The .NET Framework provides support for managing transactions from code via the System.Transactions infrastructure. Performing database operations in a transaction is as easy as writing a using block with the TransactionScope class.

When building a web application, it’s a common desire to want to expose a simple Web API along with the HTML user interface to enable various mash-up scenarios or to simply make accessing structured data easy from the same application.

In a recent post, The Law of Demeter Is Not A Dot Counting Exercise, I wanted to peer into the dark depths of the Law of Demeter to understand it’s real purpose. In the end I concluded that the real goal of the guideline is to reduce coupling, not dots, which was a relief because I’m a big fan of dots (and stripes too judging by my shirt collection).

One of the complaints I often here with our our default view engine and Pages is that there’s all this extra cruft in there with the whole page directive and stuff. But it turns out that you can get rid of a lot of it. Credit goes to David Ebbo, the oracle of all hidden gems within the inner workings of ASP.NET, for pointing me in the right direction on this.

Note, this blog post is based on Preview 1 of ASP.NET MVC 2 and details are subject to change. I’ll try to get back to normal ASP.NET MVC 1.0 content soon. :)

UPDATEThis post is now obsolete. Single project areas are a core part of ASP.NET MVC 2.

UPDATE: This post is outdated. ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM was released in March.

A member of the Subtext team discovered a security vulnerability due to our integration with the FCKEditor control as well as the FreeTextBox control. This vulnerability would potentially allow unauthenticated users to upload files using the file upload tools included with these editors.

Recently I read a discussion on an internal mailing list on whether or not it would be worthwhile to add a null dereferencing operator to C#.

Ok, I haven’t had a good track record with making up jokes before. Just see exhibit A,this groaner of an MVC joke.

When you visit Norway, it takes a week to recover. Ok, at least when I visit Norway, it takes a week. But that’s just a testament to the good time I had. As they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what happens in Oslo gets recorded as a .NET Rocks Live episode.

In my last post, I wrote about the hijacking of JSON arrays. Near the end of the post, I mentioned a comment whereby someone suggests that what really should happen is that browsers should be more strict about honoring content types and not execute code with the content type of application/json.

A while back I wrote about a subtle JSON vulnerability which could result in the disclosure of sensitive information. That particular exploit involved overriding the JavaScript Array constructor to disclose the payload of a JSON array, something which most browsers do not support now.

Every now and then some email or website comes along promising to prove Fred Brooks wrong about this crazy idea he wrote in The Mythical Man Month (highly recommended reading!) that there is no silver bullet which by itself will provide a tenfold improvement in productivity, reliability, and simplicity within a decade.

A little while ago I announced our plans for ASP.NET MVC as it relates to Visual Studio 2010. ASP.NET MVC wasn’t included as part of Beta 1, which raised a few concerns by some (if not conspiracy theories!) ;). The reason for this was simple as I pointed out:

One of the features contained in the MVC Futures project is the ability to generate action links in a strongly typed fashion using expressions. For example:

ASP.NET Pages are designed to stream their output directly to a response stream. This can be a huge performance benefit for large pages as it doesn’t require buffering and allocating very large strings before rendering. Allocating large strings can put them on the Large Object Heap which means they’ll be sticking around for a while.

Being that it’s a glorious Memorial Day Weekend up here in the Northwest, my co-worker Eilon (developer lead for ASP.NET MVC) and I decided to go on a hike to Mt Si where we had a bit of a scary moment.

This post is now outdated

A while back, I wrote about Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC for the scenario where you want to cache an entire view except for a small bit of it. The more technical term for this technique is probably “cache substitution” as it makes use of the Response.WriteSubstitution method, but I think “Donut Caching” really describes it well — you want to cache everything but the hole in the middle.