CodeClimber

As last year, before going on holiday I’m list some of the books that are in my reading list. It’s not entirely about .NET book, but will also cover other languages not related with .NET development at all, like Scala or Arduino. JavaScript and jQuery I think JavaScript is still the most unknown language among all the ones used to write web applications: mostly due to the fact that it lives in the limbo between developer and designer. JavaScript: The Good Parts It seems incredible, but I never read this “must have” book about the...

Still not officially announced by anybody inside Microsoft, but quietly this morning the first preview of ASP.NET MVC 3 appeared on Microsoft Download. And it’s exactly what everyone was expecting after last month’s announcement of Scott Guthrie of Razor, the new view engine for ASP.NET MVC. What else does this new version bring to the table? First of all it takes a dependency on .NET4. It means that you cannot be able to use it unless you migrate you applications to the latest version of the .NET framework (and if the story repeats itself, with the RTM...

A few days ago, Darren Rowse from ProBlogger stated a blogging challenge: The 7 Link Challenge. Basically it’s about picking 7 posts that fit into 7 different “themes”. Without further ado, here they are. Sometimes I’ll break the rule and will link to 2 posts per category, but, after all, rules are made to be broken, aren’t they? My first Post – I wrote my first post in October 2006. It was titled Subtext Halloween. Actually this is a post I previously posted in my Italian blog, together a few others before launching the “new” blog...

Next week I’ll be speaking about ASP.NET MVC Extensibility at the MVC pre-conference during annual Umbraco CodeGarden conference in Copenhagen starting next June 23rd. The presentation will be split in the two parts (just before and just after lunch) and it will cover the most of the main extensibility points of ASP.NET MVC which I covered in my most popular post: 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know. And I will also talk about the new extensibility points introduced in ASP.NET MVC 2, like Validation Rules and custom templates (which I covered in my Wrox Blox about ASP.NET MVC...

My latest book, the What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2 Wrox Blox, is now available for purchase from the Wrox store at the cost of US $6.99. For those who are not familiar with them, Wrox Blox are short and concise ebooks that cover very specific topics. Ranging from 30 to 70-80 pages, they are a very good option in case you need to solve a specific problem, or learn a specific technology, but you don’t to buy a whole book only when you would read a chapter or two. And this ebook is exactly like that:...

Lately I’ve been reading again lot of discussions going on about whether WebForm is a much wiser choice for developers, if it will die in favor of ASP.NET MVC, or how much ASP.NET MVC brings productivity away because it forces you to learn another framework or because it makes you think more about pattern, or name-your-other-rather-random-opinion. Even if I wrote a book about ASP.NET MVC, I’ve to say I’m getting pretty bored about this discussions: like it or not many big companies cannot afford to rebuild their whole web applications on ASP.NET MVC, even if they want the TDD...

The end of the year is approaching and it’s time for a recap on what happened during the last 12 months. As I did in 2008 I blogged a lot about ASP.NET MVC (around 40 posts) and few about jQuery (just 6 posts), but unlike last year where the most popular posts were about jQuery, this year it’s all ASP.NET MVC. Probably that’s because the technology is more mature than it was during 2008. The most popular posts of 2009 1. 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know – This post goes through all the extensibility...

Most of the mainstream IoC containers have their own implementation of a custom controller factory for ASP.NET MVC, but Unity doesn’t. There is an implementation in the MvcContrib project, but I don’t like the way it works, so I decided to implement it myself. Unity Controller Factory After a few mail exchanges with a guys of the p&p team and with Brad Wilson I came out with the following 35 lines of code. public class UnityControllerFactory: DefaultControllerFactory { protected override IController GetControllerInstance(Type controllerType) { ...

Last week I held two presentations about ASP.NET MVC for the new-born DotNetRomaCeStà user group in Rome. And one of them was about what I consider to be ASP.NET MVC Best Practices. The presentation was in Italian so I decided to translate my slide in English so that everybody can read them. Controller’s best practices 1 – Delete the AccountController You will never use it and it’s a super-bad practice to keep demo code in your applications. 2 – Isolate Controllers from the outside World Dependencies on the HttpContext, on data access classes, configuration, logging,...

In my current project I'm starting to develop a new web application using ASP.NET MVC and given all the environmental conditions, choosing the stack, from the tools to the libraries was not an easy task. I had to come to a few compromise to cope with all the different "forces" involved, so I though it would have been a good idea to share my reasoning and the final decision to show an example how an architect that works in "normal" company (as opposed to HeadSpring and such kind of on-the-edge companies) has to balance between what is the best possible...

