Tough MVC 5 OWIN External Authentication Issue

Finally managed to solve a weird issue with external Google authentication in a new MVC 5 application I am working on (CrowdBacklog). This is to help me remember what to do and hopefully help others fix their issues if they stumble upon it… The Scenario VS2013 update 2 Brand new MVC 5 project targeting .Net 4.5.1 – no old MVC4 / Web Forms crud messing things up Startup.Auth.cs has been updated with Google clientid and […] Read more »

Getting into iOS and Android development with Xamarin

I haven’t posted for a while (like 6 months or so) due to a really exciting project that I have been working on. I have been bound by a confidentiality agreement and so have avoided posting in order to not cross any lines that may cause legal issues… The project that I have been working on is a multi-platform native mobile app for a major European travel company. We looked at several ways to deliver the project […] Read more »

Fixing Cross Appdomain Call Timeouts

Working with dynamically loaded assemblies in a separate AppDomain is a powerful tool for protecting your execution context and creating a pluggable arcitecture. Brad Smith has written a great post on how to set it up using a generic architecture. There is one issue with the way he set it up for a project I have been involved in which resulted in us getting the dreaded remoting exception “Object: has been disconnected or does not exist […] Read more »

Mocking a LINQ Queryable Repository for TDD

Using ORM frameworks like Entity Framework and NHibernate has become standard practice for many developers. POCO using Entity Framework also supports test-driven-development nicely since we can create tests for our business domain objects without having a dependency on the repository used to store them. Entity Framework also supports LINQ queries which allows us to avoid defining every conceivable query necessary for our application ahead of time, instead letting the code that uses the domain objects construct a […] Read more »

6 Steps To Get Entity Framework 5 Working with MySql 5.5

After much battling with configuration and such I have finally managed to get EF5 Code First and MySql 5 working together using the Oracle/MySql .NET Connector 6.5.4 or the official Connector version 6.6.4. This configuration does not currently support Migrations. The steps are as follows: Grab EF 5 from NuGet Grab MySql.Data and MySql.Data.Entity from NuGet (6.5.4) or MySql (6.6.4) Configure a MySql Data Provider Configure a MySql Connection String Create a Custom MySql Database […] Read more »

Using MySql 5 as Membership Backend for ASP.NET 4.5 MVC 4 Application

Oracle provide MySql ASP.Net web providers through NuGet – search for MySql.Web. Using the MySql providers you can easily use MySql as your membership/profile/role backend for an ASP.Net application. But beware the MySql providers do not currently support the ASP.NET 4.5 templates since those templates use ExtendedMembershipProvider and SimpleMembershipProvider and they have an internal dependency on MS SQL Server… I am going to demonstrate using it as the membership provider for an MVC 4 application […] Read more »

Using NuGet and Git Together

Just had to setup a new project with NuGet packages using Git as source control. In order to set this up properly you need to add #Nuget packages/ to your .gitignore file so that all the binaries, configs and what ever other resources the NuGet packages contain don’t get committed to your repository. This can significantly speed up push and pull requests between repositories with .NET code since you can exclude many megabytes of unnecessary synchronisation and rely […] Read more »

Windows Phone 7 Emulator Running on Parallels

I have previously not managed to get the Windows Phone 7 emulator running on my dev install (Windows 7 on Parallels 7). After upgrading to Parallels 8, installing the latest Parallels update for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 7.1.1 SDK update. I have managed to get it working a little more. It still takes ages to startup: 2-3 minutes of “Windows Emulator is doing a full OS boot” before the Windows Phone logo shows […] Read more »

Windows Phone 8 Emulator on MacBook Pro – No SLAT

Trying desperately to try out the Windows Phone 8 emulator… I am running a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The WP8 emulator requires Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Hyper-V requires that the processor supports virtualization through Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). Intel Core i5 &, i7 should support it so a newer MacBook Pro might work, but for me that makes it impossible to run the WP8 emulator […] Read more »