Below you can download a zip file which contains the presentation as well as the code used in my “ASP.NET MVC w/ Spark View Engine” talk today at the Heartland Developers Conference. You should be able to download, unzip, open the solution and hit F5 and run. You will _not_ need to install ASP.NET MVC for this to work. I’m including the mvc assemblies in the download and referencing them in the project. Enjoy. Download: SparkViewEngine_HDC.zip (~6.5 MB)   – [presentation and...
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For anyone who attended this years MDC 2009 and came to my presentation “ASP.NET MVC w/ Spark View Engine” knows that we had some _major_ technical difficulties. We could not get the projector to present via my laptop. To make up for this I have decided to create a screen recording of the presentation. The presentation is about 67 minutes in length and can be watched by viewing the .swf file in your browser or downloading the mp4 file. I have also included the source code, and presentation for you to download as well. Screen Cast of Presentation: (~67 Mins / 102 MB) Click To View ...
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For anyone who attended this years MDC 2009 and came to my presentation “ASP.NET MVC w/ Spark View Engine” knows that we had some _major_ technical difficulties. We could not get the projector to present via my laptop. To make up for this I have decided to create a screen recording of the presentation. The presentation is about 67 minutes in length and can be watched by viewing the .swf file in your browser or downloading the mp4 file. I have also included the source code, and presentation for you to download as well. Screen Cast of Presentation: (~67 Mins / 102 MB) Click To...
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Continuing on my path to LINQ greatness, I want to cover another topic that some people get confused over: LINQ’s First() vs. Single(). Both perform a particular task for us, but just by looking at the name you’d never know which one performed the action that you expected. First() returns the first element in a sequence … Single() returns the _only_ occurrence of the element in the sequence …   … Beware: They Throw Exceptions One _very_important_ thing to be aware of is that these two functions throw exceptions if they do not find what they are looking for. First() will...
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In most code that you find that uses lists you will find something like this:  if(products.Count() > 0) { // Do stuff } Personally, I’ve seen this literally thousands of times. While this works and gets the job done, there is one issue with this method. It enumerates the entire enumerable collection. What if you have 10,000 items in your collection? What if that collection has a bunch  of other nested LINQ queries that must be executed prior to the actual count can be evaluated? A simpler way to identify if the sequence contains any...
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