11 April 2016
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.
29 March 2016
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.
15 March 2016
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.
29 February 2016
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.
06 February 2016
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.
10 January 2016
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.
03 January 2016
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.
26 December 2015
There are three behaviors that entity framework can use when loading related data. These are lazy loading, eager loading, and explicit loading. The main difference between the three are in when the related data gets loaded and whether it is done behind-the-scenes or explicitly. In this post we will learn about these behaviors and evaluate when one should be used over the other.
19 December 2015
Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) is a type of cyber attack wherein an attacker makes an HTTP request on a user's behalf without the user's knowledge or consent. If successful, a significant amount of damage can be done, depending on the nature of the request. This kind of attack can be prevented by using antiforgery tokens. In this post, we will talk about how we can prevent CSRF attacks in our ASP.NET MVC applications.
05 December 2015
In a previous post we talked about creating custom html helpers. The implementation there involved customizing helpers that already existed in the ASP.NET MVC framework. In this post we will talk about creating our own helpers from scratch. This will allow us to create helpers for any kind of html element and will also provide flexibility on the element building process.
