Matthew M. Osborn's Blog

ASP.NET 4.5 Loves HTML5, CSS3, & JavaScript

2011-09-15T00:22:40Z

Today I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the //BUILD conference in Anaheim, CA. Given that this conference is all about Windows 8 I was one of the few non windows session at the conference. Bellow is the abstract from my talk entitled. For those of you that weren’t lucky enough to get to come to //BUILD there is good news! All the session will be recorded and posted online and that includes mine. You can find a my session session on Channel 9 (although it may take a day or so to get posted...(read more)

ASP.NET 404 Custom Errors & IIS

2011-05-27T18:12:43Z

Recently I have been spending a fair amount of time working on the NuGet Documentation site (read more about it here ). One of the improvements I wanted to make to it was to add useful error pages. You know more than the YSOD (yellow screen of death). One of the major issues for me was creating a useful and informative 404 page. I wanted the page to tell the user why they got there, offer suggestions about what page they may be looking for, and allow them to search the site. So I did the development...(read more)

Introducing NuGet Docs: Community Driven Documentation

2011-05-11T23:18:58Z

http://docs.nuget.org Introducing NuGet Docs: http://docs.nuget.org ! NuGet Docs is a community driven documentation site that provides guides, walkthroughs, and information about anything and everything NuGet related. NuGet Docs is your new resource for learning and understanding how to use NuGet to the fullest. There is information about how to use NuGet to consume packages, information about how to create your own packages, and even information about how to contribute to NuGet along with much...(read more)

Joining the Dark Side | SDET to SDE

2011-02-23T20:00:34Z

Today I am excited to announce that I have joined the Dark Side and by Dark Side I mean the developer team here at Microsoft. Many of you know that for the past two and half years I have worked on the ASP.NET team as a Software Development Engineer in Test or SDET. It has been an awesome experience and I enjoyed every minute of it, however my true passion is writing production code and that is why I have decided to make the switch to a Software Development Engineer or SDE. So what did I do while...(read more)

New and Improved Templates in WebMatrix

2010-10-06T21:00:39Z

With the latest release of WebMatrix and ASP.NET WebPages I am proud to announce that we have been working to clean up the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and general file and folder structures of the templates that we ship with the product. One of the major objectives was to provide general guidance on how a developer might actually set up a production website. This means we wanted to get ride of the “this is just a sample” mentality and really write some good code. That being said we also wanted to be able...(read more)

Magic Page Names in ASP.NET WebPages

2010-07-27T23:59:26Z

One of the features in ASP.NET WebPages that is super powerful yet super simple is the “magic names” you can give to a page that make that page behave differently. Unfortunately the feature isn’t really called “magic names” (That would be way too cool!). Instead they are broken down into the two variations, Start pages and Init Pages . You may have seen these pages used before in other posts (I used one in my SimpleMembership post ) or maybe even covered in one of the tutorials. I just figured that...(read more)

Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages

2010-07-21T19:42:23Z

With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that...(read more)

Coding QA Teams Up With TekPub

2010-07-08T16:40:33Z

Today is an exciting day for the Coding QA Podcast! I am proud to announce that Coding QA has teamed up with TekPub to give-a-way some licenses for TekPub to our listeners. This has been in the works for some time now and we wanted to find some creative a way to give these licenses away. To us the standard send us an email and we will draw a name out of a hat just did not seem to cut it. I know you’re sitting on the edge of your seat and asking “How then do I get these?” Well given that we are a...(read more)

Introduction to WebImage

2010-07-06T21:57:06Z

One common operation that pretty much every website in the world does is either accepting, creating, editing, or displaying images. This could be something as simple as a user’s profile picture or as complex a full blown image gallery. Either way if you have every had implement these functionalities in a website you know that they are not the easiest thing to create. Well, here is where the WebPages team comes in to save the day! We have wrapped what we think are some of the most common image manipulation...(read more)

Introducing WebMatrix Beta

2010-07-06T21:56:26Z

Over the last year or so I have had the opportunity to help develop and shape a brand new framework that is, as of today, in its first ever public beta. I’d like to introduce you all to WebMatrix! WebMatrix is actually a group of products and frameworks all with the common goal of making web development simple and easy. A few of the pieces of WebMatrix have already been announced and some are never before seen until now. What are they all you ask, well let’s jump right in and review the pieces. SQL...(read more)

A Year of Coding QA

2010-05-17T04:15:46Z

This is one of those posts where I don’t talk about coding, sorry, but it’s still about technology so hopefully I don't scare you guys off. So what is this I want to talk about, well my podcast of course, Coding QA . Somewhere February last year (2009) I got the idea that I wanted to host my own podcast. I had been listening to various podcasts for awhile and thought it would be fun to host my own. I spent a few weeks bounce ideas around in head about what I wanted my podcast to be about. After...(read more)

How and When to Encode for the Web

2010-05-05T23:17:13Z

One of the more tricky things to learn when you are developing for the web is to know when and how to encode the content your delivering. There are a couple high level reasons as to why you need to encode your content. First is that some characters just are not valid in URLs and attributes which could cause your links and html to not work properly. Secondly, and by far the most important is that if you are outputting user generated content to the page you want to protect against HTML injection. Forgive...(read more)

Update: How and When to Encode for the Web

2010-05-05T23:17:13Z

One of the more tricky things to learn when you are developing for the web is to know when and how to encode the content you’re delivering. There are a couple high level reasons as to why you need to encode your content. First is that some characters just are not valid in URLs and attributes which could cause your links and html to not work properly. Secondly, and by far the most important is that if you are outputting user generated content to the page you want to protect against HTML injection...(read more)

What’s in my laptop bag?

2010-04-26T04:18:07Z

I figured it was time do the obligatory “what’s in my laptop bag” post. If you have been following my twitter stream you might have seen that I just purchased a new MacBook Pro and I figured it was time to get a new laptop bag as well. Previously I had the a Microsoft Ogio bag, basically the same as the Ogio Hip Hop . After some strong recommendations from my friends I decided on a Tom Bihn bag for the new one. For those not familiar with Tom Bihn they are awesome bags with awesome attention to detail...(read more)

Introducing Browsers Providers in ASP.NET 4

2010-03-19T21:10:41Z

In ASP.NET there is a concept of Browser Capabilities, they define what the device that issued the request to the site is capable of doing. For instance things like “ Supports JavaScript ” and “ Supports Frames ”, they also provide other meta information about the device such as the Name and version number. I’ll be the first to say that most of the values that are in there are no longer really useful. For example that is a property called “Is AOL”, yes I’m not kidding but at some point in time you...(read more)