GuruStop.NET

Another internal company email I sent today and found useful enough to share in the wild (after few modifications)…

Hey all,

There is an online conference (streamed over the Internet, you don’t have to go to physical place) tomorrow called MVCConf; in addition to the MVC in the name it’s related to so many .NET and SQL and jQuery related stuff.

 

You may want to attend as many sessions as you can.

http://mvcconf.com

 

The conference is going to be TOMORROW  July 22 from 8 AM to 5 PM CDT (that means UTC – 5 time, considering Abu Dhabi is UTC + 4, the mentioned time is 9 hours late than Abu Dhabi, so, 8 AM CDT  = 5 PM  for us, 5 PM CDT = 2 AM for us).

 

Of course you do not have to attend all the sessions. Actually you cannot, because they have 3 parallel tracks. (3 sessions at a time).

The conference is streamed over Microsoft Live Meeting.

 

Register from:

http://mvcconf.com/attend

 

See you online :)

Let me add here that the conference agenda can be found at:

This post gets enough said about how the Razor parser works.

http://blog.andrewnurse.net/CommentView,guid,89b7bd90-52d7-4d49-b87d-4e888f285b4c.aspx

The guy, Andrew Nurse, is the one who wrote the parser!   (from Haack’s note)

After reading it and a quick chat with @Haacked on twitter, it seems all your “escape” kind of Razor expressions (that is meaning: when mixing code and text without spaces etc…) will look like @(someCode)someText. This is coming from an example, to escape a C# identifier that’s also a keyword, say “class”, you’d be using @(@class). The @(…) style is the new <%: … %> but only required for escape situations.

Also, it seems that switching from being equivalent to <%: … %> to being equivalent to <%= … %> by using some Razor notation is not gonna make it. You need to do it through doing some classes implementing IHtmlString interface.

Of course I’m not so sure that’s exactly the case. Anyway, Razor is only available now in WebMatrix mini-IDE, not much MVC love yet (pretty soon).  Just thought it might be interesting…

Hey all,

Just in case you have not noticed it already, early last night (before I woke up near midnight our time!) Microsoft released public betas of some new and fancy stuff…

1- IIS Express

Remember when I mentioned it before? A nice alternative to Visual Studio built-in dev server.

Supports SSL and other nice stuff, works even on Windows XP but simulates IIS 7.5, no admin privileges required

2- SQL Server Compact Edition

A file-based database engine, just like SQL Server Express, except that when you develop your website with it, you don’t need it to be installed on the server to get running (or anything else installed)

3- New ASP.NET Pages Syntax code-name Razor

This is a new syntax that is going to replace the old <% … %> ASP-Classic-like style we write ASPX/ASCX pages

It’s going to be mainly for ASP.NET MVC, but watch out, I smell like it’s may reach web-forms also

This is something I have posted to a private mailing list before, and thought since I have only fixed number of keyboard strokes to death, I should be sharing it with larger audience…

Before Beginning

I know some of the audience of this blog may have not even tried ASP.NET MVC, so, you may need to bare with me for a while ((and those familiar with it just bypass this section please).

In ASP.NET MVC, the request goes to a specific method (commonly known as Controller Action) to handle it (choosing which method/action is based on something called Routing, we don’t care about that for now).

Once the method is executed, typically it ends with calling a page or user control (commonly called a View) to send some markup to the browser. Usually this is an ASPX or ASCX file without code behind. It has some special properties to interact with the data coming from the controller action, and some special shortcut methods to write HTML markup (called HTML helpers).

Allow me to quote here some emails I sent to the the Dot NET developers group in my company, Injazat, or, as we call ourselves, Ninjazat. I thought it’ll be useful to share some with you as well.

·         ASP.NET MVC – 20 Hours of FREE Video Tutorials

·         LINQ FAQ

o   LINQ FAQ for Newbie’s

o   LINQ FAQ Part 2

·         How we handle application configuration

·         ScottGu ASPNETMVC Session Video Available Now (Part 1/2 & 2/2)

·         Web Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials

·         Building a Single Sign On Provider Using ASPNET and WCF

o   Part 1

o   Part 2

o   Part 3

·         NxtGenUG Cambridge: Creating extendable applications using MEF slides and code

·         Dynamic Languages and .NET – Developer Day Scotland slides and code samples

·         patterns & practices: Data Access Guidance (VS 2010 Stuff)

·         Refactoring challenge

o   Part 1 – Examination

o   Part 2 – Preparation

·         LINQ is not LINQ To SQL

I was going to put this on twitter but it’s a bit longer to tweet.

