This post applies to any ASP.NET app that uses .aspx files, whether WebForms or MVC. When you write an aspx/ascx/master file (I’ll just say aspx for here on, but it applies to all), it gets compiled dynamically by the ASP.NET runtime. Note that this is true whether you use a Web Site or a Web Application Project (WAP). While in a WAP, most of the code is built by Visual Studio, the aspx pages themselves are always built dynamically . Normally, when you work with aspx files, you only need to worry about what you write in there, and the specifics of what ASP.NET generates under the cover are somewhat of an implementation details. However, in some cases it’s pretty useful to look at the generated code, either to learn exactly...
Note: this is based on ASP.NET MVC 2 RC , and will not work on earlier builds. The quick pitch: make your User Controls as cool as built-in render helpers! The goal of this post is to show you how to change the way MVC user controls are called from something like this: <%= Html.Partial("~/Views/Shared/gravatar.ascx", new { Email = "foo@bar.com", Size = 80 }) %> To something that looks just like a built-in render helper (like Html.TextBox(…)): <%= Html.Gravatar("foo@bar.com", 80) %> The current model for User Controls in MVC If you have used ASP.NET MVC, you probably know that you can use User Controls (.ascx files) to provide partial rendering. For example, the default MVC app has a Site...
To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to T4MVC page on CodePlex I just posted build 2.6.10. There were also a few builds in between since I last blogged about 2.6, so this post describes some of those changes (full history here ). Fluent route value API As you probably know, T4MVC uses a pattern where the route values are encapsulated using a pseudo-call to a controller action, e.g. Html.ActionLink("Delete Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Delete(Model.DinnerID)) This adds the controller, the action and the method parameters to the route values in a convenient way with no hard coded strings. But in some situation, you may need to add extra values to the route that don’t exist in the action method. Now you can do it as follows...
First, I’ll start with a little disclaimer: this post is not about whether using dynamic is better/worse than static typing. Instead, it’s about making it more convenient to use dynamic if you choose to go that route . Clearly, some people dislike dynamic, as you can see in the comments in that post from Phil Haack , and for the most part, all the key arguments for/against have been made. So anyway, let’s proceed… Recently, a few people have experimented with extending their view pages from ViewPage<dynamic>. The idea is to then be able to access model data using the more convenient dynamic syntax. e.g. check out this thread on StackOverflow, as well as Phil’s post I mention above. One limitation that people are hitting is that you can...
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. ...
Recently, I started playing around with C# dynamic, and blogged how it could be used to call static class members late bound . Today, I was talking to Phil Haack , who I think had talked to ScottGu , and he mentioned that it would be cool to use dynamic to simplify data access when you work directly with SQL query. So I thought I’d play around with that, and it didn’t take much code to make it work nicely. So the scenario is that you’re not using any fancy O/R mapper like LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework, but you’re directly using ADO.NET to execute raw SQL commands. It’s not something that I would personally do, but there are a lot of folks who prefer this over the higher level data access layers. So let’s look at an example...
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