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Auto-Deployment Using MS Web Deploy on Build Quality Change Event of TFS 2010
Getting the Most Out of the Save Pipeline in Visual Studio LightSwitch
Visual Studio LightSwitch applications consist of three tiers: presentation, logic and data. This article discusses the logic tier and its save pipeline. The save pipeline is where developers write business logic that runs as changes are processed on the logic tier and saved to the data storage tier. The save pipeline is automatically generated with every LightSwitch application. Understanding the processing done in the save pipeline is not required to successfully build and deploy applications with LightSwitch, but adding save pipeline business logic provides additional flexibility and control when data is saved.
Service Bus Architecture based on WCF (3): build your ESB
Sprite Editor 2.0
Parsing HTML Documents with the Html Agility Pack
Screen scraping is the process of programmatically accessing and processing information from an external website. For example, a price comparison website might screen scrape a variety of online retailers to build a database of products and what various retailers are selling them for. Typically, screen scraping is performed by mimicking the behavior of a browser - namely, by making an HTTP request from code and then parsing and analyzing the returned HTML.
The .NET Framework offers a variety of classes for accessing data from a remote website, namely the
WebClient class and the
HttpWebRequest class. These classes are useful for making an HTTP
request to a remote website and pulling down the markup from a particular URL, but they offer no assistance in parsing the returned HTML. Instead, developers commonly
rely on string parsing methods like String.IndexOf, String.Substring, and the like, or through the use of regular expressions.
Another option for parsing HTML documents is to use the Html Agility Pack, a free, open-source library designed to simplify reading from and writing to HTML documents. The Html Agility Pack constructs a Document Object Model (DOM) view of the HTML document being parsed. With a few lines of code, developers can walk through the DOM, moving from a node to its children, or vice versa. Also, the Html Agility Pack can return specific nodes in the DOM through the use of XPath expressions. (The Html Agility Pack also includes a class for downloading an HTML document from a remote website; this means you can both download and parse an external web page using the Html Agility Pack.)
This article shows how to get started using the Html Agility Pack and includes a number of real-world examples that illustrate this library's utility. A complete, working demo is available for download at the end of this article.
Build Business Applications Quickly with Visual Studio LightSwitch
LightSwitch is a new development tool and extensible application framework for building data-centric business applications. LightSwitch simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you. With LightSwitch, an application can be designed, built, tested, and in your user’s hands quickly. LightSwitch is perfect for small business or departmental productivity applications that need to get done fast.
Sorting a Grid of Data in ASP.NET MVC
Last week's article, Displaying a Grid of Data in ASP.NET MVC, showed, step-by-step, how to display a grid of data in an ASP.NET MVC application. Last week's article started with creating a new ASP.NET MVC application in Visual Studio, then added the Northwind database to the project and showed how to use Microsoft's Linq-to-SQL tool to access data from the database. The article then looked at creating a Controller and View for displaying a list of product information (the Model).
This article builds on the demo application created in Displaying a Grid of Data in ASP.NET MVC, enhancing the grid to include bi-directional sorting. If you come from an ASP.NET WebForms background, you know that the GridView control makes implementing sorting as easy as ticking a checkbox. Unfortunately, implementing sorting in ASP.NET MVC involves a bit more work than simply checking a checkbox, but the quantity of work isn't significantly greater and with ASP.NET MVC we have more control over the grid and sorting interface's layout and markup, as well as the mechanism through which sorting is implemented. With the GridView control, sorting is handled through form postbacks with the sorting parameters - what column to sort by and whether to sort in ascending or descending order - being submitted as hidden form fields. In this article we'll use querystring parameters to indicate the sorting parameters, which means a particular sort order can be indexed by search engines, bookmarked, emailed to a colleague, and so on - things that are not possible with the GridView's built-in sorting capabilities.
Like with its predecessor, this article offers step-by-step instructions and includes a complete, working demo available for download at the end of the article. Read on to learn more!