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ASP.NET MVC action methods can be developed using regular method parameters. In earlier versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework, these parameters were all simple types like integers, strings, booleans, … When required, a method parameter can be a complex type like a Contact with Name, Email and Message properties. It is, however, required to add a ModelBinder attribute in this case. Here’s how a controller action method could look like:

In earlier ASP.NET MVC previews, form validation was something that should be implemented “by hand”. Since the new ASP.NET MVC preview 5, form validation has become more handy. Let me show you how you can add validation in such a ridiculously easy manner. Here’s an example controller:

A while ago, KatrienDG asked me to do some screencasts on the ASP.NET MVC framework for the MSDN Chopsticks page. I’ve been working on 2 screencasts: an introductory talk to the ASP.NET MVC framework and a Test Driven Development story. Feel free to leave some comments!

ScottGu just posted that there’s an upcoming preview 4 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. What I immediately noticed, is that there are actually some community concepts being integrated in the framework, yay! And what’s even cooler: 2 of these new features are things that I’ve already contributed to the community (the fact that it these are included in the MVC framework now could be coincidence, though…). Thank you, ASP.NET MVC team! This preview 4 release seems like a great step in the evolution of the ASP.NET MVC framework. Thumbs up!

Yesterday, I received the new Dutch edition of .NET magazine containing my article on the ASP.NET MVC framework. Since the article was written quite a while ago, soucre code is no longer up-to-date. Readers who are interested (or anyone else interested in ASP.NET MVC) can download up-to-date code examples on the ASP.NET MVC guestbook page.

In my previous blog post on ASP.NET MVC OutputCache, not all aspects of “classic” ASP.NET output caching were covered. For instance, substitution of cached pages. Allow me to explain…

In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying data and processing isn’t really subject to changes a lot. This cached response is stored in the web server’s memory and offers very fast responses because no additional processing is required.

Have you ever been in a difficult situation where a software product is overall very good, but a small detail is going wrong? At least I’ve been, for the past week… Team System allows check-in policies to be enforced prior to checking in your code. One of these policies is the unit testing policy, which allows you to enforce a specific test list to be run prior to checking in your code.

Earlier this week a colleague of mine asked me if there was such thing as a DataGrid or GridView or something like that in the ASP.NET MVC framework. My first answer was: “Nope!”. I advised him to look for a nice foreach implementation or using ExtJS, Dojo or similar. Which made me think… Why not create a simple GridView extension method which generates a nice looking, plain-HTML grid with all required features like paging, editing, deleting, alternating rows, …?