Programming By A Tool

So one of the things I was forced to use, semi kicking and screaming, at one point in my illustrious career was the Spark View Engine for ASP.Net MVC. Actually that’s not totally true. I only kicked for a bit then skipped the screaming once I noticed what it did: It took all the ugly [...]

A while back, we put up an offer to write for our blog.  Only one has risen to the top as someone having both the technical know-how and the razor sharp wit required to write on a site such as this. ByATool.com Readers… Amy. Amy… ByATool.com Readers. Amy is a magnificent geek and almost 10 [...]

So if you were like me before I knew what Data Annotations were, you most likely would be thinking, “What are Data Annotations?”. Well I’m glad I can read your mind and therefore I am glad you asked. Now the fun part about this post is that I might have to admit I was wrong. [...]

Wow, that’s a mouthful far as titles go, but couldn’t think of a better way to say it. Now what I’m about to go through is the “system” I have found that works pretty well when it comes to structuring controllers knowing that there will be asynchronous operations. Why is that a big deal? Well [...]

Get ready for a roller coaster ride around the insanity that is me. You might actually find it amusing but most likely you’ll just leave sick or underwhelmed. Don’t feel bad if you do, you wouldn’t be the first and, thanks to somehow being impervious to Natural Selection, you won’t be the last. Be proud. [...]

Straight from the “I made this and maybe you can find a use for it” bin, here is one of two ways I create image buttons. Why would you care? I have no idea, but two of the catches that comes with buttons is they have to be wrapped in a form and the fact [...]

I was going to start this post with a rousing ARE YOU READY FOR SOME PROGRAMMING?, but my lawyer suggested it might cause the NFL to take action against me. He suggested something more simple like PROGRAMMING HAPPENS HERE! since he had high doubts the NBA will sue me. After all they’d have to admit [...]

If I were self involved I would say something silly like IN THIS AWESOME POST but I’m not. However in this post that is awesome I gave some examples of how to use attributes to set defaults or just check to see if an incoming id could be matched to a record somewhere… Sorry lost [...]

So if you’ve used MVC, and I know you have because you want to be cool like me, you’ve most likely run into an error like this: Certain parameter wasn’t found. Make [parameter] nullable. In other words, the parameter didn’t show up in the URL and therefor MVC can’t assign a value to it. This [...]

So something that has been somewhat of an uphill climb as of late is routing in MVC. I think part of it is the way it works and part of it is that I’ve approached MVC like a 10 year old with a new game; F- the instructions, I’m all up in this. What goes [...]