Technology Stack - tail your log files with Baretail

Baretail does a great job of giving you a view of what's going into your log files as data is written to it.

Check it out at http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/

Secret sauce for your webapi - to always return json formatted result

Add this to your App_Start\RegisterWebAPIRoutes.cs file or wherever you happen to register your webapi routes

config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonpMediaTypeFormatter());

reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10514047/how-do-i-handle-jsonp-with-webapi

Unchain yourself from jQuery

As a developer, it's easy to rely on jQuery for everything. How about breaking that link on your next project.

See this post to see how easy it is to do AJAX without jQuery.

Adventures in LINQ Enumerables Extension Methods

var a  = new List<string>{"A", "Z", "C", "D", "C"};
var b  = new List<string>{"G", "D", "E", "Z", "C"};
var c  = new List<int>{1, 1, 1};


System.Linq.Enumerable.Zip(a, b, (a1,b1)=> new {a=a1,b=b1}).Dump("Zip - creates a collection with elements from list a and b matched based on index position"); 
a.Zip(b, (a1,b1)=> new{a1, b1}).Dump("Zip - shorthand");

System.Linq.Enumerable.Aggregate(c, (resultsofar,y)=> resultsofar-y ).Dump("Aggregate1"); //first number is initial value for result so far and starting from second value, function recusrses
c.Aggregate (2000, (resultsofar, cn) => resultsofar+ cn).Dump("aggregate2"); //first argument is initial value, aggregator function is then evaluated for each item in collection

System.Linq.Enumerable.Range(101, 5).Dump("Range - generates a list of numbers starting from 101 to 105");


System.Linq.Enumerable.Except(a, b).Dump("Except - generates a list of containing items from a minus values from b.  Result is A, B"); 
a.Except(b).Dump("shorthand for except");

System.Linq.Enumerable.Union(a, b).Dump("Union - union of two lists, excluding duplicates");
a.Union(b).Dump("Union shorthand");

System.Linq.Enumerable.Concat(a, b).Dump("Concat - make two lists into one bigger list"); 
a.Concat(b).Dump("Union shorthand");

System.Linq.Enumerable.Intersect(a, b).Dump("Intersect - unique list of items which exist in both lists"); 
a.Intersect(b).Dump("Intersect shorthand");

See results of these statements below...

Thoughts on setting default language for a site

This post makes a useful suggestion.
http://blog.boro2g.co.uk/automatically-set-the-language-of-the-content-editor/

I want to see how it plays out if you have a use case where a site is primarily in english but has some spanish sections, for example. You wouldn't want the user's choice of language reset every time they click on a node.