A while back I wrote a sample that demonstrated how to use Routing with WebForms.

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:

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.

NEW UPDATE: There is no longer need for this custom ActionResult because ASP.NET MVC now includes one in the box.

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.

I did another interview with those wild and crazy guys, Carl and Richard. My first time (show 261) being on .NET Rocks was back in August of 2007 when I talked about Subtext, Open Source, and my blog.

Not long ago, my compadre Scott Hanselman related the following story…

File this one away for the next time your boss comes in and asks,

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.

In my last post I set the stage for this post by discussing some of my personal opinions around integrating a dynamic language into a .NET application. Using a DSL written in a dynamic language, such as IronRuby, to set up configuration for a .NET application is an interesting approach to application configuration.

Disclaimer: My opinions only, not anyone else’s. Nothing official here. I shouldn’t have to say this, but past history suggests I should. P.S. I’m not an expert on DSLs and Dynamic Languages ;)

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.

If ever someone was undeserving of having others spend their valuable time translating his blog, it would be me. But hey, some people from the http://blog.joycode.com/ site went ahead and did it anyway. I must admit that I’m very flattered that anyone would put the effort in.

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?

When I build applications, I personally like to have my unit tests in a separate class library project than the application I am testing. That’s just how I roll.

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’s a great interview on the How Software is Built blog with Brad Wilson, a developer in Microsoft’s OfficeLabs team, but probably better known for his work on xUnit.net, CodePlex, and ObjectBuilder.

It’s been all quiet on the Subtext front for a while. While I think many open source projects face the occasional lull, Subtext was hit by a Perfect Storm of inactivity.

UPDATE: This was an April Fool’s joke. I actually stated this in the bottom of the original post, but in a very small font, which some people noticed. :)

LazyCoder (aka Scott Koon) is organizing a little drinky drink this Wednesday around 6:00 PM-ish at The Three Lions Pub. This is just an informal gathering, not the huge production like the Hanselman Geek Dinner which requires eating at a mall food court because some three hundred plus geeks show up. (Did you know his last geek dinner was covered by theSeattle Times online?).