If you are coming from Asp.Net WebForms development, you are probably use to controls that include a lot of base functionality out of the box. Some of these controls were the DataGrid and GridView, which would construct an html table for you without writing a single line of html. While these controls offered productivity gains because you did not need to mess with the html, css, or JavaScript in order to get them to run, they gave you little control on what the output was, and often times, the output was less than desirable.
The new Razor view engine contains several handy extension methods you can use in your views. These methods mostly deal with either detecting if a string value can be converted to a particular type, or converting string values to a particular type. For instance, the following code checks to see if a querystring value is a decimal, and if so, to format it as a currency:
@{
if (Request.
Its been awhile, but the Desert Mountain region (Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Southern Nevada), has a new Developer Evangelist from Microsoft. Michael Palermo will be filling the role left by Rob Bagby, and will be supporting us in the Colorado area. DE’s are developers that support developers, and work closely with the community as well as with the MS product teams.
Join me in welcoming Michael. You can find him at the following places:
Sorry this is a few days late, but I have finally uploaded my demo from my talk at last Monday’s Denver Visual Studio.Net User Group
If you were there, thanks for coming out and seeing our community launch event for Visual Studio 2010. We had a packed house of 100+ people, and had a great time.
In order to run this demo, you will need the Entity Framework Code First CTP4 binaries.
A few days back, Rob Conery wrote a post comparing C# and Ruby, and how using the dynamic keyword in C# lets you pass in arguments into a C# method in a way similar that it is done in Ruby land. I’m not a Rubyist, but the same ideas are in JavaScript as well. I have worked on .Net applications that take in a dictionary parameter of named value pairs, and sometimes it has been a bit of a bear to maintain, but I agree with Rob that it can be very flexible, especially if you don’t have your API nailed down quite yet and you are constantly changing your method signature.
I am pleased to announce the formation of a new study group focusing on .Net technologies coming to the Denver DTC area. The study group is a sub group of the Denver Visual Studio.Net User Group. We will meet on the first and third Thursdays of the month during the lunch hours (11:30 to 12:30ish). We will focus on a wide range of technologies that the .Net developer will be interested in learning.
Last week, MVC 2 was released, and like many ecstatic developers, I grabbed the bits right away and downloaded them. First, however, I uninstalled all the MVC2 RC bits I had, including the tools for VS2008 and VS2010. Then I installed RTM, and… came to realize that this release was for VS2008 only. Ok, no biggie, I can wait till VS2010 RTMs to use the final MVC2 bits, so I uninstalled RTM and reinstalled RC.
Thanks everyone who came to my jQuery talk today at the RM Tech Trifecta v2.0. I had a great crowd of 51 people. Unfortunately, I only got about 1⁄2 through my presentation before time ran out. My my, how fast 75 minutes can go when your having fun. Below is a link to my slides and demos apps. Feel free to download them and check it out!
Demos and Slides
The formatting of JavaScript in VS 2008 has finally drove me nuts. Particularly, when pressing enter after a statement, the IDE will decrease the indent of the line above. Why it does this makes no sense to me, but there is a way to get around it.
In VS2008, go to Tools>Options>Text Editor>JScript>Formatting. Uncheck “Format completed line on Enter”. This will keep the IDE from changing the formatting when adding new lines of code to a function/code block in JavaScript.
Last year was the first Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta, and it was a blast. Nearly 400 developers, DBAs and IT admins descended into Denver and took part. It is an all day code camp/server camp/PASS camp. The event is happening again this year, Saturday February 27th. I’ll be speaking again at this years event, this time on jQuery for .Net Developers. Go to the site http://www.rmtechtrifecta.com and check out the schedule and register now!