Open Source

Fall 2010 DevConnections Wrap Up

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting at DevConnections at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV. I had a total blast interacting with attendees, fellow speakers and checking out the vendor hall. The logistics for the conference were remarkable given there was approximately 2,800 people in attendance! For those of you that attended my presentations, thank you! I hope you were able to get something out of them; I had a blast presenting and interacting with you in each of them.  Also, I had a great time with the open spaces sessions. There was lots of good...

posted @ Saturday, November 6, 2010 4:03 PM | Feedback (1812)

MVC Turbine and MVC3

I’ve been getting different questions via emails, DMs, IMs, etc. that can be summed up by this question: Once MVC3 comes out, will I need MVC Turbine anymore to provide Dependency Injection (DI) support to ASP.NET MVC? There is really no clear answer for this, so all I can say is, it depends :) For those of you that are not aware, MVC3 has added better support for using Dependency Injection (DI) within different parts of your application. This newly added support applies to: Controllers ...

posted @ Friday, September 10, 2010 10:21 PM | Feedback (666)

Open Source Support Is Not Just Code

As you know, I’m the author of MVC Turbine. Since the beginning of the project, I’ve received community assistance via code patches to address some issues or add features to the project.  Also, I’ve received non-code help from the community. For example, Hugo Bonacci (@hugoware) for donated his artistic talent and created these awesome logos for the project.  These logos adorn the CodePlex site as well as the Twitter account (@mvcturbine). Most recently, I welcomed the help of Anthony from Sticker Mule to the list of contributors to the project.  Sticker Mule prints custom stickers starting at $69 for...

posted @ Thursday, August 5, 2010 11:01 PM | Feedback (833)

MVC Turbine Resources

Recently MVC Turbine has had a lot attention, so I wanted to take the time to say “Thank You!” to those of you that have help promote it, use it, provided feed or giving it a look. Artwork In particular I wanted to say a HUGE THANKS to Hugo Bonacci (@hugoware) for donating his artistic talent and creating these awesome logos for the project. Thanks for putting up with my many draft changes and requests. The logos are awesome and I thank you for providing such a great asset to the project!   ...

posted @ Friday, July 2, 2010 12:35 AM | Feedback (803)

MVC Turbine v2.1 RTM

Last week, it was tweeted that MVC Turbine v2.1 had reached RTM. Release Notes The released bits can be downloaded from the main project site; the features it provides are (same as v2.0 RTM plus these): Instance Registration to IServiceLocator You can now add an instance of a type to the underlying container so you can address the single instance context. IServiceLocator is registered into the container ...

posted @ Tuesday, May 18, 2010 10:54 PM | Feedback (632)

FubuMVC Conventions in ASP.NET MVC with MVC Turbine

Great minds think alike … or is it that fools seldom differ? I forget… In any note, all I can say that in this case it took three people’s work to make this possible in order to bring simplicity to the masses. Please note that this piece is a work in progress and we’re still trying to figure out how things will be at the end for these two frameworks to interact. Also, if you want more code, I suggest you check out the Fubu sample for MVC Turbine. What does it all mean, Basil? I’m not going...

posted @ Thursday, April 15, 2010 12:08 AM | Feedback (629)

MVC Turbine v2.0 for MVC2 RC2 (.NET3.5)

The MVC Turbine bits are now compiled against ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 which runs on .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008.  You can get the bits by going to the CodePlex site. Please note that this the same feature release as MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM.  The following is compiled and upgraded to work with .NET3.5 in VS2008: VS2008 Templates Runtime binaries Feature Samples Nerd Dinner Sample Okonau Sample Again, as I mentioned before, the main...

posted @ Friday, February 5, 2010 10:51 PM | Feedback (636)

MVC Turbine v2.0 for MVC2 (.NET3.5)

The MVC Turbine bits are now compiled against ASP.NET MVC 2 RC which runs on .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008.  You can get the bits by going to the CodePlex site. Please note that this the same feature release as MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM.  The following is compiled and upgraded to work with .NET3.5 in VS2008: Runtime binaries Feature Samples Nerd Dinner Sample Okonau Sample Again, as I mentioned before, the main development will take place onVS2010 and...

posted @ Monday, February 1, 2010 11:51 PM | Feedback (618)

Why MVC Turbine?

