Documenting a JsonValueProviderFactory Gotcha​

About a year ago I was involved in the migration of an ASP.NET WebForms application over to MVC 3. We'd been doing a lot of AJAX-y / Single Page Application-y things in the project and had come to the conclusion that MVC might be a slightly better fit since we intended to continue down this path.

During the migration we encountered a bug in MVC 3 concerning Dictionary deserialization. This bug has subsequently tripped me up a few more times as I failed to remember the nature of the problem correctly. So I've written the issue up here as an aide to my own lamentable memory.

A while ago I wrote about optimally serving up JavaScript in web applications. I mentioned that Microsoft had come up with a NuGet package called Microsoft ASP.NET Web Optimization which could help with that by minifying and bundling CSS and JavaScript. At the time I was wondering if I would be able to to use this package with pre-existing MVC 3 projects (given that the package had been released together with MVC 4). Happily it turns out you can. But it's not quite as straightforward as I might have liked so I've documented how to get going with this here...

Just recently I've noticed that there appears to be something of a controversy around Unit Testing and Entity Framework. I first came across it as I was Googling around for useful posts on using MOQ in conjunction with EF. I've started to notice the topic more and more and as I have mixed feelings on the subject (that is to say I don't have a settled opinion) I thought I'd write about this and see if I came to any kind of conclusion...

Just recently I was tasked with seeing if we could provide a way to access our Dynamics CRM instance via OData. My initial investigations made it seem like there was nothing for me to do; CRM 2011 provides OData support out of the box. Small problem. We were running CRM 4.0.

Updated 05/10/2015​

If you're after a version of this that works with Globalize 1.x then take a look here.

Updated 27/08/2013​

To make it easier for people to use the approach detailed in this post I have created a repository for jquery.validate.globalize.js on GitHub here.

This is also available as a nuget package here.

To see a good demo take a look here.

This post is plagiarism. But I'm plagiarising myself so I don't feel too bad.

Simplicity appeals to me. It always has. Something that is simple is straightforward to comprehend and is consequently easy to use. It's clarity.

I was recently working on a project which had client side validation manually set up which essentially duplicated the same logic on the server. Like many things this had started out small and grown and grown until it became arduos and tedious to maintain.

Well done that man!​

I have occasionally done some server-side JavaScript with Rhino and Node.js but this is the exception rather than the rule. Like most folk at the moment, almost all the JavaScript I write is in a web context.

I've been a working as a developer in some way, shape or form for just over 10 years now. And it occurred to me the other day that I can't think of a better time to be a software developer than right now

Inspired by Hanselmans post on how he got started in programming I thought I'd shared my own tale about how it all began... I grew up the 80's just outside London. For those of you of a different vintage let me paint a picture. These were the days when "Personal Computers", as they were then styled, were taking the world by storm. Every house would be equipped with either a ZX Spectrum, a Commodore 64 or an Amstrad CPC. These were 8 bit computers which were generally plugged into the family television and spent a good portion of their time loading games like Target: Renegade from an audio cassette. But not in our house; we didn't have a computer. I remember mournfully pedalling home from friends houses on a number of occasions, glum as I compared my lot with theirs. Whereas my friends would be spending their evenings gleefully battering their keyboards as they thrashed the life out of various end-of-level bosses I was reduced to *wasting* my time reading. That's right Enid Blyton - you were second best in my head. Then one happy day (and it may have been a Christmas present although I'm not certain) our family became the proud possessors of an Amstrad CPC 6128:

I wanted to write about a JavaScript library which seems to have had very little attention so far. And that surprises me as it's

I've so named this blog post because it shamelessly borrows from the fine work of others: Sebastian Markbåge and Nathan Vonnahme. Sebastian wrote a blog post documenting a good solution to the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer DateTime problem at the tail end of last year. However, his solution didn't get me 100% of the way there when I tried to use it because of a need to support IE 8 which lead me to use Nathan Vonnahme's ISO 8601 JavaScript Date parser. I thought it was worth documenting this, hence this post, but just so I'm clear; the hard work here was done by Sebastian Markbåge and Nathan Vonnahme and not me. Consider me just a curator in this case. The original blog posts that I am drawing upon can be found here: 1. http://blog.calyptus.eu/seb/2011/12/custom-datetime-json-serialization/ and here: 2. http://n8v.enteuxis.org/2010/12/parsing-iso-8601-dates-in-javascript/

