Client-Side Validation with AJAX/Dynamic Form

One of the thing in my to-do list for MVC is "figure out how to do client-side validation". Isn't that supplied out of the box since like ASP.NET MVC 2? Yes, it is - but it only work out of the box if the form is not dynamically fetched.

In my projects, most of the form is a dynamic form - so user click an icon and then the form (empty or pre-filled) is fetched via AJAX and then displayed (some times in a jQuery dialog). This is a quite common scenario, for example: you are looking at your account profile screen and displayed there is a list of your phone numbers that you have registered. Let's say you then want to edit one of those since you changed your phone number. So you click the edit button/icon next to your phone number on the screen and a dialog box pops with the old phone number, you edit it, click "Save" and the list refreshes with your phone number.

To simply enforcing a "required" field validation in this scenario was quite complicated. Especially when your AJAX submit handler is a custom handler (instead of using the stock ASP.NET MVC AJAX Helper). But now, by adding less than 10 lines of code, add 2 lines of configuration settings in the web.config and including less than 3 javascripts - it is all possible!

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Munchkin Strategy: Orc

An Orc card says this:

An orc who is hit with a curse can always choose to ignore the curse and lose a level instead - unless he's already at level 1.

When an orc fighting alone defeats a monster by more than 10, he goes up an extra level.

On the surface, these abilities seem to be superficial and not that powerful. Lose a level? What idiot prefers to do that instead of absorbing a curse? Extra level if defeating more than 10? Sounds either useless or extremely hard!

But, to a skilled Munchkin player, becoming an orc can be a powerful strategy in both early and late game.

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Utilizing pass-by-ref Parameters

I recently helped a friend of mine code an application and at some point I created a method using a pass-by-reference parameter. Apparently this is new to him. I asked several other programmer friends that I know and most of them either know about it but never use it or don't know about it. So - here is a post about it.

To illustrate the usage of pass-by-reference, I will create to a simplistic example - where we want to calculate a loan amortization: with initial loan, interest rate, and loan period - and resulting in: monthly payment and total interest over loan term

So in code, without the pass-by-reference, we have to do this somewhat in 2 steps/methods:

    decimal monthlyPayment = CalculateMonthlyPayment(initialLoan, rate, period);
    decimal totalInterest = CalculateTotalInterest(initialLoan, rate, period);

With the definitions:

public decimal CalculateMonthlyPayment(decimal initialLoan, double rate, int period) { 
        decimal result;
        // calculate monthly payment
        return result;
    }

    public decimal CalculateTotalInterest(decimal initialLoan, double rate, int period) { 
        decimal result;
        // calculate interest
        return result;
    }

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