On the surface, I suppose this is YAMVCVWFC (Yet Another MVC vs. WebForms Comparison). If this topic doesn’t appeal to you, or you’re sick and tired of this discussion then I encourage you to move on. I won’t be offended, promise. This post is here to serve as my living, breathing arguments for fighting for MVC and it will serve to highlight my major gripes with Web Forms. The motivation for this post came from an all-too-familiar IRC chat in #asp.net – for those of you unfamiliar with IRC, it’s a lot like the Twitter of the 90s....

Note: This article was written for ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 – it may become outdated in future previews. The Html helper in ASP.NET MVC 2 comes with some handy methods called “DisplayFor” and “EditFor” – please see Scott Gu’s article if you are not familiar with these new features. Long story short, they provide an ASP.NET Dynamic Data-like mechanism which uses reflection and templating to render a display form or an edit form. It works great for primitive properties like String, DataTime, Int32, as well as complex types like “Address.” However, as I was playing with them, I...

Update 2/10/2009: I have updated the helper code a little bit to include an ID parameter as well as to inject the jQuery treeview script code automatically. Please modify to your desire, or make sure to include the jQuery TreeView plugin script to your page before running. The following helper will make it easy to create a tree view from a recursive self-referencing table. Below you are seeing a tree of “Locations” where each Location can contain X number of child locations. Dependencies  jQuery TreeView Plugin Rendered Tree Table Definition The table itself is extremely simple, each Location has a ParentLocationId which is a relationship...

This weekend I started playing with Automated Builds in TFS 2008. Over the next few weeks I am going to setup automated builds for my various projects so I can start running automated integration testing and automated staging releases at certain intervals (nightly, weekly, etc). Unfortunately I hit a snag when I tried building one of my solutions that contained a Web Application Project. After some digging around, I eventually opened up the “Release.txt” log file which can be found in the deployment directory, I found the following error: error MSB4019: The...

Honestly, I'm not sure if this setting is new to Visual Studio 2008 or not, but I just stumbled onto it. Typically when I'm debugging an ASP.NET application I test one page at a time, by right-clicking on the aspx and selecting View in Browser.   I prefer this method because I can keep the browser open at all times during development and not have to compile the whole site to quickly test something simple like markup changes. The caveat to this however, is that the Visual Studio debugger is not attached to the cassini process,...

The ASP.NET MVC framework ships with a number of Visual Studio project and item templates to ease our development tasks. One of these templates is a UserControl built specifically for the MVC framework. We are going to walkthrough building a re-usable Header control that can be added to the top of related pages (in this specific case, this Control will be added to all Account pages). If you want to get technical, I suppose this may be a good candidate for the new Nested Master Page support in Visual Studio 2008. But for our purposes, this will do just fine....

Many of us have probably encountered the need for this on various projects. The scenario is simple, we have optional fields that a user may or may not enter values for, and we would like to hide them from display if they were not filled in. The above screenshot could use some cleaning up. Ideally those fields that contain no data should be hidden from the rendered HTML. Our first attempt might look something like below, but hopefully, after 1 or 2 copy pastes any developer will realize this should be handled differently. Who among us has run into maintaining...