aspnetmvc
There are 27 entries for the tag
aspnetmvc
When you create a new ASP.NET MVC project using our default templates, one of the things you might notice is that there is a web.config file within the Views directory. This file is there specifically to block direct access to a view. Let’s look at the relevant sections. For IIS 6 (and Cassini) <add path="*.aspx" verb="*"
type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler"/>
For IIS 7
<add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*.aspx" verb="*"
preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler"/>
What these sections do is block all access to any file with the .aspx extension...
When approaching an extensibility model, I often find cases in which I want to merely tweak the existing behavior of the default implementation and wish I didn’t have to create a whole new specific type to do so. Instead of creating a specific type, I tend to write a decorator class that implements the interface and takes in both the default instance of that interface and a delegate (specified using a lambda of course). Let’s look at a quick example to make all this abstract talk more concrete. I’m playing around with the NVelocity View Engine for ASP.NET...
Or, as my recent inbox tells me, you’re not afraid to ask. ;) A coworker recently asked for some good resources on getting up to speed on the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern. Around the same time, I received another email talking about how people are confused around the difference between MVC and the Model View Presenter (MVP) pattern. No better opportunity to apply the DRY principle by answering some of these questions with a blog post. MVC The first place to start digging into the MVC pattern is to look at the Wikipedia entry. That’ll...
I wish I could have been there, but I was celebrating my son’s first birthday (which gives me an opening to gratuitously post a picture of the kid here). I’m talking about Tech-Ed 2008 Orlando of course where John Lam presented a demo of IronRuby running on top of ASP.NET MVC. This demo builds on prototype work I’ve done with defining ASP.NET MVC routes and views using IronRuby. The final missing piece was defining controllers using IronRuby. Working with members of John’s team, Levi (a dev on the ASP.NET MVC team) made the necessary adjustments...
My compadre Scott Hunter, another PM on the ASP.NET team, who happens to work on the Dynamic Data feature, recently put together an example of using ASP.NET MVC and Dynamic Data Web Forms together in the same application. Look for the link to MvcDynamicData.zip on this Code Gallery page. I’ve been working on a post detailing a couple different ways to integrate WebForms and MVC, but life has been really busy for me lately. Hopefully I’ll get that to you soon. In the meanwhile, you can probably learn all you need to know by looking at this...
A while back I wrote a sample that demonstrated how to use Routing with WebForms. If you missed it, you can download the code here With the recent announcement that Routing will be included with .NET 3.5 SP1, you can see why I wanted to put that demo together. I have since updated that sample to work with the versions of Routing that comes with the April CodePlex build of MVC. This should also work with the SP1 Beta. I’ll verify that when I get a moment. As part of this update, I added a new...
The news is out, the beta for the Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack has been released. As it relates to ASP.NET MVC, there are two important points to notice about the SP1 release:
ASP.NET MVC is not included
URL Routing is included
Now you can see why there’s been so much focus on Routing from the MVC team, as Routing is now part of the Framework and is not out-of-band. This meant that we had to put a lot more effort into Routing to make sure it was...
In my last post, I walked through a simple example of an ActionResult that you can use to transmit a file to the user’s browser along with a download prompt. The MVC framework will include several useful action results for common tasks. However, we might not cover all results you might want to return. In this post, I walk through a simple result that will cover all remaining cases. With the DelegatingResult, you simply pass it a delegate. This provides ultimate control. Let’s see it in action. public ActionResult Hello()...
UPDATE: I’ve updated the sample to include a new lambda based action result. This also fixes an issue with the original download in which I included the wrong assembly. The April CodePlex source drop of ASP.NET MVC introduces the concept of returning an ActionResult instance from action methods. ScottGu wrote about this change on his blog. In this post, I’ll walk through building a custom action result for downloading files. As you’ll see, they are extremely easy to build. Let’s start at the end and see what the end-user behavior of this new result will be....
A while back I wrote a routing debugger which is useful for testing your routes and seeing which routes would match a given URL. Rob suggested we have something like this for unit tests, so I whipped something simple up.
