I spent close to three weeks on the road giving talks at Tech-Ed Europe (Berlin), PDC (Los Angeles), and the Los Angeles Code Camp (Los Angeles). I got to talk about two topics that I am very passionate about: ASP.NET MVC and Ajax. Thanks everyone for coming to all my talks! At PDC, I announced all of the new features of our ASP.NET Ajax Library. In particular, I made five big announcements: ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta Released – You can download the beta from Ajax.CodePlex.com ASP.NET Ajax Library includes the AJAX Control Toolkit –...

Scott Guthrie announced the launch of the Microsoft Ajax CDN on his blog last night. If you have not read his post, I recommend that you read it now to get a general overview of the CDN and how you can take advantage of the CDN to improve the performance of your ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/09/15/announcing-the-microsoft-ajax-cdn.aspx In his announcement, Scott describes how both the ASP.NET Ajax and the jQuery libraries are included in the CDN. There is one more set of JavaScript files that we added to the CDN today that Scott did not announce: the jQuery Validation...

ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed is now published and available at your local bookstore and Amazon. I devoted over a year of my life to writing this book. At over 700 pages, this book is one of the most comprehensive books on Microsoft’s newest framework for building web applications. Buy the book at Amazon All of the code samples are included in both the C# and VB.NET programming languages in the text of the book. You can download the source code from the book by visiting my publisher’s website at: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0672329980 You can download a single file that includes all of the code...

Thank you to everyone who came to my talks at Tech-ed India! It was great meeting so many developers in India (I finally got to meet many people who I have been reading their blogs for years). I’ve had several people request the slides and sample files from the talk so I am posting them here. ASP.NET 4 Talk – The slides and sample files. MVC Talk – The slides. The Contact Manager sample application is located at http://www.ASP.net/mvc/learn. AJAX 4.0 Talk – The slides and sample files.  

I’ll be in India all next week giving 3 talks at Microsoft Tech-ed in Hyderabad. This is my first trip to India. I have no idea what to expect. I’ll be giving the following three talks: Welcome to ASP.NET 4.0 – Developing Next Gen Web Applications Developing MVC Based Web Apps using ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 I get to talk about all of the new innovations coming with the next version of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET AJAX (some exciting new stuff to talk about there). And, I get to do...

Recently, I noticed a nice pattern in the Nerd Dinner application. Nerd Dinner uses strongly typed view model classes to pass data from a controller to a view. This pattern provides you with a convenient way of representing complex view data. Note: If you haven’t downloaded the Nerd Dinner sample ASP.NET MVC application yet, you really should. It is a really easy to understand sample application that you can use as a great introduction to ASP.NET MVC. You can download it from the http://www.ASP.net/mvc page. In an ASP.NET MVC application, you pass data from a controller to a view by using view...

The motivation for this blog entry is to explain the nature and purpose of the tests used in Test-Driven Development. To avoid confusion, I’ll use the expression TDD test to refer to the type of test used in the context of Test-Driven Development. The goal of this blog entry is to clarify the relationship among TDD tests, unit tests, and acceptance tests. TDD Tests are not Unit Tests Let’s start with the distinction between TDD tests and unit tests. On the surface, TDD tests are very similar to unit tests. This is not surprising, since you use a unit testing framework such...

Recently, I had a disagreement with a colleague over the correct way to do Test-Driven Development. This is an important disagreement because it affects the design of the ASP.NET MVC framework. According to my co-worker (let’s call him Tad), there is no difference between Test-First Development and Test-After Development “except when you write your unit tests.” Tad is a practitioner and proponent of Test-After Development. When you practice Test-After Development, you write application code first and then you write a unit test that tests the application code. From the perspective of someone who practices Test-Driven Development, this gets things backwards. I...

Paul Litwin posted an interesting article that discusses the four pillars of ASP.NET (Web Forms, MVC, AJAX, and Dynamic Data) to his blog. He provides a good overview and comparison of these different approaches to building ASP.NET applications. According to the article, although Web Forms will always be an important Microsoft technology for building web applications, ASP.NET is no longer just Web Forms. And, this is a good thing :) You can read his blog entry here: http://weblogs.asp.net/paullitwin/archive/2009/03/30/the-four-pillars-of-asp-net.aspx

Thank you everyone who came to my one day ASP.NET MVC workshop at ASP.NET Connections. We managed to build an entire Movie Database application with unit tests and a reasonably good design -- Congratulations! I've attached the Movie Database application and the demo code from the workshop below. Workshop Code