For those that haven’t checked it out, bring MiniProfiler into your application via NuGet with a

Install-Package MiniProfiler

If you are working in a web project (MVC, WebForms), you simply add the following line of code in your head block AFTER your jQuery reference (this line is formatted as Razor for MVC 3) -

@MvcMiniProfiler.MiniProfiler.RenderIncludes()

One thing worth mentioning is that on IE9, I had some issues with the UI of the profiler displaying appropriately. I looked around and found a post mentioning adding the following to your CSS file and sure enough, it fixed my IE9 issue. So, give it a shot if you have any problems displaying the profile on Internet Explorer.

div.profiler-popup
{
    overflow: visible !important;
}

Mini-Profiler UI on a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 page

I’ve had success using this for profiling ASP.NET MVC3 applications as well as Entity Framework 4.2 “Code First” queries within the apps, which is great. I still really like the Entity Framework Profiler tool from Hibernating Rhinos and rely on it heavily, but Mini-Profiler does a good job of showing ORM query issues.

I plan to try this out with some old WCF projects in the near future as well. In the meantime, pop it into one of your development applications and make sure your code is performing how you expect.

So, I setup a new sample project and pushed it to github for anyone to try. I have succesfully tested this sample in IIS Express as well as IIS 7. Both had no issues after some minor adjustments. For IIS Express I do note some modifications in the README in the github repo that you should take note of. But simply cloning and running should get you going. Be sure, if you are in Visual Studio, that you tell the project to use IIS Express though.

Here is the link to the sample project on github - https://github.com/amokan/Nuget.Server-Sample-Project

The basic steps to create the project like I did were:

1. Create a new “ASP.NET Empty Web Application” in Visual Studio.
2. Either use the GUI or NuGet Console to install the Nuget.Server package.
3. Adjust the web.config, as needed.
4. Profit (or happiness… i’m not sure what’s motivating you here)

The group meets at Interface Technical Training near the corner of Thomas and Central in downtown Phoenix.

More info can be found here – http://bit.ly/pcsug_apr11

That brings me to (one of) the jQuery Autocomplete plugins. I need this functionality in an ASP.NET webforms application and wanted to give it a shot. I started messing with “jQuery Autocomplete plugin 1.1″ by Jörn Zaefferer. You can find the code and info at http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/. 

I’m mostly interested in doing an autocomplete via a remote web service call that returns json data. The example in the zip file includes a little php page that just responds to a HTTP-GET and spits out some hard-coded json. I’m working in .NET, so I made a simple ASMX web service to query my database and return a DataTable as json. (Note – There are isues with the built-in serializer to return a DataTable as json. A google search will find you a number of functions or alternate ways to generate a json string from a DataTable.) 

Right away, I found I was having problems with the autocomplete in this environment. First off, you have the whole issue with ASMX web methods only accepting a POST by default. This is easy to change, but not advised. You can find info on that issue here – http://encosia.com/2008/03/27/using-jquery-to-consume-aspnet-json-web-services/ and some other good info here – http://encosia.com/2008/06/05/3-mistakes-to-avoid-when-using-jquery-with-aspnet-ajax/ 

You’ll also notice in the above blog links that there can often be issues when POST-ing to a web method with encoding set to json, that you will need to pass your json params as a string. If you’re using something like Firebug to watch your ajax posts, you’ll catch this right away. 

But the main issue for me were the assumptions that the autocomplete plugin makes. It, by default, will only do a HTTP-GET. You can use the $.ajaxSetup in jQuery to set your future ajax calls to a default, but I wanted the ability to make this decision when calling the autocomplete plugin. 

I made these changes to jquery.autocomplete.js in the $.ajax section :

$.ajax({
// try to leverage ajaxQueue plugin to abort previous requests
mode: "abort",
// limit abortion to this input
port: "autocomplete" + input.name,
dataType: options.dataType,
//setup new options for asmx - amokan
type: options.httpMethod,
contentType: options.contentType,
//end new options - amokan
url: options.url,

This allows me to now handle my client side code a little better.

$("#task").autocomplete(
"http://somecomputername/jsonServiceTest/Testing.asmx/GetSomeDataNoParam",
{
dataType: 'json',
httpMethod: 'POST',
contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
max: 100,
scroll: true,
matchContains: true,
minChars: 3,
parse: function(data) {
var rows = new Array();
//your parsing logic
},
formatItem: function(row, i, n) {
//do something
},
width: 260
}
);

I’m still working on cleaning up the data parameter section of the plugin a bit before I post the full code.
If you’re curious, here is my ASMX method. Be sure to add the [ScriptService] attribute to your class in the ASMX file so it can handle AJAX properly. If you are using an older .NET without the System.Web.Script.Services namespace, this will not work for you. Note that the parameters “q” and “limit” are sent automatically by the autocomplete plugin. “Q” is the string currently typed into the text control so you can filter your query based on what the user has typed and “limit” is the max number of rows. Obviously, its up to you to implement these in your query if you chose to.  

[WebMethod]
[ScriptMethod(UseHttpGet = false, ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)]
public string GetSomeDataNoParam(string q, int limit)
{
DataTable dtSomething;
//connect to db, do your exception handling, etc
dtSomething = //your DAL or whatever you use
//use my method to parse the datatable into json
return GetJSONString(dtSomething);
}

Hope this helps a bit and I will be sure to upload some more code as I get this working a bit smoother in my environment.