thefrozencoder

Programming and Technology blog

Been a long time running

Seems like during the summer time I have nothing to say, or rather I don’t usually do much blogging or coding. It is after all summer time.

Except for this weekend or rather today in general. As of lately I have been immersing myself in the world of the ASP.NET MVC bits (preview 4). I never really bothered with the earlier previews since I figured that they would be changing the framework so anything you learned in Preview 1 would probably be obsolete by Preview 5 and I was pretty much right based on some of the samples that I had downloaded.

My main interest is the idea of a pluggable view engine especially a Xml/Xsl transform view engine. A couple of searches via Google and viola I was redirected to the MvcContrib page on Codeplex. After downloading the source and samples I soon realized (probably like others to their amazement) there were no samples for the MvcContrib.XsltViewEngine. There wasn't even a documents page on the site.

So off I went again searching for any kind of help. I ended up finding one post on Google Groups for the MvcContrib that pointed to a blog post (link didn’t work of course). I ended up finding the actual person who created the actual library and the blog post about it and how to get it working (created in Dec '07 - oh boy this was not looking good already). In the end I did manage to get it working after updating the code to work with preview 4 and realized I would probably be writing my own.

And so I did, today actually (rather yesterday now).

More on that later, plus a sample working site with code. But I am tired now.

Example of the ASP.NET MVC framework

Finding a good well rounded example of the new ASP.NET MVC framework might be a hit or miss these days. Most of them are either really small or are incomplete. I found one that may or may not be either of the two but it seems to implement a lot of interesting ideas along with the code. So if you want a larger example of the new framework you might want to check out Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC the code is also available on codeplex as well.

10 Ways to Improve Your Code

I recently read a couple of articles about some of the speakers and going-ons at the recent SD West 2008 conference and come across Neil Ford's Software Development West presentation, 10 Ways to Improve Your Code. The session was geared towards Java developers it probably can be applied to any language. I found the list and the summary of each point on Dev Register.

While it's not the end all and be all of how you should develop these kinds of tips make you think about how you are writing your code and ways to make it better.

Do I agree with all of them probably not but then again it does not really matter if you agree with them or not as long as you are willing to actually think about the ideas that they represent that counts; and to me that is a sign of a good developer.