Earlier I posted about a compression filter for ASP.NET MVC that was the product of two other posts on compression and QValues. I’ve also seen a couple of posts describing different approaches to creating syndication content via ASP.NET MVC – RSS or Atom feeds.

UPDATE 12/07/2009 - As Shirley Boyle sang - "I dreamed a dream". The exercise below was great for learning how to use the IIS7 Url Rewrite Module - but there is a long list of user agents that contain the string "compatible; MSIE 6.0;" including the MSN spider and some transparent proxies. Internet Explorer 6 is the browser that refuses to die.

Yet another great feature of IIS7  - declarative static content cache settings. It took a little detective work to find the settings for this feature – including a helpful post from Jörg Jooss.

I’d previously created a compression processor for dynamic content – using this excellent post for QValues by Dave Transom. Also just just discovered this post on creating an action filter for compression by Kazi Manzur Rashid.

So combining the two and we have:

UPDATE 2011-10-10: While I think ORCS is a good company - I'm not sure of the value of their shared hosting plan anymore. I've since moved  to *nix for development and hosting, and am now happily ensconced on a Linux VPS hosted at Rackspace.

Trying to find a good ASP.NET web hosting company that represents the balance I need between cost and features turned out to be harder than I thought.

UPDATE: 2011-09-23. This was definitely a TL;DR post. And I've since switched to using a Mac and Rails and other *nix tools and frameworks - so forget it. Buy a Mac (or install Ubuntu) and start writing 'real' web applications.

ORIGINAL POST: Having been inspired by BlogSvc.Net's recent switch to the ASP.Net MVC framework - I decided that now was as good a time as any to begin to get up-to-speed with ASP.Net MVC There's a ton of blogosphere content out there already (I've included some of the more helpful links at the bottom of this post). Access to the source at http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet  combined with a healthy dose of Reflector over the System.Web.Routing assembly...  and things are slowly starting to fall into place. While working through the routing process; how routes are defined, the order they're evaluated and how a default route catchall can be defined... I got a bit hung-up on default routing and in particular the routing of Default.aspx. When you create a new ASP.Net MVC project (Preview 5).. the project template creates a Default.aspx page and places the following in the code behind...

I have a lot of respect for experienced CSS/XHTML designers having lived through two medium size projects that both had accessibility and XHTML Strict requirements - it was tough going. We survived the Peekaboo Bug, the Guillotine Bug, and the Duplicate Characters Bug to name a few.

Visual Studio 2008 Professional shipped with the Visual Studio 2008 Team System unit test framework (which in Visual Studio 2005 was not available in the Professional version). The test system is pretty cool - with excellent test code generating options and wizards. One really interesting feature is the ability to create tests for ASP.Net projects (file based, or application based). The tests created will be decorated as follows: 1: /// <summary>

2: ///A test for DemoTest

3: ///</summary>

4: [TestMethod()]

Wow - Google and searchers were all over the "URI templates and hackable search engine friendly URLs" line in my short WPF post below, which means there's a lot of interest in URI templates. I found this post on Creating a Template based URI very helpful. You DON'T have to be building a WCF service to use these.

A colleague just sent me a link to the MIX07 presentation of ASP.Net Dynamic Data Controls. I'd actually seen this demo before - but something about taking a quick second look made me want to blog about it. Is it just me, or are there other people out there that kind of wince when they see these sort of presentations? (ignoring the obvious 'prop and holding' behavior of Mahesh Prakriya and his bottle of water).