Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site?s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit

A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we?ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites ( www.scottgu.com ) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I?ll cover later in this blog post:  

Search Relevancy and URL Splitting

Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site?s ?search relevancy? are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in ...

[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the nineteenth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today?s post covers a small, but very useful, new syntax feature being introduced with ASP.NET 4 ? which is the ability to automatically HTML encode output within code nuggets.  This helps protect your applications and sites against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks, and enables you to do so using a nice concise syntax.

HTML Encoding

Cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML encoding attacks are two of the most common security issues that plague web-sites and applications.  They occur when hackers find a way to inject client-side script or HTML markup into web-pages that are then viewed by other visitors to a site.  This can be used to both vandalize a site, as well as enable hackers to run client-script code that steals cookie data and/or exploits a user?s identity on a site to do bad things. One way to help mitigate against cross-site scripting attacks is to make sure that rendered output is HTML encoded within a page.  This helps ensures that any content that might have been input/modified by an end-user cannot be output back onto a page containing tags like <script> or <img> elements.  How to HTML Encode Content Today ASP.NET applications (especially those using ASP.NET MVC) often rely on using <%= %> code-nugget expressions to render output.  Developers today often use the Server.HtmlEncode() or HttpUtility.Encode() helper methods within these expressions to HTML encode the output before it is rendered.  This can be done using code like below: While this works fine, there are two downsides of it: It is a little verbose Developers often forget to call the Server.HtmlEncode method ? and there is no easy way to verify its usage across an app

New <%: %> Code Nugget Syntax

With ASP.NET 4 we are introducing a new code expression syntax (<%:  %>) that renders output like <%= %> blocks do ? but which also automatically HTML encodes it before doing so.  This eliminates the need to explicitly HTML encode content like we did in the example above.  Instead, you can just write the more concise code below to accomplish the exact same thing: We chose the <%: %> syntax so that it would be easy to quickly replace existing instances of <%= %> code blocks.  It also enables you to easily search your code-base for <%= %> elements to find and verify any cases where you are not using HTML encoding within your application to ensure that you have the correct behavior.

Avoiding Double Encoding

While HTML encoding content is oft ...

[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the eighteenth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. A few days ago I blogged about two new language features coming with C# 4.0: optional parameters and named arguments .  Today I?m going to post about a few of my favorite new features being added to VB with VS 2010: Auto-Implemented Properties, Collection Initializers, and Implicit Line Continuation support.

Auto-Implemented Properties

Prior to VB 2010, implementing properties within a class using VB required you to explicitly declare the property as well as implement a backing field variable to store its value.  For example, the code below demonstrates how to implement a ?Person? class using VB 2008 that exposes two public properties - ?Name? and ?Age?:   While explicitly declaring properties like above provides maximum flexibility, I?ve always found writing this type of boiler-plate get/set code tedious when you are simply storing/retrieving the value from a field.  You can use VS code snippets to help automate the generation of it ? but it still generates a lot of code that feels redundant.  C# 2008 introduced a cool new feature called automatic properties that helps cut down the code quite a bit for the common case where properties are simply backed by a field.  VB 2010 also now supports this same feature.  Using the auto-implemented properties feature of VB 2010 we can now implement our Person class using just the code below: When you declare an auto-implemented property, the VB compiler automatically creates a private field to store the property value as well as generates the associated Get/Set methods for you.  As you can see above ? the code is much more concise and easier to read. The syntax supports optionally initializing the properties with default values as well if you want to: You can learn more about VB 2010?s automatic property support from this MSDN page .

Collection Initializers

VB 2010 also now supports using collection initializers to easily create a collection and populate it with an initial set of values.  You identify a collection initializer by declaring a collection variable and then use the From keyword followed by braces { } that contain the list of initial values to add to the collection.  Below is a code example where I am using the new collection initializer feature to populate a ?Friends? list of Person objects with two people, and then bind it to a GridView control to display on a page: You can learn more about VB 2010?s collection initializer support from this MSDN page .

Implicit Line Continuation Support

Traditionally, when a statement in VB has been ...

