On the 6th June I had the opportunity to attend the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Guathon 2011 in London. The conference covered some brilliant topics by two great speakers – Scott Guthrie and Steven Sanderson, and had me wanting to code there and then!
The sessions consisted of:
- Build an app using ASP.NET MVC 3, EF Code First, NuGet, and IIS
- Dynamic Web UIs with Knockout.js
- C#5 and asynchronous Web applications
- Cloud Development
The main topic of interest for me was MVC3 and Entity Framework (EF). I’ve not had the opportunity to see much MVC and I had heard that MVC3 was supposed to have some nice features making it much easier to code with. Having little knowledge of MVC Scott took us through the concept of MVC which just made immediate sense. Using EF Code First and Razor we were shown just how quickly a neat application could be created.
One of the little things that I liked was that during setup you could determine the type of authentication that the application requires. For an intranet you could have Windows Authentication which makes sense for an intranet setup or choose the website setup for web forms authentication.
MVC3 framework is also flexible enough that you don’t need to have the MVC framework available on the host server – just .Net 4.0. This is a compilation option at the point of release.
The added benefit here is that MVC3 has an immediate support for HTML5, setting up the basic html code that it naturally creates, in HTML5. A plus as we continually strive to develop effectively with HTML5 and CSS3.
Aside from seeing just how simple things were with MVC3 we also got to see a tool I personally hadn’t heard of before – Glimpse. It’s a bit like Fiddler and can be obtained via the NuGet Plug-in which I also hadn’t heard of. I downloaded the install files for NuGet for Visual Studio and not having seen this before had a route around the plug-ins available for download. Definitely worth a look!
Anyway, Glimpse I think is a definite must when developing with MVC as it helps you to track what Views/Controllers, etc are being hit and when. It’s great having such a structured code set but you know you’re going to get confused if you’re trying to track what happens when. Well, I would anyway!