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

Thanks everyone for the incredible amount of feedback that I got after my two talks at MIX last week -- I'm still receiving emails. I've added links to the video recordings of the talks below: ASP.NET 4.0: What's Next? ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level Here are the links to the slides and code samples: ASP.NET 4.0: What's Next? ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level Realize that the code from the ASP. NET 4.0 Talk requires Visual Studio 2010 -- so you won't be able to do much with it without Visual Studio 2010 other than take a look at the code in Notepad.

I will be in Orlando, Florida next week speaking at the ASP.NET Connections conference in Orlando, Florida. I'm giving 5 separate talks.  I'm presenting two talks on Microsoft day: ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft’s newest framework for building web applications. In this session, you learn how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC to build loosely coupled and highly testable applications. Over the course of this session, we build a simple database-driven Web application from start to finish. You learn how to use several features of the ASP.NET MVC framework including Model Binders, Partials, and...

Hey, I'm giving two talks at MIX this year. This is my first MIX! Come hear about all of the new changes coming with ASP.NET 4.0 and ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 at the MIX conference next week. I'm giving two talks: Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0: What's Next? and Microsoft ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level. My first talk is an overview talk on all of the new features and improvements coming with ASP.NET Web Forms 4.0 I've spent the last 6 months concentrating on ASP.NET MVC (because that is my day job) and I haven't really been paying attention to all of...

I've received a lot of email about the best way to handle validation in an ASP.NET MVC application. We posted three new tutorials on validation at the http://www.ASP.net/mvc website. Here is the list:   Performing Simple Validation - Learn how to perform validation in an ASP.NET MVC application. In this tutorial, Stephen Walther introduces you to model state and the validation HTML helpers.   Validating with the IDataErrorInfo Interface - Stephen Walther shows you how to display custom validation error messages by implementing the IDataErrorInfo interface in a model class.   Validating...

This is a rough draft of a chapter from the book ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed by Stephen Walther. Comments are welcome and appreciated. When the book is published, the text from this blog entry will be removed and only the code listings will remain. Order this Book from Amazon You use HTML helpers in a view to render HTML content. An HTML helper, in most cases, is just a method that returns a string. You can build an entire ASP.NET MVC application without using a single HTML helper. However, HTML helpers make your life as a developer easier. By taking advantage...