JQuery and ASP.NET MVC

Where have I been? ;) You probably heard the news already from the GU already, but just in case, we will be shipping JQuery with Visual Studio. ASP.NET MVC will have the privilege of being one of the first products to include JQuery. I am glad we finally announced this because I got tired of stifling my mouth everytime someone suggested we just include JQuery. :)

As you can see from demos I've done in the past, JQuery will fit nicely with the ASP.NET MVC style of development.

Currently in Japan with No Consistent Internet Access

The internet access I had at my mother-in-law's last time I was in Japan turned out to be a fluke. I am at a Japanese Manga and Internet cafe (because those three things go so well together) right now typing this out. I've received a lot of comments and questions via my blog and once I get to Hong Kong, I will do my best to answer.

No promises though as I hear that the pool at the hotel is nice and I do have three talks to prepare. I must admit that not having daily internet access is probably a good thing for me as I'm a total online junkie. :)

The next time we visit, I need to remember to bring more reading material. I brought two books on Poker and am tired of reading about it. ;)

Refreshing ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support

This afternoon we released a refresh of our DLR/IronPython support for ASP.NET, now called “ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support”, on our CodePlex site.

This was originally part of our July 2007 ASP.NET Futures package, along with several other features. As updates to these features were made available, we would have liked to remove them from the package, but we wanted to wait till everything within the package was updated.

Well that time has come. This CodePlex release contains two exceedingly simple sample applications, one for WebForms and one for ASP.NET MVC. It’s compiled against the latest DLR assemblies, and our goal is to continue to push it forward fixing bugs here and there. Keep in mind that this initial refresh is pretty barebones and doesn’t contain everything that the original package contained because certain features (such as the project system) are still being updated.

I won’t go too deeply into the specifics of how to use it. Instead, be sure to check out David Ebbo’s whitepaper on IronPython and ASP.NET which was written a while ago, but still mostly relevant. Also, Jimmy Schementi from the DLR team has written a nice brief write-up on this release.

I have the pleasure of taking over as the PM for this feature (in MS parlance we’d say I “own” this feature now) which nicely complements my duties as the PM for ASP.NET MVC. If you’ve followed my blog, you know I have an interest in dynamic languages and now I can channel that interest into work time, rather than on my own time. :)

This initial release only has IronPython support, but IronRuby support will be coming soon. This gives me an opportunity to learn a bit about Python, and let me tell you, the fact that whitespace matters in this language can be nice within a normal code file, but a real pain within a view.

One nice thing about this implementation above and beyond my old IronRuby prototype is that it has true support for a Global.py file, the IronPython equivalent for Global.asax.cs. This allowed me to define my routes in IronPython directly in that file rather than reading in a separate file. I did implement some helper methods in C# that make it easy to define routes using a Python dictionary.

StackOverflow at PDC

First of all, I want to congratulate Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and their team for the release of StackOverflow.com. If you haven’t tried it out, I highly recommend giving it a shot. Be prepared, it’s addicting.

Besides my 959 reputation score (which is actually pretty weak), the other thing about StackOverflow that excites me is that it’s built using ASP.NET MVC. So far, Jeff has mostly praised the experience of using ASP.NET MVC, though he’s had a few pain points that I’m now well aware of. :)

I like StackOverflow so much that I asked Jeff to take a 10-15 minute slice of my ASP.NET MVC talk at PDC to talk about his experiences building StackOverflow using ASP.NET MVC. Having a demonstration of a real-world application using ASP.NET MVC will be a nice complement to my overview talk. For the rest of the talk, he’ll be my code monkey.

By the way, if you’re planning to attend PDC, please navigate to the link to my talk and leave a comment with any requests for things you’d love to hear me talk about. I am currently planning to give the general overview, but perhaps some of you want to hear more anecdotes from the product team, or more details about specific features.

Speaking at Tech-Ed 2008 Hong Kong

If you happen to be in Asia around October 8-10, I’ll be speaking at Tech-Ed Hong Kong. Come by and say hi. I’m giving three talks, one on each day.

I’m hoping to have a little time after some of my talks to go do a little sight-seeing around Hong Kong. The trip to Hong Kong is actually a side trip from Japan where my wife and kid will stay while I go and and speak at this conference. I’m looking forward to the vacation, but wish I had scheduled the vacation part after the conference, rather than before. Lesson learned!

MvcFutures And ASP.NET MVC Beta

UPDATE: The MVC Futures assembly, Microsoft.Web.Mvc is available on CodePlex.

Wanted to provide a quick heads up about the MvcFutures assembly within ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 5. As mentioned in various places, this assembly contains various experimental features we are considering for future versions of ASP.NET MVC.

When we release the BETA for ASP.NET MVC, it will not automatically be included in the project template by the installer. We’ve included it in the various previews for convenience, but we want the BETA installer to be as close to the RTM installer experience as possible.

We will make sure that the assembly remains available on CodePlex. I just wanted to make you aware of this so there is no surprises when we release the Beta regarding this. Thanks!