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Winter Arts Preview: Event Listings	29 November 2007
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BEA touts event-driven architecture	28 November 2007
BEA Systems officials Tuesday were eager to talk about event-driven architecture and SOA rather than discuss efforts by Oracle to acquire their company.An Oracle offer to acquire BEA expired in late-October and no new one has been tendered. For BEA officials, Tuesday was business as usual with executives touting the company's middleware stack for event processing during a media presentation in San Francisco. They stayed silent when asked about any possibility that their company might be bought by Oracle."BEA has been leading in the event-processing market for some time now," said Ruma Sanyal, director of product marketing for BEA. The company's event-driven processing arsenal includes such products as WebLogic Event Server for high-performance applications driven by event-driven architecture and WebLogic Real Time featuring a version of the JRockit Java virtual machine offering guaranteed response times of 10 milliseconds.SOA factors into event-driven processing, according to BEA."We see the next generation of SOA as being an event-driven SOA," said Guy Churchward, BEA vice president of WebLogic products. With data volumes growing, companies will be competitive and win by implementing event-driven SOA and event-driven architecture, he saidBEA's Event Server product is about data stream optimization, but SOA is deployed to make a decision on what to do with these streams, Churchward said. More than 70 percent of respondents surveyed by BEA think about event-processing in the context of SOA and BPM (business process management), Runyal said."Not all the business problems are going to be solved either by EDA or by SOA or BPM," Sanyal said. "It's all three of those together," that will probably be required for solving business problems, she said.While the BEA officials did not introduce any new products, they did provide glimpses of upcoming versions of the Event Server and Real Time software. Release 3.0 of Real Time, due next summer, will offer 5-millisecond response times. A release sometime after that will reduce this to zero milliseconds. Real Time features enhancements in Java memory management, or garbage collection, to reduce latency.The next version of Event Server will focus on development tools to extend the product to business analysts. A graphical interface for setting rules is a highlight of the product.The company emphasized how the holiday season is especially taxing on transaction systems in industries like air travel and retail and that event-processing is a solution."There's unique challenges around the holiday season," Churchward said. These challenges include compressed purchase-to-delivery time expectations, management of transactions, and an exponential increase in holiday travelers."There's more people hitting these [Web] sites, hitting the stores, there's more people getting on airlines," he said. Failure to address these problems can result in loss of revenue, lost of customers, high operational costs, and negative press and referrals, he said.BEA's Robin Smith, senior engineering product manager, detailed an airline's use of BEA software, including Event Server, Real Time and the AquaLogic Service Bus to deal with issues such as locating lost baggage. BEA did not reveal the name of the airline.

BMC releases ProActiveNet Analytics	27 November 2007
BMC on Tuesday released ProActiveNet Analytics, the first product stemming from its acquisition of ProActiveNet earlier this year.The software pulls data from hardware and applications across a company's environment, and issues IT workers warnings about upcoming performance problems.Much like its competitor, Netuitive, BMC touts the software's ability to "learn" how a customer's IT environment changes, and adapt its own performance accordingly. It will integrate with both third-party products and its own IT management portfolio, which includes BMC Event Manager and BMC Performance Manager.Stephen Elliot, a research director with IDC, said BMC's announcement underscores a growing drive by IT management vendors to inject more business-relevant analytics into their offerings."They are continuing to pound the pavement on their business service management message. They are really tring to put the 'b' in BSM," Elliot said. "What BMC is doing is saying, we want to empower IT to talk to the specific business impact of what they provide."Elliot said he expects a number of similar announcements in 2008 from the major IT management vendors: BMC, along with CA, HP, and IBM. "It's really going to elevate the messaging to empower IT to talk effectively with the business manager." Overall, however, the product category is still a work in progress, according to Elliot.Pricing information was not available Tuesday.

