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.
21 November 2015
HTML helper methods are used in Razor views to generate HTML markup in a strongly-typed, C-sharpy way. An example is `@Html.LabelFor(m => m.Name)`, which is used in a strongly-typed view whose model has a Name property. This will generate a label element with the appropriate display name. In this post we will learn how to create a custom HTML helper.
08 November 2015
In a previous post I talked about the importance of good naming when writing code. The title of that post is "Don't Make Me Think... About Your Code". This post will talk about meaningful classes and can be considered as an addition to the "writing code" series.
03 October 2015
In this post we are going to show a simple example of refactoring code to better adhere to the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP).
26 September 2015
There is no doubt that JavaScript MVC / MVVM frameworks such as AngularJS provide better experiences for both developers and users alike. However, there are some caveats that we should be aware of when using this framework. Specifically, search engines might not be able to read the content in our applications if we are using the data binding features provided by these frameworks. In this post I will compare two scenarios - one using server-side data binding and one using client-side data binding and talk about their SEO implications.
19 September 2015
Whenever we start with a new ASP.NET MVC project, the tendency is to use one of the templates offered by Visual Studio. The template goes a long way in getting us started with our project. However one thing that the template does not do is remove the HTTP headers that are related to ASP.NET and MVC. Today we are going to look at those and how and why to remove them.
12 September 2015
AutoMapper is a wonderful tool that lets us convert one class to another using fluently-defined configurations. It is useful when there is a need for multiple mappings, such mappings from persistence model classes to domain model classes or mapping from domain model classes to viewmodels. In this post we are going to look at how to use AutoMapper with Entity Framework for projections.
15 March 2015
Sometimes you would like to get the contents of a view and store it in a string rather than render it as HTML. An example of this is if you want to compose HTML emails and you want to harness the power of the ASP.NET MVC infrastructure (which includes layouts, partial views, and models). In this post I will show you how to store rendered View content in a string.
