In my last blog post, I wrote about the proper way to check for empty enumerations and proposed an IsNullOrEmpty method for collections which sparked a lot of discussion.

While spelunking in some code recently I saw a method that looked something like this:

Deploying a Subtext skin used to be one of the biggest annoyances with Subtext prior to version 2.5. The main problem was that you couldn’t simply copy a skin folder into the Skins directory and just have it work because the configuration for a given skin is centrally located in the Skins.config file.

Wow, has it already been over a year since the last major version of Subtext? Apparently so.

I saw a recent Twitter thread discussing the arrogance of Steve Jobs. One person (ok, it was my buddy Rob) postulated that it was this very arrogance that led Apple to their successes.

The June issue (also in pdf) of the online PragPub magazine, published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf has two articles on ASP.NET MVC.

A while ago I was talking with my manager at the time about traits that we value in a Program Manager. He related an anecdote about an interview he gave where it became clear that the candidate did not deal well with ambiguity.

The last time I wrote about one of my hiking adventures, it started off great, but really didn’t end well. But I survived, so on that scale, yes it did end well! It’s a matter of perspective.

Here’s a handy tip I just recently learned from the new intern on our team (see, you can learn something from anyone on any given day). I’ve long known you could access your local drives from a remote machine.

ASP.NET 4 introduces a few new extensibility APIs that live the hermit lifestyle away from the public eye. They’re not exactly hidden - they are well documented on MSDN - but they aren’t well publicized. It’s about time we shine a spotlight on them.

One of my favorite features of ASP.NET MVC 2 is the support for client validation. I’ve covered a bit about validation in the following two posts:

The ASP.NET MVC2 templates feature is a pretty nice way to quickly scaffold objects at runtime. Be sure to read Brad Wilson’s fantastic series on this topic starting at ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates, Part 1: Introduction.

Like the well disciplined secure developer that you are, when you built your ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application, you remembered to call Html.Encode every time you output a value that came from user input. Didn’t you?

One annoyance that some developers have run into with ASP.NET MVC is that certain reserved filenames are not allowed in URLs. Often, this is manifested as a Bad Request error or a File Not Found (404) error.

UPDATE: The JsonValueProviderFactory is now registered by default in ASP.NET MVC 3. So if you’re using ASP.NET MVC 3, you can ignore that part of this blog post.

This is the third in a three part series related to HTML encoding blocks, aka the <%: ... %> syntax.

The “copyleft” provisions of the GPL (GNU General Public License) require that any changes or additions to a GPL licensed work must itself be licensed under terms that adhere to the GPL.

UPDATE: After an email exchange with Eric Meijer, I learned that I was a bit imprecise in this treatment. Or, as the colloquial term goes, “wrong”. :) I’ve changed the title to reflect more accurately what Reactive extensions provide.

Last week I spent a few days in Las Vegas attending the Mix 10 conference. Mix is billed as …

Hot on the heels of the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 yesterday, I’m happy to announce that we are releasing the source code to ASP.NET MVC 2 under theMs-PL license, an OSI approved Open Source license.