Pure Blue » ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC 2 R2 Released

Matthew — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:09:47 +0000

So release candidate 2 (RC2) has been released. Most importantly from my point of view it fixes the breaking issue I had with RC1. From the release notes:

The GetValue method of the FormCollection class now allows empty string values.

Good on the MVC team for getting a quick turnaround on this and other bugs – it was only a month ago (Jan 4) that the RC1 was released.

Download: ASP.NET MVC R2

Warning: ASP.NET MVC RC FormCollection bug

Matthew — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:45:54 +0000

UPDATE: This post refers to ASP.NET MVC 2 R1. The R2 release on 4th Feb 2010 fixed the issue.

I started to update an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application to the new MVC 2.0 RC but will now put off that migration for now – I’ll wait for the RTM which should fix this.

The problem is to do with the FormCollection object throwing an ArgumentException (“Value cannot be null or empty”) when calling TryUpdateModel from within your controller:

at System.Web.Mvc.FormCollection.GetValue(String name)
at System.Web.Mvc.DefaultModelBinder.BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
at System.Web.Mvc.Controller.TryUpdateModel[TModel](TModel model, String prefix, String[] includeProperties, String[] excludeProperties, IValueProvider valueProvider)
at System.Web.Mvc.Controller.TryUpdateModel[TModel](TModel model, IValueProvider valueProvider)

This is apparently a known issue with the RC release and should be fixed in the next release. The project I am working on is fairly sizable and with the many uses of FormCollection, a lot of runtime errors have been created!

One suggested solution is to download the MVC source code and make a fix (hack?) to by-pass the issue. However, I’d rather stay on the main MVC branch and just wait for the RTM.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Released

Matthew — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:29:19 +0000

ASP.NET MVC has reached RTM! I was kind of expecting Scott Guthrie to announce the final release, but instead it was only a small news item on the ASP.NET homepage!

It has been a long time in Beta and as such I have stayed away from it until the last couple of weeks. There are enough new products released from Microsoft to keep me busy without getting bogged down in beta’s!

So in the last couple of weeks I have been learning ASP.NET MVC after discovering that the final release was imminent and I have to admit that I am very impressed. The first and foremost difference would be that there is no longer the same postback lifecycle and no ViewState, which means pages are very fast (yay)! The level of control you have over the final HTML is akin to the old days of classic ASP or PHP, but still with all the .NET goodies to make life easier. After spending so long in Web Forms, it is quite strange (but a nice strange) to look at the HTML source and see plain, concise markup.

I’ve found the best learning source to be the tutorials provided on the official ASP.NET MVC site and also the first chapter of the new Wrox book which is available for free from Scott Guthrie. As with everything there are no shortcuts and there is a lot to learn, but if you are comfortable with the web platform in general, then the learning curve is not that steep at all.

To learn something well you need to create a sample project. I always create a simple task management tool so that I get a nice comparison between technologies. What I found was that to AJAX-enable the site was a lot more straight forward than using the Web Forms approach – the end result was cleaner and the whole MVC approach leans itself totally to the AJAX approach.

All in all, well worth learning.