Do you need an experienced String Quartet for your wedding ceremony reception? (Central London)	01 January 0001
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Citrix Technical Consultant - Sheffield, Yorkshire	23 November 2007
Citrix 1.8, Consultant, Consultancy, Support, Administration, Active Directory, Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2003, Implementation, PS4 Configuration, Disaster Recovery. Our client, a leading consultancy are currently looking for a Citrix Technical Consultant to be based out of their Sheffield offices. The Technical Consultant will develop proactive identification evaluation, definition and implementation of technologies and associated processes that will ensure continued stability of the technical environment within the business and for the client. To build upon the standards and processes already in place and seek to deliver business benefits and competitive advantage through innovative and cost effective deployment of Information Technology. Essential experience will include: Citrix 1.8, XP and PS4 configuration, support and administration, ability to recover the platform[s] in a event of a failure or disaster. Active Directory administration on a day to day basis and the ability to recover the platform[s] in the event of a failure or Disaster. Exchange 5.5 / 2003 administration on a day to day basis and the ability to recover the platform[s] in the event of a failure or Disaster. This position is commutable from the following areas: Sheffield, Yorkshire, Leeds, Harrowgate, Rotherham, Chesterfield, Matlock, Mansfield, Derbyshire, Doncaster, Barnsley, Buxton, Ripley, Wakefield, Pontefract Karl Scrivener Principal Consultant Tel: 01908 562585 Email: karl.scrivener@idealpeople.net Idealpeople Ltd Idealpeople are acting as an employment agency in relation to this vacancy. Find Top Tips for Job Hunters and Hirers at the [a href="www.idealpeopleblog.com"]Idealpeople blog[/a] Take a look at all of Idealpeople's vacancies at [a href="www.idealpeople.net"]www.idealpeople.net[/a]

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wedding photographer from low as £350 (London UK)	01 January 0001
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Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available	26 September 2008
This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here. Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here. Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you can also use databinding with it. For example, we could define a "Person" class like below: And the add a ComboBox to a page like so: And then write the below code to databind a collection of Person objects to the ComboBox (by setting its ItemSource property): At runtime our simple app will then display the data-bound Person names (note that we set the DisplayMemberPath property on the ComboBox above to display the "Name" value from our Person objects): We could then implement a SelectionChanged event handler like below to run code when a person is selected from the ComboBox: Notice above how we can retrieve a reference to the selected "Person" object from the databound ComboBox using the ComboBox's "SelectedItem" property. We can then call the MessageBox.Show() helper method (new in the RC) to display a modal dialog box that displays some details about our selected person: New Control Skins The final release of Silverlight 2 will have a much more polished set of default control template skins than those that were in Beta1 and Beta2. Our goal with the default control templates is to have a look that is professional and attractive, can be used in the majority of applications as-is (without requiring you to author custom style templates), and which is also easily tweakable using Expression Blend. Today's RC build has skins that are close to the final look we plan to ship (there are a few final tweaks we are doing post RC on the focus color of controls, as well as to tighten up and tweak a few issues in some of the control templates). Below is the default look for the DataGrid, RadioButton, CheckBoxes, and the DatePicker controls with today's RC build: Note that the DatePicker control above allows users to type in a date (with a masked edit to ensure it is a valid date), or they can click the calendar icon to the right of the textbox and select the date using a popup Calendar control: One of the most powerful features of Silverlight and WPF, of course, is the ability for designers and developers to completely customize the look and feel of any control. This goes beyond simple styling of colors and fonts - you can literally completely change the visual UI of a control, as well as customize its behavior (for example: add animation) without writing any code. Within Expression Blend, simply right-click on any Silverlight control and choose the "Edit Control Parts" sub-menu to open and edit its control template: When in control template editing mode, you can manipulate any sub-element of a control (for example: a checkbox's inner content), as well as customize each "state" its in (notice the states pane circled in red below). This allows designers to customize what the control looks like in individual states (for example: checked, unchecked, mouseover, etc). Silverlight will then automatically handle animating the control from state to state depending on the user action: You can learn more about how Silverlight's Visual State Model works from my previous blog post here. Previous releases of Silverlight often rendered graphics on sub-pixel locations - which could cause lines and shapes to sometimes appear "fuzzy". The RC of Silverlight has a new features called "layout rounding" that causes the layout system to round the final measure of a control to an integer ("pixel snapping"), which results in crisper lines and fewer rendering artifacts. This feature is now on by default, and helps make applications look nicer. Summary The final release of Silverlight is not that far off now. It has been a pretty amazing project that has come a long way in a pretty short amount of time. If you have existing Beta2 applications, please start getting them ready for the final release - as once we release Silverlight 2, users that have existing beta releases installed will automatically be upgraded to use the final version. Testing your application out with the release candidate will ensure that you can easily update your applications and have them ready within hours of the final release. Let us know if you find issues with today's release candidate, and please make sure to post them on the forums on http://www.silverlight.net. Hope this helps, Scott

ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios	02 September 2008
This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here. This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4"). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here. In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here. Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented our product add scenario across two action methods: "Create" and "Save". One motivation for partitioning the implementation like this is that it makes our Controller code cleaner and easier to read. The downside to using two actions in this scenario, though, is that we end up publishing two URLs from our site: "/Products/Create" and "/Products/Save". This gets problematic in scenarios where we need to redisplay the HTML form because of an input error - since the URL of the redisplayed form in the error scenario will end up being "/Products/Save" instead of "/Products/Create" (because "Save" that was the URL the form was posted to). If an end-user adds this redisplayed page to their browser favorites, or copy/pastes the URL and emails it to a friend, they will end up saving the wrong URL - and will likely have an error when they try and access it later. Publishing two URLs can also cause problems with some search engines if your site is crawled and they attempt to automatically traverse your action attributes. One way to work around these issues is to publish a single "/Products/Create" URL, and then have different server logic depending on whether it is a GET or POST request. One common approach used to-do this with other web MVC frameworks is to simply have a giant if/else statement within the action method and branch accordingly: The downside with the above approach, though, is that it can make the action implementation harder to read, as well as harder to test. ASP.NET MVC "Preview 5" now offers a better option to handle this scenario. You can create overloaded implementations of action methods, and use a new [AcceptVerbs] attribute to have ASP.NET MVC filter how they are dispatched. For example, below we can declare two Create action methods - one that will be called in GET scenarios, and one that will be called in POST scenarios: This approach avoids the need for giant "if/else" statement within your action methods, and enables a cleaner structuring of your action logic. It also eliminates the need to mock the Request object in order to test these two different scenarios. You can also optionally now use a new [ActionName] attribute to allow the method name implementation on your controller class to be different than that from the published URL. For example, if rather than having two overloaded Create methods in your controller you instead wanted to have the POST method be named "Save", you could apply the [ActionName] attribute to it like so: Above we have the same controller method signature (Create and Save) that we had in our initial form post sample. The difference, though, is that we are now publishing a single URL (/Products/Create) and are automatically varying the handling based on the incoming HTTP verb (and so are browser favorites and search engine friendly). Model Binders In our sample above the signature of the Controller action method that handles the form-post takes a String and a Decimal as method arguments. The action method then creates a new Product object, assigns these input values to it, and then attempts to insert it into the database: One of the new capabilities in "Preview 5" that can make this scenario cleaner is its "Model Binder" support. Model Binders provide a way for complex types to be de-serialized from the incoming HTTP input, and passed to a Controller action method as arguments. They also provide support for handling input exceptions, and make it easier to redisplay forms when errors occur (without requiring the end-user to have to re-enter all their data again - more on this later in this blog post). For example, using the model binder support we could re-factor the above action method to instead take a Product object as an argument like so: This makes the code a little more terse and clean. It also allows us to avoid having repetitive form-parsing code scattered across multiple controllers/actions (allowing us to maintain the DRY principle: "don't repeat yourself"). Registering Model Binders Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC are classes that implement the IModelBinder interface, and can be used to help manage the binding of types to input parameters. A model binder can be written to work against a specific object type, or can alternatively be used to handle a broad range of types. The IModelBinder interface allows you to unit test binders independent of the web-server or any specific controller implementation. Model Binders can be registered at 4 different levels within an ASP.NET MVC application, which enables a great deal of flexibility in how you use them: 1) ASP.NET MVC first looks for the presence of a model binder declared as a parameter attribute on an action method. For example, we could indicate that we wanted to use a hypothetical "Bind" binder by annotating our product parameter using an attribute like below (note how we are indicating that only two properties should be bound using a parameter on the attribute): Note: "Preview 5" doesn't have a built-in [Bind] attribute like above just yet (although we are considering adding it as a built-in feature of ASP.NET MVC in the future). However all of the framework infrastructure necessary to implement a [Bind] attribute like above is now implemented in preview 5. The open source MVCContrib project also has a DataBind attribute like above that you can use today. 