Last Updated: Feb 13th 2012

Create A New MVC 3 Project

Create the Project.  File | New | Project:

Choose the following options and make sure to create a tests Project as well (obviously):

End up with the following:

Create a DBScripts folder in the project.

Create ASP.Net Application Services DB Scripts

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The best way to create the scripts is to use aspnet_regsql.exe.  The –sqlexportonly option is great because it makes the tool output the script it would have used and doesn’t actually create anything.  Need to do this because running the tool directly against my webhost won’t work.  So have to manually create the database first using the control panel for my website and then run the script by remotely connecting to the database using SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio).

Use the following aspnet_regsql.exe command line options:

-d <database>
Database name for use with application services. If no database name is specified, the default database "aspnetdb" is used.

-A all | m | r | p | c | w
Add support for a feature. Multiple values can be specified together.
all: All features, m: Membership, r: Role manager, p: Profiles, c: Personalization, w: SQL Web event provider

-sqlexportonly <filename>
Generate the SQL script file for adding or removing the specified features and do not carry out the actual operation. Can be used with the following options: -A, -R, -ssadd, and -ssremove.

Want Membership, Role and Profiles so use the following:
aspnet_regsql -d "DbName" -A mrp  -sqlexportonly CreateDbName.sql

The first part of the created script contains the database creation bit.  Comment this out because the database is created manually through the website control panel.

Save this file in the DbScripts folder and make sure that it does not “Copy Local” when doing the build because just want to save the script in the project (not deploy it to the remote server).

Installing NuGet Packages

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NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. NuGet is a member of the ASP.NET Gallery in the Outercurve Foundation (see the press release). 

Grab the NuGet installer from here.  Once NuGet is installed, when you right-click on the “References” folder in the Project, you should see an option to “Manage NuGet Packages…”

This will bring up a dialog that allows you to add NuGet Packages in the project.

Install Glimpse

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If you’re developing MVC 3 apps, then you need to get and start using Glimpse.  It’s an awesome tool to help you debug what’s going on on the server but from the client.  Scott Hanselman said “Glimpse, along with ELMAH,  is officially my favorite add-on to ASP.NET MVC”.  ‘Nuf said.

Bring up the NuGet manager by right-clicking on the Project References and choose “Manage NuGet Packages…”.  Once it’s up, search for Glimpse and add the one for “Glimpse for ASP.Net MVC3 (Beta)”:

Glimpse is now installed.  To find out more about Glimpse:

• Using Common.Logging with Glimpse and ASP.Net MVC
• Should I deploy Glimpse to the production site?
• Glimpse ALT.NET NYC – Nov 2011 (video)

Install ELMAH For Logging To SQL Server

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Right-click on the “References” folder  and choose “Manage NuGet Packages…”:

Search for ELMAH and install the one for “ELMAH on MS SQL Server (requires manual config)”:

To log to SQL Server, ELMAH requires a SQL Compatibility Level of 80.  After manually creating the database, run the following script:

After setting the compatibility level, open and run Elmah.SqlServer.sql against the database:

Modify the ELMAH connection string in Web.config:

To verify ELMAH is properly installed, run the app locally in debug mode and go to http://localhost:whateverPort/elmah.axd and any logged errors should show up:

To find out more about ELMAH:

• Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.Net
• ELMAH (Scott Hanselman’s blog)
• How to get ELMAH to work with ASP.Net MVC [HandleError] attribute?

Install MiniProfiler

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(to be continued…)

• ASP.Net MVC 3 Roundup of Tutorials, Videos, Labs and other Assorted Training Materials Excellent set of resources.  Going through the links on this page alone will keep you busy for ages.
• ASP.Net MVC 3 Tutorials Index Another wicked list of links/resources.
• Intro to ASP.NET MVC 3, by Rick Anderson, January 12, 2011 Great introductory tutorial for ASP.Net MVC 3 that spans 18 articles and covers everything you want to know to get up and running.
• Pluralsight ASP.Net MVC 3 Videos Set of 10 free videos from Pluralsight that gives a great overview of ASP.Net MVC 3.

• ASP.Net MVC 3 Videos From Microsoft
• Where can I learn more about how to structure an MVC site? Question on stackoverflow that has greats links in the answers.

If you want a quick tutorial on how to install/use Siren to rename files, please read my other post.

There are many more examples of renaming expressions over at the Siren forum so head on over there to check them out.

Photos

Digitized date/time (24 hour format).

%Xdd{"%Y.%m.%d"}-%Xdd{"%H.%M.%S"}.%e

Digitized date/time (AM/PM hour format).

%Xdd{"%Y.%m.%d"}-%Xdd{"%I%p.%M.%S"}.%e

MP3s

Artist – Album – Title.mp3

%Aa – %AA – %At.%e

Artist – Album – TranckNumber – Title.mp3

%Aa – %AA – %AT – %At.%e

Sequence Numbering

5 Digits In Sequence Number

%n{5}.%e

5 Digits In Sequence Number, Start Counting At 10

%n{5,10}.%e

5 Digits In Sequence Number, Start Counting At 10, Increment By 5

%n{5,10,5}.%e

Substrings And Sequence Number

First 3 characters of original filename and 5 Digits In Sequence Number

%b(1,3)-%n{5}.%e

It took me a while to figure out some of the renaming patterns so I’m posting them here and hopefully they will be useful to others as well.  And if you have any useful patterns of your own, please send them to me (geek {at} sylvainw.com) and I’ll update this post.

Note that the instructions below apply to Siren v2.01 and may be different for other versions of the software. 

Installing Siren

The latest official release is v2.01 and you can download it here.  Siren doesn’t come with an installer (it doesn’t need one) so once you’ve downloaded the ZIP file, simply unzip it to a directory where you want Siren to run from.  In this example, I unzipped the files to E:\junk\

Using Siren

When you first run Siren, you should see the following screen:

Click “OK” and then you should be in the software like so:

The basic steps for working with Siren are displayed in the welcome screen but I’ll re-iterate them here and then explain them in more detail afterwards.

1) choose the directory that contains the files you want to rename

2) select the files you want to rename

3) enter the renaming expression in the “Expression” combo box

4) click the “Play” button to rename the files

1) Choose The Directory That Contains The Files You Want To Rename

Click on the choose directory button in Siren:

This will then bring up a dialog that lets you browse for the folder you want to use.  In this example, I’m going to use E:\junk

With the test files on my laptop, Siren then displays the following:

A quick note on subdirectories.  You can see above that no files are displayed (only the test folders).  Say I wanted to display all the files in the above folders without having to go into each one separately.  Then all I’d have to do is click the Subdirectories button:

Siren will then display all the files in my test directories:

2) Select The Files You Want To Rename

Selecting the files you want to rename is easy.  Simply click the checkbox beside each file that you want to rename.  In this example, I’ve set the current directory to be E:\junk\photos and I’ve chosen all the photo files:

You’ll notice that there isn’t anything in the “Future Name” column even though I’ve checked the photo files.  That’s because I haven’t yet specified a renaming expression.  That comes next.

3) enter the renaming expression in the “Expression” combo box

To give you an idea of just how many different options Siren gives you for renaming files, right-click in the Expression combo box (that should bring up the Completion dialog):

Explaining what all of these are is far beyond the scope of this post so I’m only going to talk about a few common ones.

I do a lot of time-lapse photography and I always want my photos to be named using the date/time (including the second) so that they will sort in the order that I took them in.

If you bring up the Completion dialog (right-click in the Expression combo box), then select the Exif tab, you’ll see that the %Xdd option represents the DateTimeDigitized.  This is exactly when the photo was taken.

Siren also lets you specify a Date format using an expression in curly braces (e.g. – { }).  Again, if we look in the Completion dialog, on the Date tab, we’ll see the following options:

I want the full date and time in my filename so I’m going to use the following format string: %Xdd{"%Y.%m.%d"}-%Xdd{"%H.%M.%S"}.%e

I’m telling Siren to use the time that the photo was digitized (%Xdd) and from that, format the file as Year.Month.Day-Hour.Minute.Second.  %e is simply the existing file extension.  In this example, using the above filter, I end up with:

All we’ve done so far is enter the renaming expression.  Now we need to actually rename the files.

4) click the “Play” button to rename the files

All we have to do to actually rename the files is hit the “Play” button.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll see the filenames automatically get updated in Siren.  In this example, after renaming my files I end up with the following:

Before rename:

After rename (you can see the new filenames):

Undo Is Your Friend!!!

