Welcome to Imar.Spaanjaars.Com

Update 6/6/2010: the MVC version is already live at http://imar.spaanjaars.com and the MVC subdomain is no longer available.
I just uploaded the release candidate of my new web site built with ASP.NET MVC to my server.

As a developer and a beta-software fanatic, I tend to install and try out a lot of software. Some of it works well and adds value to my "developer toolkit". However, quite often the software is too buggy to work with, has a negative impact on my system's performance or leaves traces when uninstalled. Additionally, just using Windows and the installed applications tends to slow down a system after some time as well. Since having a speedy and responsive system is important for a productive developer, you need to find ways to keep your machine as fast as possible.

Over the years I found a good way to minimize the impact of these applications and Windows usage, enabling me to get my machine back in a clean state in just a few minutes. How?

Since a few weeks, separate chapters from three of my books are available on eBookPie.com.

When you think about testing an ASP.NET Web Applications you may be thinking about just a few topics. Maybe you're thinking about manual testing, where a tester goes through some scripts with a series of steps detailing the expected behavior of a web application. Or maybe you're a modern .NET developer, just making the move to the ASP.NET MVC framework, and have Unit Testing as the first topic that comes to mind when you hear the words Testing Web Applications.

Initially, this book review about Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson was going to be much longer.

UPDATE: Links to the MVC site on the URL mvc.spaanjaars.com are no longer active, now that the site is live at imar.spaanjaars.com.

I just uploaded a new version of my web site in MVC to mvc.spaanjaars.com. This new version has the following features:

• All data access is now done with repositories (using Entity Framework at run-time).
• My Controllers and repositories are fully testable.
• I am using Castle Windsor as my Dependency Injection tool to inject concrete repositories into my controllers at run-time or during testing.

A long time ago I worked on a web application for a large Dutch newspaper that provided access to all pictures that had ever been published in the paper, or were taken by photographers employed by the publishing agency. In total, there were around 250,000 pictures in the database used by the web application. One of the areas I worked on was the "picture list" that had features such as displaying, searching, filtering and paging of pictures. Things seemed to work fine on my machine, even with the large amount of pictures in the database. Until one day I worked from home.

They're here....

Today I noticed that my new book Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB is now available on Amazon.

UPDATE: Links to the MVC site on the URL mvc.spaanjaars.com are no longer active, now that the site is live at imar.spaanjaars.com.

Yesterday I uploaded a new version of my web site to mvc.spaanjaars.com. Besides a number of small changes in terms of layout and design, I added two main features.