angular and React and how one can benefit from them. Continue Reading…