Rick Version 02 – Building a custom ActionResult to perform a HTTP 301 redirect

mstum — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:13:56 +0000

Yesterday I've made the very first version of Rick, a URL Shortening Service in ASP.net MVC, and today I've made the first addition.

In Version 02 of Rick, I have added a custom ActionResult to perform a HTTP 301 redirect instead of the default HTTP 302 one. You can get the Source Code on http://www.codeplex.com/rick, and you can watch the tutorial video on Vimeo. Topics include a short overview of HTTP 301 vs. 302 and how to actually create a custom ActionResult.

Rick Version 02 - Building a custom ActionResult to perform a HTTP 301 redirect from Michael Stum on Vimeo.

Rick URL Shortening Service – an ASP.net MVC learning project

mstum — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:56:15 +0000

All right, I said I wanted to start learning ASP.net MVC, and I did make some progress A few weeks ago, I was talking about creating a project called Écriture, a Twitter clone that companies can deploy internally. That project is still in the plans, and when I was creating the "Wishlist" (Or Product Backlog, as the SCRUM guys like to call it) for Écriture, eventually I realized that I wanted a URL Shortening service as well, since in many corporate intranets, URLs can be really long, and using tinyurl, is.gd and all the other services have some confidentiality concerns (hint: Using tinyurl to shorten "company.internal/documents/marketing/unaccouncedproduct.htm" is possibly not very smart).

I wanted to kill three birds with one stone, so I decided to make this a standalone project. The three birds are 1. the actual URL shortening Service, 2. a project where I can play with all the newest technologies, 3. a project that allows me to create some tutorial videos.

The name of the Project is "Rick", and it's source code is hosted on CodePlex, at http://www.codeplex.com/rick

Version 01 was just released, and it actually fully works already: You can put in a long URL, get a short URL back, put that short URL in a browser, and get redirected to the original URL. And the best of all: I have created a Tutorial video for that, which you can watch online or download (download requires free registration with Vimeo). Granted, Version 01 is ugly, has no error handling and lacks a lot of features, but I am actually going to improve it over the next few weeks, making it more robust and I also plan to add more technologies to it, for example Windows Azure or Silverlight.

For your convenience, here is the video:

Rick Version 01 - Building a URL Shortening Service in ASP.net MVC from Michael Stum on Vimeo.

Please let me know what you think and what you would like to see in the future.

Not Rocket Science » Rick

Rick Version 02 – Building a custom ActionResult to perform a HTTP 301 redirect

Rick URL Shortening Service – an ASP.net MVC learning project