I had the opportunity to speak at the Best of Mix 09 Phoenix event recently and had the talk filmed. I was the last talk and due to time constraints didn’t get a chance to cover everything I had hoped to cover, but all of the important topics were discussed.



The projection screen doesn’t show up too well in the video unfortunately, but all of the slides and sample code can be downloaded here for those that may be interested in following along. The talk covers the fundamentals of ASP.NET MVC, discusses some great features the framework offers and describes how jQuery and even Silverlight can be integrated. The downloadable code samples demonstrate all of the features discussed in the video.



Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 




Click here to view in Windows Media Player (right-click and you can save the file)

ASP.NET 3.5 introduces a new control called the ListView that allows developers to have 100% control over the HTML markup that is generated while still providing paging, inserting, updating, and deleting support. To me the ListView control is a nice blend between the GridView and Repeater controls with new features added.


In this video I walk through the fundamentals of using the ListView control and show how you can use the new CSS tools in VS.NET 2008 to create a scrollable ListView control with a frozen header. See my previous blog post if you are interested in learning how to freeze GridView control headers in IE and FireFox.

Visual Studio .NET 2008 provides many new features that will definitely enhance developer productivity. In this video tutorial I provide an introductory look at VS.NET 2008 and show a few features such as multi-targeting, split view, and the LinqDataSource control. In the video you will see how to build an ASP.NET page that retrieves data from a data context object (created with the new LINQ to SQL designer) and binds it to various controls using the LinqDataSource control.

I've been playing around a lot lately with a great set of components from http://www.gpsdotnet.com/ that allow GPS functionality to be integrated into .NET applications.  The samples included with the GPS components were awesome and made it simple to do what I wanted (since they did most of the work for me).  I used the components to build a .NET Compact Framework V2 app for my Mobile 5 Pocket PC phone that could read data via bluetooth from a Pharos GPS device and upload it to a Web Service on a scheduled basis for logged in users.  While carpooling into work with my good buddy Spike Xavier I ran the application to get some test data to use.    The data is then mapped using pushpins and polylines using Microsoft's excellent Virtual Earth API.  All of the interaction with the backend Web Service is done using ASP.NET AJAX with JavaScript proxies and a little XML Script to hook it all together.  The application calls a Web Service that returns GPS users for display as well as longitudes and latitudes for selected users.  A screenshot of my trip into work a few days ago is shown below:

Here's another view using the Virtual Earth polyline functionality with pushpins for the start and stop points.  You can see where Spike and I met up for our morning carpool commute (where the green line veers off to the left).
 
I plan to create a screencast video of the sample project in the near future plus some other ASP.NET AJAX code I've been playing around with.  In the meantime, if you're interested in the source code for the mobile device application that talks with a bluetooth GPS device, the Web Service (and associated database) as well as the ASP.NET AJAX code that calls the Web Service and handles the mapping you can download it below.  You'll also find some additional ASP.NET AJAX demos in the zip file including:

Using the UpdatePanel with Triggers and the PageRequestManager
Calling Web Services using JavaScript proxies
Calling Web Services using XML Script

 

ASP.NET AJAX provides several different ways to call Web Services including JavaScript, XML Script and the AutoCompleteExtender. In this video tutorial you will see how to call Web Services using JavaScript. Topics covered include creating a Web Service, applying the ScriptService attribute, creating a client-side JavaScript proxy and calling a Web Service using JavaScript and callbacks.

Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX technology provides a quick and simple way to add AJAX capabilities into new or existing Web pages.  In this video tutorial you'll see how to use the UpdatePanel, refresh it using triggers and detect when it has finished updating using the  PageRequestManager along with JavaScript events.  Other topics covered include using the AutoCompleteExtender control to call Web Services and integrating the Microsoft Virtual Earth API.

Debugging is a key skill that every developer has to learn to become productive. However, how do you debug ASP.NET AJAX applications and client-side JavaScript? In this video tutorial I walk through a few required steps to enable debugging and show how to use tools such as Script Explorer to simplify the process. It is important to note that many of the features shown in the video can also be used with the Web Developer Express (the free ASP.NET editor).

Update: This video was created before the final release of ASP.NET AJAX and refers to the client-side debug class. This class was renamed to Sys.Debug in the final release of the product.

This code sample and video demonstrates how to create an album viewer application that leverages the following technologies:

Silverlight and XAML
JavaScript
ASP.NET AJAX
Web Services

A screen-shot of the application is shown below.  It allows a user to type in a recording artist and then returns albums associated with the artist from Amazon.com and displays them in a nice 3D-style view.  Originally I was going to lay the albums out on the screen in a 2D grid format but after seeing the excellent videos on Flash programming from Lee Brimelow I decided to go with the carousel approach he put together for Flash.
 

The album information returned from the Amazon.com Web Service is converted into XAML and queried using ASP.NET AJAX.  JavaScript then converts the XAML into Silverlight objects and adds them into the canvas.  It was quite a bit of work to get it to its current stage, but I learned a lot along the way fortunately. 
A video of the application in action as well as a "nutshell" version of how it works can be viewed at the link below.  The code can be downloaded here.  To run the application you'll need .NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX (final release) and the Silverlight viewer.

In this video tutorial I walk through the fundamentals of creating an N-Layer ASP.NET application. What is "N-Layer" you ask? N-Layer can be interpreted many different ways, but I generally use the term to mean separating presentation, business and data code into individual code layers. Doing this allows code to be re-used throughout an application and prevents unnecessary clutter in ASP.NET code-behind classes. This video covers creating presentation, business and data layers and also covers another layer I normally add to projects that I refer to as "Model". The model layer contains data entity classes that are used to pass data between the different layers. Other types of architectures can certainly be applied as well.

The video discusses how to create a Web Service from scratch but also discusses some of the pros and cons that you should know about. For example, many people will return a DataSet from a Web Service. While that works, it is not very interoperable with non-.NET clients since the generated WSDL will be quite vague about what the Web Service actually returns. By creating custom types (classes) the WSDL can more accurately show a client exactly what they are going to get back. I have also seen many people put all of the code for a Web Service into the Web Method. That works, but you can achieve better code re-use by creating distinct layers for business and data functionality. These concepts and a few others are discussed in the video. Other topics covered include consuming a Web Service from an ASP.NET Web Form.