Pure Blue » .NET

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.

Extract assembly from the GAC

Matthew — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:55:33 +0000

There are occasions where you may need to grab an assembly that is held in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), maybe so that you can deploy it as a private application assembly.

Browsing to the GAC using Windows Explorer (C:\Windows\assembly) it uses a special explorer plug-in to display the assembly names and versions. This plug-in does not allow you to extract/copy and paste the assembly.

However, if you browsed to the GAC using a network mapped drive, this plug-in is not enabled! So, by mapping to \\machineName\c$\windows\assembly you’ll now have access to the raw assemblies.

Microsoft SyncToy 2.0

Matthew — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:25:47 +0000

At the recent Christchurch Codecamp 2008, Mat Veloso mentioned SyncToy as part of his session on “SQL2008 for developers”. It helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers quickly and easily. This is great for backup and for the whole laptop/desktop worker scenarios.

It was originally developed for professional photographers to sync their photos in confidence. It is built using the Microsoft Synchronisation Framework, which in terms of SQL Server, has the same features as Merge Replication. However, what the framework does is to abstract those same features and allow them to be applied to ‘providers’ other than SQL Server. In this case, the provider is the file system! To get an idea how this was developed, take a look at the white paper “Introducing Microsoft Sync Framework: Sync Services for File Systems”.

Well worth a look! Download SyncToy 2.0 from here.

Read inserted Id from LINQ entity

Matthew — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:38:32 +0000

LINQ really does require a different mindset at times. I came across the following post when I was trying to find out how to read the Id (Primary Key) of an entity that I had just inserted into the database.

http://blog.jemm.net/articles/databases/how-to-common-data-patterns-with-linq-to-sql/

The answer is to simply read the property from your entity object directly after calling “SubmitChanges()”:

Authoring Sidebar Gadgets in C#

pureblue — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:11:34 +0000

I’ve been meaning to look more into building a Sidebar Gadget in Vista for a while now. I just happened to come across a post from Nikhil Kothari’s blog entitled Authoring Sidebar Gadgets in C#. I don’t really have the time to the follow longer, in-depth tutorials you see around and was interested to see how his Script# project allowed the use of C# when building a Gadget. Worth a closer look I think.