[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Earlier this evening the ASP.NET team shipped ASP.NET MVC (Release Candidate 2) for VS 2008/.NET 3.5.  You can download it here . The RC2 release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is a follow-up to the first ASP.NET MVC 2 RC build that we shipped in December.  It includes a bunch of bug fixes, performance work, and some final API and behavior additions/changes.  Below are a few of the changes between the RC1 and RC2 release (read the release notes for even more details): The new ASP.NET MVC 2 validation feature now performs model-validation instead of input-validation (this means that when you use model binding all model...(read more)

I heard someone saying they were having trouble setting up Smooth Streaming for IIS, so I wanted to try it myself. If you just want to see Smooth Streaming work, visit http://www.smoothhd.com/ for some sample demos. They'll adapt to your bandwidth and look as nice as they can. If you want to fake a low-bandwidth situation, you can use the player at http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming and play with limiting the bit rate. Step 0: Got IIS? I've got IIS 7 because I've got Win 7. If your Win 7 installation doesn't have IIS yet, go to Programs and Features and click "Turn Windows Features On or Off" and select Internet Information Services. Don't forgot to go through the tree and turn on the things you...(read more)

Today I’m pleased to announce the availability of Release Candidate 2 for ASP.NET MVC 2 . After receiving feedback from our last release candidate back in December, we decided it would be prudent to have one more release candidate that incorporated the feedback. You can read the release notes for everything that changed, there’s not a whole lot. The biggest change in this release was described by Brad Wilson in his blog post on Input Validation vs. Model Validation in ASP.NET MVC . Also included in this release are an assortment of bug fixes and performance improvements. The window to provide feedback on this release is going to be very short as we are closing in on the RTM. If you want to provide input into this release, please do take the...(read more)

I was working with a friend recently on a side thing they were doing. They wanted to create an "Export" function for some small bit of data and start it from their website. You'd hit a URL after logging in Some data would come out of a database You'd get a .CSV file downloaded You could open it in Excel or whatever. I spoke to my friend and they said it was cool to share their code for this post. This post isn't meant to be a WTF or OMG look at that code, as is it meant to talk about some of the underlying issues. There's few things going on here and it's not all their fault, but it smells . They are using a Page when a IHttpHandler will do. Not a huge deal, but there's overhead in making a Page, and they're...(read more)

One question that came up recently during my mid-year review is how am I measuring customer satisfaction with the products that I work on? For example, how can I measurably demonstrate that customers are happy with the work we are doing on ASP.NET MVC and that my team is responding to customer feedback? Umm, I can’t? At least not right now in a measurable manner. I don’t have any such metric and I’m not sure how reliable any metric I might come up with will be. But perhaps that’s simply due to a lack of imagination on my part. In the past, we’ve tried various unscientific online twitter polls. One thing we did was ask the world for a list of ASP.NET pain points and compile them into one big list. Then at the end of the product cycle, we could...(read more)

My one-hundred-and-ninety-eighth podcast is up . I sit down with Erik Meijer from the Cloud Programmability Team to hear about the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) . Rx is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections. Sound boring? Not even a little. Rx is a prescription for awesome. Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show Rx Team Blog Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) B# .NET Blog Wes Dyer's Blog Jeffrey Van Gogh's Blog Danny van Velzen's Blog Lambda the Ultimate Blog Rx on Channel 9 Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts , a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show. Telerik is our sponsor for this show...(read more)

My one-hundred-and-ninety-sixth podcast is up . Jason Olson works (or worked, as you'll hear) for Microsoft in DPE. In this episode he takes Scott a little deeper into some of the new features in .NET 4, including security, CLR changes, C# 4 and VB 10 improvements and the new Task Parallel Library. Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show Parallel Computing Developer Center Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 Training Course Jason's Blog Whitepaper: Patterns for Parallel Programming: Understanding and Applying Parallel Patterns with the .NET Framework 4 10-4 Show on Channel 9 Jason Olson on Twitter Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 Training Kit Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have...(read more)

