I have had some serious thoughts on what to do next in my project. On one hand I want to update the way I am doing the GUI for the product and product backlog. Right now I am warm and learning a lot about ASP.NET MVC so it feels quite good to continue there.

And on the other hand this is first and foremost a DDD-learning experience and I have got stuck for a while in the ASP.NET MVC trench.

And finally since I only have one hour a either way will take me on a detour from the other track. What to do?

After some serious consideration I decided to spend today’s session on a DDD-thingy that I ran into in the walkthrough. I want to implement the “IsValid and GetRuleValidations”-pattern. And include it in my BaseRepository Save-method.

That will be enough for today –...

Here is a demo of the famous Ruby On Rails framework that is just mind-blowing.

http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_blog_2.mov

I can’t wait until the ASP.NET MVC framework comes up with something similar. Amazing. Truly amazing. Maybe I should switch gears…

I bought a new WII game yesterday – De Blob. It is a real fun-injection which I recommend to everyone. It such a good feeling to bring color to an all black and white surrounding.

Here is a short clip that introduce the game and the plot:

I’m back! After doing a detour through the sample chapter of the upcoming ASP.NET MVC book (lovingly called “The four faces”, i heard…) I now feel ready to go on.

And I learned a few things by that sample chapter; about ASP.NET MVC, yes but also I saw some flaws of my DDD-ing, especially in the use of the Repository pattern.

The main thing is that I have a separate Update-method that feels a bit strange. Another thing I learned and finally understood was the IQueryable-interface.

By using it you can defer the execution of the actual database query until the client calls. Which means that the query will be fine tuned with all the parameters that the client has includes (such as Take, Sort etc.). (For a much better explanation see this.)

So I’ll update my IRepository to...

OK – my new favorite framework is released! I am downloading it now!

The NerdDinner example uses the MOQ-framework for mocking some authentication mechanism.

This framework is new to me and when I downloaded it (one dll – great stuff!) I immediately ran into the “Test Run deployment issue: The location of the file or directory” – exception.

Here is a great article explaining how to solve it. I needed to restart Visual Studio to get it to “take” – but then it worked great.

I am now done with the run-through the walkthrough for the ASP.NET MVC book I’ve talked about before.

The first thing to notice is how great this way of introducing a subject is/was. 196 pages of really interesting examples and code. Really looking forward to the complete book.

Secondly I’ve picked up some really useful and interesting techniques surrounding ASP.NET MVC:

• The UpdateModel-method, or rather not using it. You can specify an inparameter to an ActionMethod (of the same type as in the View) and the framework will fill it out with data from the form.
• There are some really useful attributes in the framework, such as Authorize.

I also learned some lessons surrounding my repositories that I’ll need to include in the sprint planner helper project. I’ll get back to that…

I am going through the free sample chapter that I talked about earlier. It’s one thick chapter (196 pages) but it’s really good to introduce concepts and features of the ASP.NET MVC framework.

I love it! I cannot say anything else when after a few years of WebForms and me not understanding I am back. I actually get this – no more funky event-firing and endless questions about which event is fired first.

On top of that the whole framework is built and works very well to be tested and built with TDD .

There are so many nice little features that I just cannot wait to know as the backside of my hand… UpdateModel and ModelState just to mention a few.

I am now halfway through and will continue to the end. I’ll get back to you if anything more great appears.

Today I plan to finish up the last part of the prioritizing of Product Backlog Items (see Session 19). That is TDD the controller and then wrap the GUI.

Let’s go!

Whooa – I ran into some problems with routing. Some problems that took me about two sessions (read: hours) to solve. To not to bore you with details or meaningless posts on me scratching my head, I’ll sum it up in this post.

Here is the layout of the “problem”; I have an Action-method with two parameters:

public ActionResult PrioUp(int productID, int productBacklogItemID) </div>

OK – but how do I create a link to that method? Well by using the Html-helper ActionLink-method of course. You define an anonymous...

This (The parameters dictionary contains a null entry for parameter) exception was thrown at me and confused me for a while.

If you ever encounter it I can almost guarantee that you have a Routing-issue.  That is the way the ASP.NET MVC framework is figuring out which controller and which method to invoke.

In my case I had a controller action method that required two parameter but my routing table only allowed for one.

Here is a description on how to add your own, custom route rules.

And also here is a great tool to understand and debug your routing-table entries.

Finally – this webcast contains a discussion about how to change routes.