Melvyn Harbour

SQL Server Central have just launched a new series of free SQL Server training videos.

One of the main areas that is cited as a benefit of using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework is that you can obtain a 'clean separation of concerns'. But the question is, what does this really mean, how achievable is it in reality, and should we really be interested in doing it?

Although this blog is principally about ASP.NET and web application development, I thought I'd drop in a link to an interesting article over on Simple Talk. It's about how to design a software tool. A large portion of what Stephen discusses is to do with user interaction, which is, in my view, absolutely critical to web based applications. The process we use for application design, and for web application design is fundamentally the same here at Red Gate, and this article gives a few insights into the way we do it.

In the latest preview of the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework, one of the newly included features is AJAX helper methods. It's going to be interesting to see where they go with these. At the moment, they've added just a couple of tasters. This blog post discusses how to set them up and make use of them if you want to try them out. Currently, there are two helper methods that have been created, Ajax.ActionLink and Ajax.Form. I will discuss both below. They both generate HTML, much in the manner of pre-existing helpers such as Html.Form.

Well, we've rolled out new versions of several of our products here at Red Gate. In particular, these have been adding SQL Server 2008 support. You can read more about these updates on the website http://www.red-gate.com

It's been announced on ScottGu's blog that MVC Preview 4 is due out later this week. Obviously we'll need to wait and see what it feels like when we get to have a play for real with it, but first impressions from reading down the article is that they seem to have nearly nailed down the core API to create a version that's close to what will go live, and are now busy working on all the bits and pieces that will be necessary for actually using it in a commercial sense. So we're now getting good authorisation, error handling and the like. I'll be getting it as soon as it's released and giving it a good going over to see how the new features play.

Back for more! We started the day with a quick look at Dynamic Data (no more than an overview for those that hadn't seen it before), then moved on to look at unit testing the MVC framework, before finishing off with a look at jQuery and how it works with MVC.

We've had the first of our two half days with Steven Sanderson this morning. It was split in half, with the first half covering the new C# 3.0 language features and the second tackling MVC.