I would like to thank Rob Conery for posing the question: As the project’s portal states: MVC Turbine is a plugin for ASP.NET MVC that has IoC baked in and auto-wires controllers, binders, view engines, http modules, etc. that reside within your application. Thus you worry more about what your application should do, rather than how it should do it. Let’s see how this plays out for your application… Plain Old MVC Application If you create an MVC application by using File –> New, you get the full power of the MVC framework but your application is not yet setup to take full advantage...

posted @ Thursday, December 31, 2009 12:14 AM | Feedback (625)

MVC Turbine v2.0 for MVC2 (.NET4)

The MVC Turbine bits are now compiled against ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 Beta and Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2.  You can get the bits by going to the CodePlex site. Please note that this the same feature release as MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM.  The following is compiled and upgraded to work with .NET4 in VS2010: Runtime binaries Feature Samples Nerd Dinner Sample Okonau Sample From here on out, the main development will take place onVS2010 and MVC2 as I get things setup for v3...

posted @ Thursday, December 17, 2009 12:15 AM | Feedback (637)

Injecting Your Favorite IoC Into MVC Turbine

Since the release of MVC Turbine, I’ve been getting lots of questions about the design decisions I made around the interaction with the Service Locator that ships with the plug-in.  The two main questions are: Why didn’t you use the Common Service Locator project from CodePlex? Why are we forced/constrained/etc to use generic component registration API? These questions are very valid and could be easily explained if I ever write the documentation for the project (which, I’m working on by the way). So in this post, I hope to...

posted @ Tuesday, December 15, 2009 1:39 AM | Feedback (177)

ASP.NET MVC Embedded Views with MVC Turbine

I’ve blogged in the past about the extensible component model for MVC Turbine, this post is a continuation on that concept, except with views as embedded resources. Virtual Path Provider: The Secret Sauce Not sure how many of you know this, but a VirtualPathProvider (VPP) is a way to provide the ASP.NET runtime with resources from a virtual file system. In other words, you can provide files such ash web forms, scripts or anything else that’s served to the ASP.NET run time to process.  To learn how to this more in detail, check...

posted @ Monday, December 7, 2009 10:58 PM | Feedback (58)

MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM

Well, here’s the official blog post for the tweet I did last night: I figured, I should tweet the release and have people get an early access to it, then blog the same (plus more) information here. :) What is MVC Turbine? I’ve been asked many times for the 140 char description of Turbine, so here it is for the record: MVC Turbine is a plug-in for ASP.NET MVC that has IoC baked in and auto-wires controllers, binders, view engines, http modules, etc. that reside within in your application. Thus...

posted @ Tuesday, December 1, 2009 11:58 PM | Feedback (618)

Mvc Turbine v2 RC

That’s right, get the v2 RC release while it’s hot!  Version 2 of MVC Turbine, is a complete re-write of the plug-in that allows these features: New runtime framework that allows extensibility Blades (components) that are auto-registered and loaded at runtime. Introduced the Core Blades to setup the basic runtime of an MVC application: MvcBlade -- wiring for MVC related components (Controllers, View Engines, etc). ...

posted @ Friday, October 30, 2009 10:40 PM | Feedback (617)

git-svn, SvnBridge and TFS Source Control

I’m sure it’s nothing earth shattering but I’m blogging this for myself as documentation. :) I have MVC Turbine hosted out on CodePlex, which means I can either access the source via Team Explorer or the SvnBridge endpoint the site provides. After talking with some people yesterday during lunch, I decided to try this simple proof of concept: Accessing TFS with git via SvnBridge. Sounds crazy but it works…and here’s how.   Your favorite Git client This works with either msysgit or cygwin with git installed. So pick whichever you want to use. :)   Clone your CodePlex SVN Repo Using your favorite Git client, it is...

