Nairooz Nilafdeen's Blog

Sometimes back, ASP.NET MVC 4 beta was release, this comes with quite a lot of capabilities to create mobile web applications with HTML5, to new features on Razor etc.. One of the milestones of this release is ASP.NET Web APIs, which allows developers to implement REST services. .NET 3.5/4.0 WCF provides us with the support of creating REST APIs using the webHttpBinding, however most of the features required to run the service needs the ASP.NET compatibility mode, this basically means the request to the REST service would first go through the ASP.NET pipeline, before being handed over to WCF. Then there was the WCF Web API, where Microsoft tried to re-define how REST services are created, but they opted in for moving REST support into ASP.NET and then to WCF, hence ASP.NET Web API, becomes the de facto technology for creating REST services. WCF WebHttpBinding would still exist, bu the recommendation is to to use Web APIs. Implementing a Web API is simple, the steps involved are... 1) C...

Someone asked me the question whether a simple factory can be implemented using dependency injection container. The example he bought up is where a simple factory takes in a string and switches this string to return the correct instance of the object needed....I am talking about something like this. internal IWaterMarkProvider GetProvider( string fileExtension) { IWaterMarkProvider provider = null ; switch (fileExtension.ToLower()) { case "pdf" : provider = new PDFProvider (); break ; case ".docx" : provider = new WordProvider (); break ; case "pptx" : provider = new PPTProvider (); break ; case "xlsx" : provider = new ExcelProvider (); break ; } return provider; } The answer was yes..So, if you are using Microsoft Unity (a dependency injection container), you would have your configuration file like this... < configuration > < configSections ...

.Net 4.0 introduced the System.Runtime.Caching namespace, this made developers to make use of caching functionality independent of the cache found in the System.Web DLL. Caching using the System.Runtime.Caching provides an in memory cache but also allows developers to extend this with a different provider. For an example, you could have an implementation that could hold the items in memory but also persists it into the hard disk for the fear of cache eviction. Adding an item into the cache is done this way... //Get the default cache MemoryCache cache = MemoryCache .Default; //Add the item cache.Add( "MyKey" , "Nairooz Nilafdeen" , DateTimeOffset .Now.AddMinutes(19)); //Get the item from the cache if (cache.Contains( "MyKey" )) { Console .WriteLine(cache.Get( "MyKey" )); } The caching namespace also allows you to set ChangeMonitors for the cache policy, for an example, you can specify that the cache needs...

If you have used libraries like Json.Net or the DataContractSerializer or the JavaScriptSerializer, you already know that you would need a strong typed object for you to convert you class hiarachy into JSON. In a few cases this is frustrating. In one of my earlier posts I talked about DynamicJson, this was an open source library (under MS-PL license) for you to create JSON counterparts from dynamic objects. DynamicJson allows you to create JSON values from dynamic object, meaning you don’t really need to create a strong typed object, but create your JSON representation on the fly. >net 4.5 comes with a new namespace System.JSON, that exposes similar functionalities. You can try this out by installing System.Json from NuGet. It works seamlessly as .Net 4.5 is just a replacement for .NET 4.0. So using System.Json, I can create JSON string like this… dynamic book = new JsonObject (); book.BookName = "Asp.NET MVC" ; book.Price = 123.45; ...