Top ASP.NET Items

Web Forms Model Binding Part 3: Updating and Validation (ASP.NET 4.5 Series)

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next releases of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you’ll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC – as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post is the third of three posts in the series that talk about the new Model Binding support coming to Web Forms.  Model Binding is an extension of the existing data-binding system in ASP.NET Web Forms, and provides a code-focused data-access paradigm.  It takes advantage of a bunch of model binding concepts we first introduced with ASP.NET MVC – and integrates them nicely with the Web Forms...

RC of Entity Framework 4.1 (which includes EF Code First)

Last week the data team shipped the Release Candidate of Entity Framework 4.1.  You can learn more about it and download it here . EF 4.1 includes the new “EF Code First” option that I’ve blogged about several times in the past.  EF Code First provides a really elegant and clean way to work with data, and enables you to do so without requiring a designer or XML mapping file.  Below are links to some tutorials I’ve written in the past about it: Code First Development with Entity Framework 4.x EF Code First: Custom Database Schema Mapping Using EF Code First with an Existing Database The above tutorials were written against the CTP4 release of EF Code First (and so some APIs might be a little different) – but the concepts and scenarios...

VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.   You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here . Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables.  SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does...

Announcing Entity Framework Code-First (CTP5 release)

This week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  EF Code-First enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping I’m a big fan of the EF Code-First approach, and wrote several blog posts about it this summer: Code-First Development with...

ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview Available

A few months ago we released an ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview that contained a bunch of new features that will be shipping later this year (including ASP.NET AJAX Improvements, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Silverlight Support, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data). The ASP.NET Dynamic Data support within that preview provided a first look at a cool new feature that enables you to quickly build data driven web-sites that work against a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities object model.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data allows you to automatically render fully functional data entry and reporting pages that are dynamically constructed from your ORM data model meta-data.  In addition to supporting a dynamic rendering mode, it also allows you to optionally override and customize...

New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support

The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP we shipped this past weekend contains a bunch of great new features. One of the cool new features is something we call "ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support".  In a nutshell this enables you to really quickly build data driven web-sites that work against a LINQ to SQL (and in the future LINQ to Entities) object model - and optionally allows you to-do this without having to build any pages manually. The best way to see this in action is to watch David Ebbo's awesome 17 minute screen-cast : You can also follow the steps below to easily get started and use the dynamic data support: Step 1: Create a ASP.NET Dynamic Data Site: Once you have the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP release installed, you can use VS 2008...

LINQ to SQL (Part 9 - Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the <asp:LinqDatasource> control)

Over the last few weeks I've been writing a series of blog posts that cover LINQ to SQL. LINQ to SQL is a built-in O/RM (object relational mapper) that ships in the .NET Framework 3.5 release, and which enables you to model relational databases using .NET classes. You can use LINQ expressions to query the database with them, as well as update/insert/delete data. Below are the first eight parts in this series: Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes Part 3: Querying our Database Part 4: Updating our Database Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions In...

LINQ to SQL (Part 7 - Updating our Database using Stored Procedures)

Over the last few weeks I've been writing a series of blog posts that cover LINQ to SQL. LINQ to SQL is a built-in O/RM (object relational mapper) that ships in the .NET Framework 3.5 release, and which enables you to model relational databases using .NET classes. You can use LINQ expressions to query the database with them, as well as update/insert/delete data. Below are the first six parts in this series: Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes Part 3: Querying our Database Part 4: Updating our Database Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures In part 6 I demonstrated how you can optionally use database stored procedures (SPROCs) and user defined...

LINQ to SQL (Part 6 - Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures)

Over the last few weeks I've been writing a series of blog posts that cover LINQ to SQL. LINQ to SQL is a built-in O/RM (object relational mapper) that ships in the .NET Framework 3.5 release, and which enables you to model relational databases using .NET classes. You can use LINQ expressions to query the database with them, as well as update/insert/delete data. Below are the first five parts of my LINQ to SQL series: Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes Part 3: Querying our Database Part 4: Updating our Database Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control In these previous LINQ to SQL blog posts I demonstrated how you could use LINQ query expressions to programmatically retrieve data from a...

The asp:ListView control (Part 1 - Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS UI)

One of the new controls in ASP.NET 3.5 that I think will be very popular is the <asp:ListView> control. The ListView control supports the data editing, insertion, deleting, paging and sorting semantics of higher-level controls like the GridView. But - unlike the GridView - it provides you with complete control over the html markup generated. The ListView control, when combined with the new Web Designer and rich CSS support in VS 2008 , enables you to build much cleaner HTML UI. Over the next few weeks I'll be putting together several blog posts that show off how you can use it. Building a Products Catalog Page For today's blog post we are going to start simple and just build a basic product catalog listing page like below: This products...