Here’s my attempt to write a short post, which for me means staying under 2,000 words. Channeling my inner Seth Godin, here we go… What is the purpose of life? The purpose of life is to increase your alignment with truth, love, and power. You are here to: Discover and accept ever deeper truths. Learn to love more deeply [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "The Purpose of Life", url: "http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/07/the-purpose-of-life/" });

So I wanted to get a read on how people design their web sites.  My thinking is that there isn’t much time spent in planning for supportability.  There are a lot of other concerns that take priority, What is more important – Design or Content...(read more)

ListView (the server-side control), like all repeating data controls in ASP.NET, has an AlternatingItemTemplate , but it would be a shame to have to copy all the markup in the ItemTemplate into AlternatingItemTemplate , just to alternate styles on the items. It's quite likely that only css classes will change between the two, and redundancy is bad <- big scoop here. But there is a simpler way. From within any template, you have access to the current index of the row within the whole data ... [read more]

In this tip, I demonstrate how you can retrieve a view from any folder in an ASP.NET MVC application. I show you how to use both specific paths and relative paths. Until today, I thought that a controller action could return a view from only one of two places: · Views\ controller name · Views\Shared For example, if you are working with the ProductController, then I believed that you could only return a view from either the Views\Product folder or the Views\Shared folder. When looking t... [read more]

The first time you run !DumpAllExceptions you will see it print out one full exception for each type of exception that is in the dump. This will include the message and the callstack of the exception. For example: Any time after that, if you run the same...(read more)

In this tip, I demonstrate how you can create LINQ to SQL entities that do not contain any special attributes. I show you how you can use an external XML file to map LINQ to SQL entities to database objects. I’ve talked to several people recently who are deeply bothered by the fact that the LINQ to SQL classes generated by the Visual Studio Object Relational Designer contain attributes. They want to take advantage of the Object Relational Designer to generate their entity classes. However,... [read more]

So I was hoping to get some more comments to this before posting the answer but I guess that isn’t going to happen. The minFreeThreads and minLocalRequestFreeThreads are very important settings when it comes to how much load your webserver can handle...(read more)

One principle to follow when writing a unit test is that a unit test should ideally not cross boundaries . Michael Feathers takes a harder stance in saying… A test is not a unit test if: It talks to the database It communicates across the network It touches the file system It can’t run at the same time as any of your other unit tests You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing config files) to run it Tests that do these things aren’t bad. Often they are worth writing, and ... [read more]

Monday morning the Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 update package and release notes went live on the Microsoft Download Center.  This is great news to anyone that has been using this product. Power Pack 1 fixes the data corruption bug as well as...(read more)

One of the traps that’s easy to fall into is filling your life with too many incompatibilities — people, places, objects, circumstances, and activities that just don’t mesh with the person you are on the inside. When your external reality is out of sync with your inner self, your inner self will resist it. This creates [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Tolerance Is Resistance to Love", url: "http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/07/tolerance-is-resistance-to-love/" });

In this tip, I demonstrate how you can eliminate controller methods that simply return views. I show you how to use the HandleUnknownAction method to handle every request against a controller automatically. I saw Phil Haack use the following tip in a...( read more ) Read More......(read more)

We had a good chat on Friday and I think we got most, if not all, of the questions answered in regards to SQL Injection. For those of you that missed the chat, check out the transcript here . If there is anything that we missed, please feel free to let...(read more)

I've been getting more and more interested in how folks extend their applications using plugins and things. In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you thirtieth in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." Spark I'm really enjoying the extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC , but not as much as some people. Spark is a really promising ViewEngine from Louis DeJardin . You can download Spark here and join the ... [read more]

I'm very happy to announce that the first preview for the new Ajax features in ASP.NET just went live. Thanks to everyone who made that happen and thanks to all of you for providing feedback on the Roadmap . This preview contains preview implementations for the following features: Client-side template rendering Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls DataView control Markup extensions Bindings I'll go over those features in more details and provide walkthroughs in the followi... [read more]

This morning I did a radio interview with Kaleah LaRoche and Daniel Stief of Sedona Talk Radio. This hour-long interview is available online if you want to listen to it. It will be available on their main show page for a week, and after that it will be added to their show archives. We discussed a variety [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Sedona Talk Radio Interview", url: "http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/07/sedona-talk-radio-interview/" });