2) If no binder attribute is present on the action parameter, ASP.NET MVC then looks for the presence of a binder registered as an attribute on the type of the parameter being passed to the action method. For example, we could register an explicit "ProductBinder" binder for our LINQ to SQL "Product" object by adding code like below to our Product partial class: 3) ASP.NET MVC also supports the ability to register binders at application startup using the ModelBinders.Binders collection. This is useful when you want to use a type written by a third party (that you can't annotate) or if you don't want to add a binder attribute annotation on your model object directly. The below code demonstrates how to register two type-specific binders at application startup in your global.asax: 4) In addition to registering type-specific global binders, you can use the ModelBinders.DefaultBinder property to register a default binder that will be used when a type-specific binder isn't found. Included in the MVCFutures assembly (which is currently referenced by default with the mvc preview builds) is a ComplexModelBinder implementation that uses reflection to set properties based on incoming form post names/values. You could register it to be used as the fallback for all complex types passed as Controller action arguments using the code below: Note: the MVC team plans to tweak the IModelBinder interface further for the next drop (they recently discovered a few scenarios that necessitate a few changes). So if you build a custom model binder with preview 5 expect to have to make a few tweaks when the next drop comes out (probably nothing too major - but just a heads up that we know a few arguments will change on its methods). UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Methods The ModelBinder support above is great for scenarios where you want to instantiate new objects and pass them in as arguments to a controller action method. There are also scenarios, though, when you want to be able to bind input values to existing object instances that you own retrieving/creating yourself within the action method. For example, when enabling an edit scenario for an existing product in the database, you might want to use an ORM to retrieve an existing product instance from the database first within your action method, then bind the new input values to the retrieved product instance, and then save the changes back to the database. "Preview 5" adds two new methods on the Controller base class to help enable this - UpdateModel() and TryUpdateModel(). Both allow you to pass in an existing object instance as the first argument, and then as a second argument you pass in a security white-list of properties you want to update on them using the form post values. For example, below I'm retrieving a Product object using LINQ to SQL, and then using the UpdateModel method to update the product's name and price properties with form data. The UpdateModel methods will attempt to update all of the properties you list (even if there is an error on an early one in the list). If it encounters an error for a property (for example: you entered bogus string data for a UnitPrice property which is of type Decimal), it will store the exception object raised as well the original form posted value in a new "ModelState" collection added with "Preview 5". We'll cover this new ModelState collection in a little bit - but in a nutshell it provides an easy way for us to redisplay forms with the user-entered values automatically populated for them to fix when there is an error. After attempting to update all of the indicated properties, the UpdateModel method will raise an exception if any of them failed. The TryUpdateModel method works the same way - except that instead of raising an exception it will return a boolean true/false value which indicates whether there were any errors. You can choose whichever method works best with your error handling preferences. Product Edit Example To see an example of using the UpdateModel method in use, let's implement a simple product editing form. We'll use a URL format of /Products/Edit/{ProductId} to indicate which product we want to edit. For example, below the URL is /Products/Edit/4 - which means we are going to edit the product whose ProductId is 4: Users can change the product name or unit price, and then click the Save button. When they do our post action method will update the database and then show the user a "Product Updated!" message if it was successful: We can implement the above functionality using the two Controller actions methods below. Notice how we are using the [AcceptVerbs] attribute to differentiate the Edit action that displays the initial form, and the one that handles the form post submission: Our POST action method above uses LINQ to SQL to retrieve an instance of the product object we are editing from the database, then uses UpdateModel to attempt to update the product's ProductName and UnitPrice values using the form post values. It then calls SubmitChanges() on the LINQ to SQL datacontext to save the updates back to the database. If that was successful, we then store a success message string in the TempData collection and redirect the user back to the GET action method using a client-side redirect (which will cause the newly saved product to be redisplayed - along with our TempData message string indicating it was updated). If there is an error either with the form posted values, or with updating the database, an exception will be raised and caught in our catch block - and we will redisplay the form view again to the user for them to fix. You might wonder - what is up with this redirect when we are successful? Why not just redisplay the form again and show the success message? The reason for the client-redirect is to ensure that if the user hits the refresh button after successfully pressing the save button, they don't resubmit the form again and get hit with a browser prompt like this: Doing the redirect back to the GET version of the action method ensures that a user hitting refresh will simply reload the page again and not post back. This approach is called the "Post/Redirect/Get" (aka PRG) pattern. Tim Barcz has a nice article here that talks about