Latest Microsoft Blogs

This is one of them “ coming of age ” stories about how a lowly method becomes a full fledged Action in ASP.NET MVC. You might think the two things are the same thing, but that’s not the case. It is not just any method gets to take the mantle of being an Action method. Routing Like any good story, it all begins at the beginning with Routing. By default, one of the routes defined in the MVC project template has the following URL pattern: {id}/ {action} /{id} When a request comes in and matches that route, we populate a dictionary of route values (accessible via the RequestContext ) based on this route. For example, if a request comes in for: /home/ list /123 We add the key “action” with the value “list” to the route values dictionary ( We’ve...

Download the MSI and Release notes here . Last night we released ASP.NET CodePlex Preview 5 on CodePlex. Be on the lookout for one of those famous epic blog posts from ScottGu describing the release. In the meanwhile, the release notes contain short write-ups of what has changed. We didn’t originally plan to have another preview. However, we implemented a few significant chunks of functionality and were dying to get feedback so that we could incorporate it into the product before Beta. It helps that with five or so of these interim releases, we’ve become pretty efficient producing these releases. We plan to have our next release be our official Beta , which means we’ll have a lot more test passes to produce and run before we release the next...

There's a treasure trove of interesting stuff over at http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet . It's a bunch of potential future stuff that the ASP.NET team is working on. That's where you can get builds of ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data Futures, and new AJAX stuff. Two days ago a new CodePlex release snuck up on the site. It's a potential new feature , so it could go nowhere, or we could make T-shirts and sing its praises. Could go either way. No promises. Justin Beck, an ASP.NET intern, prototyped and design it, then Marcin Dobosz, an ASP.NET Developer tidied it up nicely. Right now it's called ASP.NET Generated Image and you can get a release today . Why should you care? I've done a lot of HttpHandlers that generate images. It's...

I wanted to clear up a bit of confusion I’ve seen around the web about ASP.NET MVC and the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. ASP.NET MVC was not released as part of SP1. I repeat, ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 does not include ASP.NET MVC. What was released with SP1 was the ASP.NET Routing feature, which is in use by both ASP.NET MVC and Dynamic Data. The Routing feature is my first Framework RTM feature to ship at Microsoft! We also shipped a bunch of other features such as Dynamic Data , and this short list of breaking changes . I hope that clears things up and I apologize for the confusion. And for my next feat, I’m going to try and read your mind, oooooh! Right now, you’re thinking something along the lines of, Ok, so ASP.NET MVC didn’t ship as part...

In Preview 2 or Preview 3 of ASP.NET (I forget which), we introduced the concept of Action Filters . Sounds much more exciting than your run-of-the-mill LayOnTheCouchMunchingChipsWatchingInfomercialsFilter , that I originally proposed to the team. Thankfully, that was rejected. An action filter is an attribute you can slap on an action method in order to run some code before and after the action method executes. Typically, an action filter represents a cross-cutting concern to your action method. Output caching is a good example of a cross-cutting concern. In CodePlex Preview 4 of ASP.NET MVC , we split out our action filters into four types of filters, each of which is an interface. IAuthorizationFilter IActionFilter IResultFilter IExceptionFilter...

Folks were hassling me in the comments for not posting the picosecond that .NET 3.5 SP1 came out (or, as I like to call it, .NET 3.6 - although the bosses really don't like that). First, the obvious stuff. Should I fear this release? I wouldn't. The SP1 Framework is full of goodness. The VS Installer is slow (it was for me) but I just shut everything down, ran it, and was patient. It's POSSIBLE. It's way better than the beta installer was . There's a metric buttload of little VS fixes and tweaks that make the IDE a more pleasant place to spend your day. If you want to see some crazy interesting statistics, go check out Patrick Smaachia's updated 3.5 SP1 Changes Overview . You can get it here: Combined Visual Studio 2008...

In his Practical Review of ASP.NET MVC , Josh Charles provides a helpful review of ASP.NET MVC from a Rails developer’s perspective. It seemed fair and balanced, and the end result is that there’s room for improvement, which we’re taking to heart. However, that’s not the part that caught my attention. He mentioned that he wrote a cycle method but couldn’t write it as an extension method to HtmlHelper . this was an instance method that would take two strings and return the one that it didn’t return the last time it was called. In my templates, I used this to change the classes for each row of data, to give them different background colors. I considered writing an extension method to the Html object used for other Html operations in the view page...

Recently, Adam Kinney came by my office to interview me for a Channel 9 episode discussing ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4. I’ve known Adam for a long time, even before he joined Microsoft. I think we met (in person) at Tech-Ed 2003. In any case, we talk a bit about ASP.NET MVC and Preview 4, all the while I tried very hard not to put my foot in my mouth. At the end there are some outtakes of me impersonating Scott Hanselman doing an impersonation of Sean Conery. That wasn’t to make fun of Scott, but totally out of love and respect. ;) On Gaming In the interview, I mentioned that I used to work at a skill gaming company called SkillJam which is no longer around. We had a tournament engine that allowed users to play games of skill for money. I...

During the recent Insiders summit, Wally cornered me into recording a really short video demonstrating a feature of ASP.NET MVC. I decided to sprinkle a little Ajax in my demo by showing how to use jQuery to call an action that returns a JsonResult . Specifically, I show how to update a couple of regions in the page (two dom elements) with data pulled from the server. I then add a little sparkle to the demo by implementing the ubiquitous yellow fade when adding the content to the DOM. As you’re watching it, you’ll notice that I’m making it up on the fly based on another demo I did earlier that day. He’s posted the video here in show #106. That’s heckuva a lot of shows Wally! Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc , ajax , jquery Read More...

In June, John Lam wrote about a demo he gave at Tech-Ed 2008 where he showed IronRuby running on ASP.NET MVC. He posted the code for the demo online, but it relied on an unreleased version of MVC, so the code didn’t actually work. Now that Preview 4 is out, I revisited the prototype and got it working again. I use the term working loosely here. Yeah, it works, but it is really rough around the edges. As in, get a bunch of splinters rough. At least it looks better as I did take a moment to use a CSS layout from Free CSS Templates slightly tweaked by me. Getting the Prototype Up And Running The IronRuby assemblies are based on an internal build, so they aren’t the same version as the publicly available ones. As such, they are not fully signed...