Your ASP.NET MVC controller action (same action) called multiply times?

Here is a main “check” list for you:

• Check that you don’t have any image or another elements in View with empty src attribute (<img src=”" /> for example) or have src attribute referencing something that no longer existed. You better check directly in browser “Page Source”, than in View itself due to possibility of some “dynamic” issues when View rendered. Ones you found such empty element in page html source its usually trivial to found same element in your view and fix issue.
• Check that you don’t have any ajax calls referencing an empty URL (browsers will interpret such empty url as current page and request current page again make controller action execute few times)
• You forgot to return “false” from JavaScript click event handler for link or button that makes AJAX call. If you forget “return false” browser simply made default action of the link – regular, non AJAX, call to same page)
• Sometimes Firebug and YSlow Firefox (FF) plugins can cause such issues… Just temporary disable them in FF or check in different browser.

Know another reason? Let me know!

For developers that just cannot get Visual Studio Premium, but still want to use some code analysis tool, I would recommend to take a look into new version of FXCop 10 from Microsoft.

Now it’s a part of official  Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4. You can download it for your version of OS (x86, x64 etc) from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=35AEDA01-421D-4BA5-B44B-543DC8C33A20&displaylang=en

After you install SDK, just go to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\FXCop folder and run setup for FXCop from here.

Ah, and be sure – new version support both .NET 2.0 / 3.5 and latest 4.0!

Hope this helps somebody

• Question (Q): Why Django build-in Web Server (development server) works VERY SLOWLY on Windows 7 ? And how to fix this?
  Answer (A): seems it’s all about DNS… To fix this just open C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file (in notepad for example) and uncomment (i.e. remove “#”) in the following line: 127.0.0.1 localhost

• to be continue…

Hi! It’s good news today for a lot of java, ruby and groovy developers – new version “Maia” (officially v9) was just released by JetBrains with a lot of new features (including faster environment, extensive Java 6 support, build-in Google App Engine and Grails projects support etc) – feel read full “What’s new” list.

There exists also not so good news – this time for PHP developers – support of PHP was removed from release of free (”community”) version of IDEA, so developers can stick with other completely free IDEs this time – for example NetBeans comes to my mind this time… as alternative… but after Oracle buy Sun, I not sure it is right choice… but this is “idea” for another post…)

Actually personally I don’t understand why “Community” version does not support PHP, Javascript, Python or Ruby as this languages are used by a lot (if not most) of “open source” developers that for some reasons does not feet into JetBrains licensing of commercial version of IntelliJ IDEA for open source projects. I think “vice versa” if compare to JetBrains – Commercial version must have extended support for Java development, while Community edition must support MORE other open source frameworks / languages, like Ruby, Python or PHP etc. Sure it’s only my “personal” opinion, but I think most of developers will agree with me – people that use IDEA for Java development (usually in enterprises) can (and will!) simply BUY commercial licenses, while a lot of potential IntelliJ users actually want to use it for small open source projects in non-Java languages stack and want to get IDE for FREE!

But totally – all new features show that JetBrains go in right direction – support for most “progressive” and “latest” technologies in IDEA (even if it is available only commercially )

Keep it going, JetBrains!

In this post I will list some well known and widely used jQuery plugins and extensions. Actually I want to maintain this list with “required” stuff to build sites using jQuery framework. I can’t and don’t want to hold here full list of plugins (actually it is already available on jQuery plugins page)  - instead I want to list “common” plugins that I and other developers / designers use on most of web sites. Please let me know if you use some cool plugin that you use all the time and I forget to list here.

• jQuery UI – “provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets”
• Form Plugin – “allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX”
• Metadata Plugin – “extracting metadata from classes, random attributes, child elements and HTML5 data-* attributes”
• Validation Plugin
• Dimensions Plugin – “Extends jQuery to provide dimension-centric methods for getting widths, heights, offsets and more”
• Bgiframe Plugin - “Fixes z-index issues in IE6″
• Watermark Plugin – watermark capability to HTML input and textarea elements
• jReject Plugin – “jReject provides a simple, robjust, light-weight way to display rejections based on a the browser, specific browser version, specific platforms, or rendering engine”

to be continue…

Some additional useful plugins:

• http://plugins.jquery.com/project/lavalamp2 – LavaLamp allows you to add a nice background hover effect to HTML link lists using the Easing library.

Some more links on jQuery:

• http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2009/09/95-exceptionally-useful-jquery-plugins-tutorials-and-cheat-sheets.html
• http://jqueryfordesigners.com/
• http://visionwidget.com/inspiration/web/398-latest-jquery-plugins.html
• http://www.tutorial9.net/resources/22-beautiful-jquery-plugins-for-web-designers/