With Autofac (particularly the multitenant extensions) I see a lot of questions come through that boil down to this: I have an ASP.NET MVC project. I have some controllers in a plugin assembly that isn't referenced by the main project. At application startup, I do some scanning and use Autofac to dynamically register the controllers. For some reason I get an error when I try to visit one of these controllers. How can I have a controller in a plugin assembly? Shannon Deminick has a nice blog article that explains this in a different context - similar question,...

We use TeamCity as our build server and one of the cool things TeamCity has built in is the ability to serve as a NuGet server. You build your product, run a nuget pack task on it, and TeamCity will automatically add it to the feed. One of the somewhat odd things I’ve found with TeamCity’s NuGet server is that it seems to require that you let TeamCity run the actual nuget pack on packages it should host. That is, even if you wanted to do that action in your build script, you can’t – simply putting the package...

Although I wasn't a big fan of NuGet when it started getting big, I have to admit it's grown on me. I think part of that has to do with the large amount of improvement we've seen since back then. Regardless, I'm in a position with Autofac and other projects where I'm not only consuming NuGet packages, I'm also producing them. One of the biggest pains I have when maintaining the .nuspec files for my packages is that you can update a dependency for your project (via NuGet) but the corresponding version value isn't updated in the .nuspec. (This...

Sublime Text 2 has a nice feature where you can hit "Ctrl+B" or select "Tools -> Build" from the menus and, based on the current file type, a build system will be automatically selected and executed against that file. I recently released an update to my MSBuild package for Sublime Text 2 that includes some "build variants" for MSBuild that specifically set Debug or Release configuration during the build. Basically: msbuild yourscript.proj /p:Configuration=Debug or msbuild yourscript.proj /p:Configuration=Release I didn't know this was possible until recently or I'd have put...

I just spent like six hours trying to figure this out, so profit from my experience. I have some custom code wiring up jQuery Validation in a form and for some reason, the jQuery "html" method was causing a "HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: DOM Exception 3" whenever validation errors were being displayed. After banging my head against it for a while and getting some help from a co-worker, we found it came down to the $.each iterator. I was compiling up a list of error messages and using the $.each to add them to settings for a jQuery validator. It looked...

We have a large group of devs all working on a single web application. As part of that, we have different folks all working in different branches, making changes to configuration files. Visual Studio does a nice job of letting you keep code formatted via plugins like CodeRush and PowerCommands (“format on save”). Config files? Not so much. As you can imagine, this creates no end of churn in merge conflicts as things switch from tabs to spaces and back, NuGet mucks around with dependency redirects, and entries get added and removed. To address some of this,...

I was working on an ASP.NET MVC site for demonstrating some internal concepts recently. One of the things I wanted to show was how to use some HtmlHelper extension methods. I wanted the viewer to be able to see the rendered output and then flip to see the code, sort of like how you see in snazzy demos like the DevExpress MVC Extensions. Here's a little screencast/demo of what I'm talking about. Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required. So... how do you do that? Here's how it...

I'm working on building a bunch of projects that all follow a specific convention for naming, NuGet packaging, and so on. As part of that, I want to run the build for each component – from clean to package – all at once rather than clean everything, then build everything, then package everything. (For the sake of the article, let's ignore whether that's a good idea or not and just stick with me.) MSBuild has batching, which sort of works like "for-each," but in examples you see you can really only "batch" on tasks. Targets (groups of tasks) allow...

As of CodeRush/Refactor/DXCore 11.2, DXCore supports installation of plugins using Visual Studio Extensibility (VSIX) just like any other extension you might find in the gallery. This is beyond cool for a couple of reasons. First, I've been [slowly] working on a couple of different ways to create some nature of "plugin gallery" for DXCore extensions. There are so many community plugins, plus things like CR_Documentor and CR_CodeTweet that aren't on the community plugin site, that it's really hard to know what's out there. This would allow DXCore plugins to use the standard Visual Studio Gallery mechanism for browsing. ...

When validating input in a web forms application, you need to validate data types on the client and server side because you're working with text boxes and server controls. When you move to MVC, the client-side validation is still an interesting problem to solve, but the server-side validation all happens as a by-product of model binding. The DefaultModelBinder has some special built-in provisions to handle data type parsing errors and automatically convert those into standardized model state errors. If you're writing a custom model binder and you want to participate in this... Get the...

I'm a big fan of the "command prompt here" context menu extensions for Windows Explorer. I use them all the time. Sometimes, though, I need to go the other-way-around. That is, I'm at a command prompt and I want Windows Explorer open at the current location of my prompt. explorer %CD% Pretty simple, but super helpful. I had one of those "man, I'm stupid" moments when I put two-and-two together on this. I ended up making a little batch file "explore.bat" and stuck it in my path. @echo off echo Opening Explorer on %CD% explorer %CD% So now...

When I'm testing exception handling code, I have tests for exceptions I know I need to handle and tests for exceptions I'm not expecting. For example, say I have a component that calls a WCF service. If there's a communication issue, I want to mask that and return some stub/placeholder data. If there’s some other issue, I want to just let the exception bubble up and be handled by a global error handler. Something like this: public DataObject GetData(SomeParameter p) { if(p == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("p"); } DataObject data =...

We have a custom VirtualPathProvider that serves some static files (*.js, *.css) from embedded resources in assemblies. It is similar in function to the WebResource.axd that ships with ASP.NET, but instead of having some crazy URL, you just access the file directly and the VPP finds it in embedded resources and serves it just like it was on the disk. It makes for a nice deployment experience and easy upgrade. The problem I've run into a bunch, particularly with routing showing up, is that even with a wildcard map to ASP.NET, my static files end up with a 404...

In iTunes, if you have a track that is missing artwork you have the ability to right-click the track and opt to automatically download artwork for it. This works well if you play the track in iTunes or an iTunes-connected device (e.g., iPod)... but if you also use the same library in a UPnP server to stream your music on your network (like Asset UPnP) then you'll notice the artwork doesn't show up. That's because iTunes stores the downloaded artwork in a separate database outside the actual physical music track file, but other servers/devices expect artwork to be embedded in...

If you've worked with Windows Identity Foundation, you'll find it very nearly mandates that you implement a passive security token service using classic ASP.NET web forms rather than MVC. It doesn't lend itself well to testability, and in some cases it writes content directly to the response stream without you being able to govern when/how that happens. All is not lost, though. Here are a couple of helpers and tips when working with Windows Identity Foundation in ASP.NET MVC to create a passive STS. First, drop what you're doing and go buy a copy of Programming Windows Identity...