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} })%>...

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform.  This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out.  Here is a quick overview:   IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release! The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines .  It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines.  This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI .    ASP.NET MVC 2 beta! The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available...

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...

I had a great time at my talk today at PDC2009 .  I was able to spend much of the time in a demo…   Here is a summary of that demo so you can walk through it on your own machine: What you need to get started: Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 Silverlight 4 Beta (now includes RIA Services ) Completed Solution (starting step and demo files ) Check out the slides     Starting Off I am starting off with the new Business Application Template that gets installed with RIA Services.  This new template includes: Pattern for page navigation Log\Logout and new user registration support Localizable User settings Shared Code   For this demo, I am going to used a customized version of the template.. After you create the project,...

In my post on RIA Services: From Vision to Architecture , a while back (right after MIX09), I mentioned that I like to think of RIA Services as RAD for RIA. At that point we had a very early preview of framework bits with little tools support. A large part of jumpstarting your development actually centers around good tooling. VS2010 brings tooling for RIA Services (now: WCF RIA Services). Scott Hanselman demonstrated some key features used in building a Contacts application (as shown on the right) during the keynote at PDC09 . The latest version of RIA Services is now available for download. It works on .NET 4 and VS2010 as well. You can also check out a video tutorial on using RIA Services and Visual Studio 2010. In this post, I want to highlight...

You all probably know that new HTML 5 standard is coming. We made a new intellisense schema that you can add to VS 2008 or VWD Express 2008 and get intellisense and validation on HTML 5 elements. Note that schema is for markup only, we do not have DOM2 update for jscript intellisense yet. How to install the schema: Download attached ZIP file. Place html_5.xsd in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\html Run either x86 or x64 reg file depending on the OS and VS/VWD flavors installed. For example, for VWD Express installed on 64-bit OS run HTML-5-Schema-Reg-x64-VWD.reg and for VS 2008 installed on 32-bit OS run HTML-5-Schema-Reg-x86.reg. Restart VS You can select HTML 5 in the schema dropdown and HTML 5 element...

Lots of wow from this morning with Silverlight 4 (and RIA Services) taking center stage in the keynote, here at PDC09. [ Full post continued here... ] Read More...

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...

Today at PDC09 , Scott Guthrie Announced the beta of WCF RIA Services .  As you may know RIA Services is a set of end-to-end experiences that makes it as easy to build Silverlight based n-tier applications as it is to build traditional 2 tier apps.   I am very excited about this release as it represents a lot of great feedback we have heard from many of you.    A few goodies in this release based on your feedback You told us you wanted to get up and running with the UI quicker, so we enabled the “DataSources” window that allows you to drag and drop “tables” exposed by your Domain Service onto the form and get meaningful UI to start with.   No more guessing about the Xaml syntax for databinding, or incantation...

I just returned from Oredev and TechED EMEA , both conferences were very interesting in their own special ways.  TechED was of course bigger with a lot of good sessions on my specific area while Oredev is a bit more small and cozy, and a way to meet people that deal with completely different things than I do, like JRuby, Clojure, UI Design what have you… and I guess to some extent to get a reality check and see what the world looks like outside of my .net bubble:) Windows Crash Dump Analysis with Daniel Pearson In particular I really enjoyed Daniel Pearson’s session on Windows Crash Dump Analysis where he discussed how to debug BSODs (blue-screens). He said something interesting that really struck a chord with me.  “You should be happy...