We can do so much better than the way we're building web applications today, but it doesn't seem like anyone is investing in trying to solve the biggest issues. Here's my ideas about what should be being done.

Scott Hanselman suggested that open source software doesn't get enough praise; so I thought it'd be nice to blog a list of my favourites. Some of this is used on a daily basis and important to my work; yet I've never paid a penny for it!

Today I was configuring ELMAH to send emails when an exception occurs on my new blog. While looking for the config options, I noticed that a lot of the snippets being posted around suggests people are putting usernames and passwords in their config files to make this work. That's pretty scary! :(

I've been meaning to look into PowerShell for a while - it's been on an ever-growing list of things I'd like to learn more about. Recently I got around to spending some time with it and decided an interesting way to learn a little would be to create a module that allowed you to format objects using the Razor Engine.

[System.Activator]::CreateInstance($type)

Update: I changed from using MarkdownSharp to MarkdownDeep.NET and pushed the helper to NuGet to make it easier to use. Sure, it's only a few lines of code, but this way one command will import the MarkdownDeep.NET library and add the namespace to your views Web.config easily. It'll also make updates much simpler if you use it in many places :-)

Over the past year or so we've been wrestling with an intermittent error from classic ASP when trying to instantiate .NET components with Server.CreateObject. Everything works fine 90% of the time, and now and then we'll start seeing this error:

I'm sure I don't need to tell you how bad serving a Yellow Screen of Death to your users is. Nonetheless, it seems to be pretty common practice across the web. One of the first things I do when setting up a new ASP.NET project is set up custom error pages and ensure all exceptions are logged (who wants to find out about their errors from their visitors?). Since things work a little differently in ASP.NET MVC, I thought I'd dig in and find the best way to do the same sort of thing.

Over the last few days I've been rewriting this blog in ASP.NET MVC. As it gets closer to a state where I can upload it, I found myself needing to implement security for the administration section (adding, editing posts, etc.). I don't want yet another username/password to remember, and I don't want to IP-restrict it because that's not very flexible (and I don't know how static my IP is!), so what are my options?

As you're all no doubt aware, ASP.NET MVC recently went RTM. This brings the MVC-style of coding, made very popular by Ruby-on-Rails to the ASP.NET world. I've been eager to start using MVC for months, but I've been holding off until I knew the API was locked down so I don't have to change anything.