Shiju Varghese's Blog

In this post, I will demonstrate how to use NuGet package MvcPaging in ASP.NET MVC apps. MvcPaging provides a Pager HtmlHelper that renders a pager based on a PagedList implementation. MvcPaging’s Pager helper is also providing Ajax functionality for the paging implementation. You can add MvcPaging package via NuGet. The following command in the NuGet console will install MvcPaging in your project.

Last Friday, I got an email from Microsoft stating that I have been awarded as Microsoft MVP again for 2011!! Now I became a Microsoft MVP for the second time in a row.

Microsoft Web Platform and Tools (WPT)  team has announced the release of ASP.NET Universal Providers that allows you to use Session, Membership, Roles and Profile providers along with all editions of SQL Server 2005 and later. This support includes Sql Server Express, Sql Server CE and Sql Azure.ASP.NET Universal Providers is available as a NuGet package and the following command will install the package via NuGet.

The mvc-mini-profiler is a lightweight, but effective mini profiler tool for ASP.NET apps specially designed for ASP.NET MVC 3 apps. The mvc-mini-profiler is an free and open source tool from Stack Overflow team. The tool is initially developed for StackOverflow family of websites and open sources the tool later. This is an another great open source tool from Stack Overflow team after Dapper object mapper for .Net. The mvc-mini-profiler is available from http://code.google.com/p/mvc-mini-profiler/ . The mvc-mini-profiler is also available as a NuGet package .

I will be speaking at Kerala Microsoft User Group , Kochi on June 11. The title of the session is “Scaffolding with EF 4.1 and ASP.NET MVC 3”. This will be a hands-on session about scaffolding/code-generation in ASP.NET MVC 3 apps based on EF 4.1 Code First  The event details available from here .

Azure Storage Explorer is an open source tool at Codeplex that can allow you to inspecting and altering the data in your Windows Azure Storage projects including the logs of your cloud-hosted applications. Azure Storage Explorer is an excellent GUI tool that will be a very useful when you are working with Azure storage services. All 3 types of cloud storage can be viewed and edited: blobs, queues, and tables.

Microsoft has announced the production version of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service. Today, scalability and performance are the most challenging areas in enterprise application development and a distributed caching solution can avoid unnecessary round-trips to the database and give you better performance and even better availability. The Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service lets you create high performance apps for the Windows Azure cloud computing platform. Windows Azure AppFabric Caching is a distributed in-memory Cache platform hosted in Windows Azure. AppFabric Caching caches all types of data such as CLR objects, XML, binary data etc. Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service is an extensible caching platform that can also use as a storage mechanism for ASP.NET Session and ASP.NET page output caching.

I have created a demo web app for some of my previous blog posts and can be download from http://efmvc.codeplex.com/. The following technologies are used for the web app