August | 2010 | Coding Out Loud

Many thanks to Chris Bowen who was the guest speaker at the August 2010 Boston Azure user group meeting. The topic was ASP.NET MVC, with an Azure perspective.

Check out Chris’ blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/

Here are my rough notes:

There was no slide deck – Chris jumped right into the code. Here are a few of my rough notes.

Consider Web Platform Installer 2.0 to install Azure tooling.

Windows Azure Platform Tools
Visual Web Developer 2010 Express

ASP.NET MVC concepts / benefits:

“A lot of convention” – great in the long run, hard to grasp at first…
Separation of Concerns – controller then view
ASP.NET MVC is closer to the metal than traditional ASP.NET – if you want to implement, say, XHTML, then nothing stands in your way.
Strongly-typed Controllers and Views can be generated once your model is in place.
Controller may choose to pass along only a ViewModel – subset of full Model, or perhaps enhanced
Model Binding is also by convention
Hackable URLs

Tips and Tricks:

Ctrl-Shift-Click on Visual Studio in Win 7 will launch in Admin mode which Azure requires.
Can modify the T4 template for MVC to alter its UI options in wizards.
Ctrl-M-G – bring me to the appropriate View for this Action

New in MVC 2 / ASP.NET 4:

Html.DisplayForModel
RenderActions – new in MVC 2
New in ASP.NET 4 (not just ASP.NET MVC 2) is <%: “foo” %> where the “:” is a new feature as shortcut for HTML.Encode for the content.
MVC 2 has powerful client-side validation based on characteristics of your model. Does not require a server-side round trip. You specify e.g., [Required] attribute on Model data – and you don’t need to write any imperative code.