Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

Great news for our developers community !

 Visual Studio 2008 has been shipped !

  You can choose to download the free Express versions or the complete versions with MSDN Subscription. But if you are not a MSDN subscriber, you can also get the Team Suite version and try it for 90 days !

Team Foundation Server 2008 trial version is also available for download!

 Standalone .NET 3.5 runtime is available here

So go ahead and download your desired version and checkout all the features we have been seeing around during the past year !

There is a lot of buzz around about the new MVC framework from Microsoft. This will be an Optional feature for those who want an implementation of an MVC architecture in ASP.NET.

Latest Scott Guthrie post explains in great detail how to implement a simple e-commerce site using the new framework.

MVC maps URLs to classes, instead of files in disk, as most of the other web frameworks do.

You need create your Controller classes (which use a ControllerAction attribute on each method to map the requested URL to the proper controller method and use the parameters requested from the URL).

 Scott uses Linq to SQL ORM for coding the data model. You can use DataSets, N-Hibernate or whatever you like to handle the data access and data objects.

Having such a layer architecture improves not only maintanance but also reusability. You can easily change the controller logic to render different data to the same view page.

This architecture is also very convenient for implementing test cases for each layer/class. For example, you can have a N-Unit class to test each controller.  You don’t need the View/browser to do your unit testing, so it simplifies this task a lot.

Finally you render the UI implementing Views, and having a RenderView method to the proper View from the Controller.

For the view, MVC supports aspx, ascx, master pages and AJAX.NET. MVC View Pages by default derive from the System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage base class. This class includes helpers that you can use in the UI, such as the Html.ActionLink Method that allow you to have links in the page mapping to a Controller method.

So far, using the MVC Framework is pretty straight forward.

I suggest you to read Socott Guthrie first post explaining the new model here with lot of concepts and clear samples.

Brad Adams also posted about using MVC for creating a RSS Feed and Frederk Normen wrote about using Spring.NET to handle dependencies when creating Controllers through a Controller Factory.

If you’d like to learn in detail about all of these MVC concepts, then go to Scott’s post right away !

I already registered for the big next event from Microsoft at our South Region “ConoSur”. It is the Microsoft Technet and MSDN Briefing online, which is going to be held this month on 29th.

Best of all: this is an online event, so you can attend from your home or office using the new MS Office Live Meeting 2007 !

I like most of the topics for developers, specially are the ones related to Web development. Topics will cover Web Development with Silverlight, Expression and VS 2008, SQL Server 2008, .NET 3.5 and SaaS, among others.

You can view the entire agenda and register (Spanish readers) here.

A good reading that came in the latest MSDN newsletter, about security aspects that you would need to have in mind when using SOA in large enterprise architectures.

 It covers alternatives for authentication (centralized repository for storing the keys), placing the security logic, risks of having a coupled solution, using Sharepoint as a tool for isolating islands of data, magnified security issues that might arrive with a large-scale SOA approach, and other new concepts and trends that worth a read.

You can find the SOA article here. 

In some large scale scenarios I would consider having REST in place instead. There is a new model from MS that will help us to build REST applications faster. If you’d like to read about it, its code name is ASTORIA.

 I hope you like it.