Microsoft MVC bloggers

Recent Podcasts

ASP.NET MVC — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:58:02 GMT

Just wanted to highlight a couple of podcasts that were suckers gracious enough to have me as a guest. HerdingCode In this podcast I join the fellas at HerdingCode . Although this podcast came out after the Hanselminutes one, it was actually recorded a long time prior to that one. Jon Galloway , who does the editing, probably has some lame excuse about life changing events keeping him busy . I spent most of the time covering what’s new with ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2, how the community influences our project, and how we prioritize bugs. I also finally reveal the dirty truth about Rob Conery ’s departure from Microsoft. What’s notable about this episode is the introduction of a brand new segment, “Abusive Questions from Twitter”. I was having problems...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom Validation

ASP.NET MVC — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:14:25 GMT

This is the third post in my series ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta and its new features. ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released (Release Announcement) Html.RenderAction and Html.Action ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom Validation In this post I will cover validation. No, not that kind of validation, though I do think you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you. Rather, I want to cover building a custom validation attribute using the base classes available in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations . ASP.NET MVC 2 has built-in support for data annotation validation attributes for doing validation on a server. For details on how data annotations work with ASP.NET MVC 2, check out Brad’s blog post. But I won’t stop there. I’ll then cover how to hook into...(read more)

Html.RenderAction and Html.Action

ASP.NET MVC — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:22:24 GMT

One of the upcoming new features being added to ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta is a little helper method called Html.RenderAction and its counterpart, Html.Action . This has been a part of our ASP.NET MVC Futures library for a while, but is now being added to the core product. Both of these methods allow you to call into an action method from a view and output the results of the action in place within the view. The difference between the two is that Html.RenderAction will render the result directly to the Response (which is more efficient if the action returns a large amount of HTML) whereas Html.Action returns a string with the result. For the sake of brevity, I’ll use the term RenderAction to refer to both of these methods. Here’s a quick look at how...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released

ASP.NET MVC — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:21:00 GMT

Today at PDC09 (the keynote was streaming live ), Bob Muglia announced the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta . Feel free to download it right away! While you do that I want to present this public service message. The Beta release includes tooling for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. We did not ship updated tooling for Visual Studio 2010 because ASP.NET MVC 2 is now included as a part of VS10, which is on its own schedule. Unfortunately, because Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta share components which are currently not in sync, running ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta on VS10 Beta 2 is not supported . Here are some highlights of what’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2. RenderAction (and Action) AsyncController Expression Based Helpers (TextBoxFor, TextAreaFor, etc....(read more)

Our little team is growing - Welcome to Jon Galloway and Pete Brown

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:54:31 GMT

Just about two years ago I joined Microsoft . I'm fortunate to work in a home office with a great team that I now lead . We work for the group at Microsoft that runs MSDN , TechNet , ASP.NET , Silverlight.NET , WindowsClient.NET , basically all the online education stuff. The giant group is called STO (Server & Tools Online) and our little group is " stoninja ." That's our internal mailing alias. We create content for all of the sites above but we're also active members of the community. We listen and drive feedback back into the product group. We're not part of the product evangelism group (DPE - Developer Platform Evangelism), but rather we focus primarily on online content creation. I like to think that we're...(read more)

Interface Inheritance Esoterica

ASP.NET MVC — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:43:13 GMT

I learned something new yesterday about interface inheritance in .NET as compared to implementation inheritance. To illustrate this difference, here’s a simple demonstration. I’ll start with two concrete classes, one which inherits from the other. Each class defines a property. In this case, we’re dealing with implementation inheritance . public class Person { public string Name { get; set; } } public class SuperHero : Person { public string Alias { get; set; } } We can now use two different techniques to print out the properties of the SuperHero type: type descriptors and reflection. Here’s a little console app that does this. Note the code I’m showing below doesn’t include a few Console.WriteLine calls that I have in the actual app. static...(read more)

Html Encoding Nuggets With ASP.NET MVC 2

ASP.NET MVC — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:56:49 GMT

In a recent blog post, I introduced ASP.NET 4’s new HTML Encoding code block syntax as well as the corresponding IHtmlString interface and HtmlString class. I also mentioned that ASP.NET MVC 2 would support this new syntax when running on ASP.NET 4 . In fact, you can try it out now by downloading and installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. I’ve also mentioned in the past that we are not conditionally compiling ASP.NET MVC 2 for each platform. Instead, we’re building System.Web.Mvc.dll against ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and simply including that one in VS08 and VS10. Thus when you’re running ASP.NET MVC 2 on ASP.NET 4, it’s the same byte for byte assembly as the same one you would run on ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. This fact ought to raise a question in your mind. If...(read more)

