April 30th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio 2010

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

ASP.NET

ASP.NET MVC

  • Code Snippets for ASP.NET MVC 2 in VS 2010: Raj Kaimal documents some of the new code snippets for ASP.NET MVC 2 that are now built-into Visual Studio 2010.  Read this article to learn how to do common scenarios with fewer keystrokes.

Visual Studio 2010

  • SharePoint Development with VS 2010: Beth Massi links to a bunch of nice “How do I?” videos that that demonstrate how to use the SharePoint development support built-into VS 2010.

  • Using the WPF Tree Visualizer in VS 2010: Zain blogs about the new WPF Tree Visualizer supported by the VS 2010 debugger.  This makes it easier to visualize WPF control hierarchies within the debugger.

  • TFS 2010 Power Tools Released: Brian Harry blogs about the cool new TFS 2010 extensions released with this week’s TFS 2010 Power Tools release.

  • What is New with T4 in VS 2010: T4 is the name of Visual Studio’s template-based code generation technology.  Lots of scenarios within VS 2010 now use T4 for code generation customization. Two examples are ASP.NET MVC Views and EF4 Model Generation.  This post describes some of the many T4 infrastructure improvements in VS 2010.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.

14 Comments

  • Why are all the smart people named Scott, the first 4 articles are written by Scott's.
    Very soon I am changing my name to Scott ;) (Or at least Scotty from Star Trek).

    We had to use Tanglible T4 editor for syntax highlighting in Visual Studio 2008, still with no intellisense.
    Does T4 have intellisense support in Visual Studio 2010?

  • Great compilation Scott!!! Thanx a lot.

  • Hi Scott,

    thanks for the links. I definitively like the changes to the data controls, overall the increased control over output is great to finally have in ASP.NET WebForms.

    And the new T4 preprocessed templates should allow us to rewrite some CodeDom generating classes in a way that is very straightforward, especially for web developers.

    Release is looking great so far!

  • Hi Scott, I tried ASP.NET MVC. I was hopping that MVC2 would come with a reporting tool and some of the coolest UI features that Webforms have (a built in grid control) , but I see that we'll have to wait until they come available.

    The good news is that MVC finally could reach the great performance and power that PHP or Ruby have. Yes, I think PHP is powerful because it is light, easy to use and free.

    Let's hope that MVC moves to those horizons.

  • Binoj - @shanselman mentioned during his talk that Tangible's paid version of the editor has intellisense. I haven't tried it myself, though.

  • thank you for these helpful links.

    I wish you guys (MVC) can add the better scaffolding feature like ROR. How about this?
    >> MVC Dinner title:int description:varchar(1000) date:datetime

    then create CRUD (views), controller, model and everthing else to just get me started.

    PLEASE add this feature for 2.1 release

  • Scott,

    I make my living with Visual Studio and your greatest accomlishment is not based on any product you released these development tools are unfinished, inconsistent and buggy at best. Scott your greatest accomlishment is the way you receive praise and lowered the expectations through the cleaver use of cheerleaders, to make an entire development community believe VS 2008 and VS 2010 are actual development tools, more correctly this product should be called Visual NotePad. It is completely mind boggling to me why you didn't write this tool such that we code in one language c# and in a visual manner and behind the scenes an application layer generates all the javascript, jquery along with the rest of the alphabet soup of technologies required to build a web app. Are you so in love with your own code and yourself that you forgot about the purpose of development tools which is to deliver solutions to our customer not WRITING 200,000 lines of code. I really hope you crawl out of you hole and start giving us solutions that work.

  • @jj,

    >>>> Your post, like all others seems to suggest *manually* typing in the annotations(!!)  This can not possibly be the right way to do it when the DB already has the appropriate metadata.

    Some annotation information (like nulls) can be gleamed from the db and will be enforced. However, many rules are more advanced then what can be enforced in the db - which is where additional annotations are useful. Also - u often want to display custom error messages for db enforced schema rules - and so using annotations make that possible.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • @rawer,

    Sorry u are having problems with the new release. If u can send me email (scottgu@Microsoft.com) I can have someone help with the issues.

    In general we are seeing people have good experiences and have had very positive feedback so far.

    Scott

  • Hi Scott - you said "Some annotation information (like nulls) can be gleamed from the db and will be enforced" - but nulls and string length are not. Probably you are thinking of direct EF models? I have EF POCO models - so I'm looking for an EF template that includes auto-annotate.

  • @JJ,

    >>>>>> Hi Scott - you said "Some annotation information (like nulls) can be gleamed from the db and will be enforced" - but nulls and string length are not. Probably you are thinking of direct EF models? I have EF POCO models - so I'm looking for an EF template that includes auto-annotate.

    Ahh - sorry about that. I didn't realize you were referring to POCO models. Our default POCO template is designed to try and be as clean as possible and so doesn't add anything (since a lot of people have complained in the past about things being added to the default generated class). You could certainly modify the default TF template to add them - in fact that is probably a good scenario. Let me know if you do create a template that does this - I'd love to point others at it.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • @raweer

    I disagree with your comment, I notice you didn't provide examples. Visual Studio is aimed at board range of developers from beginners to line of business to the high-end professional developer. Therefore the tools cater to this range, giving you many options to get the job done, the code-gen drag 'n drop route or the option to have complete control. For example start a new MVC 2.0 project by selecting a ASP.NET MVC 2 Empty Web Application, you will have a project with practically no code-gen.

    I’m independent not a ‘cheerleader’, for example my blog is wordpress as it’s the best tool for the job. In my opinion if the VS team are guilty of anything it’s catering to the lowest common denominator. Maybe for VS 2011, during the installation you could select what level of developer you are, striping back the options as appropriate or what about VS 2010 Lite edition for the Emacs crowd?

  • While the shortcut posters are helpful and I'd love to hang it up over my desk does it have to have the guy on it with the grin like he just did something evil to my chair and I'm waiting for bad things to happen? I had to take it down because he wouldn't stop looking at me.

  • When does the retail version of VS2010 ship? Is there a hold up in manufacturing or something?

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