Razor changes in MVC 4

Here’s a short article describing a few changes in razor 2.0

CSS Preprocessors – Sass, Less, Stylus

CSS has been around for a while and will stay for a while longer and although I think it’s a good and working ‘language’ it has a few pitfalls – the biggest one being the lack of ability to reuse certain parts. Take colors for example, when you want to style a site you need to repeat the color declaration everywhere you want to set it, so when you change your mind, the only way to implement the changes is search and replace. Now that’s not that bad when you have a small site and one css file, but when the number of files grows, that problem grows along. So what can we do?

WYSIWYG, WYSIWYM and all that jazz

So you have a requirement – supply the possibility to create and edit rich formatted text in a web application. Seems pretty straightforward – use a ready editor and you’re done.

Now, add some constraints to that, like – the editor needs to be dead simple because the target user does not care about all that semantic stuff (that’s your job), it needs to perform well and be as intuitive as it gets.

This is a pretty valid requirement and in todays web is pretty common, but as it turns out, there isn’t a lot of maneuvering space here.

Localized enums with Entity Framework Code-First 4.1 in WPF MVVM and ASP.NET MVC 3

In part 1) I would like to present the solution of using enum types with Entity Framework Code-First (EF CF later). Then in part 2) I would like to show how easily display these enums in WPF MVVM and in Part 3)  I will try to explain my approach for displaying and binding localized enums in ASP.NET MVC 3 application. EF CF approach is still developed and in version 4.1 it …

Simple WCF. The simplest configuration.

The power of WCF is that it can be used to any kind of communication. All known old transmission protocols are covered by WCF and can be totally replaced by it.

Default route with areas in asp.net MVC

I stumbled upon a problem when trying to set up a default route for an asp.net mvc3 application. The routing mechanism itself is pretty straightforward, so I didn’t really expect any problems here, but as it turned out I was wrong.

YSlow grade “B”

Just run the YSlow test on our blog. We got a grade “B” which in my opinion is pretty decent (and if I run it with “small site or blog” profile – which is exactly what this site is, we even get grade “A”, but hey, aim high).