If and when you have to deploy your MVC application, you'll soon find out that IIS6 does not support Url Rewriting.  There are a number of options available to you, for a good list check out Steve Sanderson's Deploying ASP.NET MVC to IIS 6, the one I'm currently using is:

Use a wildcard mapping for aspnet_isapi.dll

This tells IIS 6 to process all requests using ASP.NET, so routing is always invoked, and there’s no problem. It’s dead easy to set up: open IIS manager, right-click your app, go to Properties, then Home Directory tab, then click Configuration. Under Wildcard application maps, click Insert (not Add, which is confusingly just above),  then enter C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll for “Executable”, and uncheck Verify that file exists.

Done! Routing now just behaves as it always did in VS2008’s built-in server.

Unfortunately, this also tells IIS to use ASP.NET to serve all requests, including for static files. It will work, because ASP.NET has a built-in DefaultHttpHandler that does it, but depending on what you do during the request, it might use StaticFileHandler to serve the request. StaticFileHandler is much less efficient than IIS natively. You see, it always reads the files from disk for every request, not caching them in memory. It doesn’t send Cache-Control headers that you might have configured in IIS, so browsers won’t cache it properly. It doesn’t do HTTP compression. However, if you can avoid interfering with the request, DefaultHttpHandler will pass control back to IIS for native processing, which is much better.

For small intranet applications, wildcard mappings are probably the best choice. Yes, it impacts performance slightly, but that might not be a problem for you. Perhaps you have better things to worry about.

For larger public internet applications, you may need a solution that delivers better performance.

Snippet taken from Steve Sanderson's Deploying ASP.NET MVC to IIS 6

For more information take a look at ScottGu's blog, Tip/Trick: Url Rewriting with ASP.NET

A comprehensive list of culture codes used for localising and in conjunction with the CultureInfo class.

The CultureInfo class specifies a unique name for each culture, based on RFC 4646 (Windows Vista and later). The name is a combination of an ISO 639 two-letter lowercase culture code associated with a language and an ISO 3166 two-letter uppercase subculture code associated with a country or region.

If you are like me, I like to keep my Visual Studio environment as clean as possible, so if I can get away from adding any addins in to Visual Studio I will always go for that option.

So when it comes to testing I prefer to run with NUnit and run it as n external program.  

To do this just right click on the unit test project -> choosing the properties option -> setecting the Debig tab -> choose "start external program" and enter the NUnit assembly path, in my case this is "C:\Program Files\NUnit 2.5\bin\net-2.0\nunit.exe", next is to select the command line arguments and point this to your unit test dll,

e.g.  "C:\Program Files\NUnit 2.5\samples\csharp\money\bin\Debug\cs-money.dll" /run

The "run" parameter will automatically run the loaded project

Validation is such an important part of development, and the best way I have found for the MVC is by Steven Sanderson, xVal, which is a validation framework for ASP MVC, even Scott Gu things it is absolutely fantastic.

If you are after using xVal with Linq to SQL then it is well worth check out Integrating xVal Validation with Linq-to-Sql by Adam Schroder

It's worth checking out Client-side form validation made easy by Adrian Grigore to extend this even further validation.

Don't take my word for is, check out, ASP.NET MVC Validation Refresh: Best Techniques & Frameworks by Graham O’Neale

I was wondering today if anyone had produced any benchmarks on the speed and performance of LINQ, so I had a look around and found that LINQ 2 SQL is 4 times faster than the Entity Framework.  Why is this?  It is due the the fact that the Entity Framework is a more generic solution, where as LINQ to SQL can be more fine tuned to the underlying database structure.

Here are a few links I found that might explain things in more details

ADO.NET Entity Framework Performance Comparison

How Slow is 'Slow'?

There are many ways of managing a Scrum Sprint, but I always look for the easy ways, I came across Deborah Hartmann, spreadsheet which I have found very useful and easy to get along with.  Once you understand the processes of Scrum and what is required the spreadsheet speak a thousand words.

Sprint Backlog.xls (5.68 mb)

I have found LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework has a few missing features, one of these is the ability to update the designer diagrams, and this is where Huagati DBML come to play.

Huagati DBML/EDMX Tools is an add-in for Visual Studio that adds functionality to the Linq2SQL/DBML diagram designer in Visual Studio 2008, and to the ADO.NET Entity Framework designer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Here is a list of Slides and Source code for DDD South West 2009 room 3

For full details on each of the talk check out the Agenda 

These files are now on the DDD South West web site

Here are some photos too

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/bryanavery102/DDDWouthWest#

In object-oriented programming, mock objectsare simulated objects that mimic the behavior of real objects in controlled ways. A computer programmer typically creates a mock object to test the behavior of some other object, in much the same way that a car designer uses a crash test dummy to simulate the dynamic behavior of a human in vehicle impacts.

It is possible to perform integration testing on the Membership Provider, take a look at this blog entry to find out more Integration testing the MembershipProvider

Within the Project we are using Rhino Mocks, Oren Eini is doing a great job with this framework, and I think it's the only one that seems to be keeping up with the latest features in .NET, other than TypeMock. Plus, it's totally free to use. It's also the only one other than TypeMock which does not require you to input strings for method names you'd like to mock, which is cool. It's compelling to use it but the project is currently maintained by just one person. If Oren decides to drop it, or for any reason stop working on it, the book might turn out outdated quite quickly. Plus, it's not very widely used, though it seems to be gaining in popularity.

References

Introduction to Mocking with Rhino Mocks

Mocking

Code Samples