Filters are pieces of logic that can be attached over controllers or actions which affects the way in which a request get processed. Filters are normally used to perform the common functionalities in an application like authorization, caching and logging. Filters can be applied over actions, controllers or at global level. When the filters are applied at global level they affect all the actions of all controllers. In this article we will learn about the basic things of filters, types of filters, creating custom filters and more.

Exception handling is a serious matter in any application, whether it’s web or desktop. Implementing a proper exception handling is important in any application. In most cases once we catch the exception we have to log the exception details to database or text file and show a friendly message to the user.

In ASP.NET applications, error handling is done mostly in two ways: at local level using try-catch blocks and at global level using application events. ASP.NET MVC comes with some built-in support for exception handling through exception filters. The HandleError is the default built-in exception filter. Unfortunately, the HandleError filter not gives a complete answer to the exception handling problem and that makes us to still rely on the Application_Error event.

In this article, we will learn about the HandleError filter and discuss about the different exception handling mechanisms that will fit to an MVC application.

In a web application the domain classes and the validations associated with those classes forms the Model. Validation plays a core part in a Model. In ASP.NET MVC, model validations are done by using Data Annotations. Data Annotations are nothing but special attributes that are applied to a class or properties of a class. In many cases these built-in validation attributes are not sufficient to fulfill our business requirements and in those cases we can go for building our own custom validations.

In this article we will see how to apply basic validations to a model and also we will see how to create custom validations by implementing the ValidationAttribute class or IValidatableObject interface.

I wrote my first blog post about achieving dependency injection using Ninject right here, there we have discussed about some basic stuff and even tried a small sample. One of the nice things about Ninject is there are different extensions available along with the core assemblies to work with different frameworks. Ninject has extension to work with ASP.NET MVC framework as well. Along with the core assemblies we need to add assemblies Ninject.Web.Common and Ninject.Web.Mvc to use in MVC projects. Ninject.Web.Common is a common library for both web-forms and MVC. You can download the Ninject core and extensions from here.

We have two options to use Ninject MVC extensions in projects: one is adding the binaries directly to the projects and the other way is installing from NuGet Package Manager Console (Install-Package Ninject.MVC3). In this post we have used the first approach.

Filters are behaviors that can be added to different stages in the ASP.NET MVC request processing pipeline. There are four different types of filters: Authorization, Action, Result and Exception. The Action filters are the ones that are called before and after an action is executed.

One of the interesting thing with the action filters is, we can even change the parameters before passed to an action and that’s what we are going to see in this article.

In ASP.NET MVC the Routing Module is the URL routing engine that directs the incoming requests to controller actions. There are cases where we need to impose constraints over the incoming requests that are mapped routes. These constraints are used to avoid from directing invalid requests to the controller actions.

In this article we are going to see how to create a simple custom route constraint and supply it to a mapped route.

In ASP.NET MVC the controller is the component that receives requests from the client, performs some actions and returns results back to the client. The controller typically returns results as data or views. The ASP.NET MVC 4 beta comes with a new type of controller called ApiController that helps to create RESTful applications in an easy and efficient way. So having two types of controllers now experts advise to use the default controller for returning views and the ApiController for returning data. Since the default controller itself capable of delivering both data as well as views I don’t see many benefits by introducing the new ApiController. It would be great if the default controller has been extended to add the RESTful features into the MVC framework.

In most of the MVC applications we have controllers that return both data and views. The problem is that from a single controller action we can’t return both data as well as views. Many times we end up writing two controller actions one to return view and the other to return data in either JSON or XML format (for AJAX calls). Having two controller actions makes more chances of code duplication. It would be really nice if we can return both data as well as view from a single action itself. Doing this stuff is quite difficult in ApiController because it doesn’t have capabilities to return views. So we left with the option of using the default controller to achieve that.

ASP.NET MVC 3 is a highly extensible framework that allows us to replace most of the built-in parts in the processing pipeline with custom implementations. As default it comes with two standard view engines: Razor and the Web-Forms view engines. The interesting thing is the framework provides extensions that allow us to register even our own custom view engines.

In some web applications the business model is available as XML and developers prefer to use XSLTs for rendering data as HTML. In those cases instead of using the built-in view engines it would be a nice choice to use a XSLT engine that renders the data as HTML. There are couples of XSLT view engines already available: one at MVCContrib and the other at NuGet. In my current project I need a mini XSLT view engine so instead of using the existing ones I implemented one myself.

The ASP.NET MVC is a web application framework developed by Microsoft that implements the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. It was first released in April 2009. ASP.NET MVC framework is a lightweight, highly testable presentation framework that is integrated with existing ASP.NET features. Based on ASP.NET, it allows software developers to build a Web application as a composition of three roles: Model, View and Controller.

The ASP.NET MVC Framework couples the models, views, and controllers using interface-based contracts, thereby allowing each component to be easily tested independently. In this presentation we are going to see about the important advantages and features of ASP.NET MVC.

Dates and times are very important in any online application. If you are making an online transaction it is important to record the date and time you are making the payment. Usually those values are recorded by the payment processing system and stored in a database. This payment processing system can be built using different server-side technologies like Java, ASP.NET, PHP etc. Most of these languages provides a built-in data-type to store date and time. The nice thing about web is the payment processing system and all the data associated with it is stored in a server that can be located in any part of the world and the users from all over the world can access the system for making payments through a browser.

Since different parts of the world have different timezones the same event can be represented by different date-times depending upon the timezone. In this article I’m going to explain you how we can display the date-time in clients timezone.