Thursday, July 29, 2010

Visual Studio 2010 - MVC 3 and DLR - Great New Feature

MVC 3 and the use of the Dynamic Keyword and DLR Infrastructure

As I already blogged about the dynamic keyword and it's power, what was very interesting was to see how MVC 3 leverages the DLR infrastructure that is now included with .NET 4.0.  


What was very cool was to see some of the new features of MVC 3 leveraging things such as strongly typed views in the controller.  Before your code may have looked like this ViewData["Mydata"] = "Sean's Data".


With MVC 3 you now have another object called ViewModel.YourField.  Where "YourField" would represent a dynamic value of any attribute on your model that is determined at runtime.  Very cool!!!  The only downside is that you do not have the intelli-sense, but given that you can flexibility a very nice feature added.


DLR Sidebar
So what is the DLR????  DLR stands for Dynamic Language Runtime and runs on top of the CLR or Common Language Runtime.  A very nice read on the DLR.  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff796223.aspx.









Also included is a link to my blog entry for the dynamic keyword.  .NET 4.0 "dynamic" keyword versus, "var" keyword - anonymous types

Monday, July 26, 2010

Visual Studio 2010 - Windows Phone 7 Development - Quick and Easy

Well well well, Windows Phone 7.  Hmmmmm.  What to expect.  Interestingly enough, a very big surprise.  The ease of development for Windows Phone 7 is far better than I have seen in the past, especially with the setup and the emulators.  Aside from the extremely long SDK installation, the integration of the SDK into Visual Studio 2010's IDE was worth the wait.  The design time components are drag and drop and fully functional with Silverlight.  Overall very nice!!!!

The design time IDE looks like this:


To much of a surprise to me, I was able to code a very simple lint brush application which I plan to publish on the Market Place once the application is approved very quickly.



The end result from my perspective is that Windows Phone 7 from the SDK and Visual Studio 2010 integration standpoint seem very promising. 

Nice!!!!!!

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Visual Studio 2010 - AutoMapper, MVC 2 Entity Framework, ASP.NET 4.0

Very nice articles on Auto Mapping one set of objects to another.  An example would be if you have EF objects that you want to map differently for independent views within MVC.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/50387/ASP-NET-MVC-ViewModel-Value-Formatting-using-AutoM.aspx

http://automapper.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Getting%20Started&referringTitle=Home

http://perseus.franklins.net/dnrtvplayer/player.aspx?ShowNum=0155

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Nice Guide on How to Configure IIS for Silverlight

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/262/configuring-iis-for-silverlight-applications/