this more with ASP.NET MVC. The above two controller action methods are all we need to implement in order to handle editing and updating a Product object. Below is the "Edit" view to go with the above Controller: Useful Tip: In the past once you started added parameters to URLs (for example: /Products/Edit/4) you had to write code in your view to update the form's action attribute to include the parameters in the post URL. "Preview 5" includes a Html.Form() helper method that can make this easier. Html.Form() has many overloaded versions that allow you to specify a variety of parameter options. A new overloaded Html.Form() method that takes with no parameters has been added that will now output the same URL as the current request. For example, if the incoming URL to the Controller that rendered the above view was "/Products/Edit/5", calling Html.Form() like above would automatically output <form action="/Products/Edit/5" method="post"> as the markup output. If the incoming URL to the Controller that rendered the above view was "/Products/Edit/55", calling Html.Form() like above would automatically output <form action="/Products/Edit/55" method="post"> as the markup output. This provides a nifty way to avoid having to write any custom code yourself to construct the URL or indicate parameters. Unit Testing and UpdateModel In this week's Preview 5 drop the UpdateModel methods always work against the Request object's Form post collection to retrieve values. This means that to test the above form post action method you'd need to mock the request object in your unit test. With the next MVC drop we'll also add an overloaded UpdateModel method that allows you to pass in your own collection of values to use instead. For example, we would be able to use the new FormCollection type in preview 5 (which has a ModelBuilder that automatically populates it with all form post values) and pass it to the UpdateModel method as an argument like so: Using an approach like above will allow us to unit test our form-post scenario without having to use any mocking. Below is an example unit test we could write that tests that a POST scenario successfully updates with new values and redirects back to the GET version of our action method. Notice that we do not need to mock anything (nor do we have to rely on any special helper methods) in order to unit test all the functionality in our controller: Handling Error Scenarios - Redisplaying Forms with Error Messages One of the important things to take care of when handling form post scenarios are error conditions. These includes cases where an end-user posts incorrect input (for example: a string instead of a number for a Decimal unit-price), as well as cases where the input format is valid, but the business rules behind the application disallow something from being created/updated/saved (for example: making a new order for a discontinued product). If a user makes a mistake when filling out a form, the form should be redisplayed with informative error messages that guide them towards fixing it. The form should also preserve the input data the user originally entered - so that they don't have to refill this manually. This process should repeat as many times as necessary until the form successfully completes. Basic Form Entry Error Handling and Input Validation with ASP.NET MVC In our product edit sample above we haven't written much error handling code in either our Controller or our View. Our Edit post action simply wraps a try/catch error handling block around the UpdateModel() input mapping call, as well as the database save SubmitChanges() call. If an error occurs, the controller saves an output message in the TempData collection, and then returns our edit view to be redisplayed: With earlier preview releases of ASP.NET MVC the above code wouldn't be enough to deliver a good end-user experience (since it wouldn't highlight the problem, nor preserve user input if there was an error). However, with "Preview 5" you'll find that you now get a decent end-user error experience out of the box with just the above code. Specifically, you'll find that when our edit view is redisplayed because of an input error it now highlights all input controls that have problems, and preserves their input for us to fix: How, you might ask, did the Unit Price textbox highlight itself in red and know to output the originally entered user value? "Preview 5" introduces a new "ModelState" collection that is passed as part of the "ViewData" sent from the Controller to the View when it renders. The ModelState collection provides a way for Controllers to indicate that an error exists with a model object or model property being passed to the View, and allows a human friendly error message to be specified that describes the issue, as well as the original value entered by the end-user. Developers can explicitly write code to add items into the ModelState collection within their Controller actions. ASP.NET MVC's ModelBinders and UpdateModel() helper methods also automatically populate this collection by default when they encounter input errors. Because we were using the UpdateModel() helper method in our Edit action above, when it failed in its attempt to map the UnitPrice TextBox's "gfgff23.02" input to the Product.UnitPrice property (which is of type Decimal) it automatically added an entry to the ModelState collection. Html helper methods inside the View by default now check the ModelState collection when rendering output. If an error for an item they are rendering exists, they will now render the originally entered user value as well as a CSS error class to the HTML input element. For example, for our "Edit" View above we are using the Html.TextBox() helper method to render the UnitPrice of our Product object: When the view was rendered during the error scenario above the Html.TextBox() method checked the ViewData.ModelState collection to see if there were any issues with the "UnitPrice" property of our Product object, and when it saw that there was rendered the originally entered user input ("gfgff23.02") and added a css class to the <input type="textbox"/> it output: You can customize the appearance of the the error css classes to