One of the lesser known and misunderstood feature of Html5 is offline cache, with carefully crafted it can make your application blazingly fast. In this post, I will show you how can you implement offline cache with the new asp.net asset bundle, the same technique can be also applied to other asset managers like combres or cassette. Currently the browser support of offline cache is aligned towards mobile platform comparing to desktop(except IE all other has this support) but the nice thing of offline cache is the browser that does not support it will simply ignore it, on the other hand the mobile platform which is dominated by the mobile web-kit has first class support of it, so I will use the default jQuery Mobile project the comes with the ASP.NET MVC 4.

I managed some time to stab the new ASP.NET WebAPI, I have developed few Http API in the past solely on ASP.NET MVC instead of going through the WCF route. My goal was to check how much work I can delegate it to the new WebAPI instead of doing it myself. No, I am not going to show you some CRUD controller that does the basic stuffs, I take it for granted. Instead, I would show you something that is more realistic. The example that I am going to present a Contact resource that has id, first name, last name and a collection of associated addressed, still pretty basic stuff.

This post is primarily for my fellow friends of local .net user group who asked for a rough guideline on how to get started with the latest Entity Framework Code First, I will try to keep it short and concise. I assume that it is going to be used in an ASP.NET MVC Application and behind the scene an IoC container would be used to glue everything. Before going into the implementation details there are certain design choice of mine, first persistence ignorance which means the domain model have no clue whether Entity Framework is used or any other ORM (nothing fancy here, out of the box the EF Code First has this support), next, I prefer to use class mapping which I think gives a bit more control comparing to decorating the domain classes with the data annotation attributes. Lets starts with a typical Category, Product, Customer and Order domain.

In this post, I will start with typical usage of view model in view that you often see in ASP.NET MVC Applications with full of tag soup, then I refactor it incrementally to correct the implementation and finally show you a better implementation which promotes better OOP and encapsulation, makes the view fully logic-less by delegating the presentation logic to a separate class. Lets see the initial implementation, consider a User Profile view which contains the following code:

In the recent episode of RailsCasts (highly recommended even if you have tiny bit of interest in Rails) Ryan Bates shows a nice little but very elegant trick to load different pages with Ajax request. The fundamental difference of this trick with the vanilla jQuery.ajax is that it keeps the browser history intact, the visitor of the page will see the regular url change in the browser location bar and it would even degrade gracefully if the browser JavaScript is turned off. Behind the scene it uses a jQuery plugin called pajax which does the heavy lifting, by default the plug-in comes with a Sinatra example, there is also a Rails integration gem which is written by the DHH(creator of Rails) himself. In this post I will use the same Sinatra example but ported to ASP.NET MVC.