Links : Profiling ASP.NET MVC3 Applications

MVC Mini-Profiler is an open source framework for profiling ASP.NET MVC3 applications. You can also give it a try online at http://data.stackexchange.com.

Sam Saffron : Profiling your website like a true ninja

AppHarbor : Developing .NET Apps Could Be Fun Again

How much time it will take for you to type “git push appharbor master” on Git Bash console?  Let us say, 5 seconds. Great, that’s all it takes to bring your well baked code to your waiting customers, fully tested. Push your code to AppHarbor and the rest is magic (well, almost). The Application is built, tested, deployed and live in a few moments. Wow !

Git + CI +  Azure = App Harbor, an awesome, unbelievable .NET Platform on the cloud.

I wish AppHarbor is 10 years old. Just stumbled upon AppHarbor yesterday while on Twitter and within a few minutes (say 5 at the most), have the first Hello World kind of ASP.NET MVC app created and deployed with membership database fully configured.

More as we explore further.

Pluralsight On-Demand Training : Now Starts at $29/m

Pluralsight has slashed its prices and now a monthly subscription to their FULL library costs just $29 per month.  Compare it to earlier pricing of $99/month, it’s a drastic reduction.

More over if you are in India, the monthly subscription costs even lower, $14.99 per month.

If you are a .NET developer or aspiring to become one, this is really a great news. I personally loved their videos and definitely recommend to anybody.

Link : Pluralsight On-Demand Access Pricing Plans

Cowboys To Craftsmen with ASP.NET MVC ??

Quite an interesting way to put the Journey of ASP.NET (developers) from ASP.NET Page based design to MVC based applications. Hope I am not taking it out of context. Its not explicit, but it is written all over the wall. Nevertheless, towers of abstraction and magic by Visual Studio often make developers ignore the inner workings of the framework. Its not a surprise to find an ASP.NET developer that hardly knows anything about HTML beyond the acronym and yet can still develop great ASP.NET pages that really work.

Undoubtedly ASP.NET MVC is better than ASP.NET Web forms, particularly in terms of testability and separation of concerns. But I do not think the model (be it MVC or Web forms) itself could create a better developer somehow.

There are two ways to be a developer. You can be a cowboy or you can be a craftsman. A cowboy jumps right in and starts coding. A cowboy can build a software application quickly. The problem with being a cowboy is that software must be maintained over time.

A craftsman is patient. A craftsman builds software carefully by hand. A craftsman is careful to build unit tests that cover all the code in an application. It takes longer for a craftsman to create an application. However, after the application is created, it is easier to fix bugs in the application and add new features to the application.

Most software developers start their programming careers as cowboys. At some point, however, you must hang up your saddle and start building software that will stand the test of time.

Source : Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC

You can see the focus and so much stress on ‘hand crafting’.  I guess even ASP.NET is going through a journey of its own. by moving away from it’s Page based model and embracing MVC that the rest of the world has been using for years.

Razor : New View Engine For ASP.NET MVC Applications

Pretty soon, there will be a new View Engine for ASP.NET MVC Applications called “Razor” that inherently understands and uses C# and VB.NET rather than a new language on its own and says good bye to well known “<% %>” script syntax.

Scott Gu’s blog post introducing the engine has lot more details and looks quite promising and will be available soon. Haven’t tried the new engine yet, but the blog post suggests that it can be used even with ASP.NET Web forms.