ASP.NET

ASP.NET MVC With aspNETserve

Jason Whitehorn — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 02:00:00 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/12/11/ASPNET-MVC-With-AspNETserve.aspx

I am pleased to announce that aspNETserve works with the latest CTP of MVC for ASP.NET.

aspNETserve has held up well against the MVC samples I have thrown its way, and has actually not required any code changes in aspNETserve.

Let me know if you run into any problems with this.

Using ASP.NET MVC From Visual Web Developer Express 2008

Jason Whitehorn — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 01:35:34 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/12/10/Using-ASPNET-MVC-From-Visual-Web-Developer-Express-2008.aspx

Today marked the released of the first preview of MVC for ASP.NET. While it works just fine from the free Visual Web Developer Express 2008, this release is missing a project template to help you get up an running quickly.

So, I have thrown together a project template to allow you get get starting using MVC from VWD Express. Unlike VWD Express' big brother, VWD Express seems unable to create Web Application, only Web Sites. So this template has a slightly modified layout from the one available from Visual Studio.

Since Web Site projects can only arbitrarily host classes in the App_Code directory, I have placed the Models and Controllers there. The Views are located in an appropriately named directory off of the site root.

There are two versions of this template, one for C# and one for VB.NET.

ASP.NET MVC Web Site For C#

ASP.NET MVC Web Site For VB.NET

Download the template of your choice to the Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual Web Developer directory located in your "My Documents" directory. After doing so, simply start VWD Express and you will notice a new template available when you go to create a new web site.

This was just something that I threw together really quickly, and is not intended to be a demonstration of MVC. It is simply a starting point for getting started quickly with MVC. If you should encounter any difficulties with this, please let me know.

ASP.NET MVC CTP Now Available

Jason Whitehorn — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:07:36 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/12/09/ASPNET-MVC-CTP-Now-Available.aspx

The community technology preview of MVC (Model-View-Control) extensions for ASP.NET is now available for download from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=A9C6BC06-B894-4B11-8300-35BD2F8FC908&displaylang=en

For those unfamiliar with this upcoming framework, Scott Guthrie has released a four part series on this technology that can be found at:

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1)

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 4): Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios

aspNETserve Version 1.2 Finally Released

Jason Whitehorn — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 08:17:30 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/12/09/aspNETserve-Version-12-Finally-Released.aspx

Just today I was able to release aspNETserve version 1.2!

After the birth of my son I took a few months off, so this project sat dormant for awhile. Now that he has been sleeping regularly (and I have too ), I have been able to contribute to my open source project again.

If you haven't checked out aspNETserve, you should really look into it. It is by no means a replacement for IIS, not yet anyways. But, it still proves to be very helpful. One of the new features in version 1.2 that I am excited about is the "Host in aspNETserve" context menu. From just about anywhere in Windows you can now right click on a directory and start hosting your web application.

I cannot think of how many times I have downloaded sample web applications off the net, and had wished I had this feature earlier. Now you can take that website for a test spin without having to configure IIS.

A Possible Solution To The .NET 3.5/Visual Studio 2005 Feud

Jason Whitehorn — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:12:30 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/07/03/A-Possible-Solution-To-The-NET-35Visual-Studio-2005-Feud.aspx

In my previous post I discussed a problem of developing ASP.NET 2.0 applications in Visual Studio 2005, while having the .NET 3.5 framework installed. In summation, the issue was because Visual Studio 2005 was linking against a library that shipped with .NET 3.5 instead of the explicitly referenced version from the web.config.

The comments of one reader of my previous post mentioned using binding redirection to resolve the issue. In short, it looks like they were correct. As best as I can tell, binding redirection does in fact fix this issue.

Binding redirection is the ability to take a pre-compiled application and tell the loader to link against a different version of a library than the application was originally built with. In our case, we would need to add the following configuration to our web.config.

<runtime>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Extensions" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35"/>
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="2.0.0.0" newVersion="1.0.61025.0"/>
      </dependentAssembly>
    </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>

The above configuration tells .NET to use System.Web.Extensions version 1.0.61025 instead of version 2.0.0.0. While the above does pose to be a solution to the problem, it is concerning that this would be needed at all.

Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 3.5 Don't Play Well Together

Jason Whitehorn — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 04:04:02 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/06/23/Visual-Studio-2005-And-NET-35-Dont-Play-Well-Together.aspx

As many of you have, I also have experimented with the pre-releases of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio codenamed Orcas. I, for better or worse, installed this pre-release software on my primary development machine which has Visual Studio 2005.

Despite having .NET 3.5 installed on my machine, my primary development occurred in .NET 2.0 via Visual Studio 2005. I had not experienced any problems with this setup until the other day. While attempting to build and publish an ASP.NET 2.0 website with AJAX extensions, I ran into a cryptic server error when executing the site on a staging server. The error was:

Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Extensions, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' 
or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The System.Web.Extensions assembly is the ASP.NET AJAX assembly, so at first I simply thought that the staging server did not have AJAX extensions installed. After installing the AJAX extensions, the issue remained unresolved. A quick look in the machine's GAC showed that it had version 1.0.61025.0, which is the latest version. Inspection of my development machine's GAC showed both 1.0.61025.0 and 2.0.0.0 installed.