Here is the latest in my link-listing series . If you haven?t already, check out this month?s " Find a Hoster ? page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

ASP.NET

URL Routing in ASP.NET 4 : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that talks about the new URL routing features coming to Web Forms applications with ASP.NET 4.  Also check out my previous blog post on this topic. Control of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4 : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how it is now easy to control the client ?id? value emitted by server controls with ASP.NET 4. Web Deployment Made Awesome : Very nice MIX10 talk by Scott Hanselman on the new web deployment features coming with VS 2010, MSDeploy, and .NET 4.  Makes deploying web applications much, much easier. ASP.NET 4?s Browser Capabilities Support : Nice blog post by Stephen Walther that talks about the new browser definition capabilities support coming with ASP.NET 4. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website : Nice article by Scott Mitchell that demonstrates how to call and integrate Twitter from within your ASP.NET applications. Improving CSS with .LESS : Nice article by Scott Mitchell that describes how to optimize CSS using .LESS ? a free, open source library.

ASP.NET MVC

Upgrading ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 : Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET team has a nice post that describes how to easily upgrade your ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2.  He has an automated tool that makes this easy. Note that automated MVC upgrade support is also built-into VS 2010.  Use the tool in this blog post for updating existing MVC projects using VS 2008. Advanced ASP.NET MVC 2 : Nice video talk by Brad Wilson of the ASP.NET MVC team.  In it he describes some of the more advanced features in ASP.NET MVC 2 and how to maximize your productivity with them. Dynamic Select Lists with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery : Michael Ceranski has a nice blog post that describes how to dynamically populate dropdownlists on the client using AJAX.

AJAX

Microsoft AJAX Minifier : We recently shipped an updated minifier utility that allows you to shrink/minify both JavaScript and CSS files ? which can improve the performance of your web applications.  You can run this either manually as a command-line tool or now automatically integrate it using a Visual Studio build task.  You can download it for free here . ...

1) Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework The ASP.NET MVC Framework is the latest evolution of Microsoft’s ASP.NET web platform. It introduces a radically new high–productivity programming model that promotes cleaner code architecture, test–driven development, and powerful extensibility, combined with all the benefits of ASP.NET 3.5. An integral benefit of this book is that the core Model–View–Controller architectural [...] Top Ten ASP.NET Books is a post from: .NET Answers

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Technical debates are discussed endlessly within the blog-o-sphere/twitter-verse, and they range across every developer community. Each language, framework, tool, and platform inevitably has at least a few going on at any particular point in time. Below are a few observations I?ve made over the years about technical debates in general, as well as some comments about some of the recent discussions I?ve seen recently about the topic of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC in particular.

General Observations About Technical Debates

Below are a few general observations independent of any specific technical debate: a) Developers love to passionately debate and compare languages, frameworks, APIs, and tools.  This is true in every programming community (.NET, Java, PHP, C++, Ruby, Python, etc).  I think you can view these types of religious technical debates in two ways: They are sometimes annoying and often a waste of time. They are often a sign of a healthy and active community (since passion means people care deeply on both sides of a debate, and is far better than apathy). Personally I think both points are true. b) There is never only ?one right way? to develop something. As an opening interview question I sometimes ask people to sort an array of numbers in the most efficient way they can.  Most people don?t do well with it.  This is usually not because they don?t know sort algorithms, but rather because they never think to ask the scenarios and requirements behind it ? which is critical to understanding the most efficient way to do it.  How big is the sequence of numbers? How random is the typical number sequence (is it sometimes already mostly sorted, how big is the spread of numbers, are the numbers all unique, do duplicates cluster together)? How parallel is the computer architecture?  Can you allocate memory as part of the sort or must it be constant?  Etc. These are important questions to ask because the most efficient and optimal way to sort an array of numbers depends on understanding the answers.  Whenever people assert that there is only ?one right way? to a programming problem they are almost always assuming a fixed set of requirements/scenarios/inputs ? which is rarely optimal for every scenario or every developer.  And to state the obvious - most problems in programming are far more complex than sorting an array of numbers. c) Great developers using bad tools/frameworks can make great apps. Bad developers using great tools/frameworks can make bad apps. Be very careful about making broad assumptions (good or bad) about the quality of the app you are building based on the tools/frameworks used. d) Developers (good and bad) can grow stronger by stretching themselves and lear ...

