Thanks everyone who came to my talks on ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC in Moscow last week!  Here are the slide decks and demo code for the two talks (You need Visual Studio 2010):   What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2?   What’s New in ASP.NET 4 Web Forms?   I had a great time in Russia. On the second day, I had an opportunity to walk around Moscow. Here’s a picture of me standing in Red Square:   Here’s a picture of me eating Chicken Kiev with Microsoft evangelist James Senior. James has just started his worldwide...

I’m traveling to Russia and speaking in Moscow next week at the DevConf. This will be the first time that I have visited Russia, and I know that there is a strong ASP.NET community in Russia, so I am very excited about the trip. I’m speaking at the DevConf (http://www.devconf.ru/). I don’t speak Russian, so the only words that I recognize off the home page of the conference website are ASP.NET and JavaScript (PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby must be Russian words). I’m giving talks on both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC: What’s New in ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Learn about the new...

The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can host a simple Ajax application created with jQuery in the Windows Azure cloud. In this blog entry, I make no assumptions. I assume that you have never used Windows Azure and I am going to walk through the steps required to host the application in the cloud in agonizing detail. Our application will consist of a single HTML page and a single service. The HTML page will contain jQuery code that invokes the service to retrieve and display set of records. There are five steps that you must complete to...

One objection that people always raise against Ajax applications concerns browser history. Because an Ajax application updates its content by performing sneaky Ajax postbacks, the browser backwards and forwards buttons don’t work as you would normally expect. In a normal, non-Ajax application, when you click the browser back button, you return to a previous state of the application. For example, if you are paging through a set of movie records, you might return to the previous page of records. In an Ajax application, on the other hand, the browser backwards and forwards buttons do not work as you would expect. If...

At the last MIX conference, Netflix announced that they are exposing their catalog of movie information using the OData protocol. This is great news! This means that you can take advantage of all of the advanced OData querying features against a live database of Netflix movies. In this blog entry, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData to create a simple movie lookup form. The form enables you to enter a movie title, or part of a movie title, and display a list of matching movies. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the movies displayed when you enter...

In my previous blog entry, I explored two ways of inserting a database record using jQuery. We added a new Movie to the Movie database table by using a generic handler and by using a WCF service. In this blog entry, I want to take a brief look at how you can insert a database record using OData. Introduction to OData The Open Data Protocol (OData) was developed by Microsoft to be an open standard for communicating data across the Internet. Because the protocol is compatible with standards such as REST and JSON, the protocol is particularly well suited for Ajax. OData...

The goal of this blog entry is to explore the easiest way of inserting a new record into a database using jQuery and .NET. I’m going to explore two approaches: using Generic Handlers and using a WCF service (In a future blog entry I’ll take a look at OData and WCF Data Services). Create the ASP.NET Project I’ll start by creating a new empty ASP.NET application with Visual Studio 2010. Select the menu option File, New Project and select the ASP.NET Empty Web Application project template. Setup the Database and Data Model I’ll use my standard MoviesDB.mdf movies database. This database contains one...

About two months ago, John Resig and I met at Café Algiers in Harvard square to discuss how Microsoft can contribute to the jQuery project. Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his second-day MIX keynote that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind jQuery and making it the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies. What does this announcement mean? It means that Microsoft is shifting its resources to invest in jQuery. Developers on the ASP.NET team are now working full-time to contribute features to the core jQuery library. Furthermore, we are working with other teams at Microsoft to ensure...

We updated the browser definitions files included with ASP.NET 4 to include information on recent browsers and devices such as Google Chrome and the iPhone. You can use these browser definition files with earlier versions of ASP.NET such as ASP.NET 3.5. The updated browser definition files, and instructions for installing them, can be found here: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41420 The changes in the browser definition files can cause backwards compatibility issues when you upgrade an ASP.NET 3.5 web application to ASP.NET 4. If you encounter compatibility issues, you can install the old browser definition files in your ASP.NET 4 application. The old browser definition files...

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 –...