If for whatever reason you’ve made a mistake, don’t do anything else and do an Undo.  You can do this by using the Undo button:

or by selecting Undo from the Action menu:

Either way, your files will all be renamed to their original names:

Renaming Using A Sequence Number

One of the more common things to do when renaming files is to use the number of the file in the selected sequence (e.g. – photo1.jpg, photo2.jpg, photo3.jpg, etc.).  This is really easy to do with Siren.

The sequence number is represented by %n.  So, if we want to rename all our photos with the sequence number we use the following:

OK, that’s kind of cool but what if you have thousands of photos to rename and you want them to be able to sort in the proper order when looking at them directly on your hardisk?  You’ll want to pad those numbers with leading “0” characters so that you end up with photo00001.jpg, photo00002.jpg, photo00003.jpg, etc.  No sweat in Siren.

Just like in the Date/Time example above, we can specify options for the %n flag using a set of curly braces (e.g. – {}).  So if we specify %n{4} for the sequence flag, there will be 4 digits in our sequence number format:

If we specify %n{10} for the sequence flag, there will be 10 digits in our sequence number format:

SWEET!

I can hear you now.  “OK smarty pants, what if I want to start my sequence number at something other then 1?”.  No problem!

The second option you can pass to %n is the starting number for the sequence number.  Whoot!  So if we use %n{4,20}, we will will have sequence numbers that are 4 digits long (padded with “0”) and start at 20:

Niiiiiiiiiiice.

And one last one that I know you’re dying to find out about.  What if you want the sequence numbers to increase by more then 1 every time (e.g. – 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.).  Again, Siren has you covered because the third option you can pass to %n is the increment to use for the sequence number.  Holy moly!  So if we use %n{4,20,5}, we will have sequence numbers that are 4 digits long (padded with “0”), start at 20 and increment by 5 every time:

So there you have it.  A few examples of how to use Siren to rename files.  I have another post that documents the expressions I’m using to rename my files.  Head over to that one to have a look and if you have any good ones of your own, please send them to me so that I can add them to my list.

Blog Posts

• How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers
  This is an absolute must read for anyone brand new to Web development.  It goes into excellent detail on how browsers do their thing (from when you first click a link to when the content is rendered on screen).
• HTML5: The Facts And The Myths
• HTML5: briefing notes for journalists and analysts
• HTML5: A technical specification for Web developers (Introduction)

Tools & Stuff

• HTML5 Boilerplate

http://www.powershellmagazine.com/

Blog Posts

• 2011-09-14
  How does the new Windows 8 Runtime compare to Silverlight and WPF?
  Awesome thread on stackoverflow discussing WinRT.
  
• 2011-09-19
  Mary Jo Foley – Here’s the one Microsoft Windows 8 slide that everyone wants to redo.
  
• 2011-09-13
  David Burela – BUILD keynote day 1–Metro experience with Jupiter, XAML and HTML5/JS
  The best Day 1 summary of the Build conference that I’ve found.
  
• 2011-09-14
  David Burela – BUILD keynote day 2–Windows Server 8 and developer tools
  
• 2011-09-13
  Mary Jo Foley – Microsoft to developers: Metro is your future
  Mary Jo’s Day 1 Summary of the Build conference.
  
• 2011-09-17
  Laurent Bugnion – My thoughts about Build, Windows 8, WinRT, XAML and Silverlight
  
• 2011-06-14
  David Burela – Premature cries of Silverlight / WPF skill loss. Windows 8 supports all programming models
  Probably the best post I read at the time about how people had started poking Windows 8 to see if WPF/Silverlight were dead or not.

Videos

• Jensen Harris clearly explains Metro and the thinking behind it.

Tools and stuff…

• Windows Developer Preview downloads
• Windows 8 Developer Preview Metro style app samples
• Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk)
• Windows 8: Tips and Tricks for mouse/keyboard users
• The Windows Dev Center
• Visual Studio 11 developer preview Web installer
• ASP.NET MVC4 developer preview

“Sinofsky’s newest blog post also makes it clear (to me, at least) that the new HTML5/JavaScript/Metro apps are going to be the new, cool showcase apps from Microsoft’s perspective.”

Can’t wait to see what MS announces at the Build conference in a couple of weeks…