Nathaniel Engelsen » tampamvc

Presentation at August Tampa MVC meeting — using Spark View Engine with ASP.Net MVC Framework

nathaniel engelsen — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:27:38 +0000

In August I gave a presentation at the Tampa MVC meeting on utilizing the Spark View Engine inside of the ASP.Net MVC Framework. Here, finally, is the presentation and the demonstration code I used during the presentation.

I had a good time presenting, although it was WAY too much info for a mere half an hour, and too many of the attendees had a very important question on their minds: “Why would I use this?” Really, it’s up to the developer. It’s a stylistic difference that allows a developer to write very fluent code in their View, and that’s about it.

Regardless, I like the Spark View Engine, and I recommend using it for ASP.Net MVC development.

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MvcAjax Plugin Update and Presenting Spark at the Tampa MVC Meeting

nathaniel engelsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:44:28 +0000

For starters, I bumped my MvcAjax plugin to 1.0. I was having anomalous issues with the row height in various browsers so I added a browser check. I wish I could have used jQuery.support(), but I’m not sure which browser feature(s) are causing the issues I was seeing. For a future release. Right now the paging and sorting works excellently on Chromium, Firefox, and IE, and I’ll be testing Opera and Safari soon enough.

I really enjoyed working on this plugin, as I’ve found that too many people are focusing strictly on client-side sorting and paging, passing the entire dataset to the client for presentation. The sparse server-side options define their grid inside of their jQuery calls, and in my opinion that is not the best place for them. Currently, MvcContrib has the best way of creating grids that’s in keeping with the spirit of Asp.Net MVC, and I think it’s Grid() extension method is a good starting point for any Asp.Net MVC developer who needs to present tabular data.

In other exciting news, I’m going to be presenting at the Tampa MVC Open-Mic in a few weeks. I will be demonstrating the Spark View Engine, and how a developer can use it in place of (and frankly, side by side) the standard Asp.Net MVC view engine. I’ve been using Spark for over a month now (though I’ve been otherwise disengaged the past two weeks), and I think it’s provides a wonderful, syntactic way of writing one’s views without much of the tag spam. There’s an adage that teaching others about something is a surefire way to boost your own knowledge in a subject, so I can’t wait to get up in front of 75 of Tampa Bay’s best developers and strut my stuff.

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Tampa MVC

nathaniel engelsen — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:30:21 +0000

Hit up the Tampa MVC Users Group yesterday — great bunch of people, and a pretty high-caliber group. It was my first meeting, and I’m happy that I missed the past few months as they were more beginner oriented. Yesterday there was an intro to ActionFilters and ActionResults, and we went over a site that brought everything all together.

The thing that excites me the most is the T4 templating engine. I’m thinking about using Linq-to-Sql as my model for most of my MVC work, and T4 is another RAD tool Microsoft has come out with to make our lives a bit easier.

Last year Scott Hanselman came out with a nice intro post to T4 that I plan on digging into soon, to see how I can replace my CodeSmith and CodeToaster templates.

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