Learn ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC from scratch.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has officially shipped! If you haven’t already, download a copy from here . What New with Visual Studio If you are new to Visual Studio 2010 please check out all our previous blogs to get a understanding of all the changes we made for Beta 1 including this intro blog on beta 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-10-and-asp-net-4-0-beta1.aspx What’s New with Beta 2 With this release the Web Tools team has introduced a number of great improvements. A number of these improvements are listed below. New Template Using the default ASP.NET web site template, projects now come with a pre-configured site. This template configures your site to use master and content pages. In addition, it has styles pre-defined and controls for login, register and changing your password.   If you do not want to use this template but would rather start from a empty state you can still use the “Empty Web Site” template. This creates a completely empty project that you will need to add a default web form to. Silverlight 3 Tooling Support IMPORTANT NOTE: If you already have Silverlight 3 SDK RTM version (not the GDR) installed on your box you will need to first uninstall it before running Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 setup. This is irrespective of the SDK language version and platform. The SDK GDR does not install on top of the RTM version of the SDK. This problem should be remedied by RTM. If you proceed with install in this state you will get an error at the end of install stating that the SDK failed to install. This error does not affect your setup of beta 2 for Visual Studio but you will still need uninstall to SDK RTM and re-install the SDK GDR if you wish to get the latest version of the SDK. Note that you can install the SL3 GDR SDK directly from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1ea49236-0de7-41b1-81c8-a126ff39975b . While Dev10 tooling for Beta 1 has Silverlight 2 features that worked with Silverlight 3, Beta 2 now re-introduces all the Silverlight 3 features directly into Visual Studio. Changes include: Support for configuring Out of browser (see screenshot below). Support for Transparent Platform Extensions. Page.xaml renamed to MainPage.xaml. Removal of support for Silverlight 2.    Parameterization of Web Packages VS will automatically parameterize the connection strings defined in the web.config and the destination virtual application name.  The users can specify customized parameters in parameters.xml file in the project directory as well, to parameterize configurations, such as WCF service’s end point etc. Import from web.config file for DB deployment ...

[ In addition to blogging, I?m also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Hope you all had a great holiday ? welcome to 2010! Last month I did a blog post about some of the presentations I did in Europe and posted the slides+demo files from them.  High-quality videos of the talks I did in Sweden were posted two weeks ago on the Channel9 site, so you can also now watch videos of the talks online as well.  The videos use a nice format where you can watch me talking as well as the screen at the same time.  The code is readable when running in full-screen mode. Below are links to the different talks along with the slides+sample files:

ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 Web Development

This 90 minute talk provides a nice introduction to ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 for Web Development.  It is primarily demo-driven and walks-through a lot of the new features coming with the release.  The talk starts with a 2 minute introduction of someone introducing me which is in Swedish ? but the rest of the talk is of me talking in English. Watch the Talk ? Part 1 Watch the Talk ? Part 2 Download the Slides Download the Demos Read other .NET 4 and VS 2010 blog posts

ASP.NET MVC

This 2 hour talk provides a nice introduction to ASP.NET MVC, and explains it by walking through how to build a simple application with it from scratch.  Along the way it highlights and discusses some of the new features coming in ASP.NET MVC 2.  Watch the Talk - Part 1 Watch the Talk ? Part 2 Download the Slides Download the Walkthrough Slides

Silverlight 4

This 60 minute talk recaps the keynote I gave at PDC.  It walks-through the new Silverlight 4 features and capabilities. Watch the Talk Download the Slides Download the Samples Hope this helps, Scott ...

One of my roles in the Web Platform & Tools team is managing our ASP.NET websites, including www.asp.net , beta.asp.net (running ASP.NET 2.0 since April!) and the ASP.NET Forums.   We’re about 15 minutes away from going live with our new Atlas.asp.net preview website which will show the world what we’ve been doing with Atlas since Scott blogged it in June.  Since then, the developers have been working at an amazing pace to get the preview together and ready for the PDC and I think we’re going to surprise people with what we have to date. The site will include all of the Atlas content for PDC, including  H ands-on labs, live quickstarts demoing Atlas features, documentation, and VSIs for creating your own Atlas apps with Visual Studio 2005!  In the coming days, we’ll have even more – an Atlas Wiki, that demonstrates many of the great features we’ve built in.   There are also three new Atlas forums for questions, feedback and bug reports.   This is a technology preview - not even a beta, so we're relying on your feedback to help us improve Atlas even more in the coming months. Everything goes live at 8:00am PDT.  Check it out and let us know what you think! ...