This is a class that allows you to test multiple different URLs quickly. You simply create the RouteEvaluator giving it a collection of routes and then GetMatches which returns a List<RouteData> containing a RouteData instance for every route that matches, not just the first one.
Here's a sample of usage.
[Test]
public void CanMatchUsingRouteEvaluator()
{
var routes = new RouteCollection();
GlobalApplication.RegisterRoutes(routes);
var...
Not long ago, my compadre Scott Hanselman related the following story... In a recent MVC design meeting someone said something like "we’ll need a Repeater control" and a powerful and very technical boss-type said: "We’ve got a repeater control, it’s called a foreach loop." I beg to differ. I think we can do better than a foreach loop. A foreach loop doesn’t help you handle alternating items, for example. My response to this story is, “The foreach loop is not our repeater control. Our repeater control is an iterating extension...
File this one away for the next time your boss comes in and asks,
Yeaaah, I’m going to need you to make that little change to the code. It’ll only take you a couple hours, right?
Software has this deceptive property in which some changes that seem quite big and challenging to the layman end up being quite trivial, while other changes that seem quite trivial, end up requiring a lot of thought, care, and work.
Often, little changes add up to a lot.
I’m going to walk through a change we made that seemed like a no-brainer but ended up having a...
In a recent post I expressed a few thoughts on using a DSL instead of an XML config file. I followed that up with a technical look at monkey patching CLR objects using IronRuby, which explores a tiny bit of interop. These posts were precursors to this post in which I apply these ideas to an implementation that allows me to define ASP.NET MVC Routes using IronRuby. Also included in this download is an incomplete implementation of an IronRuby view engine. I haven't yet implemented layouts. IronRubyMvcDemo.zip Download (4.93 MB) This implementation works with the latest CodePlex...
UPDATE: Just to prove that this is a preview of a preview, we had a signing problem with the initial pre-built VSI download. If you tried building from source, everything should’ve been ok. We apologize for that. Even though this is meant to be a rough preview, we do want to have a high quality bar in that you should be able to try out the code. So if you run into that problem, please do download the VSI again.
It’s no secret that Microsoft can get better at naming non RTM (Release to Manufacturing) releases. We have terms like CTP,...
Made a few corrections on having default.aspx in the root due to a minor bug we just found. Isn’t preview code so much fun?
We’ve been making some changes to routing to make it more powerful and useful. But as Uncle Ben says, with more power comes more responsibility. I’ll list out the changes first and then discuss some of the implication of the changes.
Routes no longer treat the . character as a separator. Currently, routes treat the . and / characters as special. They are separator characters. The upcoming release of routing will only treat the...
Way down the road, it would be nice to be able to build ASP.NET MVC applications using a DLR language such as IronRuby. However, enabling DLR language support isn’t free.
There are going to be places in our design that are specific to statically typed languages (such as Attribute based filters) that just wouldn’t work (or would be too unnatural) with a dynamic language.
Ideally we can minimize those cases, and for the ones we can’t, we need to make sure the extensibility of the framework allows for extending the system in such a way that we can provide a DLR friendly...
Whew! I’ve held off writing about MVC until I could write a non-MVC post in response to some constructive criticism (It’s not just Sean, Jeff mentioned something to me as well). Now that I’ve posted that, perhaps I’ve bought myself a few MVC related posts in a row before the goodwill runs dry and I have to write something decidedly not MVC related again. ;) As ScottGu recently posted, the ASP.NET MVC source code is now available via CodePlex. A move like this isn’t as simple as flipping a switch and *boom* it happens. No, it takes a lot...
In Scott Hanselman’s wonderful talk at Mix, he demonstrated a simple little route tester I quickly put together.
This utility displays the route data pulled from the request of the current request in the address bar. So you can type in various URLs in the address bar to see which route matches. At the bottom, it shows a list of all defined routes in your application. This allows you to see which of your routes would match the current URL.
The reason this is useful is sometimes you expect one route to match, but another higher up the stack matches instead....
UPDATE: I updated the sample to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 version of Routing. This sample is now being hosted on CodePlex.
