Would Be Better.com: Lessons learned building a site with a social component
I had no delusions of becoming as popular as Twitter or Facebook with Would Be Better, at least not right off the bat ;) so it came as no surprise when almost nobody signed up for the site. Release early and release often, you hear them say. Or, a favourite one of mine, if you’re not ashamed of ver ...
Usability round-up
Those of you who have bothered reading the landing page might have noted several references to user friendliness, usability and so forth. I thought it’s time to put our money where our mouth is and talk a little bit about that. To start off nice and easy, this post will just be a round-up of intere ...
Simple Time Picker model binder for ASP.NET MVC 3, and how to save it to SQL CE 4 using EF 4.1
There’s plenty of DatePickers out there, like, for instance, the ubiquitous jQuery DatePicker, but how about Time pickers? Well if you’re looking for a fancy, flashy, drop-dead-gorgeous Time picker control… this post isn’t for you. What this post will teach you, dear reader, is how to simply and ...
Using dynamic to unit test an Action Method that returns JsonResult with MVC 3 and C# 4
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? We have an action method that we call through Ajax.ActionLink, Ajax.BeginForm or even with jQuery.ajax, and returning a JsonResult is what makes the most sense. But whatever you pass to a JsonResult only gets exposed through the JsonResult.Data property which, ...
Mocking a ControllerContext with authenticated user with Moq for ASP.NET MVC (3)
Whenever you are writing unit tests or BDD-style specs for your ASP.NET MVC controllers (you are, right?) there will come a moment when you actually need to simulate that a user is authenticated to your site. Even if you’re familiar with mocking, letting the controller think someone has logged in t ...
Dealing with javascript or JSON results after an AJAX call with Ajax.ActionLink, unobtrusive AJAX and MVC 3
I’ve recently updated an MVC 3 project to use unobtrusive ajax. If you create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project unobtrusive ajax will be enabled by default, but this was a project I had once migrated from MVC 2. Instead of physically adding the unobtrusive ajax JavaScript file to my solution I got it from ...
How to add OpenID authentication to your ASP.NET MVC 3 site using Janrain Engage
Well, I finally took the time to implement OpenID/Social network log-in functionality to Would Be Better and although I had anticipated a much more troublesome process, it wasn’t entirely clear how I had to proceed on several of the steps either. I’d like to share my experiences with you. W ...
Moving WouldBeBetter.com away from Windows Azure to traditional hosting
It just happened; the Name Server changes appear to have definitely propagated a couple of minutes ago. Why did I decide to abandon Windows Azure in favour of a traditional hosting for Would Be Better? There is one reason and one reason only: Money. Hard facts I’m not going to name any fig ...
Would Be Better.com!
The world is full of great, even wonderful things; be it material things, emotions, states of mind... but Everything can be improved. We knew that much, and although we certainly don't know how to improve everything, we know you do. Would Be Better is the place where you suggest how to improve the w ...
Eternal Debate 2.0: Will the Web replace the Desktop?
It started somewhere in the (very) late ’90, faded away in shame for a while after the Big Burst and, what do you know, it came back with a good dose of supervitamin A(jax) and superminerals provided by the advent of Web 2.0: The Web will make the Desktop a thing of the past. Again. Now, I know I’m ...