November 15th, 2010
What are canonical links used for
The Canonical link element was introduced in 2009 to help cleanup duplicate pages on search engines.
The html code is shown below and it basically informs search engines of the primary URL for that page. This means any alternative entry points to that page will not be picked up as duplicate content. This HTML must be specified in the HEAD section of the document.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>
The search engines have also posted about this on a Google blog post or help center documentation from Google, Yahoo’s blog post, or Microsoft’s blog post.
How to easily use canonical links in MVC2 using Action Filters and Master Pages
Add this to the master page in the head section as follows:
<%=ViewData["CanonicalURL"] %>
<!--Your other head info here-->Create a Filter Attribute (CanonicalURL.cs):
public class CanonicalURL : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public string Url { get; private set; }
public CanonicalURL(string url)
{
Url = url;
}
public override void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext)
{
string fullyQualifiedUrl = "http://www.example.com" + this.Url;
filterContext.Controller.ViewData["CanonicalUrl"] = @"<link rel='canonical' href='" + fullyQualifiedUrl + "' />";
base.OnResultExecuting(filterContext);
}
}Call this from your actions:
[CanonicalURL("Contact-Us")]
public ActionResult Index()
{
ContactFormViewModel contact = new ContactFormViewModel();
return View(contact);
}For some other interesting articles on Search Engine Related posts check out Matt Cutts blog
April 29th, 2010
I thought I would do a quick post about Creating and more importantly Deleting cookies in ASP.NET as it’s not quite as obvious as it may seem with the misleading .Remove() method which doesnt do as you would expect.
I hope this helps someone get started with cookies if your just getting started with the .NET framework.
Creating a cookie
This is a basic example of how to create a cookie in ASP.NET C#
//Create a new cookie, passing the name into the constructor
HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie("MyCookie");
//Set the cookies value
cookie.Value = "CookieValue";
//Set the cookie to expire in 1 day
cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);
//Add the cookie
Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);
Deleting a cookie
When deleting a cookie all you need to do is amend the HttpCookie object so it has an expiry date in the past, then re-save the cookie to push the new value to the client.
// Clear cookie Info
if(Request.Cookies["MyCookie"]!=null){
HttpCookie cookie = Request.Cookies["MyCookie"];
cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1);
Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);
}
February 5th, 2010
Today ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 has been released.
To download it click here
It seems there are only a few changes to this release which you can find here: Release Notes
A few words from Phil Haack’s blog:
The biggest change in this release was described by Brad Wilson in his blog post on Input Validation vs. Model Validation in ASP.NET MVC. Also included in this release are an assortment of bug fixes and performance improvements.
The window to provide feedback on this release is going to be very short as we are closing in on the RTM. If you want to provide input into this release, please do take the bits for a spin as soon as possible. I’m pretty excited about this release as I can see the end of the tunnel fast approaching. 
At this point, we’ll only be taking recall class bugs for ASP.NET MVC 2. All other bug reports will be filed against ASP.NET MVC 3. Sometime in the near future, I’ll start sharing some of our planning around that. How exciting!