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be speaking in Rome at the Gladiators Fest (see the original in Italian): this is the first event organized by the .NET user group in Rome and I’ve been invited by Emanuele Mattei to talk about my IT passion: ASP.NET MVC. I’ll held two session: just before the lunch break, the first will be about some of the Best Practices for developing web applications based on ASP.NET MVC (level 300) and immediately after the lunch, I’ll talk about the new features that are going...

After completing our book, Keyvan and I decided to combine our efforts again, and write a quick reference about ASP.NET MVC. And today this quick reference is available from DZone, in the RefCardz section of the site. The refcard doesn’t try to explain what the library is (would have not been possible in just 6 pages) but instead focuses on giving a quick reference of the conventions used by the framework, of the API available and of all the aspect of developing with ASP.NET MVC. More details are available on Keyvan’s post. Get it here: Getting Started...

Our book is out in the wild since almost a month, and many people out there already received their copies, some also wrote reviews of the book and even had parties to present the book, but I didn’t have the pleasure to hold in my hands a real copy of the book till this morning (yeah, I know, Italian post is very slow delivering parcels). And being my first book I’m very excited and pleased to see the real thing, and to see my face on the its cover. Tags: book,aspnetmvc

Now that my book is on shelves, I’m out of things to do when I come back from work. Furthermore during this year I bought or I was given quite a few interesting programming book, so I think I’ll start using my spare time to improve my skills. Here is the list of books I’m going to read, some of which I think are a must read for all .NET developers. Frontend development and JavaScript I’m a web developer at heart, and I truly believe that a web developer must know everything about Javascript, CSS and HTML....

Ninject with ASP.NET MVC series How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC How to use Ninject to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters Extending Ninject to inject dependencies into Action Filters Ninject.FilterInjector v1.5: now injecting inside all filters How to use Ninject 2 with ASP.NET MVC Back in February I wrote a series of posts about Ninject and ASP.NET...

The DropDownList html helper differs a bit from the standard Html helper methods, and, not surprisingly, the way it works is one of the questions I get asked the most. So in this post I’m going to dissect this method, and show you how to use it. Standard Html Helpers One of the cool features of ASP.NET MVC is the automatic binding of html form fields: all the Html helper methods will auto-magically take the default value of the form field directly from the ViewData or the view model object with the same name of the control. ...

It's been a long journey, that started more than one year ago: today our Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book is available for purchase on Amazon US. Probably some of you, the ones which pre-ordered the book, will be receiving it soon. And in a few days (probably next week), the book will be officially available also on Amazon UK (still in pre-sale now) and later this month also on physical bookstores. If you want to have a look at what's inside the book, you can download the free chapters we made available last month, or you can just...

In order to promote our book on ASP.NET MVC and to spread some love for the library itself, for the Italian ALT.NET conference I printed 40 T-Shirts similar to the one that Chad Myers created on Zazzle last year. It was quite an interesting experience, as I didn’t know how many people would have been interested in buying such “marketing” t-shirts. And it turned out that quite a few developers wanted them, as you can notice from the people in the first rows of the room. I ran out of T-Shirts, but I’m thinking...

I’m happy to announce that my first 3 webcasts have just been published on BE-IT, the video portal of MSDN Italy. They are the first 3 of a longer series about ASP.NET MVC, and they cover: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC - level 200 ASP.NET MVC: HTML forms – level 300 ASP.NET MVC and Ajax – level 300 They are in Italian, but they are mostly screencasts of code editing inside Visual Studio, so I think even people that understand a little of Italian will...

Our Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book is going to available on Amazon and on bookstores in a month or so. But for those of you who cannot wait till the release date, I’m going to publish the table of contents: Introduction Chapter 1: The Model-View-Controller Pattern Chapter 2: ASP.NET WebForms vs. ASP.NET MVC Chapter 3: Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC Chapter 4: The Model Chapter 5: The Controller Chapter 6: The View Chapter 7: Routing ...

Looking deeper into the raw data of the survey about Ajax adoption among .NET developers I found some interesting figures that show a probably different mindset you get when you start working with ASP.NET MVC. Let’s see the following table, that show the percentage of developers that use jQuery vs the MS Ajax Stack based on which web UI framework they are using.   ...

Almost one month ago I created a survey in order to try and understand how .NET developers are using Ajax. And also to compare it with the results I collected at the end of 2007. I left the survey running a few weeks and once I received around 2500 responses I closed it: but without further ado let’s have a look at the results, and later I’ll do a more in depth analysis of the data collected. The results The most used Ajax/JS library among .NET developers is jQuery, which is used by the 71,4% of...

