And then there is ASP.NET MVC to make make web development clean and TDD friendly. If you are not familiar with ASP.NET MVC you should check out Scott Gu’s Blog posts on different previews (currently Preview 4).

There are quite a few articles on how to integrate ASP.NET MVC and JQuery to make our lifes happier. A simple google search for “ASP.NET MVC with JQuery” return quite a few articles.

Here, i am not going to talk about how to use JQuery for communication (for making AJAX Calls) or presentation (Subtle or major UX effects). Insted i am add “SuperFlyDOM” to the mix. The most important part of SuperFlyDOM is the way that it lets us define the Templates. If are making a AJAX call and expecting a JSON Response, the chances are we are expecting a list of objects and would probably need to display them in either a tabular or (un)ordered list to the DOM. SuperFlyDOM is the perfect allay for this situation.

If i have a JSON object with serialized properties (ID, Name, Url), and i want to display/populate these JSON objects to the User by Manipulating the DOM, all i needed to do are the following simple steps…

I need to create a template (which is very easy depending how complicated you want the item to look after it is rendered) – To simply display an anchor tag, you could use the following Template

var itemTpl = function(){return ['a', {href:this.Url, id:this.Id, className:'myclass'}, [this.Name]]};

I am creating an “a” element with properties “href”, “id”, and “className” and it will have the “Name” value go in between the “a” tag. The good thing about templates is they you can change the way what goes in to the template and how it will be presented (markup) could be changed with out much coupling with the rest of the app.

Once you have the template, you could make a simple call to one of the methods provided by SuperFlyDom, tplAppend(jsonObj, itemTpl), foreach JSON object in your collection. Thats it. This is the best way i have found to deal with JSON objects rendering. If you know any better techniques, please feel free to drop me a line.

Note- You can also do string concatenation on Templates as follows…

var itemTpl= function(){return ['a', {href:'/product/' + this.Name+'/', id:this.ID, className:'myClass'}, [this.Name]]};

This is one of the few techniques i have used in DealFlakes.Com, Online Deal Aggregator.

Good Luck…

[update]

I thought its good to include few more sample templates, just to give more info on template creation.

To render the following HTML

<div id=”id-of-the-object” class=”someClass”><a href=”/point to some url” target=”_blank” title = “name-of-the-object”>name-of-the-object</a></div>

our template is going to be something like

var itemTps = function() {return ['div', { id:this.Id, className: "someClass"}, ['a', {href:"/point to some url", target: "_blank", title: this.Name }, [this.Name]]]};

the key understand the templates are as follows

• “[” is for creating a new element (could be a text element)

• “{” represents the attributes of the enclosing elements.
• Enclose your elements with single quotation “‘” marks
• Enclose your attribute values with double quotation “”" marks…

Hope this clears few things…

One of the main thing was the way i handle my Data Layer. My Data Layer is a class library project and I have separate Business, Entity, and UI layers. My Data Layer is done using LINQ to SQL with stored procedures (All my interaction with Database are using Stored Procedures). When i dragged and dropped required tables and stored procedures in to the designer, behind the scenes, the DBML file, (specifically, the DataContext class) hasa default constructor that stores the connection string. To Re-iterate, we have this connection string defined in Web.Config, and app.Config (gets created for class library projects), and this hard coded value in “.dbml” File.

I googled for few min to find out couple of good posts on this issue and here is the summary and the steps to only have one connection string in “web.Config” file.

You can find more info on this by Rick, by Jon Gallant, and by David Klein.

I went ahead with what was posted on David klein’s article. On the “.dbml” designer properties, first made the “Application Settings” to false and tried to compile with partial class. But that didn’t compile. I read the comments David’s post and made the “Connection” to “Null”. When i saved and compiled the project it compiled. So, i deleted the Settings File, App.Config File and compiled and ran the application with out any problem.

Now, i only have one place to manage my connection string (in web.config file).

Recap.

• Set the “Connection” Property for the “.dbml” designer file to “Null”
• Create a partial class for your DataContext class and have the constructor with base constructor reading the connection string from web.config file

public partial class DataClasses1DataContext

{

public DataClasses1DataContext() : base (ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ConnectionString"].ConnectionString)

{

OnCreated();

}

}

• Make sure you have Connection string in your web.config.

Thats it. Simple !!! Happy Coding…

Update: The next time i tried to add a Stored Procedure or Table to the DataContext Designer, i still have to go to the properties of the DataContext and tell it not to read from “appsettings” and set the connection string to null/empty string. I wish there is a permanent way to say, do not populate these values

This whole thing is very cool and works great on my local machine with Vista Ultimate running IIS7. I was excited and wanted to put it on my hosting account only to realize, my hosting account only supports IIS6 (some cheap Shared Hosting, right!). Now, all my pretty looking URL are going to look bad with that “.MVC” extension, right?. After a quick a google search, i found an interesting idea on doing a ReWrites with ISAPI modules. Having done this a lot in my previous jobs, i assumed the job.

My Host, does not support main ISAPI_ReWrite modules, and kind of suggested me to get “LinkFreeze” from the same company. In my excitement to get my website online, i bought that license (about $50.00) and asked my hosting provider to install and let me know how to set up the configuration i needed to do.

Apparently, this is quite different from the main module and is very limited in what it does. I finally figured (or not) that this is not the right software for what i wanted to do.

Now, i am in the HUNT for Web Host.

Either a decent Windows Serer 2008 Shared Host with reasonable SQL Serever Space or a Virtual Dedicated Windows Server 2003 (then i can install SQL Serer Express).

I would appreciate any feed back with your hosting providers. I have had some bad experiences with couple over this last weekend.

(One Provider went on to say that i can install ISAPI_Rewrite module and assured me that all the things i am asking for are already in the package, only for the Tech REP to tell me, after sign-up, that they don’t support it.) Now, i am canceling that account and asking for a refund. Please share your experience.

The solution i am mentioning about hosing ASP.NET MVC apps with pretty URLs on IIS6 are This ONE and This ONE.

Good Luck Hosting with hosting ASP.NET MVC apps. Microsoft, Could you Please provide us some DEV HOSTING PACKAGES for some decent price to play with new technologies. Thanks!!!

This post is neither on Master Pages nor on best practices on handling these two topics. I would try to list couple of simple ways to handle them.

Title:

Title tag in Master Page acts as a place holder. On each page that uses Master Page, specify the “Title” in the page declarative.

In your content page, i.e., (.aspx),

<%@ Page Language=”C#” MasterPageFile=”~/Master1.master” AutoEventWireup=”true” Title=”Content Page Title” %>

You could also change the “title” tag in the code file as follows.

base.Master.Page.Header.Title = “Content Page Title”;

Meta Tags:

Meta Tags are little different compared to setting the page Title. Check the code that creates a meta tag “keywords” with content “ASP.NET, AJAX, Web Services”.

HtmlMeta metaTag = new HtmlMeta();

metaTag.Name = “keywords”;

metaTag.Content = “ASP.NET, AJAX, Web Services”;

base.Master.Page.Header.Controls.Add(metaTag);

If you need to do this in multiple content pages, you might want to have a base page with properties like, “MetaKeywords”, “MetaDescription”, “MetaRobots” etc. So, on your regular page you could set these properties.