Thoughts on .Net & Coding

Visual Studio 2013 provides a unified development environment for ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications. This unified environment is called as One ASP.NET. What it means for developers is that a single project can use Web Forms, MVC controllers and Web API. Under One ASP.NET at times the existing Web Forms may want to send and receive data to and from the MVC controllers. This article illustrates how this task can be accomplished.

Many websites don't need to know anything about the geographical location of their visitors. In certain cases, however, this knowledge can be useful and can be used to enhance the user experience. This knowledge can also be used to integrate special features into your application. Consider, for example, a company selling some electrical equipment. By knowing the user's geographical location you can suggest the nearest store where they can visit, and purchase the products. To provide such suggestions it is important to capture the user's location. To that end, the Geolocation API allows you to do just that. This article examines seven key things you should know about the Geolocation API in order to use it in your web applications.

A database table represents your application data in row-column format. Although in many cases this row-column structure can be mapped directly to entities, at times you may need to reorganize the same. Consider, for example, the Customers table of Northwind database. The Customers table has Address, City, Region, Country and PostalCode columns representing the address of the company. The entity that represents this table might not be as "flat" as the table. For example, you may wish to have a property - Location - that is of class type and has properties such as Street, City, Region and PostalCode. Luckily, entity framework allows you to do so quite easily. The remainder of this article explains how.

A web page being rendered in the browser consists of many things - logo, informative text, pictures, hyperlinks, navigational structure and more. HTML5offers a set of markup elements that allow you to create a structured layout for web pages. These elements are often termed as Semantic Markup because they convey their meaning and purpose clearly to the developer and to the browser. This article discusses some of the important HTML5 elements that can contribute to the layout of a web page.

While working with Entity Framework developers mostly use LINQ to Entities to query database. However, at times you may need to execute raw queries against the database. A common scenario is when you wish to generate an SQL query dynamically. Luckily, EF allows you to execute raw queries easily. This article explains how that can be done.

Web API allows you to create RESTful services easily. A typical Web API implements GET, POST, PUT and DELETE verbs by writing methods intended to handle each of these HTTP verbs. Although the actual method implementation can be anything as per your application requirement, you need to follow certain method signatures. For example, the Post() method signature accepts the data accompanying the request as a single parameter.

As HTML5 becomes more and more common, it is important for web developers to know the main features and how to use them. HTML5 not only includes new markup elements but also APIs that can be consumed from the JavaScript code. If you are not familiar with HTML5 yet, it's the right time to peek into some of the interesting features. To that end this article discusses some of the features of HTML5 that are worth knowing. Specifically you will learn about audio, video and canvas elements, new input types, miscellaneous form features and custom data attributes.

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