Casey Charlton - Insane World - All Comments

re: jQuery Gotcha - Functions in Events

Casey Charlton — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:07:00 GMT

Cheers Sergio ... I didn't think there was anything wrong with the docs ... just my understanding of what (fn) meant in that context ... of course it makes sense when you read closely, but I'm a C# developer at heart and used to having strong typing to stop me doing silly things like this :)

The alternative syntax is probably a little messier ... but useful to know about ...

Little by little I'm kicking JQuery into line, occassionaly it kicks me back ... brilliant though JQuery is, VS sucks for JS work ...

re: jQuery Gotcha - Functions in Events

sergiopereira — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:18:36 GMT

Casey, there's nothing wrong with the docs. The syntax you tried at first has a problem that may not be apparent at first. Since the submit(fn) method expects a Function, GetTableContent(a, b) has to *return* a function. You're actually invoking GetTableContent in that line, not passing the function itself. You can get around that by doing what you did or create a function that produces the needed function (so many functions, right?)

//I'm assuming GetTableContent returns false.

function createHandler(p1, p2){

return function() {

return GetTableContent(p1, p2);

};

}

and use it

$('#SearchForm').submit(createHandler(controller, displaySelect));

re: Testing Is Not Technically Hard, It Is Hard Because It Requires Clear Thought and Understanding

Kevin Berridge — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:26:45 GMT

Hear hear!

2008 October 02 - Links for today « My (almost) Daily Links

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re: Problems Upgrading ASP.NET MVC to Preview 5

John Brennan — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:03:33 GMT

Cheers Casey, Html.ActionLink was driving me nuts. I couldn't figure out why querystring was not rendering correctly. That error in the constructor overload was a sneaky one.

Thanks again,

John

Arjan`s World » LINKBLOG for October 1, 2008

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Unit Testing decoupled from TDD as well== Adoption

ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:27:28 GMT

The discussion on the future of unit testing for the masses has shifted from the standard “if they are

re: Where Did filterContext.ActionMethod Go?

Casey Charlton — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:52:03 GMT

Eilon,

Thanks very much for that explanation. I appreciate where you are coming from, and also appreciate that the action name should be recovered from the RouteData ... I think my frustration is that more and more magic strings are appearing over our ASP.NET MVC application, and while I fully accept there is almost no chance that this value will change, it is still left open to a lot of guesswork as to what it is in the first place - hence why I posted this to save other people the same frustration ... but this post will soon disappear into the depths of time, and the next generation of MVC developers will have to discover this one all over again.

There is a strongly typed method for ActionParameters on the filterContext, I guess all I am asking is that all other relevant "metadata" be exposed in a similar way, so that the dependency upon the magic string is in the MVC framework, rather than in our codebase.

In this case, the purpose of this attribute/ActionFilter is a templating engine - by adding an attribute of "Templated" the attribute goes off to the relevant template defintions, sets up metadata like Title and Meta tags, loads up all "static" html content from the database, and populates ViewData with it appropriately. Without the method name (or action name specifically) we would not know which template definition to be loading, or which navigation menu options to set.

With this we now have a method that looks like:

[Templated]

public ActionResult Index()

{

return View((string)ViewData["TemplateViewName"]);

}

If we could also eliminate the call into ViewData at the end, that would alsobe cool - have yet to investigate how to write this into the Result as part of the attribute ....

re: ASP.NET MVC Problems with UpdateModel(model, Request.Form.AllKeys);

Eilon Lipton — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:52:51 GMT

Hi there,

We don't recommend that you just update *all* properties of your object because that has the potential to be a major security problem. If a malicious user crafts a request they can set any property of your object. Instead we recommend that you use that whitelist property as it was meant to be used: Specify exactly which properties you *want* to update, and nothing more.

Nevertheless, for the next release we've made some significant improvements to model binders and UpdateModel so some of these scenarios should work much better.

Thanks,

Eilon

re: Where Did filterContext.ActionMethod Go?

Eilon Lipton — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:48:01 GMT

Hi Casey,

One of the reasons it was removed is that we were making our APIs sufficiently extensible for other controller implementations, such as those used by dynamic languages, for example IronPython. In dynamic languages there is no MethodInfo at all, so we can't give you anything. However, we're thinking of adding back some functionality such as providing the list of attributes on the method.

One thing that's important for us to understand is exactly why you need that data. If what you want is the action name as seen in the URL then it's entirely correct to dig into the RouteData. That's all we would do for you anyway if you wanted just the action name, so we felt there was little value there.

Keep in mind that in Preview 5 and forward the action name doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the name of the method being executed for the action. The two naming concepts are unrelated, so we don't want to mislead people by providing an action name - it wouldn't be clear which name it refers to.

Thanks,

Eilon

re: Where Did filterContext.ActionMethod Go?

Steve — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:44:16 GMT

I wondered as well.

Thanks

re: 8am and The Managed Extensibility Framework

Jarle Nygård — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 08:56:56 GMT

I've had plenty of such days... I find that there is only one real solution; beer. :)

re: Development is Hard

Jean-Francois Poilpret — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:53:59 GMT

I believe that the need to continuously learn new frameworks, techniques and even languages, is what makes the developer's job interesting. Try to imagine yourself working in C all your professional life (40 years or so) with always the same libraries (and I don't talk about assembly). I could not! I am grateful to people (in particular in the OSS community) and organizations for bringing us new things to learn on an almost daily basis.

Of course, the downside is that you may feel you will never have enough time to catch up, but you have to make choices, anyway you cannot know every single language and framework that exist.

Of course, not all developers are like this. Some develop for a living; that's fair, too, but for them, yes, it will be harder, because they WILL have to spend some time learning (generally outside working time) in order to keep current with technologies.

I'm in the "passionate developer" category, hence I don't count my time on trying to be aware of what's new, evaluating new frameworks (or building projects on these), learning new languages (that I may never use professionally, but that will still develop my way of thinking and will bring me some indirect benefits).

re: Development is Hard

Casey Charlton — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:42:26 GMT

>>But, if majority of people only read your blog post title and not the content (just like here on the formats of DZone - not to pick on DZone, it is a good service), it only helps to spread only the negative word, plus very fast in today's media.

<<<

An interesting point, but would the kind of person who skim reads titles be an appropriate person to be a developer?

And sadly development generally pays so well (even to people with little ability) that a significant number of people are in it purely for the money, and not for the satisfaction of doing a job well.

I had the option yesterday of renewing my contract, and I was in perfect position to demand a significant raise in rate and the head of the project would have had no option but to agree - he asked "ok, so what do you want" laughing in a way that said "here comes the rate increase request" - I told him that I wasn't interested in a higher rate - finishing the project was a personal committment I had made to him, and the financial aspect was not my motivation. That is my committment to my profession.