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Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been less than a week since NuPack went public.  We were hoping to get noticed, but the attention we got was way beyond my wildest expectations!  The buzz on Twitter has just been phenomenal, and for the most part the feedback has been very positive.  Thank you all for that, this is very encouraging for our little NuPack team :)   NuPack as a noun for the packages   Before I get into the meat, I’ll just say that I want to start using NuPack as a noun that refers to the packages.  So rather than saying “There is a NuPack package for Spark”, I’ll say “There is a NuPack for Spark”.  Or to use NuPack teammate Rob Reynold’s catch phrase. “ There a NuPack for that! ”.  Hmmm...

While at PDC, I met Louis DeJardin and we had some lively discussions on various topics around ASP.NET MVC. He kept bugging me about some view engine called Flint? No… Electricity? No… Spark ! I had heard of it, but never got around to actually playing with it until after the conference. And the verdict is, I really like it. Spark is a view engine for both Monorail and ASP.NET MVC . It supports multiple content area layouts much like master pages, which is one thing that seems to be lacking in many other view engines I’ve seen, which only support a single content area, correct me if I’m wrong. Not only that, but he’s already included IronPython and IronRuby support. But what I really like about it is the simple way you effectively data bind...

One of the relatively obscure features of ASP.NET view rendering is that you can render a single view using multiple view engines. Brad Wilson actually mentioned this in his monster blog post about Partial Rendering and View Engines in ASP.NET MVC , but the implications may have been lost amongst all that information provided. One of the best features of this new system is that your partial views can use a different view engine than your views, and it doesn’t require any coding gymnastics to make it happen. It all comes down to how the new view system resolves which view engine renders which views. Let’s dig into a brief example of this in action to understand the full story. Lately, I’ve been playing around with the Spark view engine lately...

I've been getting more and more interested in how folks extend their applications using plugins and things. In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer , Dear Reader, I present to you thirtieth in a infinite number of posts of " The Weekly Source Code ." Spark I'm really enjoying the extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC , but not as much as some people. Spark is a really promising ViewEngine from Louis DeJardin . You can download Spark here and join the mailing list here . Not only is it promising, it's also freaky. Freaky in that good, makes-you-think way. Louis says " The idea is to allow the html to dominate the flow and the code to fit seamlessly. " When he says HTML should dominate...