One of my roles in the Web Platform & Tools team is managing our ASP.NET websites, including www.asp.net , beta.asp.net (running ASP.NET 2.0 since April!) and the ASP.NET Forums.   We’re about 15 minutes away from going live with our new Atlas.asp.net preview website which will show the world what we’ve been doing with Atlas since Scott blogged it in June.  Since then, the developers have been working at an amazing pace to get the preview together and ready for the PDC and I think we’re going to surprise people with what we have to date. The site will include all of the Atlas content for PDC, including  H ands-on labs, live quickstarts demoing Atlas features, documentation, and VSIs for creating your own Atlas apps with Visual Studio 2005!  In the coming days, we’ll have even more – an Atlas Wiki, that demonstrates many of the great features we’ve built in.   There are also three new Atlas forums for questions, feedback and bug reports.   This is a technology preview - not even a beta, so we're relying on your feedback to help us improve Atlas even more in the coming months. Everything goes live at 8:00am PDT.  Check it out and let us know what you think! ...

Prior to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010, the only way to upgrade an ASP.Net MVC 1 application to ASP.Net MVC 2 was to use Eilon Lipton’s tool . With the release of Visual Studio 2010 you will now be able to open your MVC 1 projects in Visual Studio 2010 and upgrade them to ASP.Net MVC 2 projects. Also, you can upgrade the target framework of the project to 4.0 or continue to target the 3.5 framework. When you first open an ASP.Net MVC 1 application in Visual Studio 2010, you will see the familiar Visual Studio Conversion Wizard.   ASP.Net MVC specific code runs during this wizard and updates all System.Web.MVC references from version 1 to version 2. The wizard also updates the version numbers in the project’s Web.config and the Views folder’s Web.config. The project guid is also updated to the MVC 2 project guid so you will now be able to take advantage of Add Area while working on your application. If you upgrade your project to 4.0, the project system will also upgrade System.Web.Routing and System.Web.Abstractions to 4.0 and modify the references in the project’s Web.config. At this point, you should be able to build and run your project. What about class libraries and Visual Studio Test projects in my solution? Unless you are using Visual Web Developer Express, the ASP.Net MVC upgrade wizard code does not upgrade your class libraries to the 4.0 framework, so make sure to upgrade them in the project properties if you choose to target the 4.0 framework when upgrading your ASP.Net MVC Application. Also you should check to make sure that class library references to System.Web.Abstractions and System.Web.Routing point to the version in the gac, now that these two assemblies are part of the 4.0 framework. Visual Studio Test projects do not support multi-targeting but for solutions with ASP.Net MVC applications they can be migrated to 4.0 along with your MVC Application. If you are using C#, your VS Test project will upgrade to 4.0 regardless of whether you upgrade your ASP.Net MVC 2 Application and your project will build and run whether you target 3.5 or 4.0. Visual Basic test projects will prompt for an upgrade to 4.0 so choose according to which framework you wish to target for your ASP.Net MVC app. In other words, don’t upgrade your app to 4.0 and not upgrade your test project or vice versa. Hope this helps you get your ASP.Net MVC apps up and running in Dev10! Joe Cartano | Visual Web Developer ...

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 contains ASP.Net MVC 2 in the box so there is no need to install an out of band update to Visual Studio 2010 to develop ASP.Net MVC applications. Phil Haack posted about the in-box experience for Beta 2 andd also provides some info on how to upgrade your ASP.Net MVC 1 apps to ASP.Net MVC 2. From a tooling perspective, all of the new functionality released in ASP.Net MVC 2 Preview 2 for Orcas is available in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 including support for  Single Project Areas . Additionally, if you look in the Scripts folder of a new ASP.Net MVC application, you will notice that jquery.validate is included as well as a vsdoc file to go with it. I'll post more on how to use jquery.validate in the coming weeks but for now, you should notice rich intellisense in your pages that use jquery.validate thanks to the inclusion of jquery.validate-vsdoc in your ASP.Net MVC 2 application.  Joe Cartano | Visual Web Developer