At this point I was puzzled how my machine had an unofficial version of AJAX extensions, and how my website was referencing it. Next I looked at the web.config of my site to see if I could just change the referenced version to 1.0. However, inspection of the web.config reveled:


<add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"> 
</add>

As it turned out, I was already explicitly referencing the correct version. As you can imagine, at this point I was extremely puzzled. I even attempted a few cleans and rebuilds of the site, but to no avail. After some time, I realized that the 2.0.0.0 version of System.Web.Extensions was something that shipped with .NET 3.5, and despite my explicit reference to 1.0.61025.0 Visual Studio 2005 was linking against this other version. The only way to resolve this issue was to uninstall Visual Studio codenamed Orcas and .NET 3.5.

I do not know if the fault lies with Visual Studio 2005, or something with the .NET 3.5 framework. But, whichever component is at fault, I hope that this issue is resolved before the final version of .NET 3.5 ships.

An Embedded ASP.NET Web Server

Jason Whitehorn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:16:52 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/06/21/An-Embedded-ASPNET-Web-Server.aspx

To correspond with the release of aspNETserve version 1.1, I have written a simple demonstration of hosting an ASP.NET 2.0 web server right into your own application.

The following code sample is about as simple as it gets.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using aspNETserve;

namespace ConsoleWebServer {
    class Program {
        static void Main(string[] args) {
            string physicalPath = "c:\\wwwroot";
            int port = 8080;
            using (Server s = new Server(new System.Net.IPAddress(new byte[] { 127, 0, 0, 1 }), "/", physicalPath, port)) {
                s.Start();
                Console.WriteLine("Press any key to stop the server");
                Console.ReadKey();
                s.Stop();
            }
        }
    }
}

The aspNETserve namespace contains the Server object which represents an ASP.NET web server. The constructor of Server accepts an IPAddress to bind to, a virtual path, a physical path, and a TCP/IP port to listen on.

The above example will start a server at "http://localhost:8080/". One of the nice things about this is that you can embed an ASP.NET web server right into your own application, without your users needing IIS installed on their machines.

aspNETserve Version 1.0

Jason Whitehorn — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 02:49:23 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/06/14/aspNETserve-Version-10.aspx

Just today version 1.0 of aspNETserve was released. This version fixes all known major bugs, and represents a feature complete version in regards to aspNETserve's original goals. Specifically this means that it can host any ASP.NET 2.0 web application without the need for Internet Information Services (IIS).

Originally intended to be a learning tool for myself, aspNETserve has quickly turned into a viable alternative for the ASP.NET development web server. Additionally, the libraries that compose aspNETserve can be referenced from your own applications to include a full featured ASP.NET web server right into your next project.

To include an ASP.NET web server in your application, you will need to reference aspNETserve.Core, and aspNETserve. You can use the aspNETserve.Server object to control your own in-memory ASP.NET web server. For an example of doing just that, see the SimpleWebServer project that is available as part of the aspNETserve source download.

aspNETserve beta 2

Jason Whitehorn — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 06:49:51 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/06/08/aspNETserve-Beta-2.aspx

The second beta of aspNETserve has just been released. Among other improvements, this version includes an automated installer to allow for easy installation.

I have only tested this on my personal machine, running Windows Vista. It should work on XP, and possibly 2000, but I have not had a chance to test those systems yet.

aspNETserve beta 2 can be downloaded from here, in either binary or source form.

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About HttpBrowserCapabilities

Jason Whitehorn — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:32:01 GMT

UPDATE (12/17/2007): My blog has moved. This post is now located at: http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2007/06/04/More-Than-You-Ever-Wanted-To-Know-About-HttpBrowserCapabilities.aspx

In ASP.NET the HttpBrowserCapabilities object easily allows you to determine which web browser your site's visitors are using. This information is pulled from the User Agent data sent by each visitors web browser.

The HttpBrowserCapabilities object can tell you, for example, which version of Javascript the client's browser supports. This is an interesting feature for this object to support, considering no major browser advertises which version of Javascript they support via their User Agent field. For browsers ASP.NET recognizes, it can assign reasonable values for HttpBrowserCapabilities. But what happens if ASP.NET does not recognize the client's browser? I discovered the answer to this question can rather unexpectantly while working on aspNETserve.

Recently I was experiencing an issue with aspNETserve where pages were lacking their __doPostBack Javascript function. Normally ASP.NET automatically includes the __doPostBack method on pages were at least on control (or the page itself) has made a call to GetPostBackEventReference. No matter what I did, I could not get this method to be included on pages hosted within aspNETserve. To make a long story short, it turned out that when my code was parsing incoming HTTP requests, it was messing up the browser's user agent field. For example, Firefox's user agent would be transformed from:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4

To:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv 1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4

Notice the difference? Yeah, me neither... at least not at first. The latter user agent is missing a colon between "rv" and "1.8.1.4". Seems like a small enough mistake, but this small mistake was preventing ASP.NET from recognizing my browser as Firefox. The consequence of which was that ASP.NET did not think my browser could support Javascript, so therefore did not output any Javascript in the HTML it produced.

I have since fixed this issue in aspNETserve, and it now correctly outputs the __doPostBack method. What started as a frustrating attempt to get the __doPostBack method to be properly included for pages hosted within my ASP.NET web server, turned into a chance to better understand the inner workings of ASP.NET.