A couple of weeks ago we looked at ASP.NET MVC routing in the MVC framework.  The routing controls which method in which controller gets called.

The obvious next question is, how do we get from the controller to the view?

First, we need to look at the general layout of our Views.

If you open up the sample project that we created, you’ll see that there are a few directories that have been created.  The one we want to take a look at today is the View directory.

You’ll see that under each View directory is a directory that has the same name as each of the controllers in the Controller directory as well as a directory named ‘Shared’ that has nothing to do with MVC directly.  Don’t worry about figuring that one out right now.

Under each of the directories that map to the controller, you’ll see that there is an ASPX file that maps to each of the methods in the controllers, or is otherwise called from those controllers.

The easiest way to get from the Controller action to the View it corresponds to is to return View() from that action, as in:

public ActionResult About()
{
return View();
}

This would then call ~/Home/About

But what if the new page needs to have data sent along to it?

In this case, you can assign the data to the ViewData property.  The ViewData property works a lot like a Session object in that it is keyed.

So, to pass data you would use

ViewData[“Key”] = objectData;

You can see that the sample project does this in the HomeController.Index method.

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public ActionResult Index()
{
    ViewData["Message"] = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!";
    return View();
}

And you can see that the Index.aspx file picks it up later:

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<h2><%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Message"])%></h2>
<p> To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit
    <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">
      http://asp.net/mvc</a>.
</p>

Returning View() is not the only way of specifying the View we want to display from the Controller.  You can also return Redirect(), RedirectAction(), RedirectToRoute().

It is often tempting when working with your code to test against static values in your system.  For example:

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if (i == 1)
{
    // do something
}
else if (i == 2)
{
    // do something
}

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I’ve spent a good chunk of the last two days working on an interesting project for one of my clients that I think the rest of the jQuery community could benefit from.

The task started when my client came to me with an existing script that was being used in a DotNetNuke system to expand and collapse content under head tags that was produced by an article editing system similar to the Text/HTML module.

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Well, a post that is no longer available really got  things going in blog-o-sphere.  Shoot!  Even Joel Spolsky got involved.  I saw another post, but I’m sorry to say, I can’t find it right now.

The original article put forth the idea that we are teaching the right stuff in our undergraduate Computer science degree programs.

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A few months ago, I demonstrated how to use ASP.NET’s JSON capabilities.  Lately, I’ve been demonstrating how to use jQuery.  Both use a considerable amount of JavaScript so if there is some way we could eliminate or reduce the amount of code we had to load, performance would naturally increase.

Fortunately, there is.

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Here’s a quick tip for those of you still using modules in your VB.NET applications.

If you create a module and don’t want to see the module name in your intellisense, you can hide it with an attribute.  This can be extremely useful when you have a lot of modules that would show up in your intellisense code and they don’t have names that conflict with each other.

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This post has been percolating in my brain for several weeks now and I think it’s finally at the point where it’s “done.”  Well, see…

The problem area is this.  At what point and under what conditions would you write the code yourself vs. using a content management system?  And if you were to use a content management system, which one should you use and why?

Along the way I’ll tell you what my current choices are, but more importantly, I’ll tell you what my thought process is.  So even if you decide to use different tools than I do, you can ask the same questions to select the tools you have decided to use.

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Last night, one of my clients assigned me a problem that I thought was going to require one solution, and in the end it was just poor programming. But the process reminded me of the need for good debugging skills. Just how do you know where the performance problem is? Too many programmers I know approach performance issues from the front end. “I know there is going to be a performance problem if I do it this way, so I’m going to do it that way instead.” But unless your theory was correct, you are very likely to spend extra time doing something you may not need to do. While solving problems is what makes programming fun for a lot of us, solving problems that don’t exist is a waste of time for the organizations we work for. My motto is:

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I got the following question recently.

What is the difference between Dispose and SupressFinalize in garbage collection?”

The problem with this question is it assumes Dispose and SupressFinalize have similarities, which I’m sure is not what is being asked here.  So let’s rephrase it in terms that make sense.

I see three methods available to me in .NET that all seem to have something to do with garbage collection.  Can you explain what Dispose, Finalize, and SupressFinalize do and why I could use or call each one in my code?”

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By now, most people are familiar with the fact that ASP.NET will send mail from the codebehind by simply adding a few lines to your web.config file and adding another few lines of code in the codebehind file.

But it wasn’t until recently that I found that you don’t need to have access to an SMTP server to test your code.

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