Jon Galloway

The goal here is pragmatic tips - things you can use right away. Three or four are specific to ASP.NET Web Forms, the rest are pretty cross-cutting and in some cases apply to any web development platform. These are pragmatic tips, not advanced JavaScript development or coding practices, although I did sneak in a bit of SignalR, Node.js, and CoffeeScript at the end. If you're looking for coding practices, I'd highly recommend Elijah Manor's MIX11 talk: Good JavaScript Habits for C# Developers.

Node.js is an event-driven I/O server-side JavaScript environment based on the open-source V8 Javascript engine. It's really easy to run it on Windows now, and if you run it under iisnode, it's actually running under a standard IIS Handler, which means you can integrate it directly into ASP.NET applications.

I've always liked the pictures on the Bing homepage. In late September, they started occasionally replacing the picture with an HTML5 video. The Bing team blogged about it, and included an interesting video from the managing editor for the Bing homepage that talks about how they select photos and why they're going to start adding the occasional video backgrounds.

We're happy to announce the beta release of something we've been quietly working on for a while now: a redesign for the ASP.NET website (http://asp.net). You can browse directly to it at http://beta.asp.net, or if you're on the http://asp.net site you can click on the "Try the NEW beta site" link in the header.

This is Part 2 of a series overviewing changes in ASP.NET MVC 4. In Part 1, we looked at installation and new options in creating a new project. In Part 2, we'll look at changes to the default project template and how it uses adaptive rendering to optimize the display for the end user's browser dimensions.

I'm starting a series going through some new features in ASP.NET MVC 4. I may accidentally build a working application along the way, for some value of working. Probably not, though. The main goal is to overview what's in ASP.NET MVC 4.