Download the demo here
In my last post I described how Routing no longer has any dependency on MVC. The natural question I’ve been asked upon hearing that is “Can I use it with Web Forms?” to which I answer “You sure can, but very carefully.”
Being on the inside, I’ve had a working example of this for a while now based on early access to the bits. Even so, Chris Cavanagh impressively beats me to the punch in blogging...
At this year’s Mix conference, we announced the availability of the second preview for ASP.NET MVC which you can download from here. Videos highlighting MVC are also available. Now that I am back from Mix and have time to breathe, I thought I’d share a few (non-exhaustive) highlights of this release as well as my thoughts on the future. New Assemblies and Routing Much of the effort and focus of this release was put into routing. If you’ve installed the release, you’ll notice that MVC has been factored into three assemblies: ...
This is part 2 in an ongoing series in which I talk about various design and versioning issues as they relate to Abstract Base Classes (ABC), Interfaces, and Framework design. In part 1 I discussed some ways in which ABCs are more resilient to versioning than interfaces. I haven’t covered the full story yet and will address some great points raised in the comments.
In this part, I want to point out some cases in which Abstract Base Classes fail in versioning. In my last post, I mentioned you could simply add new methods to an Abstract Base Class and not...
By the way my blogging frequency has declined, you can guess I’ve been quite busy here at Microsoft preparing for the next release of ASP.NET MVC. It’s not just working on specs, design meetings, etc... that keep me busy. It’s preparing for several talks, various spec reviews, building hands on labs, demo and and app building, etc...that keeps me busy. All the while I am still learning the ropes and dealing with selling a house in L.A. and buying a house up here. There’s a lot that goes into being a PM I naively didn’t expect, on top...
UPDATE: I improved this based on some feedback in my comments.
With ASP.NET MVC it is possible for someone to try and navigate directly to a .aspx view. In general, this only leaves them with an ugly error message as Views typically need ViewData in order to work.
However, one approach that I think will easily work is to create a Web.config file in the root of your Views directory that contains the following.
We need to do more testing on our side to make sure there's no pathological case in doing this, but so far in my personal testing, it seems to...
At the risk of embarrassing myself and eliciting more groans, I am going to share a joke I made up for my Code Camp talk. I was inspired to come up with some humor based on Jeff’s Sesame Street Presentation Rule post. I fully understand his post was addressing something deeper than simply telling a gratuitous joke in the presentation.
The context is that I just finished explaining the various dependencies between the Model, View, and Controller within the MVC pattern.
UPDATE: Updating this joke as the feedback comes in. The original is at the bottom.
So a Model, a View, and a...
A common pattern when submitting a form in ASP.NET MVC is to post the form data to an action which performs some operation and then redirects to another action afterwards. The only problem is, the form data is not repopulated automatically after a redirect. Let's look at remedying that, shall we?
When submitting form data, the ASP.NET MVC Toolkit includes a helper extension method that makes it easy to go the other direction, populating an object from the request. Check out the following simplified controller action adapted from an example ScottGu’s post on handling form data.
[ControllerAction]
public void Create()
{
Article article...
The ASP.NET Routing engine used by ASP.NET MVC plays a very important role. Routes map incoming requests for URLs to a Controller and Action. They also are used to construct an URL to a Controller/Action. In this way, they provide a two-way mapping between URLs and controller actions.
When building routes, it may be useful to write unit tests for the routes to ensure that you’ve set up the proper mappings you intend.
ScottGu touched a bit on unit testing routes in part 2 of his series on MVC in which he covers URL Routing. In this post, we’ll go into a...
One of the guiding principles in the design of the new ASP.NET MVC Framework is enabling TDD (Test Driven Development) when building a web application. While still leaving room for improvement, the soon to be released CTP (Community Technology Preview) release of ASP.NET MVC will do a pretty nice job in supporting the TDD habit.
This post will provide a detailed walkthrough of building a web application in a Test Driven manner while also demonstrating one way to integrate a Dependency Injection (DI) Framework into an ASP.NET MVC app. At the very end, you can download the code.
I chose StructureMap 2.0...