Ed Andersen

Software Developer and Architect in Japan

  • Windows 8.1’s user-hostile backup story

    Update 13th June 2015: It looks like Microsoft has reversed course and reinstated the Windows 7 Backup and Restore feature in Windows 10! Success! Update 16th Sept 2013: What follows is a rant written after upgrading to 8.1 and seeing my automated backups just stop working and the backup restoration function also removed. An afternoon…

    Read more…

  • ASP.NET MVC Basics Part 2: ViewModel to Model Mapping and Editing

    In Part 1, I walked through creating a simple form with a backing ViewModel and Validation. In Part 2, I’ll walk through creating a backing Model and Edit functionality. To start off from here, load up the code from part1: https://github.com/edandersen/mvcformtutorial/tree/part1 The final code for Part 2 will be uploaded here: https://github.com/edandersen/mvcformtutorial/tree/part2 Model Mapping flow…

    Read more…

  • ASP.NET MVC Basics Part 1: View Model binding

    I’m going to walk through the basics of Form submission with ASP.NET MVC, showing some best practices. This set of tutorials will be useful for developers moving away from ASP.NET WebForms into ASP.NET MVC or even Rails developers curious about how we do things in .NET. You can download the code for Part 1 at:…

    Read more…

  • Life with Surface RT – and why I’ve upgraded to a Surface Pro

    I picked up my Surface RT on launch day last year as I happened to be in New York for work. The strong yen made it a bargain and I’ve been living with it since. Because it won’t run most desktop apps, it has seen limited use. It was an excellent video player during flights,…

    Read more…

  • Adding a Dynamic Robots.txt file to an ASP.NET MVC site

    Robots.txt is required to allow search engines to properly index your site, and more importantly not index it. If you have a public-facing staging or preliminary site that you don’t want to show up in Google results, you need to make sure that it returns the correct robots.txt with the Disallow: / line to prevent…

    Read more…