The new System.Web.WebPages 2.0.0.0 assembly that ships with the latest MVC4 contains a pretty cool feature that lets you override the current browser capabilities. Sure, most modern browsers let you set a custom user agent string out of the box or via extensions. However, there are certain scenarios, where you would want to switch the user agent on the server side. That’s where the BrowserHelpers class comes in handy.
If for whatever reason you use IHttpHandlers in your MVC project, it may be that you are still using web.config to set the path to the handlers. This can get tricky and easy to miss, especially if you move from cassini dev to IIS7 live.
There is however a better, neater way to declare paths to your handers. If you are using MVC, you can register the handlers in RouteTable, along with your other routes. All you need to do is implement IRouteHandler interface and register a route using your custom route handler.
Model binding in MVC attempts to map values from IValueProviders to your specified model. The value providers (FormValueProvider, QueryStringValueProvider, HttpFileCollectionValueProvider, RouteDataValueProvider, JsonValueProviderFactory … ) abstract the actual value retrieval and binders then handle the value mapping onto the model.
You can create custom model binders to abstract and centralise complex mapping logic that would otherwise end up in your controllers or services. When dealing with a larger number of binders, it is good to refactor common logic and enable wiring up of the new binders easily. Instead of having to register each binder one-by-one in global or prefix the type in the actions, we can create our own model binder broker to replace the default MVC DefaultModelBinder.
Statistically Awesome Style Sheets with Compass can help you easily generate sprites. Not only that, it will re-generate the images, re-calculate the position and update the CSS every time you update the source images. This post explains the basics and aims to address the most common scenarios when creating sprites.
Traditionally, settings in ASP.Net apps are stored AppSettings area of the app as a key-value store. More complex apps would create specific config sections. The app would then have a static settings wrapper that would read the content from the web.config.