Visual Studio

So it happened that I had a library project in a large solution in Visual Studio 2010 that I now wanted to operate as a Web Application project so I can configure an IIS application for it (it was bascially a bridge project for communication with a third-party library to which I now needed to add HttpHandlers to provide http end-points for interaction with the third-party library).

UPDATE (June 11, 2011): A complete sample ASP.NET application demonstrating features in this blog post is available here: ASP.NET - A complete translation framework through Powershell and Google Translate

I finally got fed-up today with having to use online javascript beautifiers whenever I needed to re-format a minified javascript file to make it readable. I often need to reformat a minified script to have a look at some part of it and thought it would be great if a utility can quickly format the script through command-line.

I just had an immediate need for modifying the core Ext.Net scripts that are embedded into the toolkit assembly itself. Till now, I resisted all temptations for doing so earlier, instead choosing to override Ext.Net behavior when needed by including my own scripts after the Ext.Net scripts on the page.

So yesterday, I was creating a custom configuration section in web.config for an ASP.NET application. I did not had direct contact with the administrators who would administer the day-to-day operations of the application, and needed to make them aware of the various options available for the custom configuration section together with their quick description. I decided to display the options and their basic description in the Administration UI of the application itself.

Well, I am in a bit of a hurry, so if you are not aware of what asynchronous web-methods in ASP.NET web-services are, or why and how to use them, check out this article on MSDN.

Essentially, you split your regular web-method (let's say XXX) to a pair of web-methods (BeginXXX and EndXXX) with particular signatures, enabling them to run in background freeing-up the ASP.NET thread pool thread for handling requests. This is only useful if your web-method is expected to perform a long-running task.

A couple of days ago, I was asked to figure out if it's possible to integrate Ext.Net DirectMethods with the ASP.NET asynchronous pages to achieve scalability with long running DirectMethod calls.

I am currently working on an assignment to convert a Perl/PHP based intra-net project to an ASP.NET web application.

The complexity of the project has been significant as it involves the management of an internal Windows 2003 Active Directory setup for a large governmental organization, integrated with a proprietary ticketing system, and a Sql Server database. The (sometimes cryptic) non object-oriented PHP/Perl code together with a severely limited testing environment have only made the task that more difficult.

No doubt Visual Studio provides extensive Unit Testing framework. Plus there are feature-rich third-party frameworks (e.g. NUnit) available for Unit Testing your .NET code.

However, I was disappointed by lack of .NET support for Assertions. As you might be able to recall, Assertions guarantee that a given expression evaluates to a true value. If it doesn't, the Assertion fails and languages have their own ways of dealing with failed assertions.

As before, I deeply appreciated the Ext.Net (also known as Coolite) extensions over the core ExtJs (both server-side and client-side), and how well they integrated with ExtJs, making them look-like part of core ExtJs itself. And this time, it was the turn of the Ext.Net's Notification class to get me to make such a statement.