On a current project I have decided to use NancyFx for services that expose data to the client via Ajax. The solution already uses Umbraco for CMS capabilities and everything is wired up using Castle Windsor for DI.

From the start I was hoping to just install the nuget packages for hosting in an ASP.NET application and for bootstrapping with Windsor. As it turned out neither worked in my case.
Getting Nancy to run alongside an existing site is pretty well documented, so that went pretty smoothly, once I gave up on the package and just followed the documentation.

More...

Prelude

The last year I have been posting more or less the same blogposts here and at blog.vertica.dk – but my plan is to stop that going forward. I have been asked to do more blogging in Danish, and that fits pretty well with the fact that I have been postponing making a decision on which blog to stick with, since I don’t care much for the cross posting. So going forward this blog will be kept in English and It will contain the topics that are either micro-posts or a bit off topic for what I do at Vertica. So lets get started!

Mini-Profiler colliding with Umbraco

For some time I have been using the MVC-Mini-Profiler, to get a quick look at how my pages perform during development. The good thing about the mini-profiler is that it is so light weight, requires little setup and it is a lot less intrusive than most profiling tools.

In spite of its name the profiler works just fine with regular ASP.NET websites and applications, however I did run into a little twist when using it with Umbraco, which is what I want to share today.

To get started using  mini-profiler you simply add the nuget package to your project, and do the regular setup with adding scripts and calling start and stop methods on the profiler.  If you run your site now, nothing will happen that is visible to the naked eye – doh!

The solution

If you take a look at the DOM by using your favorite browsers developer-tools/firebug you will see that some container elements have been added to the page but with no content. This is because the elements are loaded asynchronously, but as the tab in your developer-tool that shows network traffic shows the call to mini-profiler-results returns a 404.

So as you may have guessed by now if you are used to working with Umbraco, you also need to add the mini-profiler-results to the umbracoReservedUrls in the web.config making it look something like this:

<add key="umbracoReservedUrls" value="~/config/splashes/booting.aspx,~/install/default.aspx,~/config/splashes/noNodes.aspx,~/mini-profiler-results" />

Now if you run the site, you should get the profiler box in the top-left corner of the site, and you are ready to go hunting for performance bottlenecks.