Thoughts on .Net & Coding

We will be conducting a 5 day intensive training programs on ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, AngularJS and HTML5 in the month of November 2014. Small batches, personal attention and real world examples. Registration has already started. In case you or your friends are interested to join please get in touch with us as soon as possible. The courses are conducted in Thane. You may read more details here.

ASP.NET offers Forms Authentication as one of the authentication schemes. Developers often use Forms Authentication in combination with membership, roles and profile features to provide security to their web applications. Over the years the needs of authentication schemes used in a web application have changed. To take into account these changing trends Microsoft has released ASP.NET Identity - a new way to authenticate users of your web application. This article describes how ASP.NET Identity can be used in an ASP.NET MVC application from the ground up.

ASP.NET MVC developers often use HTML helpers such as LabelFor() and TextBoxFor() to display model properties on a view. Although this approach works fine in many situations, it proves to be inadequate when you wish to customize how data is presented to the user for displaying and for editing. Luckily, you can use display templates and editor templates to overcome this limitation. This article discusses what display templates and editor templates are and how to use them in an ASP.NET MVC application.

We will be conducting a 5 day intensive training program on ASP.NET MVC in the month of October 2014. Learn MVC5, EF6, Web API 2, VS2013 and more. Small batches, personal attention and real world examples. Registration has already started. In case you or your friends are interested to join please get in touch with us as soon as possible. The courses are conducted in Thane. You may read more details here.

When you make any additions, modifications and deletions to an Entity Framework DbSet and call SaveChanges(), EF starts a new transaction and executes all the INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE operations inside that newly created transaction. If the call to SaveChanges() succeeds the underlying transaction is committed, otherwise the transaction is rolled back. In some cases you may want that multiple calls to SaveChanges() be executed in the same transaction. Luckily, Entity Framework 6 provides an easy way to accomplish the same.

ASP.NET Web API can be either be hosted in IIS or in a separate host process. The former approach is usually appropriate when the Web API is part of a web application and one or more web applications are going to consume it. The later approach is suitable when you wish to avoid the overhead of hosting the Web API in IIS and want to have something lightweight. Hosting a Web API inside IIS is quite straightforward as the process is identical to hosting a web application. On the other hand, hosting a Web API in it's own process requires the creation of a host application and is referred as self-hosting. This article shows in step-by-step manner how to self-host a Web API and how to consume it using a client application.

Beginners often ask this question - "What course of action should I take when a call to SaveChanges() fails?" The answer may vary based on a given situation and requirement. This article discusses one way to deal with the errors and shows how to display descriptive error messages to the end user and then rollback the changes made to the model.

At times you need to pass data from an action method belonging to one controller to an action method belonging to another controller. There are three ways to accomplish this task. They are - Pass data as query string, pass data in TempData, and pass data as route parameters. Let's quickly see how each of these three approaches work.