Why can’t I use Request["id"] inside an action to get the value of the query string parameter named "id"? I was asked this questions millions of times in the talks I did about ASP.NET MVC during the last months. I also got it asked a few times from colleagues so, when yesterday a friend asked the same question on a comment on one of my latest posts, I decided that the time had come to try and clarify this with a post. The quick answer is: “Because you don’t want to have a dependency...

Now that the book I’m writing with Keyvan has gone to production (will be available in stores at the end of July), I decided to spend some time reading other programming books: I’ve got a few of them in the queue, and I’ll probably post a review of them on my blog. Quick look at the book My first review is about another book about ASP.NET MVC: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly, written by the Belgian blogger and community speaker Maarten Balliauw. This book is, as the title says, a quick overview (around 190 pages plus 50 pages...

It is with an unquantifiable amount of pleasure that I can announce that we have just released a free public preview chapter of our Beginning ASP.NET MVC v1.0. The name of the chapter is “Chapter 9 – Testing ASP.NET MVC Applications”. It explains how to test controllers, how to use mocking to test interactions with the Http runtime, how to refactor an application to make it testable, and also shows some TDD in action. Also, when you read it, remember that the intended audience is developers that are new to ASP.NET MVC and most likely also...

That’s the main fact about ASP.NET MVC: “ASP.NET MVC brings the web back inside web development” [from a tweet by Hadi Hariri] With ASP.NET MVC the “real” web is back into the development workflow of a web application. And to me this translates in having more fun developing apps, and, at the end of the day, being more productive since I don’t have to work-around issues of a framework that takes too much of my work. It’s true: some might say that ASP.NET MVC is “half-backed” or without a strong opinion about how the M should be implemented,...

There has a been a lot of talking on a possible “big design flaw” in ASP.NET MVC: partial view path resolution was not cached and so a big performance issue. It all started with Rudi Benkovic’s presentation on ASP.NET MVC performances. I also wrote a commentary on his presentation, but I was a bit skeptical about the fact that view path resolution was faster with a full url than with just the name of the view. I said: This last one looks strange to me because the RenderPartial method should be caching the path resolution:...

Earlier today I wrote a post about how to improve the performance of ASP.NET MVC web applications, and I came out with the conclusion that the best way to improve performance is to add data caching and that the rest was not very important. Rudi sent me an email pointing out that turning the optimization upside down as I asked in my post, the expression tree-based ActionLink method still causes a lot of performance problems, at least in his sample application, a DIGG-like application, where there are 4 calls to the ActionLink helper for each of the 20 items...

Today I stumbled upon a nice presentation that Rudi Benkovic gave last week at the Slovenian DotNet User Group, about ASP.NET MVC Performance. The Big Picture It is an in depth analysis of a Digg-like site and how it went from serving (on a test machine) 6 req/sec to 390 req/sec. The biggest gain, 74 req/sec to 390 req/sec happened when he introduced data caching and another 25 req/sec where gained when he introduced the compilation of LINQ queries. Data caching is always the key Splitting the gains among the various components: ...

One of the main design principles ASP.NET MVC has been designed with is extensibility. Everything (or most of) in the processing pipeline is replaceable so, if you don’t like the conventions (or lack of them) that ASP.NET MVC uses, you can create your own services to support your conventions and inject them into the main pipeline. In this post I’m going to show 13 extensibility points that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know, starting from the beginning of the pipeline and going forward till the rendering of the view. 1. RouteConstraint Usually you could put some constrains on url parameters using regular expressions,...

Currently I’m in the process of upgrading all the samples I wrote from my Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book from the Beta to the RTM version of ASP.NET MVC. The biggest update is taking advantage of the views without code-behind. This is not something you have to do on a “real application” since the old way will work also on the RTM, but since my samples are made to show how to develop an ASP.NET MVC application, I hade to upgrade them all to the “correct” way of doing things. The first step is pretty easy: just download the...

Just a quick reminder, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be talking about ASP.NET MVC at the local DotNetUmbria usergroup. Today I spent the whole day putting the finishing touches on tomorrow’s talks and demos. I’ll talk from 3PM to 6PM (or till when people ask for mercy). I’ve two talks planned: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, my “usual” introductory presentation, update with the RTM bits and yesterday’s big announcement ASP.NET MVC, so what? This was originally planned to be a “live refactoring” of an old WebForm application to ASP.NET MVC, but I changed it...

I’m still not convinced completely (the news was announced on April 1st), but seems like ASP.NET MVC source code has been released under MS-PL license, a OSI approved open source license. I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).  MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license.  The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code. Codeplex license is not updated yet, but at this point I guess ASP.NET MVC deserves a project of its own as the asp.net codeplex project...

