CodeJAK Designs

January 3, 2008

As part of my MVC PD this week I’m creating a real website that does real things.

This website is called CodeJAK and I hope to have it go live soon.

Here is the initial design “CodeJAK design by Alex Knight” – its cool as!

So here is the low-down:

CodeJAK is a site that allows you to store code snippets – don’t let me lose you there, it’s got some cool features (okay, it *will* have some cool features).

First and foremost my plans for CodeJAK are to create a Visual Studio plugin that manages your snippets. All snippets you store in CodeJAK are stored on-line – so when you install CodeJAK on another machine and log in, all your snippets will be synched between your machines automatically.

The next feature is that you can publish your snippets if you like, i.e. share them. Then others can search for published snippets (in VS, or on the accompanying website).

Other features include community features like tagging snippets, comments on snippets, RSS feeds (subs to a feed based on user or tags or some other search query) – you get the idea (don’t steal it! – if you think its good then leave a comment and help me out!)

P.S. If you have heard of this idea before (which I havn’t) then please let me know (let me down gently).


MVC Server Control Code Behind Problem

January 3, 2008

This week I am doing a few days PD on the new ASP.NET MVC Framework.

I came across a problem when using server controls with MVC based ViewPage (which is inherited from System.Web.UI.Page) class.

Basically you create a page, add some controls and the controls are not accessible in code behind.

After a bit of hunting I discovered a simple workaround – every time you create a ViewPage based ASPX file, right click on the project and click “Convert to Web Application”.

Convert to Web Application

What this does is update the *.aspx.designer.cs/vb files that let you properly use codebehind.

This has been identified as a bug (here, but I can’t find the source of the bug identification, comments please!).