ASP.NET MVC - Model binding to a list OR How to bring your “datagrid” into full edit mode?

MVC is awesome. I love the nice and clean HTML output, and the nice separation of concerns!!
Not to mention how easy we can test the controllers, with Moq and MvcContrib…

“How can we bring a list of items into full edit mode like in the image below?“
         I had this request from a client a couple of months ago…
image 
Disclaimer: I am not saying this is a good idea (from a UX perspective), I am just showing how you can do it…

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Figure: A list of items in Full edit mode

Google Wave in Silverlight – Online collaboration made easy

Google Wave is pretty cool, and was a big hype in the beginning.
I still use for sharing some notes with others…

Building something similar like Google Wave in Silverlight should be fairly easy

image  
Figure: RichTextBox control in action from MSDN

 

Google Wave = Big Silverlight Richtextbox that gets updates from others

How can we build it with Silverlight?
AND
How do other applications work, like EtherPad?

 

Silverlight – Showing HTML content “inside” Silverlight – without the WebBrowser control

Everyone was VERY excited about the possibility to show HTML content inside Silverlight.
But soon we Silverlight developers realized that it wont work in a inside-browser scenario (if you can call it like that).

image

It’s a NOOB scenario where we need the browser control, just like the browsercontrol in Winforms (aahhh… the good old days, everything was better ;-)
NOOB = Not Out of Browser scenario

 

Silverlight - Reduce your XAP download and increase the start-up performance

How can I reduce the size of my Silverlight application? And make it a better user experience on start-up?

ASP.NET – Global Variables

I know that global variables are bad… but sometimes you have to…

Until a couple of months ago I used the Application object. A student of mine asked me what the difference is between using the Application object and a static class with some nice typed properties?

I said: “I don’t know for sure, but I guess the static class lives only as long as the app domain is living, and the Application object lives “a bit” longer…”
Some tests and a bit of googling (definitely read this to know the details) revealed:

Silverlight - Browser interaction

Reminder to myself

  • Silverlight - How to use managed code to manipulate HTML DOM?
    • How to interact with the DOM of the hosting page from Silverlight?
  • Silverlight – How to call a JavaScript from Silverlight
    • How to open a new browser window in code?
    • What about "htmlWindow.invoke" print from Silverlight?
  • Browser – How to call a Silverlight function?
    • How to tell the Silverlight control to show next customer details from the HTML page?

All this is part of the Html bridge API of Silverlight, that allows talking to the browser
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645076(VS.95).aspx

 

log4net – How to change settings of an appender at runtime

I found this awesome blog post about 4 tips on log4net from the year 2005.

Since the code is out to date I post here my update.

2 nice things:

  1. I use EntityConnectionStringBuilder to extract the database connection string from an entity framework connection string
  2. If my log4net connectionstring, holds {auto} , we replace it, otherwise we wont
    (so that we can change the logging database, if we want to)

Silverlight – The UI thread belongs to the browser!

To myself: Remember the following

Silverlight is “normally” hosted in the browser.
So, the single UI Thread should belong to the browser.

You can either learn that from different blogs, presentations or you learn it the hard way, like myself.

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