Posts

Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer snippets (which are really really cool, just like other parts of the roadmap for ASP.NET MVC 2.0). I’ll give the new TDD workflow introduced in VS2010 a take. First of all, I’ll create a new ASP.NET MVC application in VS2010. After installing the project template (and the designer snippets if you are cool), this is easy in VS2010: Proceed and make sure to create a unit test project as well.

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have seen that I don’t like the fact that my ASP.NET MVC views are stored in the deployed package as well… Why? If I want to change some text or I made a typo, I would have to re-deploy my entire application for this. Takes a while, application is down during deployment, … And all of that for a typo…

I just returned from The Hague where Kevin and I delivered a session on PHP and Silverlight. As promised, we are putting our slides and demos online. Download the demo code from here: PHP and Silverlight - DevDays.zip (1.00 mb) Abstract: “So you have an existing PHP application and would like to spice it up with a rich and attractive front-end. Next to Adobe Flex, you can also choose Silverlight as a solution. This session shows you around in Silverlight and shows that PHP and Silverlight can go together easily.” PHP And Silverlight - DevDays session

The fifth episode of the ConnectedShow podcast is up. This podcast is all about cloud computing, Windows Azure, … Recently, they have asked me if I wanted to be in one of their podcasts on the PHP SDK for Windows Azure. In this episode Dmitry welcomes a new co-host, Peter Laudati. Next, we speak to Maarten Balliauw about the new PHP SDK for Windows Azure which is designed to help PHP developers use Windows Azure services. Here’s the link to the podcast: http://www.connectedshow.com/default.aspx?Episode=5

Looking for an ASP.NET MVC 6 version? Check this post. Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been trying to convince us that you have full control over your URL and routing. This is true to a certain extent: as long as it’s related to your application path, everything works out nicely. If you need to take care of data tokens in your (sub)domain, you’re screwed by default. Earlier this week, Juliën Hanssens did a blog post on his approach to subdomain routing. While this is a good a approach, it has some drawbacks:

After a pleasant flight with VLM airlines (Antwerp – London City), traveling under half of the city of London, I arrived at the Microsoft offices in Victoria for their third (?) DII workshop, of which I attended a previous one in Brussels last year.

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don’t forget to rate the video! Abstract: “This session provides an introduction to unit testing using mock objects. It builds a small application using TDD (test driven development). To enable easier unit testing, all dependencies are removed from code and introduced as mock objects. Afterwards, a mocking framework by the name of Moq (mock you) is used to shorten unit tests and create a maintainable set of unit tests for the example application. ”

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, a new open source project has just been released on CodePlex: PHP SDK for Windows Azure, bridging PHP developers to Windows Azure. PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & Queues. I’m pleased that Microsoft has chosen RealDolmen and me to work on the PHP SDK for Windows Azure.

Thursday evening, I did a session on Mocking for the VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). As promised, here is the slide deck I’ve used. The session will be available online soon, in the meantime you’ll have to go with the slide deck. Mocking - Visug session Demo code can also be downloaded: MockingDemoCode.zip (1.64 mb) Thank you for attending the session!

In this post, I’ll share some of the best practices and guidelines which I have come across while developing ASP.NET MVC web applications. I will not cover all best practices that are available, instead add some specific things that have not been mentioned in any blog post out there. Existing best practices can be found on Kazi Manzur Rashid’s blog and Simone Chiaretta’s blog: After reading the best practices above, read the following best practices.