This post introduces you to a small improvement that has been made in Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4 to reduce the size of the ASP.NET application level web.config 3.0 and 3.5 web.config As ASP.NET technology evolved, the application level Web.config had new things added to it. Since the earlier frameworks were using the same set of machine level configuration files, incremental feature that was added subsequent to the 2.0 release resulted in additional config settings included in the file. .NET 4 web.config With .NET 4, the web.config is tremendously reduced in size to improve the simplicity  of ASP.NET The config settings have been moved down to the machine config file. This includes registers all of the ASP.NET tag sections, handlers, modules and settings for the following: ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET Routing ASP.NET Chart Control You can look at the trimmed down web.config by creating a .Net 4 'ASP.NET Empty Web Application' in Visual Studio 2010. Following is the web.config file for .NET 4 C# 'ASP.NET Empty Web Application':     The config file above has settings to tell ASP.NET to enable debugging by default for the application and provides the version of .NET framework to use.(Please read the post http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/09/30/visual-studio-2010-property-grid-filtering.aspx to find out why targetFramework version attribute should not be updated manually)   Hope this helps, Deepak Verma | Visual Web Developer ...

Just a reminder that the next Tampa ASP.NET MVC Developer Group Meeting is on Thursday, June 11 at the Microsoft Office in Tampa, Florida. Introduction to jQuery with ASP.NET MVC The meeting will be 2 hours of bliss focused on the UI of your ASP.NET MVC Web Applications and cover an introduction to: MvcContrib ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly ASP.NET AJAX in ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC and jQuery Make sure you register . I look forward to seeing you there :)   David Hayden  

This is the twentieth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today?s blog post covers some of the nice improvements coming with JavaScript intellisense with VS 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.  You?ll find with VS 2010 that JavaScript Intellisense loads much faster for large script files and with large libraries, and that it now provides statement completion support for more advanced scenarios compared to previous versions of Visual Studio. [ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Improved JavaScript Intellisense

Providing Intellisense for a dynamic language like JavaScript is more involved than doing so with a statically typed language like VB or C#.  Correctly inferring the shape and structure of variables, methods, etc is pretty much impossible without pseudo-executing the actual code itself ? since JavaScript as a language is flexible enough to dynamically modify and morph these things at runtime.  VS 2010?s JavaScript code editor now has the smarts to perform this type of pseudo-code execution as you type ? which is how its intellisense completion is kept accurate and complete.  Below is a simple walkthrough that shows off how rich and flexible it is with the final release.

Scenario 1: Basic Type Inference

When you declare a variable in JavaScript you do not have to declare its type.  Instead, the type of the variable is based on the value assigned to it.  Because VS 2010 pseudo-executes the code within the editor, it can dynamically infer the type of a variable, and provide the appropriate code intellisense based on the value assigned to a variable. For example, notice below how VS 2010 provides statement completion for a string (because we assigned a string to the ?foo? variable): If we later assign a numeric value to ?foo? the statement completion (after this assignment) automatically changes to provide intellisense for a number:

Scenario 2: Intellisense When Manipulating Browser Objects

It is pretty common with JavaScript to manipulate the DOM of a page, as well as work against browser objects available on the client.  Previous versions of Visual Studio would provide JavaScript statement completion against the standard browser objects ? but didn?t provide much help with more advanced scenarios (like creating dynamic variables and methods).  VS 2010?s pseudo-execution of code within the editor now allows us to provide rich intellisense for a much broader set of scenarios. For example, below we are using the browser?s window object to create a global variable named ?bar?.  Notice how we can now get intellisense (with correct type inference for a string) with VS 2010 when we later try and use it: ...

Enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits and features: - Separation of concerns and application tasks (input logic, business logic, and UI logic) - Testability (support for Test-Driven Development) - Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript - Intuitive URLs through a URL-mapping component - Extensible and pluggable: the components of the ASP.NET MVC framework are designed so that they can be replaced or customized - Support for existing ASP.NET features (forms authentication, Windows authentication, URL authorization, membership and roles, output and data caching, session and profile state management, health monitoring, the configuration system, and the provider architecture) Categories: ASP.NET MVC more about ASP.NET MVC

Enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits and features: - Separation of concerns and application tasks (input logic, business logic, and UI logic) - Testability (support for Test-Driven Development) - Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript - Intuitive URLs through a URL-mapping component - Extensible and pluggable: the components of the ASP.NET MVC framework are designed so that they can be replaced or customized - Support for existing ASP.NET features (forms authentication, Windows authentication, URL authorization, membership and roles, output and data caching, session and profile state management, health monitoring, the configuration system, and the provider architecture) Categories: ASP.NET MVC more about ASP.NET MVC

