Steve Andrews' DevExpress Blog

Learn how the new MVC extensions integrate seamlessly into the ASP.NET MVC validation infrastructure.

Benefits

The MVC extensions support the validation attributes in System.ComponentModel.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Model Validation screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Model Validation

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Model Validation screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC Combo Box Extension which advanced combo box functionality to your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The MVC Combo Box Extension has display format string, incremental filtering (type-ahead), callback support, and multi-column capabilities.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Combo Box Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Combo Box Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Combo Box Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC Tab Extension which adds tabbed content support to your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The MVC Tab Extension supports both vertical and horizontal tab positions, multiple action types, hot state tracking, and tab state support.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Tab Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Tab Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC File Upload Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC File Upload extension which adds file upload support to your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The MVC File Upload extension allows end users to upload files to the server and has multi-file upload support , file type and size constraints, and AJAX capabilities.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC File Upload Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC File Upload Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC File Upload Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC Spin Edit extension which allows you to easily edit numeric values on your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The MVC Spin Edit extension allows end users to edit numeric values along and has null text, minimum and maximum value, and display format string capabilities.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Spin Edit Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Spin Edit Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Spin Edit Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC Date Edit extension which provides a date picker with display format string, null text, and edit format for your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Date Edit Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Date Edit Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Date Edit Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC HTML Helper extension which provides a WYSIWYG HTML editor for your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The MVC HTML Editor extension provides for rich text editing with support for scripts, tables, IFrames, image upload, HTML and preview mode, and custom CSS.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC HTML Editor Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC HTML Editor Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Date Edit Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC Round Panel extension to add a rounded corner look to your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The MVC Round Panel extension provides rounded corners to content along with header and GroupBox layout functionality.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Round Panel Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Round Panel Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Date Edit Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC Splitter extension which provides dynamic resizing and collapsing pane support for your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Splitter Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Splitter Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Splitter Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC GridView extension which provides tabular data support for your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The GridView extension provides many useful features including sorting, grouping, data editing, filtering and filter rows, focused row, row selection, paging, data preview, scrolling, templates and data exporting.

Watch the ASP.NET MVC GridView Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC GridView Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC GridView Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC TextBox extension which provides display format string, null text, and mask support for textboxes:

Watch the ASP.NET MVC TextBox Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC TextBox Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC TextBox Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Learn how to setup the new MVC Popup extension which provides client-side modal window and popup support for your ASP.NET MVC websites.

Benefits

The Popup extension can be used to both provide popup informational windows on specific elements on the page:

and modal dialog windows:

Watch the ASP.NET MVC Popup Extension screencast:

Online Demo and Source

Try the feature online here: Features – MVC Popup Window Extension

You can also view the full source code for that demo or try it locally in Visual Studio.

Check out the new ASP.NET MVC Popup Extension screencast and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Next year, January 14-16, Microsoft is helping to organize a National Day of GiveCamp. We at DevExpress are proud to have been asked to help organize a GiveCamp in New York City.

What is Give Camp?

Give Camp is a weekend for software developers, designers, and other technical professionals to give back to local non-profits in their community.

More Info

For more information, visit the Give Camp website: http://nycgivecamp.org

Thanks to everyone who attended my webinar today on jQuery and ASP.NET MVC. I hope I was able to show you how awesome these two technologies are and how they can work together. There are again lots of requests for both the video and source code: the video has been posted and you can also download the source code attached to this post.

Question and Answer

Here are questions that some of your peers asked during today’s webinar:

First, there was some confusion around the term AJAX. It actually refers to two things:

• AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and it is a group of technologies used for interacting with the server on the client side. Technically, XML is not required, and it doesn’t have to be asynchronous, but the concept is the same: to interact with the server without reloading the page.
• Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX is a client-side framework which implements the AJAX group of technologies.

How do I create a website without ViewState? Where do I store changes?

The concept of ViewState was Microsoft’s attempt to help ease the conversion from desktop development, which is stateful, to web development, which is stateless. I have built quite a few websites now in ASP.NET MVC, some of them ranging in the hundreds of Actions and Views, and I do not miss ViewState. The one instance I see some sort of state being useful in an application however is a multi-page shopping cart, and you can approach this in several ways:

• Have the entire cart rendered on the client and use a client-side framework like jQuery to perform the visual transitions and communicate with the server. I prefer this method.
• Store information on each round trip to the database with the user’s session. This requires a bit of extra work however to get the information, and make sure it is cleaned up when it’s no longer needed.

Is ViewData in ASP.NET MVC the same thing as ViewState in ASP.NET Web Forms?

ViewState and ViewData are two very different things. ViewState is used to emulate state in the stateless world of ASP.NET Web Forms. ViewData is used to pass data from an MVC Action to an MVC View. Once the View has been rendered, the ViewData is no longer available.

I have an existing app with classic JavaScript, can i use jQuery alongside going forward?

Absolutely, jQuery and JavaScript can be used alongside each other. In fact, they can interact somewhat with each other as well. For example, I can make a core JavaScript alert(); call while setting the message to something from jQuery: alert($(‘field#id’).val());. Be sure that you don’t pollute the global namespace however, this can cause major issues.

Can i use jQuery to connect to SQL Server?

Since jQuery is a client-side technology, it doesn’t connect to SQL Server directly. You can however call an Action on the server that will perform data tasks and return the results to you. See the Search demo in the sample code.

Can I use Wijmo widgets and jQuery together?

Yes, the Wijmo widgets are in fact built on top of jQuery.

Can I use the DevExpress controls in ASP.NET MVC?

The DevExpress ASP.NET Web Forms controls will not work in ASP.NET MVC since they require ViewState. We currently have a set of 5 ASP.NET MVC extensions, and will have roughly 20 additional extensions in our next release to our Universal, Enterprise, and ASP.NET Edition customers.

Next month, November 1-4, is DevConnections in Las Vegas and not only will it be my first ever trip to the infamous city, but I will also be leading a session on a topic very near and dear to my heart: ASP.NET MVC. In the session, I’ll explore a dozen or so ASP.NET MVC extensibility points that will help you create awesome web applications. Trust me, it’s really cool stuff!

And if you’re at DevConnections, also make sure to stop by the DevExpress booth to ask questions after my session, check out demos of our software (I hear Mark Miller is working on a coding-at-the-speed-of-thought demo), or simply say ‘hi’. See you there!

Session: Advanced ASP.NET MVC Extensibility

Presenter: Steve Andrews

The ASP.NET MVC framework provides a powerful Model View Controller (MVC) approach to building web applications. MVC provides separation of concerns, increased testability, control over HTML output, and intuitive URLs. Under the covers, ASP.NET MVC is also highly extensible. In this session, we will look at over a dozen extensibility points including route handlers, controller factories, controller base, view engines, and more. Finally, we’ll tie it all together with a working application.

Session: Introduction to High Speed Coding in Visual Studio with CodeRush

Presenter: Mark Miller

Learn how to write C# and VB code quickly and with great efficiency using CodeRush for Visual Studio. See powerful code building features including code templates, selection wrapping, and consume-first declaration; refactorings for improving code quality & performance; advanced navigation, selection, and clipboard tools; background code analysis, MVC support, a full-featured test runner and so much more. If you’re interested in seeing what moving up to the full featured version of CodeRush can do for your productivity and for your team, be sure to see this session.