In years past building Visual Studio Extensions have often been considered the realm of the big boys. Staff working at Jetbrains or the Microsoft employees of the world. Last year I saw a talk given by Mads Kristensen aimed at taking away some of this stigma and showing how easy the guys at Microsoft have tried to make it for developers like you and me to just up and write extensions. I’ve been wanting to build one ever since, but haven’t had a good enough excuse to jump right in – until now. Here follows the creation of “OnCheckin Web.config Transformer”.

When writing forms for your ASP.Net MVC websites the common approach to ensuring only real people use them site is to simply add an Html.AntiForgeryToken() to your form’s view mark-up and controller and be on your way. I've recently found out this approach while simple, can actually have pretty serious affects on both how your visitors use of your site as well as their view of it’s professionalism and stability – two things you really don’t want any trouble with.

The past year has been a crazier year than most for me. I moved jobs to working in publishing where I've created a new thriving user group within the very company (post to come soon), launched the most awesome way for ASP.Net web developers to deploy their sites and generally loved being a developer for another 365 days. Our jobs are made so much easier by the online contributions of others, and moving into another year we get a chance to give something back.

Continuous Deployment is an time-saving, team-loving, kudos-earning, stress-reducing capability that any team is wise to implement. OnCheckin is definitely aiming to bring this awesome’ness to as many ASP.Net developers as possible by making it fast and easy to setup. Once you’ve started out automating deployment though iteration is the key. Deploying your website early and often is great but with OnCheckin this goes further – Add-ons. And where better to start than helping developers out than with an often overlooked part of web development: Application Security.

Constantly over the past few years I’ve thanked my lucky stars that I’ve had continuous integration and deployment setup for the web sites I’ve been working on. It is one of the few development opinions where I break the “religion and politics” laws of social etiquette. I feel incredibly strongly about the benefits that having a good Continuous Integration and Deployment story can bring to a project and it’s team. Sadly, not everyone has been able to experience the awesome sauce of CI/CD. I’ve been working hard to change that.