Gunnar Peipman's ASP.NET blog

ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 is launced and available for download. There are many cool features and I strongly suggest you to try the new version out. In this posting I will give you quick overview about what’s new in ASP.NET MVC 3.

I decided to write over long time one posting that is directed to beginners who start with jQuery and AJAX. One of the first things to study is how to make requests to server and how to retrieve objects. In this posting I will show you how to use jQuery to retrieve JSON data from ASP.NET MVC application and how to debug it.

I wrote unit tests for my ASP.NET MVC application that uses some jQuery AJAX-components. These components load data from server in JSON format. I needed to write tests for these methods to make sure that correct data is returned to client. In this posting I will show you how to use dynamic type to test JSON-based action results and therefore avoid creating DTO classes.

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools contains now Solution Navigator that merges many good features of Visual Studio 2010, Solution Explorer and some Power Tools features to single view. After playing shortly with Solution Navigator I found it to be very good replacement for Solution Explorer. In this posting I will show you some very cool features of Solution Navigator.

Long time ago there was simple ASP.NET editor called Web Matrix that was replaced by Visual Web Developer Express when Express versions came for Visual Studio. Now is time again for some small and easy tool and here it is – Microsoft WebMatrix Beta. In this posting I will introduce you Microsoft WebMatrix and show how it works.

Using Visual Studio symbols and source files makes debugging much easier. I am specially happy about ASP.NET MVC 2 source files because I develop on ASP.NET MVC 2 almost every day. You may also find other useful symbols and source files. In this posting I will show you how to get ASP.NET MVC source to your computer and how to use it.

I get almost every week some e-mails where my dear readers ask for source code of my ASP.NET MVC and FullCalendar example. I have some great news, guys! I ported my sample application to Visual Studio 2010 and made it available at CodePlex. Feel free to visit the page of MVC Time Planner.

In one of my community projects I needed to output some listings as Excel file. As installing Excel to server is non-sense that I was easily able to avoid I found simple solution for Excel 2007 files – open-source project called ExcelPackage. In this posting I will show you hot to create simple event attendees report in Excel 2007 format using ExcelPackage.