Latest Microsoft Blogs

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...

Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I’ve done in the last year. [I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] ASP.NET Introducing new ASP.NET Universal Providers : Great post from Scott Hanselman on the new System.Web.Providers we are working on.  This release delivers new ASP.NET Membership, Role Management, Session, Profile providers that work with SQL Server, SQL CE and SQL Azure. CSS Sprites and the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Library: Great post from Scott Mitchell that talks about a free library for ASP.NET that you can use to optimize your CSS and images to reduce HTTP requests and...

The (awesome) UK developer community is holding another all day event with Steve Sanderson and me in London on June 6th.  The event is free to attend, and the venue will be in Central London (at the ODEON Covent Garden).  The website for the event is here . Content The event goes from 9am to 5pm, and will feature a bunch of great .NET content.  The current agenda includes the following talks: Build an app using ASP.NET MVC 3, EF Code First, NuGet and IIS Express (ScottGu) We'll spend 2 hours building an application with some of the latest releases of the Microsoft Web Stack. You get to choose what app to build and then watch Scott code it on stage. See how the Microsoft web stack fits together, how to take advantage of great...

In the previous post in this Contoso Karate MVC Series we re-factored our LogIn control widget into a PartialView. We did this for a few reasons. Views want to be associated with only one model and we want to reserve that model for one that is more central to the particular page being displayed. (Specifying the Model for the view [...] Read More...

Having fitted the theme generated for the Contoso Karate Web Sites (see the previous posts in this series) it’s time to start adding functionality to the template. If you’re new to ASP.NET MVC, let me take this opportunity to encourage you to stick with it. Much is different and sometimes this makes things especially frustrating [...] Read More...

We’ve recently published some great end-to-end ASP.NET video training courses on the http://asp.net web-site.  Created by Pluralsight (a great .NET training company), these video courses are available free of charge and provide a great way to learn (or brush-up your knowledge of) ASP.NET Web Forms 4 and ASP.NET MVC 3.  Each course is taught by a single trainer, and provides a nice end-to-end curriculum (from basic concepts to working with the new Entity Framework “code first” model to security, deployment, and testing).    Below are some details on the two free training courses we published this weekend (and links for how to watch them): ASP.NET MVC 3 Training This weekend we posted the final videos in a brand new 10...

I’ve been a bit slow doing egtting all the COpntoso Karate Sites that I want to build off the ground. A couple weeks agho I started postiong about Vontoso Karate WebMatrtix [ read HERE ] To get started with the MVC version, the first thing that I needed to do was to get the theme [...] Read More...

ASP.NET MVC 3 supports a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last last 9 months: Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with...

Last week I blogged about the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update , and then followed it up with a detailed post that covered using the EF Code First and the new Data Scaffolding features in it. Today’s blog post is a continuation of this series and covers some of the new HTML5 improvements with the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update release. Project Template Support for HTML5 Semantic Markup The ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update adds support for you to optionally use HTML5 semantic markup when creating new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects.  You can specify this by checking the “Use HTML5 semantic markup” checkbox when creating new projects: Selecting this checkbox option does two things: 1) It causes VS 2010 to use HTML5 semantic markup elements like <header>...

Earlier this week I blogged about the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update that we shipped last month.  In today’s blog post I’m going to go into more detail about two of the cool new features it brings: Built-in support for EF 4.1 (which includes the new EF “code-first” support) Built-in data scaffolding support within Visual Studio (which enables you to rapidly create data-driven sites) These two features provide a really sweet, and extremely powerful, way to work with data and build data-driven web applications. Scenario We’ll Build To help illustrate how to use the above features, we’ll walkthrough building a simple data-drive site.  It will support listing products: As well as creating/editing new products (and categories): We can now...