ScottGu's Blog

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the important considerations that any Internet web-site needs to design with in mind.  A non-trivial percentage of Internet traffic to sites is driven by search engines, and good SEO techniques can help increase site traffic even further.

One of the cool new releases coming out this year is a small download manager - the Microsoft Web Platform Installer - that makes installing and configuring web server and web development stacks really easy.  It is a free tool that you can download from the www.microsoft.com/web site (here is the direct link to the installer – choose the 2.0 version).  It works with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. 

LIDNUG (Linked .NET Users Group) is hosting an online chat with me today (Wednesday) from 11:30am to 1pm PST (Pacific Standard Time).  Anyone is free to join and the agenda topic will be open – so bring your questions!

Last month I blogged about a free end-to-end ASP.NET MVC tutorial called “NerdDinner” that I wrote for the Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book from Wrox Press.  The book is now released and shipping on Amazon. 

In a model-view-controller framework the term "model" refers to the objects that represent the data of the application, as well as the corresponding domain logic that integrates validation and business rules with it.  The model is in many ways the "heart" of an MVC-based application, and as we'll see later fundamentally drives the behavior of it.

We'll be using a database to store all of the Dinner and RSVP data for our NerdDinner application.  The steps below show creating the database using the free SQL Server Express edition.  All of the code we'll write works with both SQL Server Express and the full SQL Server.

This will bring up the "New Project" dialog.  To create a new ASP.NET MVC application, we'll select the "Web" node on the left-hand side of the dialog and then choose the "ASP.NET MVC Web Application" project template on the right: