Tag Archives: Visual Studio

Take the first hour of any online developer course for free at LearningLine

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[Note: reblogged from blog.learninglineapp.com. I'd like to personally invite you to check out our work over at LearningLine - just follow the links below.]

We believe that LearningLine is the most effective online training for developers, period. Today it gets even better. We are announcing the ability to preview any of our online courses, for free without entering any payment information.

This is not a trial that becomes a subscription or a silly 5 minute preview like other company’s offer.  You can now study approximately the first hour of any one of our courses. And you can spend as much time as you like doing so.

To get started, just head over to our schedule page, click on any course title you’d like and choose “Preview course for free“:

   preview-online-developer-course-for-free

This means there is now a lot of content available to you right now. At a typical student speed working for an hour a day, it would take over a month to complete all the content that is available for preview. Continue reading →

Announcing LearningLine: Instructor-led online training from DevelopMentor

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I am very proud to announce an exciting new online learning platform from DevelopMentor:



http://www.learninglineapp.com

At DevelopMentor we have been thinking deeply about online training. We wanted to create an environment that combines the best parts of online learning and classroom training, the best parts of self-directed exploration and expert-led mentoring. We believe we have created just such an environment and I am thrilled to publicly announce it today.

Here’s a short 2-minute video which will give you a quick overview. You can get more details at 
http://www.learninglineapp.com
.

Online training today

There are many shortcomings in how developers learn online today. Continue reading →

Screencast – Validating ASP.NET MVC Forms with DataAnnotations

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Here’s a new screencast for you MVC guys and gals out there.

Validating ASP.NET MVC Forms with DataAnnotations

In this short screencast, I will show you how to leverage ASP.NET MVC’s excellent model binding as well as the DataAnnotations attributes to easily add both server-side and client-side validation for MVC websites.

Use NuGet package restore to simplify code sharing

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Here’s a quick post on how and why you want to consider using NuGet package restore.

First, if you’re unfamiliar with NuGet, it’s basically “add reference” to external software projects (typically open source ones such as jQuery, but also for Microsoft ones such as Entity Framework). You definitely need to check out David Ebbo’s post introducing it. NuGet will change the way you develop.

Now when using NuGet it maintains a packages folder near your solution file. For things like ASP.NET MVC that heavily leverage NuGet, you’ll see this folder is very large. It’s usually much larger than your project itself in the beginning.

If you write small projects and share them out as compressed files (e.g. zip’s), and size matters to you, you might want to consider enabling NuGet package restore (off by default) for those projects and delete the packages folder before zipping and sending it out.

As an example, with a typical MVC 4 project, the “raw” content is 680 KB. After doing a build and counting the packages folder you’ll see it jumps to 16.9 MB. If that helps you significantly, then it’s probably a good idea to use package restore.

Three things have to happen to use NuGet package restore. Continue reading →

Create new ASP.NET MVC views the easy way

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As an instructor at DevelopMentor, I have the unique opportunity to watch many developers experience ASP.NET MVC for the first time. This typically goes through several stages:

  1. Extreme Interest (the web is exciting again!)
  2. Confusion (where does the view go again? wait, what’s routing?)
  3. Shock (you have got to be kidding, forearch in the html file?)
  4. Loss (surely there are some drag-and-drop controls, right… right?)
  5. Acceptance (OK, I will learn HTML and CSS after 10 years of working on the web)
  6. Joy and Freedom (How could I have ever used webforms?)

I rarely hear developers who’ve adopted MVC returning to webforms voluntarily. But not everyone makes it to level 6 of MVC enlightenment. So here is an article to help the new comers make it across step 2 more easily as well as help the advanced MVC developers be more productive. Continue reading →

Screencast: ViewBag and View Data in ASP.NET MVC

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In this screencast I discuss the ViewBag and ViewData properties in ASP.NET MVC. We look at how they can be used to pass data (both simple and complex) from controller action methods down to razor views.