As I've started making greater use of JavaScript to give a richer GUI experience the amount of JS in my ASP.NET apps has unsurprisingly ballooned. If I'm honest, I hadn't given much consideration to the code quality of my JavaScript in the past. However, if I was going to make increasing use of it (and given the way the web is going at the moment I'd say that's a given) I didn't think this was tenable position to maintain. A friend of mine works for Coverity which is a company that provides tools for analysing code quality. I understand, from conversations with him, that their tools provide static analysis for compiled languages such as C++ / C# / Java etc. I was looking for something similar for JavaScript. Like many, I have read and loved Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts"; it is by some margin the most useful and interesting software related book I have read.So I was aware that Crockford had come up with his own JavaScript code quality tool called JSLint. JSLint is quite striking when you first encounter it:

I was recently working with my colleagues on refactoring a legacy application. We didn't have an immense amount of time available for this but the plan was to try and improve what was there as much as possible. In its initial state the application had no unit tests in place at all and so the plan was to refactor the code base in such a way as to make testing it a realistic proposition. To that end the domain layer was being heavily adjusted and the GUI was being migrated from WebForms to MVC 3. The intention was to build up a pretty solid collection of unit tests. However, as we were working on this we realised we had a problem with properties on our models with internal setters...

Updated 03/01/2013​

I've written a subsequent post which builds on the work of this original post. The new post exposes this functionality via a WCF service and can be found here.

Making PDFs from HTML​

I wanted to talk about an approach I've discovered for making PDFs directly from HTML. I realise that in these wild and crazy days of PDF.js and the like that techniques like this must seem very old hat. That said, this technique works and more importantly it solves a problem I was faced with but without forcing the users to move the "newest hottest version of X". Much as many of would love to solve problems this way, alas many corporations move slower than that and in the meantime we still have to deliver - we still have to meet requirements. Rather than just say "I did this" I thought I'd record how I got to this point in the first place. I don't know about you but I find the reasoning behind why different technical decisions get made quite an interesting topic...

Last time I wrote about WCF I was getting up and running with WCF Transport Windows authentication using NetTcpBinding in an Intranet environment. I ended up with a WCF service hosted in a Windows Service which did pretty much what the previous post name implies.

Yes the title of this post is *painfully* verbose. Sorry about that. Couple of questions for you: - Have you ever liked the way you can have base classes in C# which can then be inherited and subclassed in a different file / class

Update​

The speed of change makes fools of us all. Since I originally wrote this post all of 3 weeks ago Visual Studio 11 beta has been released and the issues I was seeking to solve have pretty much been resolved by the new innovations found therein. It's nicely detailed in @carlbergenhem's blog post: My Top 5 Visual Studio 11 Designer Improvements for ASP.NET 4.5 Development. I've left the post in place below but much of what I said (particularly with regard to Hungarian Notation) I've now moved away from. That was originally my intention anyway so that's no bad thing. The one HN artefact that I've held onto is using "$" as a prefix for jQuery objects. I think that still makes sense. I would have written my first line of JavaScript in probably 2000. It probably looked something like this: alert('hello world'). I know. Classy. As I've mentioned before it was around 2010 before I took JavaScript in any way seriously. Certainly it was then when I started to actively learn the language. Because up until this point I'd been studiously avoiding writing any JavaScript at all I'd never really given thought to forms and conventions. When I wrote any JavaScript I just used the same style and approaches as I used in my main development language (of C#). By and large I have been following the .net naming conventions which are ably explained by Pete Brown here. Over time I have started to move away from this approach. Without a deliberate intention to do so I have found myself adopting a different style for my JavaScript code as compared with anything else I write. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm completely happy with the style I'm currently using. But I find it more helpful than not and thought it might be worth talking about. It was really 2 things that started me down the road of "rolling my own" convention: dynamic typing and the lack of safety nets. Let's take each in turn....