Microsoft MVC bloggers

ASP.NET MVC + Selenium + IISExpress

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:11:55 GMT

The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can create integration tests for ASP.NET MVC applications by using a combination of Selenium WebDriver and IISExpress. Integration tests are useful when you want to test an entire user story. For example, you might want to test whether a user can successfully add an item to a shopping cart. Adding an item to a shopping cart might require the execution of C# code, database code, and JavaScript code. Using an integration test, you can verify that the entire process of buying an item from your website works. Typically, an integration test is contrasted with a unit test . A unit test is used to test a unit of code in isolation. A unit test is typically used to verify the behavior of a single method...(read more)

New ASP.NET website launched

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 07:01:00 GMT

A few weeks ago we introduced a beta of a freshly designed http://asp.net website. Today we launched it. Jon , myself, and the team that manages the site took lots of your feedback (lots from the comments of the Beta Blog Post ) and did our best to incorporate as much as we could. This is just the start, and we've got lots of plans for the future including responsive design, more text content, localization, more HTML 5, HD Video, closed captioning and lots more. It is a big site with a thousands and thousands of pages. However, a lot of those pages were hard to find. We're continuing to try to folks what they need in fewer clicks. There's new content for people getting started , including " choosing a technology " videos...(read more)

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

ScottGu's Blog : MVC — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 04:58:52 GMT

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...(read more)

Ajax Control Toolkit November 2011 Release

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:48:29 GMT

I’m happy to announce the November 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This release introduces a new Balloon Popup control and several enhancements to the existing Tabs control including support for on-demand loading of tab content, support for vertical tabs, and support for keyboard tab navigation. We also fixed the top-voted bugs associated with the Tabs control reported at CodePlex.com. You can download the new release by visiting the CodePlex website: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Alternatively, the fast and easy way to get the latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit is to use NuGet . Open your Library Package Manager console in Visual Studio 2010 and type: After you install the Ajax Control Toolkit through NuGet, please...(read more)

ASP.NET Connections Fall 2011 Slides and Code

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 02:00:39 GMT

Thanks everyone who came to my talks at ASP.NET Connections in Las Vegas! There was a definite theme to my talks this year…taking advantage of JavaScript to build a rich presentation layer. I gave the following three talks: JsRender Templates – Originally, I was scheduled to give a talk on jQuery Templates. However, jQuery Templates has been deprecated and JsRender is the new technology which replaces jQuery Templates. In the talk, I give plenty of code samples of using JsRender. You can download the slides and code samples RIGHT HERE HTML5 – In this talk, I focused on the features of HTML5 which are the most interesting to developers building database-driven Web applications. In particular, I discussed Web Sockets, Web workers, Web Storage...(read more)

NuGet Package of Week #11 - ImageResizer enables clean, clear image resizing in ASP.NET

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:57:19 GMT

The Backstory: I was thinking since the NuGet .NET package management site is starting to fill up that I should start looking for gems (no pun intended) in there. You know, really useful stuff that folks might otherwise not find. I'll look for mostly open source projects, ones I think are really useful. I'll look at how they built their NuGet packages, if there's anything interesting about the way the designed the out of the box experience (and anything they could do to make it better) as well as what the package itself does. Today, it's imageresizer . Bertrand Le Roy has long been an advocate of doing image resizing correctly on .NET and particularly on ASP.NET. Last week he posted a great post on a new library to choose...(read more)

RFC: New Beta.ASP.net website

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:49:31 GMT

Before I worked for the ASP.NET team as I do now, I worked for MSDN . While I was over there, part of my time was spent working on the http://asp.net team. I led the charge to move the site over to Umbraco , and we did. Over the last two years, we have continually made improvements to the .NET ( asp.net , silverlight.net , windowsclient.net ) sites. In July, the MSDN team announced the release of a new Silverlight site, and today I'm happy to announce the Beta launch of a redesigned ASP.NET website at http://beta.asp.net . This redesign is still a work in progress , but we wanted everyone to see where we are heading with not just a new look and feel, but also improved organization and navigation that will hopefully make content easier to...(read more)

September 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:28:43 GMT

I’m happy to announce the release of the September 2011 Ajax Control Toolkit. This release has several important new features including: Date ranges – When using the Calendar extender, you can specify a start and end date and a user can pick only those dates which fall within the specified range. This was the fourth top-voted feature request for the Ajax Control Toolkit at CodePlex. Twitter Control – You can use the new Twitter control to display recent tweets associated with a particular Twitter user or tweets which match a search query. Gravatar Control – You can use the new Gravatar control to display a unique image for each user of your website. Users can upload custom images to the Gravatar.com website or the Gravatar control can display...(read more)

New Tools and New Content - ASP.NET, Visual Studio 11 Web and .NET 4.5 Developer Preview (with commentary)