A few days ago, Simon Tokumine, a Ruby On Rails developer from UK who had to build a web app using, as he calls it, .NET MVC (ASP.NET MVC as we usually calls it), wrote a nice post that makes a comparison between RoR and ASP.NET MVC. Actually it was not really a comparison, more a “ASP.NET MVC for RoR developers” kind of post. He was a foreigner that came into the .NET country and visited the city called ASP.NET MVC, and he gave his opinion on his first (or second) visit. But not being a local he only used...

Many new things came out before the actual keynote, like ASP.NET MVC RTM, Silverlight 3.0 Beta 1 (with Blend for SL3 and its VS2008 tools), RIA DataServices. Not sure if it was something they planned or an error by someone that forgot that 9AM in Las Vegas happens 8 hour after 9AM in Europe, but that’s what we’ve got. The Opening keynote by Buxton I would have never expected such an awesome keynote by Buxton: it was about user experience designer, about UX in MS, about the importance of sketching. Buxton is a researcher, but it was one...

Finally, after a two year long cycle that started went public exactly on March 16th 2007, and 3 month later the first planned release date (or maybe Scott’s “end of year” was referring to the end of the second of year of the public development cycle), today before MIX09, ASP.NET MVC goes RTM. Congratulations to Phil, Eilon and all the ASP.NET MVC team for this important milestone. You can download the new bits here. This new release should doesn’t have anything new since RC2, except having updated jQuery to the latest version (1.3.2), and solved a bug...

Phil Haack just announced that ASP.NET MVC R2 has been released. There are not many changes, and the biggest one is the installation procedure: there is a dependency requirement on .NET 3.5 SP1 (that means you have to have .NET 3.5 SP1 in order for the ASP.NET MVC RC2 to work) there is a “server-only” install mode That’s a big change in the installation tools and, since it’s a new process, it’s the thing that is most likely to break. So, if you want to see...

We have been planning this since a half a year, and finally we made it: I’ll be going to talk about the usual, boring stuff I so excited about and that I always talk about (ASP.NET MVC) at the next workshop of DotNetUmbria, the .NET UserGroup of Umbria, the weekend before Easter: Friday April 3rd, in Perugia. It will be an afternoon long workshop, with two sessions: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, where I’ll introduce ASP.NET MVC, what it is, and how to do things with it ASP.NET MVC, so what? where I’ll be discussing...

Ninject with ASP.NET MVC series How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC How to use Ninject to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters Extending Ninject to inject dependencies into Action Filters Ninject.FilterInjector v1.5: now injecting inside all filters The first version of my tiny FilterInjector included only the action invoker for ActionFilters. But ASP.NET MVC has four different filters: Action Filters: executed before and after an Action is executed Result Filters: executed before and after the ActionResult returned by...

...Or at least this is what we can infer from Google Trends. From this graph we can see that searches started in 4th quarter of 2007 (when ASP.NET MVC was first announced) and spikes always happened at each release of the various preview versions. The final ramp coincides with the announcement of the RC and the wait for the actual RC release. I wonder what is going to happen when the RTW is released. If you browse to the graph, you'll notice a funny thing: the city that performs most searches...

Ninject with ASP.NET MVC series How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC How to use Ninject to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters Extending Ninject to inject dependencies into Action Filters Ninject.FilterInjector v1.5: now injecting inside all filters  UPDATE: There is a new version of Ninject.FilterInjector out, version 1.5. You can read more about it on: Ninject.FilterInjector v1.5: now injecting inside all filters  ...

A few days ago DotDotNet, the UserGroup of the Emilia-Romagna, published the first episode of DotCast, the first Italian podcast about .NET. The first episode is about ASP.NET MVC and about a general discussion on Cloud Computing and Azure. And I'm honored to have been the first guest of this show. I hope this doesn't bring bad luck to the show, as the last I've been the first guest at a show (Mindscape's BrainDump), I've also been the only guest. I hope this time, Igor and Alessandro will keep up with the good work, and give to Italians a reason to...

Ninject with ASP.NET MVC series How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC How to use Ninject to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters Extending Ninject to inject dependencies into Action Filters Ninject.FilterInjector v1.5: now injecting inside all filters   ActionFilters are a great way to encapsulate pieces of functionalities and move them outside ASP.NET MVC Controllers, but they have a problem: it’s very difficult to inject dependencies...

