Dragan Panjkov : aspnetmvc

ASP.NET MVC has reached beta stage

panjkov — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:49:00 GMT

UPDATE 17.10.2008: Here are more detailed blog posts by

Scott Guthrie

Phil Haack
Scott Hanselman

Last night I reviewed Twitter, as usual, and one tweet take my attention. Kevin Dente posted this status:

I jumped immediately on this link and downloaded readme and binaries of ASP.NET MVC beta release.

What was strange, MSFT-ies are completely silent regarding this, although I tried to tweet to @Haacked and @Scottgal and to get more info on this. It seems that @shanselman demoed some beta bits on VSLive in Las Vegas.

This morning, there are some new articles that describe possible source of this information: From DotNetSlackers I found a link to this article on VS Magazine that outlines Robert Shelton as possible source of this DL link.

Beta…

I tried this beta last night – updated my UG demo from P5 to beta. Changes are not so big, and I’ll only list some of biggest:

Binaries are now GAC-deployed. Binaries are now both in GAC and saved in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC Beta and they are not automatically saved to Bin folder inside MVC web app. However, you can change this behavior by setting Copy Local property to TRUE for all 3 binaries
HTML Helpers are in separate namespace similarly to AJAX Helpers. You need to reference both System.Web.Mvc.Ajax and System.Web.Mvc.Html namespaces in your web.config
Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll is not included. As part of MVC team to make this beta as close to RTM, they’ve decided not to include MVC Futures binaries in this release. However, you can use them when by downloading from www.codeplex.com/aspnet
Form helper method is renamed to BeginForm.
Scripts now reside under root folder instead of Content, and jquery is included in project template in both .js and .min.js(minified) versions.

Besides that, there are improvements in VS template from which I already outlined some in my UG presentation:

Add View from controller code
Add View in Views folder

Readme file is listed on Download page . It contains very useful information about changes in this release, and I recommend reading it.

Dragan

Follow me on Twitter: @panjkov

Talk: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC

panjkov — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:47:00 GMT

Yesterday I was speaking on Banjaluka INETA User Group Meeting about ASP.NET MVC. It was introductory presentation where I tried to address only basic functionalities of ASP.NET MVC. PowerPoint I created is compiled from Stephen Walther, Scott Guthrie, Peter Laudati and Jeffrey Palermo presentations and presentation about Routing from .NET FX Enhancements Training Kit. It also contains two demos where second one is “Photo Albums” application with basic functionalities. In this demo I use some free photos taken from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/. Presentation PowerPoint and demo are on my SkyDrive storage(due to the some weird error that struck me every time i tried to upload it on asp.net weblogs, probably file is too large)

LANACO sponsored this event with presentation room, which was filled entirely, and Microsoft Bosnia and Herzegovina sponsored us with drink. We also have exclusive to be first displaying book “Beginning ASP.NET MVC” written by Simone Chiaretta and Keywan Nayyeri. Here is a followup by Simone.

Here are some photos from this event:

New ASP.NET MVC related videos and tutorials

panjkov — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:10:00 GMT

As Stephen Walther announced on his blog, there are 15 new videos and 8 new tutorials in ASP.NET MVC posted on ASP.NET website. Videos are separated in 2 different tracks:

"How Do I" videos
"ASP.NET MVC Pair Programming" videos

and have separate target audiences. "How Do I" videos are targeted to beginners in the ASP.NET MVC Framework and their purpose is to describe basic tasks and features of ASP.NET MVC. Second set is targeted to developers that want to learn ASP.NET MVC in TDD-based approach, and in this series Stephen is doing pair programming sessions with Charlie Poole, developer of NUnit framework (http://nunit.org/), developing blog sample application.

Besides these videos, 8 new tutorials in VB or C# on ASP.NET MVC are covering (stolen from website):

I already watched two videos from "How Do I" series and my first impressions are excellent. Both videos code was in VB. Although I am C# developer, I had no difficulties to understand code and philosophy behind those videos. Stephen is really a excellent teacher and his explanations alre concise and understandable.

I already created sample code in C# for "Creating Model Classes with LINQ to SQL" video and posted it to my website http://panjkov.qsh.eu/. (It is on freehosting, so if I encounter high amount of requests, I'll transfer it somewhere else).

My general impression is that things around MVC are rolling, and it seems that Microsoft has directed ASP.NET MVC ship in the right direction. We'll see what will happen in the future, but today is excellent :) I only hope that they will not change its name to something long and recognizable, as pointed by Scott.

Avoiding tag soup - sample files

panjkov — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:24:00 GMT

I just read Rob Conery's blog post "ASP.NET MVC: Avoiding tag soup", and following his steps (except last one) I created some sample files in one of my existing MVC sample apps. He didn't post sample code on his blog, so I created zip archive with only files needed this sample to run. Archive is posted on my website:

http://panjkov.qsh.eu/files/folders/aspnetmvc/entry68.aspx

I hope it will be helpful to others

Dragan