look however you want. The default CSS error rule for input elements in the stylesheet created in new ASP.NET MVC projects looks like below: Adding Additional Validation Messages The built-in HTML form helpers provide basic visual identification of input fields with issues. Let's now add some more descriptive error messages to the page as well. To-do this we can use the new Html.ValidationMessage() helper method in "Preview 5". This method will output the error message in the ModelState collection that is associated with a given Model or Model property. For example: we could update our view to use the Html.ValidationMessage() helper to the right of the textboxes like so: Now when the page renders with an error, an error message will be displayed next to the fields with problems: There is an overloaded version of the Html.ValidationMessage() method that takes a second parameter that allows the view to specify an alternative text to display: One common use case is to output the * character next to the input fields, and then add the new Html.ValidationSummary() helper method (new in "Preview 5") near the top of the page to list all the error messages: The Html.ValidationSummary() helper method will then render a <ul><li></ul> list of all the error messages our ModelState collection, and a * and red border will indicate each input element that has a problem: Note that we haven't had to change our ProductsController class at all to achieve this. Supporting Business Rules Validation Supporting input validation scenarios like above is useful, but rarely sufficient for most applications. In most scenarios you also want to be able to enforce business rules, and have your application UI cleanly integrate with them. ASP.NET MVC supports any data layer abstraction (both ORM and non-ORM based), and allows you to structure your domain model, as well as associated rules/constraints, however you want. Capabilities like Model Binders, the UpdateModel helper method, and all of the error display and validation message support are explicitly designed so that you can use whatever preferred data access story you want within your MVC applications (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, NHibernate, SubSonic, CSLA.NET, LLBLGen Pro, WilsonORMapper, DataSets, ActiveRecord, and any other). Adding Business Rules to a LINQ to SQL Entity In the sample above I've been using LINQ to SQL to define my Product entity and perform my data access. So far, the only level of domain rules/validation that I am using on my Product entity are those inferred by LINQ to SQL from the SQL Server metadata (nulls, data type and length, etc). This will catch scenarios like above (where we are trying to assign bogus input to a Decimal). However, they won't be able to model business issues that can't be easily declared using SQL metadata. For example: disallowing the reorder level of a product to be greater than zero if it has been discontinued, or disallowing a product to be sold for less than what our supplier price is, etc. For scenarios like these we need to add code to our model to express and integrate these business rules. The wrong place to add this business rule logic is in the UI layer of our application. Adding them there is bad for many reasons. Among others it will almost certainly lead to duplicated code - since you'll end up copying the rules around from UI to UI and from form to form. In addition to being time-consuming, there is an excellent chance doing so will lead to bugs when you change your business rule logic, and you forget to update it everywhere. A much better place to incorporate these business rules is at your model or domain level. That way they can be used and applied regardless of what type of UI or form or service works with it. Changes to the rules can be made once, and picked up everywhere without having to duplicate any logic. There are several patterns and approaches we could take to integrate richer business rules to the Product model object we've been using above: we could define the rules within the object, or external from the object. We could use declarative rules, a re-usable rules engine framework, or imperative code. The key point is that ASP.NET MVC allows us to use any or all of these approaches (there aren't a bunch of features that require you to always do it one way - you instead have the flexibility to reflect them however you want, and the MVC features are extensible enough to integrate with almost anything). For this blog post I'm going to use a relatively simple rules approach. First I'm going to define a "RuleViolation" class like below that we can use to capture information about a business rule that is being violated within our model. This class will expose an ErrorMessage string with details about the error, as well as expose the primary property name and property value associated with it that is causing the violation: (note: For simplicity sake I'm only going to store only one property - in more complex applications this might instead be a list so that multiple properties could be specified). I will then define an IRuleEntity interface that has a single method - GetRuleViolations() - which returns back a list of all current business rule violations with that entity: I can then have my Product class implement this interface. To keep the sample simple I'm embedding the rule definition and evaluation logic inside the method. There are better patterns that you can use to enable reusable rules, as well as to handle more complex rules. If this sample grew I'd refactor the method so that the rules and their evaluation where defined elsewhere, but for now to keep this simple we'll just evaluate three business rules below like so: Our application can now query the Product (or any other IRuleEntity) instance to check its current validation status, as well as retrieve back RuleViolation objects that can be used to help present UI that can guide an end-user of the application to help fix them. It also allows us to easily unit test our business rules independent of the application UI. For this particular sample I am going to choose to enforce that our Product object is never saved in the database in an invalid state (mea