Last Friday I headed to Microsoft Italy offices in Segrate (with my Vespa and under a pouring rain), for being interviewed by Pietro Brambati, Italian Developer Evangelist, about ASP.NET MVC. You can watch the video (in Italian) on Channel9. I want to thank Pietro and the Italian DPE team for the interview and for the nice tech chat we had during the day. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,interview,channel9

Ninject with ASP.NET MVC series How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC How to use Ninject to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters Extending Ninject to inject dependencies into Action Filters Ninject.FilterInjector v1.5: now injecting inside all filters  By default, the ASP.NET MVC framework instantiate controllers calling their default constructor. This makes using Dependency Injection impossible. But, as almost everything inside that framework, the logic...

Less than a month ago I reviewed my 2 years of blogging and I listed my top 10 posts ever. Looking back at 2008, I noticed that I blogged a lot about ASP.NET MVC. But looking at the stats probably this is not yet a popular topic, since it’s too early in the product lifecycle: in fact the most popular post of the year is about jQuery. And since my figures are not that high, it’s enough to have a post on the homepage of non .NET social bookmarking site (like reddit) for one day, that the number of views...

Today is a sunny (even if damn cold) day in Milano so while I was coming to work I decided I wanted write something good about Oxite, the CMS built by the MIX Online team. The point I want to make is: Oxite is the best example to show how bad WebForms are when it comes to rendering standard compliant HTML. There has been a lot of  negative talking about Oxite: it’s not working out-of-the-box, it’s not such a good example of how to implement something with the ASP.NET MVC framework, people looking at it as state-of-the-art  will...

ScottGu just wrote about the new features that are coming with the release candidate of ASP.NET MVC V1 that is going to ship in January. Views without code-behind: all other view engines works that way, and having an additional file just to specify the type of the model is pretty overwhelming. Good for this enhancement. HtmlHelpers now expose the model of the view: this is strictly related to the new feature above. Since you cannot create view-specific helpers anymore, we needed a way to supply the model of the view to HtmlHelpers. ...

I was on the mountains skiing during this last weekend so I might have missed some big announcement from the .NET blogosphere, but today I found on many “official” IT online magazines (thanks to aspdotnetmvc.com) that the team behind Channel 9 (and 8, 10 and Mix Online) just released on CodePlex the blogging/CMS platform they developed to build Mix Online: Oxite. Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online. It’s developed with ASP.NET MVC and has been designed...

During the TechDays-WPC that happened in Milano in the last 3 days I distributed around 130 cards at the ASP.NET MVC related sessions, and yesterday, during the MVP Q&A session, we did the draw for the 5 numbers whose owner will receive a copy of Beginning ASP.NET MVC. The winning numbers are: 8 48 60 78 97 If you are own one of those lucky winners, please contact me. aspnetmvc

Tomorrow is the starting day of TechDays-WPC, a conference for developers and IT professionals held every year since more that 10 years, in the Congress Center of Assago, just outside of Milano. I’ll be there, at the Ask The Expert booth, answering questions about ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET 3.5 and the “ALT.NET stack”. I still don’t know my schedule there: I guess I’ll find it out tomorrow morning when I arrive there. And for all the length of the conference I’ll distribute cards with the cover of our book “Beginning ASP.NET MVC” and with a number on them. The last day of the...

Tomorrow I’ll be at the Italian Agile Day in Bologna: it’s going to be “my first time” at an Agile conference and I’m pretty excited about that. Two members of the UGIALT.NET user group, Emanuele Del Bono and Claudio Maccari, are going to drive a TDD on .NET lab, and for those that were not able to take part at the lab (only 12 seats out of 400 people attending the conference) and are interested on listening to SCRUM-W (the wrong approach to Scrum), there is going to be an OpenSpace that will probably be about tools for an...

NHaml, an alternative view engine for ASP.NET MVC written by Andrew Peters, uses indentation instead of opening and closing tags to identify code blocks. If you never saw something written in NHaml here is taste of it. If you want to loop over a list and put it inside a unordered list with webform you would write: <div class="list"> <ul> <%foreach (var route in ViewData.Model) { %> <li><%= route.Name %></li> <% } %> </ul> </div> The same...

If your ASP.NET MVC is growing large, it’s likely that you are partitioning your controllers in different namespaces, or maybe even in different assemblies, and it might happen that you have controllers with the same in different namespaces. Phil Haack and Steve Sanderson wrote some great write-ups on how to partition an ASP.NET application down into Areas, a concept that exists in MonoRail but not in the core ASP.NET MVC framework. The two posts above allow grouping both the controllers and the views, so if you want a complete solution to the aforementioned problem make sure you read them. What I want...

