In this post I am going to show how to implement Basic HTTP authentication in a Web API project by customizing AuthotrizeAttribute. HTTP authentication is a standard protocol and can be easily handled by most popular client and mobile platforms.

ASP.NET 4.5 includes a new feature to minify and bundle CSS and JavaScript within your web application. Static content like javascript and css files contains lot of white spaces and comments. Bundling and minification improves load time by reducing the number of requests to the server and reducing the size of requested assets (such as CSS and JavaScript.) In the past, the recommended technique was enabling compression either using programmatically (I have a post on enabling compression in asp.net using Http Module.), or you can configure it in IIS. But it was difficult configure and has got some performance issues.

Broadcasting a message from SignalR hub is pretty straight forward, but sometimes you may need to do the same from outside the hub, like from MVC controller or a Web Page.

In the recent project I was using few nuget packages. And I was using TFS. Committing these packages into TFS was increasing the size of the repository. Later I found a solution using Enable NuGet Package Restore option. You can enable this option by right clicking on the solution file or from Project > Enable NuGet Package Restore option.

WebAPI will return JSON or XML based on the request accept header. But some times you may need to return JSON only, without considering the accept header.

Sometimes you may required to return anonymous types from your WebAPI functions; I found a situation like this today, where I need to return list of values with a count, which was using to plot some graphs. Initially I thought of creating an class for this purpose with a count property, but later I found a simple solution using anonymous types.

Yesterday while working on an ASP.Net MVC application, I got an error like this from Entity Framework Data Context. The problem started when I deployed the application in IIS server, while in the development server (IIS Express) it was working fine. In the connection string, I was using Windows Authentication.