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:22:59 GMT

While all of you Build attendees are making me feel bad because you have a fancy Tablet and I don't (sell me yours!) the folks over here in the "Angle Brackets Team" (I'm trying out some new names. One will stick.) have been busy. Here is a summary of all the items from our team that have been announced and shown at Build this week, all of this will be publicly available today (9/16) along with a some narrative and asides from yours truly. They are listening One of the things I am am personally enjoying in working daily with this build of Visual Studio is that there's dozens (hundreds) of little "mental speed bumps" that are smoothed over. A lot of thought was put into workflow and common scenarios in order to...(read more)

NuGet Package of the Week #10 - New Mobile View Engines for ASP.NET MVC 3, spec-compatible with ASP.NET MVC 4

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:26:13 GMT

I did some basic mobile view engine work for ASP.NET MVC for Mix in 2009 and then created what I thought was a better ASP.NET MVC Mobile ViewEngine in 2010 . Unfortunately, the second one (the "better" one) had a caching bug that only showed itself in Release mode. This last month, Jon, John, Peter and I updated NerdDinner to MVC 3 with Razor and a pile of other new features . One of those new features was jQuery Mobile support and that meant we need to fix this bad Mobile View Engine. Additionally, ASP.NET MVC 4 will include actual supported Mobile Views support , so the pressure was on. However, we wanted to make sure any new MVC 3 Mobile View sample was mostly compatible with whatever scheme ASP.NET MVC 4 uses. The original folder...(read more)

NerdDinner being updated to MVC3 with Razor, HTML5, GeoLocation, EF CodeFirst, jQuery Mobile, YepNope and Modernizr and a fixed Mobile Device Capabilities ViewEngine

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:11:10 GMT

Two years ago Rob , Phil , and I released our MVC 1.0 book with the Gu helping with the big intro. I created the basic Nerd Dinner sample application ( code here ) and released the first 185 pages for free. Since the initial 1.0 release, we've had help from lots of people like Dave Ward , Andrew Aarnott and Jon Galloway on a lot of little things like JavaScript and OpenAuth support, then John V. Petersen moving us to MVC3 with Razor Views, and Peter Mourfield taking on lots of JavaScript and new features. These guys started working on a feature here and a feature there in our spare time. It's been a collaborative effort with folks dropping in, contributing here and there with long periods of silence in between. After John V. Petersen...(read more)

Learning about Progressive Enhancement - Supporting Mobile Browsers with CSS3 Media Queries

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:03:39 GMT

I blogged about how happy I've been working with designer Jeremy Kratz on my recent site redesign . We've been meeting lately about small improvements and tweaks. One of the core goals was to support many screen sizes from 30" down to a small smart phone screen. You can see the results on the right in a Windows Phone and iPhone. My team is doing a lot of work on Mobile lately, not just with things like jQuery Mobile and what that means not just for ASP.NET but the mobile web in general. We've also worked with 51Degrees and they've even created a NuGet package that can help you tailor your site to any device. You'll hear more about Mobile in ASP.NET from Steve soon and I'll be sharing some ideas in a few upcoming...(read more)

Bug and Fix: ASP.NET fails to detect IE10 causing _doPostBack is undefined JavaScript error or maintain FF5 scrollbar position

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET MVC — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:59:16 GMT

Browser version numbers continue to march on. IE9 is here, IE10 is coming , Firefox 5 and 6 are here with 7 and 8 in the wings , Opera's on 11, and Chrome is on, I dunno, somewhere between 14 and 50. Regardless, we'll all be on version 99 before The Singularity. There is a bug in the browser definition files that shipped with .NET 2.0 and .NET 4, namely that they contain definitions for a certain range of browser versions. But the versions for some browsers (like IE 10) aren't within those ranges any more. Therefore, ASP.NET sees them as unknown browsers and defaults to a down-level definition, which has certain inconveniences, like that it does not support features like JavaScript. If you want to see this for yourself, create a...(read more)

Adding the New HTML Editor Extender to a Web Forms Application using NuGet

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:29:19 GMT

The July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit includes a new, lightweight, HTML5 compatible HTML Editor extender. In this blog entry, I explain how you can take advantage of NuGet to quickly add the new HTML Editor control extender to a new or existing ASP.NET Web Forms application. Installing the Latest Version of the Ajax Control Toolkit with NuGet NuGet is a package manager. It enables you to quickly install new software directly from within Visual Studio 2010. You can use NuGet to install additional software when building any type of .NET application including ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications. If you have not already installed NuGet then you can install NuGet by navigating to the following address and clicking the giant...(read more)

Ajax Control Toolkit July 2011 Release and the New HTML Editor Extender

Stephen Walther on ASP.NET — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:37:15 GMT

I’m happy to announce the July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which includes important bug fixes and a completely new HTML Editor Extender control. You can download the July 2011 Release by visiting the Ajax Control Toolkit CodePlex site at: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Using the New HTML Editor Extender Control You can use the new HTML Editor Extender to extend any standard ASP.NET TextBox control so that it supports rich formatting such as bold, italics, bulleted lists, numbered lists, typefaces and different foreground and background colors. The following code illustrates how you can extend a standard ASP.NET TextBox control with the HtmlEditorExtender: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"...(read more)