Whenever ASP.NET MVC receives an HTTP request, the request goes through code in the MVC framework before it reaches our controller actions. And then, after we return from our controller, it also goes through framework code before an HTTP response is emitted. The framework code that is involved is typically called the "pipeline". In this post we will talk about how we can insert our own custom code into the pipeline. This is achieved by creating special classes called filters.

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Today I'm going to talk about a slightly controversial topic about using the repository pattern in combination with an ORM such as Entity Framework.

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In a previous post I talked about how we can manage lookup tables with Entity Framework Code First. In that post I suggested using the primary key directly to check for a specific lookup, rather than introducing an arbitrary column that will serve as an identifier. In this post I will talk about how we can make a generic lookup service to simplify how we show lookup values in, say, dropdown lists.

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Oftentimes in our applications we will have such things as a "lookup table". I am defining a lookup table as a list of relatively fixed or static choices such as status codes, states or provinces, and so on. In this post I will share how I manage lookup tables using Entity Framework.

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Web scraping is defined as getting and saving information from an HTML page through a program. In this post we will leverage F# and the HTML type provider to do web scraping.

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SQL Server lets us design tables which have constraints and checks in them. Some examples of these constraints / checks are primary key constraints, nullability flags, maximum length flags, and so on. These checks are used to ensure data integrity. Insert, update, and delete commands which will result in an invalid state when executed are not allowed. However, there are some advantages to not using these checks. In this post, we will talk about some of those advantages.

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Application settings for .NET projects provide a way to change the behavior of a program without recompilation. These settings are typically stored as key-value pairs in the web.config or app.config files and can be accessed through the `ConfigurationManager` class provided by the framework. In this post we will be taking configuration access to the next level by providing a strongly-typed wrapper around the ConfigurationManager class.

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Recently I deployed a new ASP.NET 5 web application to a local IIS server. Though there are several online resources available about deployment, I encountered some problems that were difficult to diagnose and fix. In this post I will talk about the general deployment process and the steps I followed for a successful deployment.

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Protection against CSRF (use of AntiForgery tokens) is supported in both the ASP.NET MVC and AngularJS frameworks. However, they have different implementations. What this means is that the default implementation of ASP.NET MVC for AntiForgery tokens will not work out-of-the box on an AngularJS front-end. In this post we will look at this in more detail and come up with a solution to the problem.

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One common pattern we see in ASP.NET MVC controller actions is a conditional check for ModelState.IsValid, with different branches getting executed based on whether the result is true or false. The ModelState captures errors arising from data annotations such as `Required` and StringLength. When there are custom validations that cannot be captured using data annotations, what usually happens is that these validations are checked in the success block of ModelState.IsValid. In this post we are going to talk about how to integrate custom validation into ModelState.

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