Bundling AngularJS HTML pages with ASP.NET

Bundling and minification are two well-known techniques used to improve the load time of your website. These are especially important for sites that use extensively JavaScript to offer better user experience. There are plenty of tools to help you do bundling and minification of JavaScript and CSS files. If you are a .NET developer you are probably very used to live inside Visual Studio and expect it to offer you everything you might think of. In ASP.NET 4.5 you can use a bundling API to define how your files will be grouped and sent to the client. The following example demonstrates the usage of this API.

public static void Register(BundleCollection bundles)
{
 bundles.Add(new ScriptBundle("~/bundles/jquery")
  .Include("~/Scripts/jquery-{version}.js"));
 bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/bundles/css")
  .Include("~/css/*.css"));
}

public static void Register(BundleCollection bundles)

{

bundles.Add(new ScriptBundle("~/bundles/jquery")

.Include("~/Scripts/jquery-{version}.js"));

bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/bundles/css")

.Include("~/css/*.css"));

}

Then in your page (either an ASP.NET page or a MVC view) you would invoke the rendering of these bundles by calling Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/jquery”) and Styles.Render(“~/bundles/css”). Continue Reading…

Display Attribute Not Working With ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM

Recently I was asked about a strange problem concerning the Display attribute in ASP.NET MVC 2. The problem was the Display atribute had no effect in the view. It was really a strange one. I tried it myself and it was true.

Let’s have a look at that situation. Below is the model for a user.

public class User
{
 [ScaffoldColumn(false)]
 public int Id { get; set; }

 [Required]
 [Display(Name = "User name")]
 public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class User

{

[ScaffoldColumn(false)]

public int Id { get; set; }

[Required]

[Display(Name = "User name")]

public string Name { get; set; }

}

Using Html.DisplayForModel() in our view results in the following web page:

As you can see the Display attribute has not been taken into consideration at all. The reason for this is ASP.NET MVC 2 RTN do not know about it. Display attribute is new for .NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM is compiled under .NET 3.5. This attribute is supported in Futures release of ASP.NET MVC and will be supported in any newer releases (like MVC 3).

OK, but I didn’t give you a working solution so far. Well, there is – DisplayName attribute. Note that it resides in System.ComponentModel not in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. Our model now looks like this:

public class User
{
 ...
 [Required]
 [DisplayName("User name")]
 public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class User

{

...

[Required]

[DisplayName("User name")]

public string Name { get; set; }

}

ASP.NET MVC DI with Common Service Locator and NInject

I think everyone knows about Dependency Injection (DI) and how important it is when it comes to building low-coupled components. There are many IoC (Inversion of Control) containers. The most popular are

Each of them has its own pros and cons. I have been using NInject for years and I am really happy with it. Autofac is quite a new DI framework which shows really good results on benchmarks. You can find information for all DI frameworks on their websites or just google them for comparison. Continue Reading…

Test-Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC has become more and more popular. In my previous post I gave you my vision about it and what it introduced to ASP.NET developers. One of the advantages of the MVC pattern is the better testability. You can easily test every controller without dealing with the View itself.

Test-Driven Development (TDD)

Principles of TDD are really simple. The entire TDD process is described on the following scheme:

Boyan Mihaylov