ASP.NET MVC 2 supports Spark!

What? hear me out. The release of ASP.NET MVC 2 includes an amazing hidden gem. You see the “Add View/Controller” dialog now takes into account a T4 directive “output extension”.

Getting started with Custom CodeTemplates

To get started with Custom CodeTemplates check out this excellent article by K. Scott Allen

Getting started with Custom CodeTemplates and Spark

1. At the top of your templates add the output extension as shown below.
2. Modify the template to use spark.

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ASP.NET MVC 2 was RTM’ed today and with the help of Jay Harris – @jayharris we upgraded our rather large codebase to not only ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM but also a new drop of the Spark View Engine built against the RTM.

Since the release of Spark View Engine 1.1 RC a few weeks ago there have been some minor bugs/enhancements identified but no blockers. The update to RTM was nothing more then changing the assembly reference, build number and running the build script.

These changes are not yet reflected in on the GitHub source. I’m sure there will be a pull request or Lou – @loudej will update master pretty quickly.

Head over to CodePlex to download the new release and of course thanks to Lou for building an amazing tool.

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try:
If you annotate your methods with the WebGet annotation, when a client adds your service as a service ref, there will be no client configuration information.

catch:
To put that another way, if you use the WebGet annotation it’s assumed the calling party is going to use rest.

finally:
if you use the WebGet annotation on your WCF operations they can be called as soap operations

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THIS IS NOT AN OFFICAL RELEASE…YET

I spent the evening updating the spark source to support ASP.NET MVC RC/RC2. Well, actually I simply applied the changes that were posted to either the mailing list or codeplex.

All the tests pass:

Download it here:

Binaries: Spark-1.0.1.0-release.zip

Source: Spark-1.0.1.0-source.zip

This post, hopefully, won’t be up long.

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Ok, that might be going a little too far but it sounds like the barrier I wrote about a few weeks ago might be going away.

Earlier this evening Phil Haack posted this tweet:

Excited to hear this I asked a leading implementation question about honoring the output extension directive in T4 templates.

Us old-timer remember the almost year before ASP.NET MVC 1.0, when we had not tooling support inside visual studio. Right before 1.0 was released we got right-click view/controller support and it made a world of difference. I honestly believe that without the GUI integration, that pushed us to use strong-typed views, MVC would have taken longer to get into less progressive shops.

I’m really excited about MVC2 …but it still needs a logo.

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Disclaimer: This post is my personal reflection of a current situation. It’s not intended for any other use. Don’t use this information in anyway.

Background

The previous enterprise-grade SOA architected systems I’ve worked on, last decade, were Classic ASP, Java or Webforms. These systems had their presentation layer wired directly into the services. The largest, .NET or other, MVC application I worked with was huge MVC but it had a “traditional” connection to the database.

First thoughts on SOA+MVC

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I could, and will soon, write a long ass post about how I cobbled together a messed-up architecture for building Silverlight applications on top of an enterprise class SOA architecture without RIA but with RIA…

Here is a branch of AutoMapper, compiled against Silverlight and now with support for entities generated from WCF service references.

http://github.com/detroitpro/AutoMapper.Silverlight

I really hope I published it to GitHub correctly; yell at me if not.

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This feature is small, hell since I’ve been using spark I almost forgot about it, that is until I started working on a simple administration section. The application has enough entities that “Right Click –> Crud” would make just the right tool.

Idea

ASP.NET MVC provides customizable code templates for the view/controller content. There are a few really good articles on how to get started.

Plan

1. Include the CodeTemplates in my project
2. Change the output extention to .spark
1. 
3. Modify the markup to sparkup
4. Phase 3: Profit.

Problem

ASP.NET MVC uses a custom tool to process the T4 templates.

MvcTextTemplateHost

It ignores the output extension directive in T4 templates.

(Click play)

Sadness

MvcTextTemplateHost is included in Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.Extensions.dll and this DLL that is not “part” of MVC code that was open sourced.

Conclusion

I’d love to write a Visual Studio addin to create spark views but I just don’t have the time. However; I do wonder if I can just have spark parse the .aspx and .ascx files.

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1. Keep using a custom controller
2. Learn and Use Ajax Helpers More
3. Rob Conery’s Law: When you have an “if” statement in the view, make a helper!
1. I think this might be optional depending on your view engine. Spark almost solves? this problem.
4. I miss dynamic languages.
5. Please with model binding as a way to create a terse application/framework.

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Changes you make in Blend will NOT show up in your pending changes in TFS. hence, they will not be pushed to the server and as such you will lose all your work when you do a “get latest and overwrite existing” since TFS FUCKING SUCKS!

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