posted @ Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:22 PM | Feedback (41)

Multiple View Engines with MVC Turbine

This past weekend while working on my talk for the Heartland Developer's Conference, I toyed with the idea of showing multiple ASP.NET MVC View Engines (VE) ‘co-existing’ within the same application. Why do that? Well, I wanted to show how using open source tools like MVC Turbine, MVC Contrib and Spark within your application, you can assemble some pretty cool stuff.  And most important, it made for a really cool demo. :) Please note that this concept is not anything new. Phil has blogged about a similar topic in the past. However, this approach extends what Phil...

posted @ Monday, October 5, 2009 4:37 PM | Feedback (652)

MVC Turbine

For those of you that follow me on twitter, you’ve noticed that I’ve been tweeting a lot about a new side project called MVC Turbine. MVC Turbine is a simple way to provide flow and plumbing within ASP.NET MVC applications, or as its tag line suggest, it converts flow into useful work.  A few weeks ago, I had a quick poll on twitter that asked: As you can see, from the results, 50% of the responses where “Yes, always!” which means that you’re wanting more out of your MVC application. Please, don’t get this the wrong way: I’m not saying that Phil...

posted @ Friday, September 25, 2009 1:55 PM | Feedback (280)

Autowire IHttpModules with IoC

My original title for this blog post was going to be HttpIoC - Find Out What It Means To Me, as Steven Smith suggested via twitter, but I figured it wasn’t going to be as searchable. :) So I went with the boring title. Sorry Steven! A while back, Tuna Toksoz and I were having a conversation on twitter about how he does registration of any modules his application will need/use.  After playing around with the concept for a little, I was able to get something that will work for our any ASP.NET application with minimal effort. ...

posted @ Wednesday, August 19, 2009 10:45 AM | Feedback (618)

miniurl – ASP.NET MVC URL Redirection Sample Application

Not sure how many of you out there use a URL redirection service such as tinyurl, is.gd or snurl. They come very handy when you’re trying to take a long url like: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=des+moines+iowa&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.879582,87.714844&ie=UTF8&z=12&iwloc=A Into something that's a bit more manageable: http://tinyurl.com/nzqn5f How can you do this within your ASP.NET application? Well, check out miniurl on CodePlex. :) What is miniurl? The miniurl MVC application is a very simple example on how to use MVC and URL Routing to create a URL Redirection service. That means you’re...

posted @ Sunday, July 5, 2009 10:36 PM | Feedback (694)

Contextual Sessions with NHibernate – Part 2

In my previous post, I talk about how the problem with sessions and NHibernate (NH) can get pretty tricky to deal with; specially within ASP.NET web applications.  This post shows how you can use a pretty nice feature within NH that simplifies this problem. A Solution NH supports a mechanism of providing a ‘current’ session via the ISessionFactory.GetCurrentSession method by using a concept called Contextual Sessions.  This is what the NH documentation says about the feature: Most applications using NHibernate need some form of "contextual" sessions, where a given session is in...

posted @ Wednesday, February 18, 2009 4:26 PM | Feedback (619)

Contextual Sessions with NHibernate – Part 1

As with any piece of software development, there is more than a million ways to skin a cat.  Working with NHibernate in a multi-threaded environment is no different. :)  To help with the illustration of the interaction of NHibernate and ASP.NET, I’ve created a sample application out on Google code.  Please feel free to check it out and run it locally.  The only requirement for the sample is to have a local install of SQL Server Express. The Problem Those of you using NHibernate in a multi-threaded environment (say ASP.NET) have probably written code to maintains an ISession...

posted @ Tuesday, February 17, 2009 8:56 PM | Feedback (614)