You remember my Opteron Workstation Gaming Rig Hybrid aka Scylla right? It’s been almost 2 years since I built my rig and I think it’s time to look at a upgrade. What to upgrade though, the 9800GTX video card still runs all games very well, the processor and RAM is rarely fully utilised, however there is definitely a bottleneck after a little bit of digging around like most modern computers the hard drive is a clear bottleneck.

One of the major trends in the last couple of years is the use of Solid State Drives (SSD), from Wikipedia:

“A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. SSDs are distinguished from traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads.”

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To use this extension download and reference MVC 2 Futures .

public static string ActionFor<TController>(this UrlHelper helper, Expression<Action<TController>> action) where TController : Controller
{
    return Microsoft.Web.Mvc.LinkBuilder.BuildUrlFromExpression(helper.RequestContext, helper.RouteCollection, action);
}

To use this extension in a view use:

Url.ActionFor<MyControllerType>(controller=>controller.MyAction())

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In April I did a comprehensive blog post about the Html.EditorFor() and Html.DisplayFor() helpers in MVC 2, and there use with templates. It turns out I missed quite a cool feature added in the MVC 2 RTM release in March.

Taken from the release notes:

ASP.NET MVC 2 now includes new overloads of the EditorFor and DisplayFor methods. These overloads contain a parameter that accepts an anonymous object that can be used to provide extra view data. The view data provided in this parameter is merged with any existing view data that is passed to the template.

This new overload is very handy for providing additional information to your template without any nasty hacks. In this post we are going to continue our Employee example from my MVC Templates and MVC Model Binders posts, we will change the code to make use of the new overload.

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Thanks to BraveNewCode for the cool plug-in WPtouch.

Currently the WPtouch plug-in supports the following devices: iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre/Pixi, and BlackBerry Storm.

I would recommend this great plug-in to anyone using WordPress. Now there is no excuse not to support touch based smartphones on your blog.

Next task a better syntax highlighter WP plug-in. Any recommendations? You know what to do.

D

I program with different languages and for a while now I have wanted to make the K&R variant coding style my default in Visual Studio.

So what do I mean by the K&R variant coding style, this coding style was named after co authors of the book The C Programming Language (thank you Wikipedia!) Kernighan and Ritchie. The variant I like is based on Java – rather than taking up a new line I like the opening brace on the first line of the statement block.
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