Microsoft MVC bloggers

April 14th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API and Visual Studio

Here is the latest in my link-listing blog series: ASP.NET Easily overlooked features in VS 11 Express for Web : Good post by Scott Hanselman that highlights a bunch of easily overlooked improvements that are coming to VS 11 (and specifically the free express editions) for web development: unit testing, browser chooser/launcher, IIS Express, CSS Color Picker, Image Preview in Solution Explorer and more. Get Started with ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms : Good 5-part tutorial that walks-through building an application using ASP.NET Web Forms and highlights some of the nice improvements coming with ASP.NET 4.5. What is New in Razor V2 and What Else is New in Razor V2 : Great posts by Andrew Nurse, a dev on the ASP.NET team, about some of the new improvements...

New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series)

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the performance of applications.  This feature can be used by all ASP.NET applications, including both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms solutions. Basics of Bundling and Minification As more and more people use mobile devices to surf the web, it is...

Great Free Video Training on ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC

We’ve recently published some great end-to-end ASP.NET video training courses on the http://asp.net web-site.  Created by Pluralsight (a great .NET training company), these video courses are available free of charge and provide a great way to learn (or brush-up your knowledge of) ASP.NET Web Forms 4 and ASP.NET MVC 3.  Each course is taught by a single trainer, and provides a nice end-to-end curriculum (from basic concepts to working with the new Entity Framework “code first” model to security, deployment, and testing).    Below are some details on the two free training courses we published this weekend (and links for how to watch them): ASP.NET MVC 3 Training This weekend we posted the final videos in a brand new 10...

ASP.NET MVC 3 and the @helper syntax within Razor

ASP.NET MVC 3 supports a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last last 9 months: Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with...

HTML5 Improvements with the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update

Last week I blogged about the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update , and then followed it up with a detailed post that covered using the EF Code First and the new Data Scaffolding features in it. Today’s blog post is a continuation of this series and covers some of the new HTML5 improvements with the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update release. Project Template Support for HTML5 Semantic Markup The ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update adds support for you to optionally use HTML5 semantic markup when creating new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects.  You can specify this by checking the “Use HTML5 semantic markup” checkbox when creating new projects: Selecting this checkbox option does two things: 1) It causes VS 2010 to use HTML5 semantic markup elements like <header>...

EF Code First and Data Scaffolding with the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update

Earlier this week I blogged about the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update that we shipped last month.  In today’s blog post I’m going to go into more detail about two of the cool new features it brings: Built-in support for EF 4.1 (which includes the new EF “code-first” support) Built-in data scaffolding support within Visual Studio (which enables you to rapidly create data-driven sites) These two features provide a really sweet, and extremely powerful, way to work with data and build data-driven web applications. Scenario We’ll Build To help illustrate how to use the above features, we’ll walkthrough building a simple data-drive site.  It will support listing products: As well as creating/editing new products (and categories): We can now...

Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here .  The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here . ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features.  Some of the improvements...

VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.   You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here . Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables.  SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does...

Links to my “Best of 2010” Posts

I hope everyone is having a Happy New Years! 2010 has been a busy blogging year for me (this is the 100th blog post I’ve done in 2010).  Several people this week suggested I put together a summary post listing/organizing my favorite posts from the year.  Below is a quick listing of some of my favorite posts organized by topic area: VS 2010 and .NET 4 Below is a series of posts I wrote (some in late 2009) about the VS 2010 and .NET 4 (including ASP.NET 4 and WPF 4) release we shipped in April: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL...

ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor

This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss how Razor enables you to both implicitly and explicitly define code nuggets within your view templates, and walkthrough some code examples of each of them.  Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing...