Monthly Archives: June 2009

How we do MVC – View models

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

A while back, I went over a few of the patterns and opinions we’ve gravitated towards on our current large-ish ASP.NET MVC project, or, how we do MVC.  Many of these opinions were forged the hard way, by doing the … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.NET MVC, AutoMapper | 61 Comments

Expressions Cheat Sheet

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

I started getting really tired of looking up the translation between the ExpressionType and concrete Expression type (they don’t match up), so I created this cheat sheet that has each ExpressionType, derived Expression type and a simple example.  What’s interesting … Continue reading →

Posted in C# | 5 Comments

The Filter-ViewData anti-pattern

Posted on June 19, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

In just about every website you go to these days, its layout follows a very similar pattern: You have some static resource logo, a large main section with information that our controller action supplies.  But we also have some other … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.NET MVC | 18 Comments

More on Late-Bound Invocations with Expression Trees

Posted on June 18, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

Recently, I went on a bit of a tear in the AutoMapper trying to improve performance.  Besides the threading issues I introduced (dictionary lookups are NOT thread safe, in case you’re wondering), I looked at improving the performance of the … Continue reading →

Posted in C# | 3 Comments

Why opinionated input builders for ASP.NET MVC?

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

When we first started looking at crafting forms for MVC in a recent big project, we had just completed a ton of “view” screens for a wide variety of information.  Having learned quite a few things on crafting HTML on … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.NET MVC | Leave a comment

Requesting features for AutoMapper

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

On the AutoMapper mailing list, I get a lot of what I consider wacky requests.  Not because the requests aren’t valid, but rarely do I get any context of what people are trying to do with AutoMapper.  As a reference, … Continue reading →

Posted in AutoMapper | 6 Comments

Simplest versus first thing that could possibly work

Posted on June 11, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

One of the core XP practices that resonated with me quite early on was the concept of simple design.  When I learned TDD, this practice was further refined with the concept of doing the “simplest thing that could possibly work”.  … Continue reading →

Posted in Design | 3 Comments

Defining and refining conventions

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

At last night’s ADNUG talk, Jeremy Miller talked about Convention over Configuration, and many of the principles the Rails community embraces.  He showed a few examples of opinionated software, such as FubuMVC.  One thing I would have liked more conversation … Continue reading →

Posted in Design | 2 Comments

Reflecting reality

Posted on June 8, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

Reading over the latest MSDN magazine issue, I’m always encouraged when I see something that I consider important on the cover, Test-Driven Design.  It covers one of the more difficult technical aspects of TDD, which is mock objects.  It took … Continue reading →

Posted in TDD | 5 Comments

Fighting technical debt with the wall of pain

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Jimmy Bogard

Technical debt, even on the agile-ist of agilista teams, still accumulates.  Debt is inevitable, as initial design is always based on assumptions, not all of which pan out.  I never view that as a failure, as all we can do … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile, Refactoring | 8 Comments