Rating: 5 out of 5 I believe Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework is one of the best books on the market about MVC. This book is crammed with a lot of information that you need to know as a developer. While he doesn't cover each subject fully (no book really does that), he does cover the major topic points related to MVC in-depth, and touches upon the other concerts that you need to be aware of to implement or customize MVC for your own purposes. I’ve broken up my review into several major subsections

I'm starting to get into a project using ADO.NET entity model. This is a pretty cool technology, and I like a lot of the features (especially the logical model approach). There are some things I really dislike about Phase 1, like having to delete the entire model or edit SSDL manually (or with XML tool) - anybody know of some free tools available for this? But overall, I like the approach, and the concept, so I look forward to adding features. Some features I want to add is automatic logging

Most people may not realize, but you can use Facebook Connect with your http://localhost server. This works great for ASP.NET and MVC (and other environments too, but I'm primarily a .NET guy so please pardon my favoritism). You setup the localhost environment as the Facebook connect URL, as in http://localhost/<Virtual>. I would recommend using a virtual directory, and not using the Cassini web server (the local web server which may reassing port addresses on you). You do have to be connected

If you haven't heard from my blog or Facebook WIKI's before, there are two ways to query data from Facebook, using the ApiClient object to query the data from the Facebook server, or by using FQL to query against their propietary database directly. In a recent app, I found that using FQL cut in half the number of calls to the server than what I would have had to made using the REST api. So using FQL can be a great benefit. Picture this query: select page_id, name, page_url, pic_small, website

I really like CodeSmith, a great tool for generating templates. It comes with a variety of default templates, all managed in a Visual Studio-like environments, complete with intellisense that's good, but not quite as powerful as Visual Studio. I do a lot of scripting, so I wanted to make stored procedure generation easier. One scenario not covered is reference tables, where the reference tables happen to have two specific columns all the time: EffectiveDate datetime not null, EndDate datetime

The Controller class maintains a reference to the HttpContext property, and object of HttpContextBase. HttpContextBase is a great class because now we have an abstract way to replace default logic if needed (but generally that wouldn't be recommended). Ideally, it's great for fake environments. But I digress, HttpContextBase is the main object for accessing context-specific information. But where does this actually get created? I went digging around the API in Reflector, and found where the

If you have used the Facebook FQL syntax to query the location column of a table, or have requested the location parameter from the friends_get or other API methods, what you need to know is location is a complex object consisting of the following properties: city country state street zip These properties can be directly accessed via location.zip, location.city, etc.

Facebook supports a variant of SQL called FQL, or Facebook Query Language. If you know anything about Facebook's data storage center, Facebook has moved away from the traditional relational database and created their own custom application for storing data, which has the ability to query petaflops worth of data in seconds. So what is FQL? FQL looks very like SQL. It has a select and select list, a from, a where clause, which makes it seem like its ordinary SQL. However, it cannot use inner joins

I recently submitted a Facebook development article to ASP.NET Pro magazine. It was quite the challenge initially to get it started. But once I got going (I think I'll blog on this later), I was off and running but there aren't a lot of examples on the WIKI. I put a combination of items together in order to figure it all out. First, the core content I used to extract user's information was the Facebook JavaScript API, available here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/JS_API_Index

This post assumes you are familiar with TypeMock's Arrange-Act-Assert method of test creation. If you are not, please read my overview at: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/TypeMocks-Arrange-Act-Assert.aspx . When creating your fakes with TypeMock, you have to be careful which member your choose as the default mocking level. For instance, when you create the following class: var cls = Isolate.Fake.Instance<TestClass>(); The variable cls has a fake reference to our test class