Last week Jeremy Miller introduced their own opinionated MVC stack built on top of the MS ASP.NET MVC framework. They talked about this at the KaizenConf that was held last weekend in Austin and as it happened for all the PDC sessions, here are the videos of their “Using and Abusing ASP.NET MVC for Fun and Profit” session. It’s available in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,KaizenConf

I’m not at PDC 2008, so I’ve to keep up with what’s being announced in LA only through videos. I watched the two keynotes live (for those who missed them, they are available on demand from the homepage of PDC site). But there are many other interesting videos to watch. Here is a list of the ones I’m downloading and I’m planning to watch over the next days (well, probably nights): ASP.NET and Web Development PC20 - ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap - Scott...

Yesterday I talked about what’s new with the SP1 of .NET 3.5 and about ASP.NET MVC in front of around 50 people in the sunny city of Bari: I really enjoyed doing these two talks, and the public was fantastic. Furthermore it was a pleasure to meet in person people I only “met” virtually on the forum or through blogs. Today, after recovering from the trip from Milan to Bari, I organized the material and I put everything on the server for everyone to download. Slides are in Italian, but samples are language-agnostic and most of the terms in...

Another weekend, another community event: last Friday/Saturday I was at the Italian MVP OpenDays in Milano and next Friday (October 24th) I’ll be talking in front of more than 70 person (the event is sold out) at the “ASP.NET 3.5 and beyond Web Development” workshop organized by DotNetSide, the .NET usergroup of South Italy. I’ll speak for 3 hours (and probably more) about ASP.NET MVC and the new features that the .NET 3.5 SP1 brings to the table. There will be 2 sessions: Life after SP1: I’ll talk about Dynamic Data, Routing, the new...

The latest release of ASP.NET MVC had a weird bug: with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, when you open any view page, Visual Studio just vanishes, with no error dialog displayed. The Application log contains an item with the following error message: .NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (6AFD0F92) (0) With a bit of trial and error, and thanks to some other posts and comments I found out that the reason for this is some conflict with the Visual Studio PowerCommands tool: uninstalling it fixes the problem. In my previous installation,...

Well, not as the Guano Apes in Big in Japan, but, tonight our (Keyvan’s and mine) book, Beginning ASP.NET MVC, went for the first official public display at a INETA user group meeting in Banjaluka, Bosnia, during a presentation about ASP.NET MVC held by Dragan Panjkov. Thanks to Dragan for the plug and for the photo. UPDATE: More info about the talk, together with slides, demos and more pictures of the event can be found on Talk: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,Banjaluka,book

A tweet in the morning, straight from Remix08 UK, where ScottGu is doing a presentation on ASP.NET MVC: ScottGu says feature complete MVC beta "in a few weeks". final v1 by end of year Then the month that ends in ember is December, not March-ember as someone said. [via irascian and Andrew Rimmer] Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,remix

As every year on September 11th I’m getting one year older… and today I’m becoming 34. My 33rd year has been an exciting one from the professional stand point, and pretty good from the open-air ones as well. I started an exciting job in Avanade and I met great colleagues, I co-founded the UGIALT.NET community, I got excited by the ASP.NET MVC framework and started evangelizing it, I became a Mac addicted, I wrote a bunch of articles on ASP.NET MVC for DotNetSlackers, I started writing a book, again on ASP.NET MVC (it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon UK and...

Keeping on with the 6 weeks release plan, the ASP.NET MVC team quietly release P5 of ASP.NET MVC on Codeplex. Some changes happened: the IViewEngine now is responsible of finding the view, not rendering them any more The Ajax Helper class has been moved to its own namespace to enable easier replacing of Ajax client library Added a ModelBinder to bind complex custom type as action parameters Added the AcceptVerbs and ActionName attibute to be able to use actions with the same name...

I might be the only that missed that, but today a discussion on the internal Avanade mailing list brought to my attention an interesting fact: the ASP.NET MVC framework is not as all other Microsoft pre-release software that need a GoLive license (like it was for Silverlight or Atlas) but you can legally use in production code. On the mailing list they pointed out a comment on ScottGu’s blog: >>>>>>>>> 2. For which MVC drop we will have GoLive licence? I'd like to use it for my next project, and this fact will decide what...

Well, not yet, but hopefully soon. Which book cover am I talking about? It’s book I’m writing together with Keyvan, about ASP.NET MVC, for Wrox. The book title will be “Beginning ASP.NET MVC”. You way wonder why a book about a technology that is not even in beta and about which there are already six books. The reason is simple: all the six books are “pro” books, targeted at experienced developers, that are already trying out the early bits, but that want to know more. We both are writing two introductory series on ASP.NET MVC on two famous .NET...

