Latest Microsoft Blogs

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...

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex   T4MVC build 2.5.00 brings a couple of fun new features that I’ll describe in this post.  I can’t take too much credit for them as they came from users who suggested them to me, and helped out getting the code going.   Support for multiple output files Up until now, T4MVC.tt has always generated a single file, which is the T4MVC.cs that you see get nested under it in VS.  And normally, this is the way T4 templates work: they just generate one file.  But last week I got an email from Stuart Leeks who pointed me to a new blog post from Damien Guard that describes a nice way to get around this description.  All of Damien’s logic is very nicely encapsulated...

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 contains ASP.Net MVC 2 in the box so there is no need to install an out of band update to Visual Studio 2010 to develop ASP.Net MVC applications. Phil Haack posted about the in-box experience for Beta 2 andd also provides some info on how to upgrade your ASP.Net MVC 1 apps to ASP.Net MVC 2. From a tooling perspective, all of the new functionality released in ASP.Net MVC 2 Preview 2 for Orcas is available in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 including support for Single Project Areas . Additionally, if you look in the Scripts folder of a new ASP.Net MVC application, you will notice that jquery.validate is included as well as a vsdoc file to go with it. I'll post more on how to use jquery.validate in the coming weeks but...

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex   Though I haven’t blogged for a while about T4MVC, I’ve been making a few minor updates and only sent notification via Twitter.  Now, I have a few things that are worth discussing in a little more detail.  Note that you can see the complete list of changes from version to version in the readme.txt file that comes with it.  BTW, I used to have all this revision information directly in the .tt file, but it was getting a little long so I moved it to the readme. The changes described below were added between version 2.4.00 and 2.4.04.   MVC 2 Preview 2 support The most interesting things to many people is that I just made a fix to allow T4MVC to work on MVC...

Last week we released ASP.Net MVC 2 Preview 2 for Visual Studio 2008 Sp1. In the box support for single project areas is now included and the Add View tool has been modified to streamline this scenario. A walkthrough that creates two simple single project areas can be found here . If you follow the steps in the walkthrough you will notice that Add Controller and Add View are now available in the single project areas in your ASP.Net MVC 2 Preview 2 application. Here are some screenshots that show off the tooling changes. Right-Clicking the Controllers folder of any single project area (Areas –> Blog –> Controllers) will invoke the familiar Add Controller dialog. The new controller will be added to the Controllers folder of the single project...

I think today is an appropriate time to write this post, as Rob Conery is leaving Microsoft tomorrow . “Who?”, you might ask. Rob is the author of the excellent MVC Storefront and Kona series where he explored the challenges in building an MVC-bound storefront application. I’ve been working with Rob for a few months on the continuation of that, which will be the subject of this post. This is challenging for a number of reasons. First, Rob’s are large shoes to fill (he’s a 12, I’m an 11). That’s fine, I’m just going to do things my way and try to have as much fun as possible (and communicate that if I can). Second, the focus of the application has changed and that is a much more important challenge. Rob built this as a learning tool, as much...

(Screencast can be found at the end of the post) To be clear when I say “total n00b”, I’m not talking about you, dear reader, I’m talking about me. The last time I wrote any serious data access code was circa 2002. Since then, I got hired by the Evil Empire and started developing new tools to make it easier to build demos of Northwind master-details. I jest, I jest. Or do I? So let me explain what I’m going to talk about in this and future related blog posts. We have this e-commerce application that Rob started and that we’re going to continue developing. Last time Rob touched the data access, he wanted to experiment with going back to less abstraction and to working directly with that interesting data-centric Domain Specific Language, you know...

Few days back I summarized the difference between a project system and a project templates ; today I want to focus on key differences between different project systems available for web developers in Visual Studio… You might be aware of the fact that we have two different types of project systems for Web developers i.e Web Application Projects (WAPs) and Web Site Projects (WSPs)…  Often time I get asked this question on which type of project should to use for web development…  Sometimes web developers even start a religious war on the two choices, honestly here you have an option to choose the god of your own choice and this post is my attempt to help you make an informed decision… Most of the time I land up asking questions to people...

The ASP.NET team just released the first public preview of ASP.NET MVC Version 2.  You can download it here . Today’s preview works with .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008, and can be installed side-by-side on the same machine as ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (meaning they don’t conflict and your existing ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects will not be impacted if you install it).  If you have both ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0 installed you’ll see two ASP.NET MVC project templates within Visual Studio 2008’s “New Project” dialog: The release notes that come with the ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview release detail how to upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects to use V2 if you’d like to migrate them forward to take advantage of the new features. New Features ASP.NET MVC...