Download the code: Code-Kennedy.Mvc.ViewBagsAndViewData.zip

Understanding the MVC Project Folder Structure (ASP.NET MVC Foundations Series)

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Here’s a short screencast I did on understanding the ASP.NET MVC folder structure.  As you will see, MVC uses the philosophy of convention over configuration. There are many benefits to this. You simply drop a file here or there, give a class a certain name, etc, and things start to happen. But you must understand how MVC expects you to layout your project.

Cheers,
@mkennedy

Preventing JavaScript Files from Loading Multiple Times

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This post is about ensuring that you do not execute a particular JavaScript file more than one time. Let’s start by asking:

What happens if you link to a js file twice in your page?

Here is a contrived example.

Notice that we are including bad-example.js twice. Do modern browsers somehow realize they loaded this file already and skip this? Not yet, as we’ll see!

Imagine bad-example.js had this code in it. Continue reading →

Asynchronous Programming in .NET 4.5 (Video)

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Here’s a recording of a webcast I did for DevelopMentor covering .NET 4.5 and .NET 4 asynchrouns programming concepts, including Task<T>, async, and await.

Enjoy!
@mkennedy

PS – Be sure to watch it in 720p quality.

Webcast: Building Rich Input Forms in ASP.NET MVC Tuesday April 10

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[Update: View the recordings and downloads.]

Want to learn more about building great forms in MVC? Attend my free DevelopMentor webcast this Tuesday.

Webcast: Building Rich Input Forms in ASP.NET MVC


https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/559059054

In this webcast we will explore the powerful features of ASP.NET MVC that allow us to build rich forms that accept user input. We’ll begin by discussing the built-in HTML Helpers and Model Binding. Next we’ll add validation and show how we can do both client- and server-side validation using DataAnnotations. Finally, we’ll see that sometimes using domain models as our form-bound objects doesn’t make sense. We’ll look at more advanced scenarios using View Models.

Cheers,
@mkennedy

Screencast: Building ASP.NET MVC Forms with Razor

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[note: This screencast has been adapted from my earlier blog post.]

In this ASP.NET MVC Foundations screencast, we’re going to look at building an ASP.NET MVC page which allows users to create and edit objects in our domain. We’ll cover just the basics of using HTML helpers to map model properties to our HTML form and Model Binding to convert our HTML form back into our rich domain object.We’ll start with a very basic store website which has read-only data and we’ll add the ability to create and edit products in our store. Be sure to watch in HD mode for a crisp screen.

Building a Cloud OS for .NET Developers – Part 2

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In Part 1 of my Building a Cloud OS for .NET Developers series, I talked about setting up a pure cloud OS focused on developers. But the one crucial aspect I left out was the developer tools.

In this second installment, we’ll be covering exactly that. How do we manage having Visual Studio and associated tools and servers universally accessible in the cloud, even on mobile devices such as iPads?

Continue reading →

Building a Cloud OS for .NET Developers – Part 1

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Let’s talk about cloud operating systems. This article explores the options and potential of moving entirely “To The Cloud” for developers who normally demand significant offline power from their applications (IDEs, compilers, debuggers, etc). We’ll focus on .NET / Visual Studio developers, but I’m sure you can adapt this to your technology of choice.

I’ve been fascinated with what Google is doing with Chrome OS. I think finding a way to fully “live in the cloud” has a lot of promise. However, in practice Chrome OS is entirely unappealing to me. It’s just a single browser window, maximized. Yuck. I don’t mind doing most things in the browser, but I’d like multiple non-maximized browser windows and a desktop to organize things like shortcuts. That’s OK though because Chromebooks aren’t the only option. We have decent operating systems right now that can function largely in the same way if we set them up with discipline.

Continue reading →

11 Killer Open Source Projects I Found with NuGet

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So maybe I’m late to the party, but I recently started playing with NuGet. It’s a killer new way to find, install, maintain, and manage references to open source libraries in Visual Studio 2010. Plenty of people have written about it (Phil Haack and  Scott Hanselman for example). Let’s just say you should learn about NuGet if you don’t know it already.

What I want to talk about is all the cool open source projects I found just by flipping through the pages of the NuGet directory in the Visual Studio “Add Library Package Reference” dialog.

Continue reading →