Latest Microsoft Blogs

A while back, I blogged about how ASP.NET Dynamic Data apps can uses an Associated Metadata class (aka a ‘buddy’ class) to add metadata attributed to properties defined in a generated class. It’s a mostly ugly thing that was made necessary by limitations of the C# and VB.NET languages: they don’t let you add attributes to properties defined in another partial class. What I didn’t mention there is that this ‘buddy’ class mechanism is actually not specific to Dynamic Data apps, and can in fact be used anywhere. Since I’ve recently heard of several cases of users trying to do something similar, I’ll describe how it’s done. If you’re familiar with TypeDescriptionProviders (which have been around since ancient times), this will look very trivial...

So there is this guy in the ASP.NET Community named Peter Blum who writes great ASP.NET Controls. One of the control sets he offers is a Data Entry Suite with ASP.NET Dynamic Data support. I want to share the link because, apart from the controls being great, there is also useful info on Dynamic Data http://www.peterblum.com/des/dynamicdata.aspx   Technorati Tags: Microsoft , ASP.NETOOP , Dynamic Data Read More...

If your web site is heavily data driven then here is a quick and easy way for you to create one without writing much code. All you need is Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 installed on your box. Dynamic Data Web Sites makes...

Today I'm excited to share that we've released DynamicData Preview 4 on codeplex. Check out the latest bits here . This release is particularly interesting not only for people that have been using Dynamic Data for a while now, but anyone that has an existing application today who wants to use some of the niceties Dynamic Data offers without having to take all the junk associated. Take a look at the SimpleDynamicData project for examples. Existing Sites Here are 2 good reasons to use Dynamic Data: Rich model validation Rich templating support via FieldTemplates If you've ever written a data driven app in webforms using our data controls, you would have realized that we are lacking a lot when it comes to validation. You can enable...

ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a framework that lets you create data-driven ASP.NET Web applications easily. It does this by automatically discovering data-model metadata at run time and deriving UI behavior from it. By default for a Dynamic data Web Application...

ASP.NET Dynamic Data is one of the "Big New Things" in ASP.NET development. It's a templating / scaffolding system in ASP.NET that REALLY accelerates rapid application development. I did a set of Hoe-Do-I videos which you can find here - http://www.asp.net/dynamicdata/ WROX has come out with a "Wrox Blox" e-book on Dynamic Data. I've read it and it's definitely worth the$6.99 Click [ HERE ] to check it out or buy it ! Read More...

Last Friday, I gave a talk at MIX on various things that we’re working on in ASP.NET data land.  This includes both some Dynamic Data features and some features usable outside Dynamic Data. The great thing about MIX is that they make all talks freely available online shortly after, and you can watch mine here .  Enjoy! I’ll try to blog in more detail about some of the features discussed in the talk in the next few days. Read More...

Last week at the Mix conference in Las Vegas we released a whitepaper that contain a list of many of the items that we are adding to ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. The paper provides an overview of what we expect to be in the first beta release (do not ask for timeframes as we do not have a published date yet). You can view the whitepaper here in both HTML and download form: http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet40/   Lasr week we also released a new preview of Dynamic Data. You can download the preview 3 of Dynamic Data from this link: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=24887 . This preview really rocks and contains the QueryBlockExtender mentioned in the whitepaper above it also includes a new...

When you run into an issue or have a question about ASP.NET Dynamic Data , the best place for it is the Dynamic Data Forum .  When you write your question, there are a few simple things that you can do to make it easier for the ‘experts’ to answer (and hence to get an answer quicker!). 1. Mention what ORM framework you are using Out of the box, Dynamic Data supports LINQ To SQL and Entity Framework.  While they seem similar on the surface, they are actually fairly different once you get a little deeper into the API.  Just mention which one you’re using and you’ll save a roundtrip. 2. Mention what release you’re using The official release of Dynamic Data is the one that comes with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (or Visual Studio 2008 SP1...

When you use Entity Framework, you can perform Insert/Update/Delete operations on your entities, and you eventually call ObjectContext.SaveChanges() to actually make it all happen.  The call to SaveChanges() is either explicit, or can happen implicitly when you use the EntityDataSource (e.g. within a Dynamic Data application). Before SaveChanges() actually performs the operations, it gives you a chance to look at the entities, letting you modify them, and possibly cancel certain operations.  Unfortunately, doing this requires using some pretty ugly code, because the API is a little too low level.  Instead of nicely handing you the changes one by one, it just gives you the raw change list and lets you deal with it. For instance...