Latest Microsoft Blogs

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next releases 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 is the third of three posts in the series that talk about the new Model Binding support coming to Web Forms.  Model Binding is an extension of the existing data-binding system in ASP.NET Web Forms, and provides a code-focused data-access paradigm.  It takes advantage of a bunch of model binding concepts we first introduced with ASP.NET MVC – and integrates them nicely with the Web Forms...

Last week the data team shipped the Release Candidate of Entity Framework 4.1.  You can learn more about it and download it here . EF 4.1 includes the new “EF Code First” option that I’ve blogged about several times in the past.  EF Code First provides a really elegant and clean way to work with data, and enables you to do so without requiring a designer or XML mapping file.  Below are links to some tutorials I’ve written in the past about it: Code First Development with Entity Framework 4.x EF Code First: Custom Database Schema Mapping Using EF Code First with an Existing Database The above tutorials were written against the CTP4 release of EF Code First (and so some APIs might be a little different) – but the concepts and scenarios...

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...

This week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  EF Code-First enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping I’m a big fan of the EF Code-First approach, and wrote several blog posts about it this summer: Code-First Development with...

Microsoft's been releasing a number of right-sized LEGO pieces lately. In case you missed it, Betas have been announced for: SQL 4 Compact Edition - It has a small embedded file-based SQL Database, and a web-server called IIS Express that's compatible with the full version of IIS. "Razor" Page Syntax - A way to make pages/ViewEngine called "Razor." Your sites can be later be expanded to use all of ASP.NET MVC. It's a simple syntax that is easy to learn. WebMatrix - It's a small (15 megs if you have .NET 4, 50megs if you don't) lightweight IDE for making ASP.NET or PHP websites. Good for non-pro developers. It uses the WebDeploy engine to deploy apps to hosts, setting up permissions, copying databases,...

Remember good developers don't just write source code, they also READ it. You don't just become a great poet by writing lots of poems. Read and absorb as well. Do check out the Source Code category of my blog here , there's (as of today) 15 pages of posts on Source Code you can check out. Recently my friend Jonathan Carter (OData Dude, my name for him) was working with a partner on some really weird stuff that was happening with a LINQ to SQL query. Remember that every abstraction sometimes leaks and that the whole port of an abstraction is "raise the level" so you don't have to worry about something. Plumbing is great because it abstracts away water delivery. For all I know, there's a dude with a bucket who runs...

Remember good developers don't just write source code, they also READ it. You don't just become a great poet by writing lots of poems. Read and absorb as well. Do check out the Source Code category of my blog here , there's (as of today) 15 pages of posts on Source Code you can check out. Recently my friend Jonathan Carter (OData Dude, my name for him) was working with a partner on some really weird stuff that was happening with a LINQ to SQL query. Remember that every abstraction sometimes leaks and that the whole port of an abstraction is "raise the level" so you don't have to worry about something. Plumbing is great because it abstracts away water delivery. For all I know, there's a dude with a bucket who runs...

The original NerdDinner Sample was very simple. Two samples, simple, in fact. Perhaps it's the new Northwind, as it's a good way to start working with ASP.NET MVC. However, it's not a perfect sample or an idealized example on how to do many things that users want to do. Fortunately, there's been lots of cool folks in the community who have "forked" NerdDinner and done interesting stuff with it. Each of these samples is usually focused on a specific scenario, so they won't necessarily be merged with the trunk, but they are educational nonetheless. Four Five NerdDinners - Each Accessing Data Differently When NerdDinner was originally done, I did it in Linq To SQL as L2S was fast, easy, had a 1:1 relationship between...

You can use the SQL Publishing wizard in VS 2008/VWD 2008 to deploy a local database from your development machine to a hosting environment on a remote machine. This is how you will accomplish this: Step 1: Create a new web site by selecting menu File...

In Tip#64, we showed you how to convert a GridView's bound fields into template fields. In this tip, we will show you how to quickly create a GridView that is hooked up to a SQL table. Typically, if you want a GridView then you need to add it to the...