Working hard… sorta of – it’s the day before Thanksgiving and many people aren’t working today – makes for a long weekend for many.
Well, I’m still working, so thought I’d post some updates from the week since my last ‘Saturday Splash’.
Couple of items this week of interest:
Saturday Night Live : ‘China Cold Open’
http://www.hulu.com/watch/110317/saturday-night-live-china-cold-open
Telerik ASP.NET MVC Controls
Telerik has some free open source mvc controls available: http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc/
Pure ASP.NET MVC components Built on top of ASP.NET MVC to leverage its values – lightweight rendering, clean HTML, separation of concerns, and testability.
Completely Open Source The Extensions are licensed under the widely adopted GPLv2. A commercial license with support is also available.
Exceptional Performance No postbacks, no ViewState, and no page lifecycle. The Web Asset Managers optimize the delivery of CSS and JavaScript, so no precious HTTP requests are wasted.
Based on jQuery Telerik Extensions draw on the power of jQuery for visual effects and DOM manipulations.
Search Engine Optimized The Extensions render clean, semantic HTML, which is essential for indexing your content in the major search engines.
Cross-browser support Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC support all major browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.
One of the biggest concerns for those hooked (more like stuck – lol) on webforms is ‘but what about my controls’?’. Sad but true, however, with asp.net mvc it’s much easier to create controls. Combine those with a powerful javascript library like jQuery and it can be magic.
Take for instance the Telerik grid (by the way, you can get a similiar grid from MVCContrib, which I use, which this code is nearly the same… hmm… wonder if the same guy made them for Telerik – lol):
<%= Html.Telerik().Grid<Order>(Model)
.Name("Grid")
.Columns(columns =>
{
columns.Add(o => o.OrderID).Width(100);
columns.Add(o => o.Customer.ContactName).Width(200);
columns.Add(o => o.ShipAddress);
columns.Add(o => o.OrderDate).Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}").Width(120);
})
.ServerBinding(serverBinding => serverBinding.Action("FirstLook", "Grid", new { ajax = ViewData["ajax"] }))
.Ajax(ajax => ajax.Enabled((bool)ViewData["ajax"]).Action("_FirstLook", "Grid"))
.Scrollable(scrolling => scrolling.Enabled((bool)ViewData["scrolling"]))
.Sortable(sorting => sorting.Enabled((bool)ViewData["sorting"]))
.Pageable(paging => paging.Enabled((bool)ViewData["paging"]))
.Filterable(filtering => filtering.Enabled((bool)ViewData["filtering"]))
%>
Simple to use, and very powerful… and free. Check out the link above to view the other available controls.
Update: http://blogs.telerik.com/AtanasKorchev/Posts/08-11-06/ASP_NET_Ajax_Controls_in_ASP_NET_MVC.aspx
From that link above:
…I am glad to inform you that RadScriptManager provides support forASP.NET MVC view and master pages. What this means is that RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax can be used in ASP.NET MVC…
(Learn more from Atanas Korchev’s blog here – he has some good posts surrounding asp.net mvc with Telerik)
RIA Services: A DomainService IS A WCF Service – Add Service Reference
Brad Abrams has a good post on showing how a RIA.NET Domain Service IS a WCF Service:
This is a recent change in RIA.NET – and I should add, several other services like ADO.NET Data Services – where they are using WCF ‘under the covers’ as their communication protocol. I think this is a good move – it provides a very standard way to communicate across the wire regardless of which flavor you choose.
Using JsonP with WCF and jQuery
Ben Dewey has an excellent blog post on how to use JsonP with WCF and jQuery in the new release of .NET 4.0. As he explains, the WCF team has added support for JsonP. Since jQuery ships with a getJSON ajax function, it makes this a piece o’ pie 
ASPNET MVC from Basic to Tips and Tricks
Michael Johson has a good writeup on tips and tricks with asp.net mvc. I think he is spot on in all his recommendations. Much of what he write about is best practices with asp.net mvc.
As more and more asp.net developers see the light of mvc, we’ll need more posts like this to keep them writing good mvc codeÂ
Refactor or Rewrite
Another good infoq article – this one on ‘refactor or rewrite’.  I’ve had this same conversation several times in my career – as I’ve seen projects really expand and bolt more and more functionality, which ends up changing the overall scope of the application – making it harder to maintain and understand. Obviously many companies are scared to rewrite an app from scratch.
Other
Google: Last but not least, I’ve really enjoyed my switch to using google products. I switched my email address over to gmail, I’m using google reader, google docs, etc… and finally I’m using Google Chrome in full force now. I miss two items from Firefox that I’m looking for replacements… (1) Firebug –which is the greatest and best web dev tool ever… and (2) FireFTP. For now, I just pop open Firefox when I need it. I think Chrome is more stable, uses less memory, and is faster.
I deployed a test of the Google chrome on a web project. This enable me to keep chrome as the website engine, and allow the client to use IE still as the main browser. Certain pages, like reporting services, just use vanilla IE to print reports, etc..
Lastly, I had a good talk with a member of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team last week. I had been critical in a blog post about their releases, etc… As always, talking directly to someone helps tremendously. We were able to voice our concerns (I invited a few coworkers) and where we think they could do better. It was well taken. That team is very customer focused, and they want and value community feedback. This helped change some of my views.  One area I want to get more involved with is growing their web client guidance – expanding it to asp.net mvc – and their Prism for Silverlight. Just wanted to express that the P&P team is hard at work and I was able to get more clarification on the role they play at Microsoft. As fyi – they are an extension I believe of the product teams, and yet rather than just one product, they have several under their belt – that keeps them quite busyÂ
That is all for this week – I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving. This is my favorite holiday – family and good food, time to be thankful for all we have. The Lord has been good to my family and myself. Just pray for all those that don’t have a family to be with and for those less fortunate. I also pray for those out of work to be able to find some work. This economy has been very hard on our community. God Bless!