Speaking at Tech-Ed Europe Next Week

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:15:02 GMT

I’m going to Berlin! Next week, I’m giving talks at Tech-Ed Europe on two of my favorite topics: What's New in Microsoft ASP.NET Model-View-Controller ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) 2 introduces new features to make you more productive when building an ASP.NET MVC application. Templated helpers allow automatically associatiating edit and display elements with data types. Areas provide a means of dividing a large Web application into multiple projects. Data annotations allow attaching metadata attributes on a model to control validation. Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX: Taking AJAX to the Next Level Hear how ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 makes building pure client-side AJAX Web applications even easier, and watch us build an entire data-driven ASP.NET AJAX...(read more)

The Microsoft Ajax Library and Visual Studio Beta 2

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:21:39 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released this week and one of the first things that I hope you notice is that it no longer contains the latest version of ASP.NET AJAX. What happened? Where did AJAX go? Just like Sting and The Police , just like Phil Collins and Genesis , just like Greg Page and the Wiggles , AJAX has gone out of band! We are starting a solo career. A Name Change First things first. In previous releases, our Ajax framework was named ASP.NET AJAX . We now have changed the name of the framework to the Microsoft Ajax Library . There are two reasons behind this name change. First, the members of the Ajax team got tired of explaining to everyone that our Ajax framework is not tied to the server-side ASP.NET framework. You can use the...(read more)

The Minutes On 9 - Channel 9 Video Interviews with the ASP.NET 4 Team

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:30:10 GMT

Who loves you? Not only is Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 now available for everyone to download (not just subscribers) but I've got 11 short video interviews with the ASP.NET 4 team up on Channel 9. I was up in Redmond just last week and made sure to stop by the offices of as many ASP.NET developers and program managers as I could. I chatted with a few faces you may recognize and a few you may not. All of them are working hard to make ASP.NET 4 cool. I'm still working on my video techniques, and I used two different HD cameras to film these videos. Your feedback (negative AND positive) is always appreciated. This series of videos is called Hanselminutes on 9 and you can get to all of these (and many more) using the Channel 9 Tag " hanselminuteson9...(read more)

VS10 Beta 2 From an ASP.NET MVC Perspective

ASP.NET MVC — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:30:10 GMT

You probably don’t need me to tell you that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has been released as it’s been blogged to death all over the place. Definitely check out the many blog posts out there if you want more details on what’s included. This post will focus more on what Visual Studio 2010 means to ASP.NET MVC and vice versa. In the box baby! Well one of the first things you’ll notice is that ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 is included in VS10 Beta 2. When you select the File | New menu option, you’ll be greeted with an ASP.NET MVC 2 project template option under the Web node. Note that when you create your ASP.NET MVC 2 project with Visual Studio 2010, you can choose whether you wish to target ASP.NET 3.5 or ASP.NET 4. If you choose to target ASP.NET 4...(read more)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:32:43 GMT

Lots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday. I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish. .NET 4 This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release. Shouldn't every release...(read more)

Hanselminutes Podcast 184: Preview of ASP.NET 4 with Scott Hunter

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:57:21 GMT

My one-hundred-and-eighty-forth podcast is up . Scott's in Seattle this week and catches Microsoft Program Manager (and one of 1000 Scott's) Scott Hunter who shares insights in the history and future of ASP.NET 4. What's coming in VS2010? Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts , a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show. Telerik is our sponsor for this show. Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET . It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't...(read more)

Using the New Microsoft Ajax Minifier

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:25:13 GMT

Last night, Scott Guthrie announced that the ASP.net team published a free tool that enables you to improve the performance of your Ajax applications by reducing the size of its JavaScript files. The new tool is named the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. You can read Scott Guthrie’s announcement here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/15/announcing-microsoft-ajax-library-preview-6-and-the-microsoft-ajax-minifier.aspx And you can download and install the free tool from the CodePlex website here: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=34488 In this blog entry, I explain how you can take advantage of the Microsoft Ajax from the command-line and when you are using Visual Studio. Overview of the Microsoft Ajax Minifier...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Scripts Available on Microsoft CDN

ASP.NET MVC — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:56:02 GMT

A little while ago, Scott Guthrie announced the launch of the Microsoft Ajax CDN . In his post he talked about how ASP.NET 4 will have support for the CDN as well as the list of scripts that are included. The good news today is due to the hard work of Stephen Walther and the ASP.NET Ajax team , they’ve added a couple of new scripts to the CDN which are near and dear to my heart, the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 scripts. The following code snippet shows how you can start using them today. < script src ="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/3.5/MicrosoftAjax.js" type ="text/javascript" ></ script > < script src ="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/mvc/MicrosoftMvcAjax.js" type ="text/javascript" ></ script...(read more)