This post applies to any ASP.NET app that uses .aspx files, whether WebForms or MVC. When you write an aspx/ascx/master file (I’ll just say aspx for here on, but it applies to all), it gets compiled dynamically by the ASP.NET runtime.  Note that this is true whether you use a Web Site or a Web Application Project (WAP).  While in a WAP, most of the code is built by Visual Studio, the aspx pages themselves are always built dynamically . Normally, when you work with aspx files, you only need to worry about what you write in there, and the specifics of what ASP.NET generates under the cover are somewhat of an implementation details.  However, in some cases it’s pretty useful to look at the generated code, either to learn exactly...(read more)

I apologize for the neologism. What I’m going to demonstrate in this post is a technique I prototyped a few months ago to make it very easy to embed an ASP.NET page’s content in another page, even if it’s using another server technology. This of course works cross-domain. The reason why you would do that is to enable people to embed badges with your contents on their own sites. Examples of such badges can be found in the margin of this blog: there’s the ad badge, a Twitter badge, a Facebook badge, an Xbox Live badge, a Zune badge, and there used to be a Flickr badge. There are even full commenting systems that you can include on your blog this way. All those are Flash or JavaScript, and in both cases there’s a short JavaScript stub that includes...(read more)

It’s that time of year again when a young man’s thoughts turn to Las Vegas! Yep, it’s another year and another Mix conference (March 15-17, 2010), but this time they’ve changed locations to Mandalay Bay. It looks like my prediction that the Mix conferences would end at Mix 09 did not pan out. ;) As I did last year , I’ll be giving two talks at Mix 10 this year, one of them with the irrepressible Scott Hanselman . What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2 Come see and hear about the latest innovations in ASP.NET MVC 2 and the tooling support in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. We'll introduce you to a range of productivity (and extensibility) enhancements such as template helpers, model validation, and the new “Areas” feature, which enhances the team development...(read more)

[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] I’ve been working on a series of blog posts the last few months that cover some of the new features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010. Earlier today someone pointed me at some nice “quick hit” videos that have been published that also provide quick first looks at some of the new features coming with ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010.  These videos aren’t an exhaustive list of everything new – but do provide a great way to quickly learn about many of the cool new things coming with the release.  ASP.NET 4 Videos You can learn more about some of the new ASP.NET 4 features by watching these 22 ASP.NET Quick Hit Videos . VS...(read more)

[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the fourteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s post covers some of the output caching extensibility improvements being made to ASP.NET 4.  These can be used by all ASP.NET 4 applications – including those built using both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Output Caching Today ASP.NET 1.0 introduced the concept of output caching, which enables developers to capture and store the generated output of pages, controls, controllers, and HTTP responses in an in-memory cache.  On subsequent web requests, ASP.NET can then serve content faster by...(read more)

NOTE: An alternative title to this post might be: " The Weekly Source Code 48: Making The Weekly Source Code 47 Suck Incrementally Less. " Last week I wrote a post about Dynamic Linq Query Generation in order to solve a kind of meta-programming problem. I had a site that used ASP.NET Dynamic Data and I wanted to do a LINQ query against some data. However, because I was creating a template that didn't know enough at compile time to write a proper LINQ query that could, well, compile, I needed to creating my LINQ dynamically. Be sure to hang in here with me, the awesome happens at the end. I was trying to generate effectively this at runtime Items.Select(row => row.Property).Distinct.OrderBy(colvalue => colvalue) And I succeeded...(read more)

Themes are a way to define properties of pages and controls, and can be used to provide consistent look across pages. There are several different levels of applying a theme to an individual control, a page, or an application. Control Level Define a named...(read more)

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Technical debates are discussed endlessly within the blog-o-sphere/twitter-verse, and they range across every developer community. Each language, framework, tool, and platform inevitably has at least a few going on at any particular point in time. Below are a few observations I’ve made over the years about technical debates in general, as well as some comments about some of the recent discussions I’ve seen recently about the topic of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC in particular. General Observations About Technical Debates Below are a few general observations independent of any specific technical debate: a) Developers...(read more)