Where’s Lou

Just finished writing the documentation for the most recent feature added to Spark. It provides output caching for sections of a template that could be costly in terms of rendering or data acquisition.

Part of this comes back to Phil’s blog post about Donut Hole Caching in ASP.NET MVC. Especially below where he writes, as he’s thinking out loud, “This would have to work in tandem with some means to specify that the bit of view data intended for the partial view is only recreated when the output cache is expired for that partial view, so we don’t incur the cost of creating it on every request.”

I have to admit I’m not necessarily a huge fan of the built-in ASP.NET page caching directives… Also didn’t particularly care for the forced alignment of partial-boundaries and cache-boundaries. I would hate to have a larger number of smaller files on disk simply because that’s the breakdown at which I wanted to cache the individual parts. In an ideal world I would like to be able to quickly and easily mark an expensive bit as cacheable, and provide the caching details that relate specifically to that bit, and be done with it.
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Here’s a sample of a technique that might be of general interest. It came up retrofitting a particular url structure onto an existing ASP.NET application originally built with the Web Client Software Factory. I came into the project fairly late in the game and the ROI for migrating to MVC would be nearly zero, so instead a technique was used which welds System.Web.Routing onto a web forms app in a fairly transparent fashion.

Putting Lipstick on a Web Site

To start with there are a few ground rules and goals to establish. One is that a 301 permanent redirect is desirable from older urls onto new routed urls. Another is that not all urls in the app need to be fixed “in place” in the original html response assuming the 301 redirects will keep the resulting urls canonical. Third is that it’s highly desirable to be able to calculate the new route given an old url server-side, for such things as the site map and updating the links on pages which are particularly significant.
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Lots of fun this weekend camping with Brenda. It was a scramble with some light grocery shopping and packing beforehand so some of the food was improvised. One thing which turned out surprisingly well was the Spam and cheese sandwiches.

In a nutshell - duct tape a tongs to the end of a spatula for length. Use the spatula to slice spam into 8mm slices. Place single slice on spatula and wrap around with tin foil, twisting like hard candy wrapper. Cook liberally over fire, unwrap carefully, put on hamburger bun and spray with pressurized cheese in a can. Enjoy.

Brenda swore by them. A warning however - have only one without an antacid on hand.

There was a brilliant fireworks display on the fourth with dozens of cakes of two- and three-inch mortars. Long story short Brenda’s cousin was involved in the show and I was enlisted to be perimeter security. So with flashlights in hand as Brenda and I watched for anyone who would may have wandered up to the launching area and we had point blank view of the show. Didn’t get hit by much debris at all. :)