Upgrading to ASP.NET 4.0

Posted 08 June 2010, 22:00 | by | Perma-link

Bit of a Link List this one, but it's got a few nuggets in there too.

Thanks to my excellent web hosts LiquidSix Hosting who upgraded our servers within about a week of ASP.NET 4.0 coming out, I've been able to focus on pulling this site over to the latest platform.

There were various reasons for wanting to do this, from cleaner web.config files, the new <%: %> syntax for HTML encoding output, and indeed answering some of my issues with Entity Framework, but obviously the key reason is it's new and shiney Grin

The key issue I had with it was that I forgot to update one small part of my web.config:

<system.web>
    <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0"/>
</system.web>

As I'd forgotten to set this, I was unable to use any markup when editing my blogs. Thankfully the error message tells you exactly what to set, so the fix was easy.

Other tweaks that also went live this week:

  • TypeKit have recently opensourced their code, and added an events system, which means that in FireFox the Flicker of Unstyled Text should be somewhat less intrusive.
  • The launch of DoodleStatic to host my static files (JS, CSS, images) a small, cookieless domain to speed up download of the site infrastructure.
  • Changing my calls to jQuery and Typkit's core libraries to ajax.GoogleApis.com, so your browser should be able to find them in its cache where other sites have used them.
  • Thanks to Damien Gaurd for spending the time to point out how to use the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespaces in the context of an ASP.NET MVC site, something I'd been meaning to do for some time.

And a few other minor tweaks to keep things tidy.

Filed under: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Site Updates