ASP.NET MVC Training Kit Available

Microsoft recently released the ASP.NET MVC Training Kit.

Overview (from MSDN download site)
The ASP.NET MVC Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize ASP.NET MVC.

Kit Content(from the downloaded kit)

ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC helps Web developers build compelling standards-based Web solutions that are easy to maintain by leveraging the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern to decrease the dependencies between layers. It also provides complete control over the page markup and improves testability which enables Test Driven Development (TDD).

The contents of this training kit provide the means to learn how to begin leveraging ASP.NET MVC. It also includes materials for those that would like to take their knowledge of ASP.NET MVC and use it to present information on it to others, such as at user groups or codecamps.

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
This presentation serves as an introduction to ASP.NET MVC. It covers where it sits at within the ASP.NET ecosystem and what value propositions it offers. It includes demos showing how to create a basic ASP.NET MVC application as well as how to unit test it.

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
This hands-on-lab will introduce you to developing web applications with ASP.NET MVC and teach you the basic conventions and features contained within it. It will also show you how to unit test your custom controllers as well as your application's route definitions.

Asp.NET MVC Applications
This hands-on-lab will show you how to deal with some additional common requirements that occur when developing application with ASP.NET MVC. This includes: handling form posting/validation, model binders, partial views, and action filters.

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
This demo will walk you through how to demonstrate an introduction to ASP.NET MVC. This includes explaining its basic conventions and features as well as how to develop custom controllers and views. It also includes showing how to unit test controllers and routes.

ASP.NET MVC FAQs
Frequently asked questions about ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC Key Messages
A description of the key benefits of ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC Links to Resources
Links to tutorials, blogs and other useful resources.

Get it here.

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007 Book Review

This book is awesome. It covers everything you need to know to develop professional level VSTO applications with Visual Studio 2008. I am glad this book was written using C# as a programming language. In the past VBA left a lot to be desired, enough so that I never took Office programming serious at all. When 2003 came out it sparked my interest, but I ran into enough pain right out of the box to drop it fast. This book has renewed my hope that I can start taking Office application seriously. By using C# the authors reaffirmed this is not VBA anymore. Had I browsed this book and found it to be written in VB.NET I would not have given Office 2007 VSTO another shot, because I would have thought the toolset was still lost in the VBA world. For VB'ers... the authors do point out the differences in VB and C# where appropriate, they just do not provide code samples of each. There are still a lot of traces of the crazy COM programming interfaces in the interops, but this book does a great job of pointing them out and shows you how to work with them. The "missing" and "ref missing" make the most elegant code look psychotic. It will be nice to have the C# 4.0 named and optional arguments feature to remedy the "missing" and "ref missing" messes. The one complaint I have is about the code library that goes along with the book. There isn't one. The only thing made available is word documents that have the code listings from the Chapters cut and pasted from the book's manuscript. All in all I do not think anyone developing VSTO should be without this book, and those that aren't developing VSTO should buy the book to educate themselves about the value the technology now provides.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Released

Microsoft has posted the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release for download.

Brief Description (from MSDN download site)
ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime.

Overview (from MSDN download site)
ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile, etc.

Get it here.