I don’t know about you, but a great way to learn a new technology is to start using it. But to even start using it, it helps to be able to look at a real-world running application built on that technology. Combine that with source code and a walkthrough, and I think you have a winning combination.

Yesterday, I wrote about troubleshooting Windows MSI Installers and talked about the pain we here feel when an installation fails. Turns out, it’s not always our fault. ;) It appears there’s a hotfix released for Visual Studio which addresses a problem with installing ASP.NET MVC when you have a third party add-in installed. I mentioned the three above because they are among the most commonly used add-ins which run into problems.

UPDATE: I updated this post slightly to address some good criticsm from Rob Mensching by removing the MsiZap section. Note that this post does not blame the Windows Installer for the few problems we have with ASP.NET MVC installations. The major culprit tends to be either devenv /setup or ngen.exe.

UPDATE: This post is outdated. ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released already!

I finally have my registration worked out and I’m officially going to Mix09 this year! Woohoo! Not only am I going, but I’ll be speaking at Mix for the first time, so be sure to come by and say hi.

Day two of ALT.NET is over and I’m already pooped (for you non-English speakers, that means tired, not something else that might come to mind).

The third and last day of ALT.NET Seattle was a short one for me. My poor extremely patient wife was not feeling well today so I had to leave right at lunch time. But before I left, I did manage to attend a great session by John Lam and Jimmy Schementi on “Adding Scripting Support to .NET Applications”. In fact, you can watch the session here via Kyte.tv.

Last July, I blogged about an IronRuby ASP.NET MVC prototype Levi and I put together with John Lam and Jimmy Schementi of the DLR team. It was really rough around the edges (and still is!)

Alternate Title: Linq, it’s not just for SQL.

Today I read something where someone was comparing Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC and suggested that Web Forms does a lot more than ASP.NET MVC to protect your site from malicious attacks.

Here’s a little known fact about T4 Templates…well besides that they exist in the first place. Visual Studio 2005 had support for T3 templates. T4 is the natural successor to T3. T3 is also the abbreviation used when marketing the movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. I heard that the names are related, but I haven’t confirmed it beyond a doubt, which seems appropriate given the title of the movie. But you didn’t hear that from me, deal?

UPDATE: I have a followup to this post that works for down-level browsers.

Earlier this morning, I posted on making a simple jQuery delete link which makes it easy to create a delete link that does a form post to a delete action. Commenters pointed out that my solution won’t work for down-level browsers such as some mobile phones, and they were right. I wasn’t really concerned about down-level browsers.

Hello there. :)

In my last post, I announced the happy news that the Release Candidate for ASP.NET MVC is available. In this post, I say mea culpa for a known bug within this release.

At long last I am happy, relieved, excited to announce the release candidate for ASP.NET MVC. Feel free to go download it now. I’ll wait right here patiently.

A while back on a lark, I posted a prototype demonstrating how one could use Routing within Web Forms. This is something you can do today with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, because of the work we did to separate Routing from ASP.NET MVC. I would have liked to include Web Form Routing as part of the Routing feature when we were working on SP1, but we didn’t have the time to do so in a robust manner before SP1 was locked down.

UPDATE: Be sure to read Peli’s post in which he explores all of these implementations using PEX. Apparently I have a lot more unit tests to write in order to define the expected behavior of the code.

I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep lately, so I thought last night that I would put that to use and hack on Subtext a bit. While doing so, I ran into an old Asynchronous Fire and Forget helper method written way back by Mike Woodring which allows you to easily call a delegate asynchronously.