Jack @ ASP.NET

A hotfix is now available for issues most commonly described as "Controls are not being recognized in the code-behind" and "Editing existing .aspx regenerates .aspx.designer.(cs), but most of the controls are now missing”.

This hotfix can be downloaded from: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=27117

The update addresses the following Connect bugs:

    * Cannot embed standard asp.net controls in Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer
    * Controls in CreateUserWizard WizardStep not visible as before
    * issue with auto-generated Designer files not addding components
    * Code Generation in 2010 RC doesn’t work the same as 2008 for ASP.NET Application
    * Editing existing .aspx regenerates designer.cs (good) but most of the controls are now missing (bad)
    * ASP.NET designer fails to auto-generate fields
    * Bug in generating the designer.cs file in VS2010 (Converting VS2008 project to VS2010)

ASP.NET MVC 2 is a framework for developing highly testable and maintainable Web applications by leveraging the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The framework encourages developers to maintain a clear separation of concerns among the responsibilities of the application – the UI logic using the view, user-input handling using the controller, and the domain logic using the model. ASP.NET MVC applications are easily testable using techniques such as test-driven development (TDD).
The installation package includes templates and tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 to increase productivity when writing ASP.NET MVC applications. For example, the Add View dialog box takes advantage of customizable code generation (T4) templates to generate a view based on a model object. The default project template allows the developer to automatically hook up a unit-test project that is associated with the ASP.NET MVC application.
Because the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5 SP 1, developers can take advantage of existing ASP.NET features like authentication and authorization, profile settings, localization, and so on. Download it at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7aba081a-19b9-44c4-a247-3882c8f749e3&displaylang=en

What is new:

• The new ASP.NET MVC 2 validation feature now performs model-validation instead of input-validation (this means that when you use model binding all model properties are validated instead of just validations on changed values of a model).  This behavior change was based on extensive feedback from the community.

• The new strongly-typed HTML input helpers now support lambda expressions which reference array or collection indexes.  This means you can now write code like Html.EditorFor(m=>m.Orders[i]) and have it correctly output an HTML <input> element whose “name” attribute contains the index (e.g. Orders[0] for the first element), and whose “value” contains the appropriate value.

• The new templated Html.EditorFor() and Html.DisplayFor() helper methods now auto-scaffold simple properties (and do not render complex sub-properties by default).  This makes it easier to generate automatic scaffolded forms.  I’ll be covering this support in a future blog post.

• The “id” attribute of client-script validation message elements is now cleaner.  With RC1 they had a form0_ prefix.  Now the id value is simply the input form element name postfixed with a validationMessage string (e.g. unitPrice_validationMessage).

• The Html.ValidationSummary() helper method now takes an optional boolean parameter which enables you to control whether only model-level validation messages are rendered by it, or whether property level validation messages are rendered as well.  This provides you with more UI customization options for how validation messages are displayed within your UI.

• The AccountController class created with the default ASP.NET MVC Web Application project template is cleaner.

• Visual Studio now includes scaffolding support for Delete action methods within Controllers, as well as Delete views (I always found it odd that the default T4 templates didn’t support this before).

• jQuery 1.4.1 is now included by default with new ASP.NET MVC 2 projects, along with a –vsdoc file that provides Visual Studio documentation intellisense for it.

• The RC2 release has some significant performance tuning improvements (for example: the lambda based strongly-typed HTML helpers are now much faster).

Why SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large percentage of traffic to sites now comes from search engines, and improving the search relevancy of your site will lead to more user traffic to your site from search engine queries (which can directly or indirectly increase the revenue you make through your site).

IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit

The SEO Toolkit helps you improve your Website’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make your new or existing site content and structure more search engine-friendly. It works on any Website on the Web. Best of all – it’s a small, lightweight free download!

ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of new runtime features that can help you to further optimize your site for SEO.  Some of these new features include:

• New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties
• New Response.RedirectPermanent() method
• New URL Routing support for ASP.NET Web Forms

You can use the above routes and methods for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based URLs.

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of feature improvements that make it easier to build public facing sites that have great SEO.  When combined with the SEO Toolkit, you should be able to use these features to increase user traffic to your site – and hopefully increase the direct or indirect revenue you make from them.

• Paging Events
  In order to handle paging you have to deal with paging events. The events fire at specific time instances in the page pipeline and because of this you often have to handle data binding in a way to work around the paging events or else end up double binding your data sources based on paging. Yuk.
• Styling
  The GridView pager is a royal pain to beat into submission for styled rendering. The DataPager control has many more options and template layout and it renders somewhat cleaner, but it too is not exactly easy to get a decent display for.
• Not a Generic Solution
  The problem with the ASP.NET controls too is that it’s not generic. GridView, DataGrid use their own internal paging, ListView can use a DataPager and if you want to manually create data layout – well you’re on your own. IOW, depending on what you use you likely have very different looking Paging experiences.
• DataSource Controls required for Efficient Data Paging Retrieval
  The only way you can get paging to work efficiently where only the few records you display on the page are queried for and retrieved from the database you have to use a DataSource control – only the Linq and Entity DataSource controls  support this natively. While you can retrieve this data yourself manually, there’s no way to just assign the page number and render the pager based on this custom subset. Other than that default paging requires a full resultset for ASP.NET to filter the data and display only a subset which can be very resource intensive and wasteful if you’re dealing with largish resultsets (although I’m a firm believer in returning actually usable sets :-}). If you use your own business layer that doesn’t fit an ObjectDataSource you’re SOL. That’s a real shame too because with LINQ based querying it’s real easy to retrieve a subset of data that is just the data you want to display but the native Pager functionality doesn’t support just setting properties to display just the subset AFAIK.
• DataPager is not Free Standing
  The DataPager control is the closest thing to a decent Pager implementation that ASP.NET has, but alas it’s not a free standing component – it works off a related control and the only one that it effectively supports from the stock ASP.NET controls is the ListView control. This means you can’t use the same data pager formatting for a grid and a list view or vice versa and you’re always tied to the control.
• Postback and JavaScript requirements
  If you look at paging links in ASP.NET they are always postback links with javascript:__doPostback() calls that go back to the server. While that works fine and actually has some benefit like the fact that paging saves changes to the page and post them back, it’s not very SEO friendly. Basically if you use javascript based navigation nosearch engine will follow the paging links which effectively cuts off list content on the first page. The DataPager control does support GET based links via the QueryStringParameter property, but the control is effectively tied to the ListView control (which is the only control that implements IPageableItemContainer).

MaximumASP is offering a free hosting account so you can get started with ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010.

On this account you can test ASP.NET 4 applications in a hosting environment and try out the new publishing features with Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool.

• Windows Server 2008 R2 / IIS 7.5
• .NET Framework 4 Beta 2
• 1GB disk space
• 50 MB SQL Server 2008 database
• MS Deploy Access
• FTP over SSL Access

The environment on which your apps will be running is a slimmed down version of our robust MaxESP platform. Experience some of the platform’s features such as instant scaling, application aware load-balancing, and the IIS Remote Manager. If you like what you see during the ASP.NET 4 beta, sign up for a full account. We would love to have you.

http://aspnet4beta.maximumasp.com/