Web Api - Ninject & IHttpControllerActivator

I was reading through the following blog posts today by Mike Seemann:

• Dependency Injection and Lifetime Management with ASP.NET Web Api
• Dependency Injection in ASP.NET Web Api with Castle Windsor

In his posts, Mike shows how to use the IHttpControllerActivator to wire up Dependency Injection (DI) without using the built in IDependencyResolver in the Web Api bite. After reading through both of these, I was inspired to create the Ninject based equivalent DI leveraging the IHttpControllerActivator.

Here is the class that I created for this:

A complete sample application is available from https://github.com/paigecook/WebApiNinjectIHttpControllerActivator

ELMAH & ASP.NET MVC

If you are planning to use ELMAH - Error Logging Modules and Handlers with your MVC application , I would like to recommend the following resources to assist you.

• Logging Errors with ELMAH and MVC 3 - This is a great 5 part walk through of how to setup Elmah within your MVC 3 (and MVC 4) application and even includes a great way to log JavaScript errors as well. It covers the following:
• Setup
• Notifications
• Filtering
• HandleErrorAttribute
• JavaScript
• Elmah.MVC NuGet Package - "for painless integration of ELMAH into ASP.NET MVC". Provides the following:
• Custom route and Handler (uses /elmah by default instead of /elmah.axd), but you can specify your own  as well.
• Prebuilt HandleErrorAttribute
• Supports both C# & VB.NET applications
• Configurable authorization rules

So, if you are using ELMAH with ASP.NET MVC, please do yourself and favor and checkout these resources to make using ELMAH easier and better. And if you are not currently using ELMAH, I would urge to consider using it, as it provides easy and simple error logging for your MVC or WebForms ASP.NET applications. 

VS 2012 Color Theme Editor Extension & ReSharper 7.0

I just installed the excellent Visual Studio Extension - VS 2012 Color Theme Editor. This is the newly updated version that is compatible with VS 2012. I was running this on VS 2010 and loved being able to use some of the built in or create my own custom color theme. One of my favorite improvements with the VS 2012 version is the ability to mix the editor/IDE experience of the built in Light & Dark themes in VS 2012. Two of the available options in the Color Theme Editor are "Light with Dark Editor" and "Dark with Light Editor". I have chosen the "Light with Dark Editor" option and have been loving it so far.

One thing to be careful with right now however, is that there is an issue with the Theme menu that is added to the VS menu bar with this extension if you also have ReSharper 7.0 installed. The menu should show you all of the available built-in Color Themes and allow you select one, however, that list is not displaying properly when ReSharper 7.0 is installed. However, there is a workaround -- You can still access and select the themes by selecting Tools->Options->Environment->General and these new color themes are listed in the drop down menu there.Also the Editor behavior is a little off as well and it cannot properly show the available themes to allow you copy one of those as your starting point. Hopefully the author will work with JetBrains to figure out the issues and get this fixed before too long.

Update: This issue has been corrected with the release of version 2.1 of the extension. If you are running ReSharper, please make sure to update to this version or a later release.

WordPress on IIS 7

Today I installed WordPress on IIS 7.X (Windows 2008 R2 Server). The initial setup was very easy thanks to the use of the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) I selected the following options:

Products

• PHP 5.3.10
• MySQL Windows 5.1

Applications

• WordPress

It was very simple to setup and within about 10-15 minutes (including) download times, I had a WordPress site running with IIS 7.X on my Windows 2008 R2 server.

One thing of  note was that WordPress wanted to update to a later release and when I clicked the Update button, it kept failing with an error of being unable to unzip the update. After some searching I found this article - WordPress and Plugin Updates on IIS7 Fail a Lot that walked me through the steps to get the update working by modifying permissions for the IUSR and Network Service accounts on my server.

RegEx: Remove Line Numbers

Found this Regex to replace any line starting with one or more numbers followed by colon -

\b[0-9]*:

I used this today for removing line numbers from code a snippet I copied off of a web page.

NuGet Package Restore Tips

I recently have started using the NuGet Package Restore option in all of my .NET projects. This is a great new feature that was enabled with NuGet version 1.6. I followed this blog post Cleaning Up Your Git Repository for NuGet 1.6 and saw my repository size shrink drastically, a very good thing.

However, I noticed that when I enabled Package Restore that Git was excluding my NuGet.exe file in the solution .nuget folder. This was based on my having a *.exe entry in my .gitignore file. I was able to manually add the file by issuing the command git add -F NuGet.exe from the git command line. This worked but I wanted to find a better way. I tried a few different entries in the .gitignore file unsuccessfully. Then today, I had this issue again and did some more research and found this Answer on StackOverflow about putting an additional .gitignore file in the .nuget folder and explicitly including all executables via a !*.exe line. This worked great.

How to get Application Version

Ever need to the the version of your application? For example showing the version of a executable (a console application, for example). Then you can do that with a single line of code

Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version

Please note that Version is of the type System.Version that contains properties for the major and minor revisions and others if needed.

IIS Application Pool Identity access to SQL Server

I recently had a need to connect to a SQL Server Express 2008 R2 instance using the 'Integrated Security=SSPI" option in my connectionString setting. Of course when I ran the site the first time, I got an error stating that IIS APPPOOL\{MyApplicationPoolName} could not access the database. So after a little searching, I found this post ApplicationPoolIdentity IIS 7.5 to SQL Server 2008 R2 not working. on the IIS Forums that provided the proper steps to grant the Application Pool Identity access to the database.


The necessary steps from the post are below for reference.


In SQL Server Management Studio ...

• connect to your SQL Server and navigate to Security - Logins in Object Explorer.
  
• Add a new login:
• Create a Windows login with the name of your application pool. Use the virtual domain name "IIS AppPool", like: "IIS AppPool\{YourApplicationPoolName}"
  
  (Dont' forget to use the real application pool name after the backslash, e.g.: "IIS AppPool\DefaultAppPool")
• Assign the new login to your database(s) in the User Mapping page of the New Login dialog.
  Give it any user name you find appropriate.
• Save and close the New Login dialog.
• In Object Explorer ...
• Navigate to your database, then navigate to Security - Users
• Navigate to your new user and set permissions according to your needs.

Solr 3.6

I am excited to see the latest improvements that are now available in Solr 3.6. Please see the following links for more details about the latest release:

• Lucene / Solr 3.6 Released - Blog post by the Solr Project Manager - Robert Muir
• Solr 3.6 Release Notes

For me the I am most looking forward to the improved HtmlStripCharFilterFactory and improvements to the FST based Suggesters.

TFS Compare Tool

The very first thing you should do before starting to use the TFS explorer, is to replace the Diff/Compare Tool. The one that comes with Visual Studio is pretty bad. Here is a good blog post - Replacing the TFS Diff Tool that shows how to quickly setup a new tool.

I prefer to use SourceGear DiffMerge, but you can use whatever you like. Just, please do yourself a favor and change it to something other than the default.