Large or asynchronous file uploads in ASP.NET MVC

The challenge of uploading large files in ASP.NET through HTTP is not a new challenge. It’s been covered extensively, by Jon Galloway, Stephen Walther, Milan Negovan and by one of the most active ASP.NET forum threads in history. In addition to handling large files, users often request an experience that shows the progress of an upload as it occurs. When you have either or both of these requirements, or if you simply need direct control of a stream of file data uploaded from a browser, you invariably hit the wall. So, I set about solving the problem in an ASP.NET MVC-specific way

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Skipping the SMTP line with Postmark

With a few web applications in development, one common challenge I face is accounting for SMTP concerns, whether that’s worrying about spam complaints, ensuring delivery, or configuring SMTP hosts for development and deployment scenarios. Sometimes I just want to fire out an email template and know it’s going to reach its destination, whether I’m debugging or in full delivery. Wildbit’s latest application, Postmark, fills this need.

While still in private beta, Postmark, in the new tradition of single-serving web application infrastructure services, is shaping up to become a welcome addition to my collection of development web services. As such, I’ve…

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A theming engine for ASP.NET MVC 2 (video)

Get the example code shown in the video here.

I’ve wanted a way to apply custom themes in ASP.NET MVC that “just works” for awhile. Sometimes you want to apply a new theme that switches out just a few CSS elements, or changes the structure of a specific view, or the entire site. There’s no out-of-the-box way to do that, and the existing solutions I’ve seen will only solve the CSS problem, or the views problem, but not both, or they require you to duplicate your views for every theme or use exact file names rather than your own, which…

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Using a controller to manage static resources

If you’re like me, you’re more or less addicted to YSlow and getting the best performance for your web applications whenever you can. One challenge is to address multiple YSlow recommendations at the same time, particularly when it asks you to compress the content sent to clients, and in the same breath asks that ETags are used to avoid resending cached content for particular resources. In this excellent overview of some of the pitfalls of using ETags, you’ll learn that if you try to base your ETag value on compressed content, the timestamp-based format of that content will cause a new…

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Managing social data in Silverlight: do you push or pull?

Here’s a problem you want to have: many concurrent connections to your web application, all vying for your precious data. Before you enjoy the challenges of that problem, you should consider whether your application works best in a push or pull scenario. In summary, pull applications are the most common; any time your client makes a service call to your application or another, expecting relevant data in the response, you are “pulling” data from a source and into your application. This is a fine way to go, as you are only keeping a thread in use long enough to…

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