A new book about ASP.NET MVC is coming: Professional ASP.NET 3.5 MVC. And is written by the guys that are developing it: Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. [via keyvan on twitter] Amazon says it will be released on October 20th, so I guess that by that date we will have the RTW version of ASP.NET MVC. Or maybe they are hiding the truth. ASP.NET, aspnetmvc, book

It always started with a tweet from Scott Hanselman yesterday evening: “ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet”. The ASP.NET MVC interim version has been released as source code + MSI with project template + release notes 7 weeks after the last official release of the P3. Lots of people already wrote about the new features so I’d rather read what they already wrote then rewriting it myself. Here is the list of the posts/documents I printed and that I’ll be reading today: ASP.NET Codeplex Preview 4 Readme (PDF) and Changes between Preview 3 and...

A few days ago, looking at the referrers to my blog, I found a reference to site I never see before: aspdotnetmvc.com. It’s a really nice content aggregator that collects anything related to ASP.NET MVC, gathering it automatically from various sources. It already helped me discover a few ASP.NET MVC related blogs I was not following. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,blogs

On Friday I’m delivering my third presentation on ASP.NET MVC in less than one month (actually the 4th because I repeated twice the one I delivered inside Avanade). This time it will be inside the 6th DotNetMarche Workshop on “Applications’ automated testing and ASP.NET MVC”. You can have a look at the agenda of the event (translated by Google). I’ll try and make everything available online after the event, especially the code samples. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,event,dotnetmarche

Yesterday I delivered the first of the 3 presentations on ASP.NET MVC I'll be delivering in less then a month. It was also my first webcast ever and I'd like to share my impressions on the presenter experience and what an attendee can do to make life easier for the presenter, thus increasing the overall experience for everybody. The biggest and probably the most obvious difference between a webcast and a in person presentation is that you (as presenter) don't have a visual feedback, you don't get to see the people that are attending the presentation: you cannot...

This year it's going to be a busy spring for me: April 26th/27th: Loci - Evoluzione generativa: Aurora - an art exhibition where there I presented a short video I made with Processing (on Vimeo 2 drafts of the final video) - Porto Sant'Elpidio End of May: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC - This is a private 2h workshop I'll deliver for my colleagues at Avanade Italy - online June 14th: UGIALT.NET conference - The second conference of the the Italian ALT.NET group. Actually not a real talk, but an OpenSpace meeting......

After all those months where my main community related activity was writing articles, this weekend I decided to go back into coding: Subtext is approaching a new release soon, with tons of new features, so back on the project to make it happens I started having a look at CodeCampServer and already submitted a tiny little patch Processing: my wife and I are working at a video for an exhibition at the end of April... let's see if I we come out with some cool generative art ...

My second article on the ASP.NET MVC is now live on DotNetSlackers. This time the article is about how to test ASP.NET MVC web applications: unit testing, how the ASP.NET MVC framework facilitates testing and how to test Controllers, both with mocking and with the Extract and Overide Call method. Check it out here: ASP.NET MVC Framework – Part 2: Testing Any comment is welcome. If you missed the first article, with a introduction to the ASP.NET MVC framework you can read it here: ASP.NET MVC Framework – Part 1. Technorati Tag: aspnetmvc,unit test,article,dotnetslackers

I just spent the last 3 hours watching all the latest videos available on the ASP.NET MVC MIX08 Preview Release: Part 1 - Displaying Data Part 2 - Editing Data and Making Forms Part 3 - Advanced Techniques Part 4 - Testing Developing ASP.NET Applications Using the Model View Controller Pattern, session from MIX08 If you haven't done yet, I recommend you to watch them all, especially the last one, which is summing up of all the first 4 screencasts, but enhanced with some technical and...

One thing that is wrong with the ASP.NET MVC framework is the name: ASP.NET MVC Framework is too long, it's composed by 4 words, and so not easily usable as "tag". Usually social sites have problems when dealing with multi-word tags: some split them in more tags: ASP.NET MVC becomes ASP.NET and MVC other needs you to enter them with a + between the words: ASP.NET+MVC yet another behavior is using the underscore: ASP.NET_MVC Given all these different behaviors people tag posts, articles and whatever else related to that topic with many...

I'm playing a bit around with the ASP.NET MVC "MIX08 preview" and I wanted to use a different approach to testing the RedirectToAction method. SubText fellow Phil Haack wrote some sample tests back in December with the previous preview version of aspnetmvc, but I wanted to play around a bit so I wrote my own version. [TestMethod]public void AboutOverride(){ HomeControllerForTest controller = new HomeControllerForTest(); controller.About(); Assert.AreEqual("Index", controller.SelectedViewName, ...