The multi-targeting feature of Visual Studio 2010 allows web developers to develop web applications targeting ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0. The key benefit of multi-targeting is that you can use Visual Studio 2010 to create and develop new projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework (such as 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5). Multi-targeting in VS 2010 also lets you continue to develop projects that were created using earlier versions of Visual Studio such as Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. What's different about Multi-targeting in Visual Studio 2010? We supported multi-targeting of web applications in Visual Studio 2008 as well. But the capabilities we had for multi-targeting in VS 2008 were really a pseudo form of multi-targeting, i.e. even though VS 2008 allowed us to target different versions of the ASP.NET framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, the underlying Common Language Runtime (CLR) for all these frameworks is the same (= the .NET CLR 2.0). With the release of the new ASP.NET 4.0 Beta1 framework (that runs on top of the .NET CLR 4.0 that installs side-by-side with earlier versions of the .NET CLR) along with Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, we now have the ability in Visual Studio to target ASP.NET framework versions spanning multiple versions of the CLR (CLR 2.0 and CLR 4.0). VS 2010 can detect when your web project is targeting ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 (that runs on top of CLR 2.0) versus targeting ASP.NET 4.0 (that runs on top of CLR 4.0). Accordingly: VS 2010 allows you to choose ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 or 4.0 as the target framework when you create a new Website or Web Application Project (WAP) Figure 1 You can convert and migrate your web applications built using earlier versions of Visual Studio to Visual Studio 2010. Like you could do with VS 2008, you can continue to have your web project target lower framework versions like ASP.NET 2.0 after conversion. See "Converting web projects from earlier versions of Visual Studio" section below for details. Visual Studio automatically filters controls in toolbox, and types in intellisense and properties window based on the ASP.NET framework version being targeted Compilation and building of the web project works correctly based on the target framework, ie. VS 2010 will show errors when you try to use 4.0 controls or properties in a web project targeting 2.0 or 3.5. You can change targets from one ASP.NET framework to the other via the property pages (as you could in VS 2008). Note: In VS 2010, we prompt you to reload the project when you change the target framework of a website project (VS 2008 used to do this for WAP projects). This is to ensure that the references are updated correctly when you change the target. New capabilities in VS 2010: We already had the above multi-targeting capabilities in VS 2008. VS 2010 extends these capabilities to handle ASP.NET 4.0 (and the new CLR 4.0). Additio ...

Microsoft Floods us with updates supporting VS08 RTM .   I am going to try to sort out what these updates are and how they are grouped together so you know what to choose, these are not in order of when they where released, but rather in the grouping they are most commonly used.  In addition, NONE of these have "Go Live" licenses yet, so don't try using them in production. ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions This is the one I just posted about, it is a glimpse of new, powerful functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET next year (2008).  It includes: ASP.NET model-view-controller (A.K.A. MVC) It does NOT include the ASP.NET MVC Toolkit which provides HTML rendering helpers and dynamic data support. You should be aware that this will break just about every Third Party ASP.Net Control you may be using. ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET AJAX ADO.NET Entity Framework This is confusing, since you still need the ADO.Net Entity Framework Tools Dec 07 CTP AND the Designer and they should be installed FIRST.  The EF Designer requires this Patch to VS08 (VS90-KB945282.exe) So if you plan to use EF, then you should download and install these first. ADO.NET Data Services (A.K.A. Astoria) This requires EF... Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET if you plan to use Silverlight, you also need (want) these updates for Silverlight More info about this can be read here All the Quickstart samples are here , an example of how to get started with ADO.Net Data Services is here . Silverlight 1.1 (soon to be 2.0, but not quite yet.) Make sure you have the Sept 07 Alpha Release and the VS08 RTM release of the Silverlight Tools Alpha You should also get this update for Expression Blend so you can work with a better Designer. Expression Blend 2 December Preview Web Deployment The Web Deployment Projects - December 2007 CTP is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008 which provides developers with advanced compilation and deployment options, while not strictly required, it does make deployment much easier.  There is nothing in the License that says this cannot be used now, but then again, it does not specifically say you can use this in production either. Parallel Extensions Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5, December 2007 CTP gives you a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, and coordination on parallel hardware.  If you are contemplating Parallel Development, you need to read this: The Manycore Shift White Paper it is Microsoft's plan for how they p ...