November 2009 - Posts
To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to T4MVC page on CodePlex One of MVC 2's major new features is the support for breaking up a large application into "Areas". This works by following a structure that looks like: Root folder Models Views Controllers Areas NerdDinner Models Views Controllers Blog Models Views Controllers So basically you still have your top level Models/Views/Controllers folders, and in addition to that you can have an arbitrary number of “Areas”, each having their own set of Models/Views/Controllers folders. Starting with MVC 2.6, T4MVC lets you use areas in much the same way it lets you access top level items. e.g. you can now write: <%= Html.ActionLink("Delete Dinner", MVC.NerdDinner...
Up until now, most things related to T4MVC were happening through my various blog posts about it. And while that was sort of working ok for a while, it was also less than ideal for a couple reasons. First, there was no single place to go to in order to get information about it. You’d basically have to go through the various posts that describe the various features as they were added. And as the number of posts grew, so did the pain involved in doing that. The second issue is that there was no good place to discuss it, ask questions and report issues. So all of those things were mostly just happening organically as comments in my various posts, which really doesn’t work so well. Blog Post comments don’t support threading...
To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex MVC 2 Beta introduces two nice helpers called Html.RenderAction and Html.Action. Phil Haack described them in detail on his blog , so you may want to read through that before reading this post. Basically, they’re two additional methods that follow the standard MVC pattern of passing the controller name and action name as literal strings, and the action parameters as anonymous objects. e.g. Copying from Phil’s example, if you have an Action like this: public ActionResult Menu(MenuOptions options) { return PartialView(options); } You can write this in your View: <%= Html.Action("Menu", new { options = new MenuOptions { Width=400, Height=500} })%>...
To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex T4MVC build 2.5.00 brings a couple of fun new features that I’ll describe in this post. I can’t take too much credit for them as they came from users who suggested them to me, and helped out getting the code going. Support for multiple output files Up until now, T4MVC.tt has always generated a single file, which is the T4MVC.cs that you see get nested under it in VS. And normally, this is the way T4 templates work: they just generate one file. But last week I got an email from Stuart Leeks who pointed me to a new blog post from Damien Guard that describes a nice way to get around this description. All of Damien’s logic is very nicely encapsulated...
Peter Blum has been well known is the ASP.NET world for many years for writing a whole suite of powerful controls, which you can read all about on his site . One thing that was missing on Peter’s resume is that he never had a blog. Well he started one earlier this month, and is making up for the lost time in a big way, with already 11 posts! And we’re not talking about small posts that just point to other people’s stuff (unlike this post I suppose!), but real with useful meaty content. Make sure you check out his blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/peterblum/ . I hope he keeps the good stuff coming! In particular, Peter has been working hard on some interesting data source controls that work with Visual Studio 2010. ...
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