A couple of weeks ago I found a new shiny book in my mailbox: ASP.NET MVC2 Cookbook by Andrew Siemer and Richard Kimber. Due to a very busy schedule at work and the 2011 MVP summit in Seattle it took me a bit of time to go through it completely.

 

First of all, I like the cookbook approach that Packt’s been using for some time now. These books show off small examples that are reusable in most occasions of day to day development. This book is for sure no exclusion on that part so I liked it. The benefit of having short, spread over several pages, recipes is that you can simply read it when needed or go through them if you don’t have much time in a one by one fashion.

The book itself is clearly written and divided in several chapters which not only covers MVC but also topics like data storage. What I found to be great is that it also introduces tools like Automapper, NBuilder, MvcContrib, MvcSitemap, … and also makes the reader used to things like Dependency injection (by making use of Structuremap) and for example the PRG pattern (Post/Redirect/Get), Hijaxing (also called progressive enhancement or graceful degradation).

Are there downsides on this book? Well, yes. First of all it’s not for people who just want to start with ASP.NET MVC. Some being used to the technology basics will surely help to grasp this book. I would suggest making Nerddinner or MVC Music Store, both free tutorials with guiding eBook, is a must. Second is the fact that it was published a month too soon. Why? Just before this book got released Microsoft unleashed ASP.NET MVC 3 to the world. It would’ve been great if some recipes would’ve included some MVC 3 juice too. Not everyone’s using MVC 3 yet so it is great to have all things working in MVC 2 too but for the future readiness of the book it would’ve been just on spot.

Grz, Kris.

This article shows how to use ajax to load a partial view into a view and afterwards the form data can be retrieved from that dynamically added control.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to deliver my first international presentation in Lebanon. The talk was about ASP.NET MVC 2 which got recently released topped with some jQuery. Since I knew that most people didn’t have hands on experience with MVC I made a more entry level presentation, explaining why it was introduced by Microsoft and what it was. Then I used several demos especially crafted to demonstrate some of the handy and powerful additions like data annotations and the interaction with jQuery validation, templated helpers, partial views, using a JsonResult together with jQuery to fill up html elements dynamically, …

For me it was a great experience and I got several felicitations from the spectators. I myself would like to thank Bilal Haidar for getting me into contact with the Lebdev user group and Samer Chidiac from Microsoft Lebanon for organizing this event at Berytech.

The slidedeck that I used can already be found on slideshare:

Grz, Kris.

Noticed it a couple of hours ago on the forums that someone was able to download the bits and just noticed that the download link itself was available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b&displaylang=en.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.
The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.
As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.n

Time to read the free eBook from Scottgu: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-net-mvc-ebook-tutorial.aspx.

Grz, Kris.

It's MIX and that always means great stuff coming to web developers. This year it's the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Silverlight 2. Great times are ahead of us.

Grz, Kris.

Ok, it seems this year has been the year of new technologies from Microsoft and yet new stuff's coming out. I found this blog post from Julie Lerman that had a talk with Scott Guthrie on how to handle everything that comes out of the firehose: ScottGu on how to deal with the Microsoft firehose.

Grz, Kris.