Web Notes

Introduction to MVC In the last few years a software architecture changed very heavily. From desktop (forms) application which were very popular in Windows XP users move to SOA and now completely start using web based solution hosting in a cloud . Of course such evolution is not something bad, just the opposite in my opinion because web based application are highly scalable, better secured and available from each place in the Earth where user has an Internet connection. Such a big changes in software architecture cause that also programming model has to change. As response for this need, IT companies start working for on new technologies and improving existing ones. APIs became very popular tool  in a developer hands and whole communication became much more lightweight (by switching from XML to JSON) - mainly because the emerging market of mobile devices. In a new MVC version 4 also Microsoft introduce some improvements which allow developers creating web services (APIs) in well kn

An asynchronous operations become very popular in modern programming because by using its developers can take full advantage of multicore processors and perform several operation at the same time. Multithreding exists in ASP.NET since 2.0 version but it was very sophisticated to use it. However starting from .NET 4.5, ASP.NET is fully compatible with all these great features . To demonstrate how to start with the asynchronous operation in ASP.NET 4.5 I`ve created very simple solution which consist of three projects (Picture 1.): AsyncPageService - REST service based on a ApiController ; provides function which will be called by the website. AsyncPageWebsite - main ASP.NET website. Contracts - contains shared type between service and website. Picture 1. Solution projects. In my solution data is served by very simple REST web service, which is build by using  ApiController  from ASP.NET MVC. Inside this I`ve created two controllers (first return N random integers and the sec

Let assume that we want to create a simple scheduler which allow user to plan meeting as long as he want with 1 minute precision. There is multiple ways to make such implementation but in this post I want to present an approach I used recently. In my implementation I`ve created separated type which represents any time period. I called it Range and it`s consists of three properties (one is read-only). Main idea behind creating this time is encapsulate state and end date of used defined time period. /// <summary> /// Represents range in time. /// </summary> public class Range { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets represents range start time. /// </summary> public DateTime StartTime { get ; set ; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets represents range end time. /// </summary> public DateTime EndTime { get ; set ; } /// <summary> /// Gets ra

Almost in each modern website project one of the feature is suggesting user possible items to select when he start typing one of them. Such functionality is done by using control named autocomplete . Under the hood  it consists of at least three elements: UI control which allow user to type some text - mainly this in HTML input of text type Server-side function which serves data to be auto-completed Client-side logic (written in JavaScript) which , by using AJAX, send request to the server asynchronously and then process the results. When we think about creating autocomplete control in ASP.NET MVC 4 we definitely should take a look at  jQueryUI framework. One of the feature of this framework is autocomplete control which enables users to quickly find and select from a pre-populated list of values as they type, leveraging searching and filtering. That sounds very good and is excellently what we are looking for. First step in autocomplete control  creation is creating a