Rob pinged me today asking about how to respond to requests using different formats based on the extension in the URL. More specifically, he’d like to respond with HTML if there is no file extension, but with JSON if the URL ended with .json etc…

TRIPLE UPDATE! C# now has string interpolation which pretty much makes this post unnecessary and only interesting as a fun coding exercise.

At the end of the year, it’s very common for bloggers to take a look back at their own blog and list their favorite 10 blog posts. I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that.

Dmitry, who’s the PUM for ASP.NET, recently wrote a blog post about an interesting approach he took using VB.NET XML Literals as a view engine for ASP.NET MVC.

I was reading Jeff Atwood’s latest post, Programming: Love it or Leave it when I came across this part, emphasis mine.

A while ago ScottGu mentioned in his blog that we would try and have an ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate by the end of this year. My team worked very hard at it, but due to various unforeseeable circumstances, I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen. Heck, I couldn’t even get into the office yesterday because the massive dumping of snow. I hope to get in today a little later since I’m taking next week off to be with my family coming in from Alaska.

ASP.NET Routing is useful in many situations beyond ASP.NET MVC. For example, I often need to run a tiny bit of custom code in response to a specific request URL. Let’s look at how routing can help.

UPDATE: There’s a workaround mentioned in the Google Groups. It’s finally resolved.

While at PDC, I met Louis DeJardin and we had some lively discussions on various topics around ASP.NET MVC. He kept bugging me about some view engine called Flint? No… Electricity? No… Spark!

I’m working to try and keep internal release notes up to date so that I don’t have this huge amount of work when we’re finally ready to release. Yeah, I’m always trying something new by giving procrastination a boot today.

A Subtext user found a security flaw which opens up Subtext to potential XSS attacks via comment. This flaw was introduced in Subtext 2.0 by the feature which converts URLs to anchor tags. If you are still on 1.9.5b or before, you are not affected by this issue. If you upgraded to 2.0, then please update to 2.1 as soon as you can.

How many of you out there who use Subtext host it on a hosting provider who does not have ASP.NET 3.5 available? I’d like to make the next version of Subtext 2 take a dependency on 3.5. Note that it wouldn’t have to take a dependency on SP1. Just ASP.NET 3.5 proper as I believe most hosting providers support it.

UPDATE: If you run ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 with ASP.NET 4, setting up extensionless URLs just got easier. In most cases, it should just work.

As I mentioned before, I’m really excited that we’re shipping jQuery with ASP.NET MVC and with Visual Studio moving forward. Just recently, we issued a patch that enables jQuery Intellisense to work in Visual Studio 2008.

I recently learned about a very subtle potential security flaw when using JSON. While subtle, it was successfully demonstrated against GMail a while back. The post, JSON is not as safe as people think it is, covers it well, but I thought I’d provide step-by-step coverage to help make it clear how the exploit works.

Pop quiz. What would you expect these three bits of HTML to render?

One of the relatively obscure features of ASP.NET view rendering is that you can render a single view using multiple view engines.

Quick question? What’s higher than a kite?

I’ve heard a lot of concerns from people worried that the ASP.NET team will stop sparing resources and support for Web Forms in favor of ASP.NET MVC in the future. I thought I would try to address that concern in this post based on my own observations.

UPDATE: I added three new unit tests and one interesting case in which the three browser render something differently.