I have been a huge fan of jQuery ever since I started working on IdeaPipe about 10 months ago. Mostly because of its simplistic DOM access using standard CSS syntax that we all have to learn anyways in the modern Web 2.0 world. In addition to the ease of finding elements on your page, it also works very nicely with other frameworks, I have used it in combination with Microsoft AJAX, Google’s GData JavaScript, and TinyMCE.

Personally I found this to be amazing news, because Microsoft is shipping an Open Source project, licensed under MIT License, with its flag ship developer tool, Visual Studio.  Maybe if we play our cards right, we can start seeing other projects like NUnit and Moq start to ship with Visual Studio.  I have my fingers crossed.

John Resig the developer of jQuery had this to say on his blog:

Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

And according to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft is also extending the standard product support to jQuery:

We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24×7 with Microsoft PSS.

This is probably some of the most exciting, because it means that jQuery will be a supported stack in some of the more rigid enterprise development environments that won’t install anything that isn’t supported by Microsoft.  I also beleive this is great news for MVC, because jQuery makes MVC just that much more useful for the average developer.

I will be presenting September 17, 2008 at Philly .NET User Group Meeting.  My talk will be on:

Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor.  My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation.

The group will be meeting at the Microsoft Malvern Campus, located at 45 Liberty Blvd, Malvern, PA 19355.

If you think you might attended the meeting please make sure to register, so that Bill has an accurate count for the food order.

User Group News * Please distribute this notice throughout your development community! We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site. September 17 ASP.NET Dynamic Data, MVC & Web 2.0 Wednesday Malvern, PA Our monthly meeting will be held at the Microsoft Greater PA Office in Malvern, PA on Wednesday, September 17 from 5:30-8:30. Refreshments are provided courtesy of Vovéo Marketing Group. Please register on our web site. Detailed directions are on the Microsoft Greater PA web site. 5:30 Rachel Appel, Appel Consulting An Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data If you are tired of the same old ASP.NET webforms, GridViews, and ADO.NET data access code that make up your current applications, then you’ll want to take a closer look at ASP.NET Dynamic Data.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data is Microsoft’s new technology that provides a template infrastructure for your application, page and fields based on your application’s data model. In this session you will learn concepts and use of application templates to create ASP.NET dynamic data web application. We’ll then create customizations at the application and page levels showing how easy website maintenance is when using ASP.NET Dynamic Data. We’ll also cover field level customizations by supplying data display formats, custom field types, and data validation based on the application’s data model. Rachel Appel lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania and is the senior technology consultant at Appel Consulting. Rachel is an MVP and a member of ASPInsiders, and holds the MCT MCAD & MCSD certifications.  She has been working as an instructor, software developer, architect and DBA for a wide variety of organizations. She is the Vice President and a regular speaker of the dotNetValley user’s group, as well as an active member in other local user groups of Northeastern Pennsylvania and the tri-state area.  Rachel’s expertise lies within developing solutions that align business and technology using the Microsoft .NET family of products. 6:45 Q&A Rob Keiser & Dani Diaz, philly.net co-leaders, ask questions, get answers from your peers! 7:00 Break Meet your peers. Refreshments and drinks courtesy of Vovéo Marketing Group. 7:15 Nicholas Berardi, Vovéo Marketing Group MVC & Web 2.0 Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor.  My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation. Nicholas Berardi works for Vovéo Marketing Group in Malvern, PA as a Software Architect.  He is the co-author of ASP.NET MVC Website Programming, Problem, Design, Solution published by Wrox and will be released early 2009.  He received his BS in Information Science and Technology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2003.  Nick has been using C# and the .NET framework since its beta and has over 10 years of experience in web development and related technologies. He helped to develope one the first websites on the internet to use the ASP.NET MVC framework, in a production environment, at http://www.ideapipe.com.  He blogs at http://www.coderjournal.com. 8:30 Closing & Raffle! Books, software, and other goodies!

Looks like the MVC team has put out preview release 5 of the MVC Framework today.  You can get the latest version from CodePlex.

Here is what I can tell has changed from the release notes.

What’s New

• Added global registration of view engines
• Changed the IViewEngine interface to add the RenderParial method
• Added support for rendering partial views
• Added a parameter to specify a default option label for DropDownList controls
• Moved ASP.NET AJAX extension methods to a separate namespace
• Added helpers for RadioButton and TextArea controls and made overall improvements to other helpers.
• Removed helper method overloads to avoid ambiguity
• Added array support for action method parameters
• Removed the ActionMethod property from action filter context objects
• Added support for custom model binders
• Added an IActionInvoker interface
• Added an UpdateMode method to the Controller class
• Changed HandleErrorAttribute so that it does not handle exceptions when HttpContext.IsCustomErrorEnabled is false
• Added a new AcceptVerbs attribute
• Added a new ActionName attribute

Known Issues and Breaking Changes

• Controller class now is derived from ControllerBase class
• Controller.Execute as removed, it is not called ExecuteCore.
• Controller initialization steps should be done in Initialize method now.
• IViewEngine interface is now responsible for finding views, not rendering them.
• Some overloads to some helper methods have been removed.
• AJAX helper methods have been moved to a new namespace.
• This version is incompatible with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta

Upgrading from Preview 4 to Preview 5

• System.Web.Abstractions and System.Web.Routing have been changed to version 3.5.0.0
• Assemblies are located at %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 5

Derik also noticed that many of the classes are still sealed, and is requesting that the team un-seals all classes, and I agree with him.

Breaking and mysterious changes that I have submitted a bug request for:

• AcceptVerbAttribute Not Following HTTP Standards
• ActionMethod Missing From ActionExecutingContext

Update (2008-8-31): Also Derik found a replacement for RenderUserControl, very minor change, but it is the difference between a error and having the thing work.