I'm watching MIX keynote online, but for curiosity I browsed the MS download site, and I found those 2 interesting links: ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 - with Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 runtime and tools Technorati Tag: mix08,Silverlight 2.0,aspnetmvc

Yesterday I noticed on Jeffrey's blog that the book he is writing on the ASP.NET MVC framework is available now as Early Access Program. At the moment the first 4 chapters (first as in first to be written, not first as in the order of the chapters) are available for download (not free, you have to pay for the Early Access, but you will get the book as well, once it is published): Chapter 1 - Getting Started: a nice introduction on the MVC framework (this chapter is free for everyone) ...

Yesterday I went to the first conference of the recent born UGIALT.net usergroup. It was my first time at a OpenSpace conference and I really like it. We talked about ASP.NET MVC, about UnitTesting, TDD, Mocks, and also about code metrics with NDepend and SourceMonitor. I was the moderator of the session on the ASP.NET MVC framework, and was nice to see all the other bringing to the table their experiences, especially Gianluca that, for each feature of the ASP.NET MVC, made a comparison with MonoRail. We noticed that ASP.NET MVC lacks of a feature that might be interesting: the possibility to...

Today my first article on DotNetSlackers just got published. It's an introduction to the ASP.NET MVC framework that was released as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview: it contains an overview of the MVC pattern and how it is implemented inside the ASP.NET framework. Check it out: ASP.NET MVC Framework – Part 1. The second part is already in the works, and it will be about testability. Technorati Tag: aspnetmvc,asp.net,article,mvc

Together with playing around with Silverlight, lately I started to have a look at the MVC framework that the ASP.NET released as part of ASP.NET 3.5 extensions. Here is a list of some of the best links I found on the topic: Downloadable content from ScottHa blog: ScottGu MVC Presentation and ScottHa Screencast from ALT.NET Conference - the first presentation ever on the MVC framework ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - plus MVC How-To Screencast - How-to Screencast on the...

If you are like me, and don't read the instructions and the readme files, you might encounter a few problems in getting the ADO.NET designer to work. To enable the ADO.NET designer you need to install the ADO.NET EF Tools. But in order to install it correctly you have to install also the ADO.NET EF beta 3 and a cryptic XML Editor QFE in the right order. So the correct installation order is: Visual Studio 2008 XML Editor QFE ADO.NET EF Beta 3 ADO.NET EF Tools (Dec...

Hammett, founder of Castle, the father of MonoRail, went to Redmond invited by the ASP.NET MVC team, to review the new framework, and give his opinion based on his experience having built a similar framework. You can have a look at the blog post where he wrote his opinions, but I'd like to quote here the ones I feel are the most impressive: [...] surprisingly - at least to me - is how MS is approaching this framework. They are not in a rush, they are more concerned about getting it right than getting it done fast. My overall impression is that...

This afternoon, while I was installing for the 4th time this year the Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005, I printed the first post by ScottGu about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. It's a long article (28 printed pages excluding comments) that details quite well the process behind the development of a simple website using all the default behaviors of the framework. I just want to highlight a sentence I really liked: You can use any unit testing framework (including NUnit, MBUnit, MSTest, XUnit, and others) with the ASP.NET MVC Framework. We'll also be shipping project template downloads for NUnit, MBUnit and other...

I just watched the videos published by ScottHa with the presentation by ScottGu on the new MVC framework for ASP.NET, and really liked the approach the MS team that is going to be lead by Phil is having on this: everything is pluggable, everything is replaceable, no more postbacks, no more viewstate. To view the video yourself, if you are not among the 20k subscribers of Scott Hanselman blog, go to his post and follow the links to watch the videos in Silverlight format. Or download the WMV files: ScottGu on MVC at ALT.NET Conference ...

Phil Haack already semi-announced it when he said he was going to work for Microsoft and would be the Program manager for the new MVC framework for ASP.NET that Microsoft was planning to build. Today at the ALT.NET conference, Scott Guthrie officially announced it. The main goals of the MVC for ASP.NET are: Natively support TDD model for controllers. Provide ASPX (without viewstate or postbacks) as a view engine Provide a hook for other view engines from MonoRail, etc. Support IoC containers for controller creation...

After Scott Hanselman, Peli, Alex James and a lot more other active community member and opensource developers, also Phil Haack, founder of Subtext, is going to join Microsoft as Senior Program Manager in the ASP.NET team, and will be working on a MVC framework for a future version of ASP.NET. Congratulations Phil: two big achievements in just one year. Now, when is Microsoft coming to me for a job in the ASP.NET team as well? Technorati tags: Phil Haack, Microsoft, ASP.NET, aspnetmvc