Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

Last week we started a new ASP.NET MVC project here at UruIT.

This new framework for ASP.NET is quite cool. It eliminates the page life cycle, postbacks and viewstate. It divides the architecture in View, Model and Controller.

We have been using MbUnit to test the code. Having these well defined tiers really improves unit testing. We can have an object mock instead of rendering the actual page (View) for testing the Controller and be sure that all the methods are working properly, even before we finish the coding phase.

However the framework is still in Preview (2) and there are lot of changes with each release. The community around MVC is increasing every day but there is still poor documentation for some of the features. For instance, we found several issues when trying to add File Upload functionality to our MVC web site.

Last week Microsoft released the source code for the actual build of this new framework. This will definetely help to understand what is going on behind the scenes.

If you would like to learn more about ASP.NET MVC I can recommend Scott Hanselman videos available at http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-extensions-videos/default.aspx. Scott Guthrie also published some tutorials (a bit out of date and some lines are not working with latest Preview 2 version but it worth a read) at his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/12/asp-net-mvc-framework-road-map-update.aspx

In order to test this MVC Framework you need VS 2008 and the MVC Preview 2 installed in your computer.

Soon I will be posting more about our experiences with MVC.

Have fun

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 !

Excellent news from Scott (Microsoft Technologies General Manager):

We will be able to Debug the .NET Framework 3.5 Source Code ! Yes, as you read it !

When releasing .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft will enable us to download and browse the Source Code of the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows).  They also aimed to add more libraries in the following months (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ).  Source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

Visual Studio 2008 will be enabled to download the source code and debug symbols on demand from a Microsoft web server, so when pressing F11 in a breakpoint, we will be able to go through the underlying Microsoft .NET Code, even if you haven’t installed it as a standalone install!

I think this are great news, this will help us to understand those weird behaviors we sometimes don’t understand and then building better applications for our customers. And there won’t be any need of using any Reflection tool and no IL, just a commented and with original var names Source Code!

New VS 2008 has a small but very useful feature that will probably help some asp.net programmers.
Right now, when using VS 2005 and if you don’t have much time to fix all the errors in the Error List because your HTML code is not in compliance to the required standard (HTML or XHTML) and you are in a hurry to run your application by hitting F5, then you  probably  feel very upset when you see a large list of design errors (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and application just don’t run.

VS 2008 Beta 2, downgrades Markup errors to Warnings, and even when you don’t complain to selected standard, the list of errors would become a list of warnings, or messages if you prefer, and VS will let you run your application smoothly.

Well, even when this small tip can save you some time, don’t use it to avoid Standards compliance