Last week I shared some videos on Google Reader and twitter from Microsoft’s MSDN Chopsticks video website. If you don’t know it, it’s a VERY nice videos website with much content on very interesting topics and very recent products as well as different experience levels of content.

http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/

Today, some other friends on twitter noticed the Chopsticks site and were wondering why it doesn’t allow downloading the videos (you can only view them online).

Well, there is a work around to download the videos though:

1. Go to the video web page (you need to have Silverlight installed, and a .NET passport login, like Hotmail account).
   I’m using a sample here: “Using ASP.NET MVC Model Binder” http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=798
   
2. [Update: Skip this is step. Go to Step 3>1]
   If you hover on the video player, you find some icons/buttons that were not showing.
   1. Click the 2nd icon/button from the left, which has the tip “EMBDE”.
       
   2. When you click it, it shows like this:
      

Thank you all for attending my “Applying Domain Driven Design on Asp.net MVC” session. It’s interesting how things went that we got a bit deep into the ASP.NET MVC framework and have achieved the geeky talk goal via covering the other aspects of ASP.NET. Even that this took the entire session, it is nice that it could benefit the attendance.

I am not sure whether we can arrange another session for Domain Driven Design fundamentals and combining that in the same project while using the MVC pattern and ASP.NET Framework. If you are interested in a similar session, please contact me via this blog or email.

Session Slides

Here are the slides for this session:

Sample Code

For the HaackOverflow code sample and another great presentation about ASP.NET MVC, check the PDC 2008 session: “ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications”.

Related Sources

• My Other Presentations on SlideShare
• The 9th Gathering Facebook Event
• dotNETwork Facebook Group
• dotNETwork Yahoo Group
• Official dotNETwork Website
• Earlier "Local Events" Posts in My Blogs

Update

Presentation slides and sample are now available. Please click here to find them!

Yeah, somehow dotNETwork decided to allow me to show all my psychopath about design and implementation in a session with a very weird long title, “Applying Domain Driven Design on ASP.NET MVC”.

Yeah, two unrelated topics. In 2 hours frame, I should be introducing day to day development styles from a different perspective. I had a small talk about the process side of the world. This time we move towards the other areas related to architecture and design.

About the event

dotNETwork is an independent .NET user group in Egypt. They organize a semi-monthly FREE event about various .NET related topics. This is going to be the 9th gathering/event. I have delivered a couple of sessions there before, about Scrum for developers and Design Patterns in C# 3.0.

This time the event will be:

At: Saturday, November 29th, 2008. 12 PM to 4:30 PM

In: CIC Canadian International College

Busses Availability: @ Nady El Sekka, Nasr City (11:00 AM to 11:30 AM)

This is the event agenda, note that session videos will be recorded:

Although I haven`t noticed any announced from the big names yet (see update 2 below), ASP.NET MVC BETA release is already online and available for download.

ASP.NET official MVC page and CodePlex site are not yet updated.

Will keep you updated when the announcements come.

Udpate 1:

You can find screenshots for the new release with some info in this blog post.

Update 2: Announcements have arrived :)

• [MUST READ] Scott Guthrie has posted his announcement, with so many interesting details and how-to guides as you would expect him to.
• From the ASP.NET MVC Framework team:

• Phil Haack has written his own announcement, with many references to very useful ASP.NET resources.
• Scott Hanselman wrote an announcement with references to the new features in the BETA release as described in Scott Guthrie’s post.

I’ve have just sent this email to the developers exchange group in my company:

I think you all know the routing engine that works with ASP.NET MVC framework to enable customizing URLs and mapping those to the corresponding controls, actions and their parameters.

Some of you may know too that the routing engine is not just for ASP.NET MVC, but ASP.NET in general. If you happened to download the source code of the ASP.NET MVC framework (any preview), you’d have noticed that the routing comes as DLL not in source code format like other parts of the ASP.NET MVC framework.

I have found an interesting series of articles going through the routing assembly that I thought you might be interested in:

• The MVC routing assembly – part I
• The MVC routing assembly – part II
• The MVC routing assembly – part III
• The MVC routing assembly – part IV
• The MVC routing assembly – part V
• The MVC routing assembly – part VI
• Using routing with ASP.NET web forms apps

I found them at: http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu/archive/2008/07/04/the-routing-series.aspx

Regards,

Mohamed A. Meligy
SilverKey Technologies – Egypt

Senior Software Engineer