Q2 Extensions for MVC official

And just like that, the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC Q2 2010 have left beta and are now officially available on Telerik.com! As you know, the Telerik Extensions were released as a beta with the rest of the Q2 2010 bits to ensure that the official release could deliver well-tested new UI extensions- most significantly, a new rich text editor. The extra time has been used extremely efficiently by the product team, and not only do we get polished beta features, we get some new features in the official release:

• In the new Editor, we’ve added:
• Font name and size tools
• Background and foreground color tools (basic)
• Smart indent
• Support for custom tools(!)
• Localization support
• Support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1
• Support for the new Razor syntax

This is a major update for the MVC Extensions and it delivers one of the most unique rich text editors available for ASP.NET (any “flavor”). We hope you enjoy the new bits.

Remember, the Telerik Extensions are still free and open source (GPLv2). We’ll be updating the CodePlex download very soon, too, so that you have the option of grabbing the tools there, if you prefer. We’ll also soon announce our road map plans for Q3 2010. We’ve got some exciting ideas for the final release of 2010 that should make the Telerik Extensions even more useful in a broad range of web applications. For now, download Q2 2010 and keep sending us your feedback.

Updated Telelerik Extension online demos

Virtual MVC Conference this Thursday, Join my sessions

As if there wasn’t enough to do online this week with the Telerik Webinar Week, I have another online event that needs mentioning. This Thursday, July 22nd, from 8 AM to 5 PM Central time, there will be a virtual ASP.NET MVC conference. Conducted entirely over Live Meeting, the day long (free, Telerik-sponsored) conference, dubbed mvcConf, will feature 3 tracks with sessions exclusively covering ASP.NET MVC and related topics. There will be some great speakers presenting throughout the day, so if MVC is something you’re even remotely interested in, this is a great “event” to attend.

For my part, I’ll be delivering two sessions (official schedule should be on website soon):

• Creating Rich MVC Views with Open Source Telerik Extensions
  11:00 AM Central Time
  ASP.NET MVC is a great web development platform, but it shouldn’t require you to write all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by hand. Come learn how the free and open source Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC are making it easy to build rich MVC views by giving you MVC-native reusable UI components. This session will focus on how to add Telerik Extensions to an MVC project, how to use the rich Grid for MVC (including binding to web services), in addition to highlighting additional tools in the MVC toolbox, such as the new rich text Editor for MVC.
• The Four C’s of Web Asset Optimization
  2:00 PM Central Time
  Learn how to leverage the four C’s of web asset optimization- caching, combining, compressing, and CDNs- to deliver higher performance standards-based web sites. By applying one or all of these techniques to JavaScript and CSS resources, ASP.NET MVC applications can improve load-time performance and scalability. This session will  also look at two Extensions included in the open source Telerik Extensions for MVC- ScriptRegistrar and StyleSheetRegistrar- that simplify the actions required to optimize web assets.

So, right after you attend the JustCode/JustMock/OpenAccess ORM Telerik webinar (at 10:00 AM Central), jump over and join me for some MVC fun at mvcConf. If the conference will allow it, I’ll give away a few commercial licenses for the Telerik MVC Extensions and JustMock to attendees of my sessions.

One final note: the event is currently sold out! I know, unusual for an online event, but I’m told it has to do with the event’s access to Live Meeting (or Live Meeting limits, or something…). Fortunately, they are working on streaming sessions via UStream, too, so check the conference website for updates (or check their official Twitter account). Otherwise, I’ll see you- virtually- at mvcConf on Thursday.

Importance of server-side rendering for web UI controls

As we move in to the Age of jQuery, where web developers are finally embracing and using JavaScript for all variety of cool thing, there are some important “gotchas” that tend to get overlooked. One of the most critical is the importance of supporting server-side rendering.

Most of us don’t worry about browsers not supporting JavaScript these days because, frankly, every browser does! Even mobile browsers (that matter) support and execute JavaScript. And despite what you may have heard, JavaScript can be used in accessible applications (a requirement for most government websites) as long as certain “precautions” are taken. Unfortunately, there is still a MAJOR consumer of the web that cannot deal with most JavaScript! Know who?

Search engine crawlers.

If you want your content to be indexed (by public crawlers OR your own internal corporate crawlers), pure client-side initialization and rendering is a problem. Search crawlers do not execute JavaScript. Some research suggests that modern crawlers are starting to use “tricks” to follow links embedded in JavaScript, but most SEO experts agree that the crawlers are not doing any arbitrary JavaScript execution on your page. (Even Google continues to advise developers to use a text-only browser like Lynx to see a page as web crawlers see it.)

 Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC in “client-binding mode” as seen by Google’s cache

So what? Why is this subject for Telerik Watch?

As web developers, we want to ensure that we deliver highly-optimized, high-performance web applications, but we also want to make sure our content is indexable. When you pick UI components, it’s important to pick tools that support BOTH server-side rendering AND client-side rendering.

For most “normal” users, the client-side rendering will enable you to deliver a premium, high-performance experience. If your control is really well built, the client-side mode will only send data between the browser and server and will handle HTML in the browser (minimizing bandwidth, maximizing responsiveness).

For search crawlers, the server-side rendering mode will enable you to present all content on the initial request. HTML is rendered on the server, sent the browser, and then easily indexable by the search crawler.

 Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC in “server mode” indexed correctly by Google

Telerik is one of the only UI component vendors that offers this type of “dual mode” support for both ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET MVC. Many UI component vendors offer all or nothing- client-side or bust- so beware! Not all tools are created equal, and you might miss this all important feature in your initial review.

Recap: Client-side rendering is great for performance, but terrible for search indexing. Make sure you pick UI components that provide flexible support for both rendering modes so you can have your cake and eat it too.

Working with the Grid for ASP.NET MVC

One of the main "challenges" in making a switch from ASP.NET WebForms to ASP.NET MVC is- or rather has been- the lack of a functional data grid. There are many examples showing you how to use a different views for reading and editing data in MVC, but few that show the true "grid experience," where data review and editing can occur in a single view.

Enter the Grid for MVC in the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, and specifically the new data editing features in the Q1 2010 release.

With the Telerik Grid (which is open source, by the way), you can easily perform core data grid operations connected to MVC controller action methods. Things like sorting, filtering, paging, and now grouping and editing are a simple matter of configuration. To help you get started quickly with these features, I've created six new videos that you can find on Telerik TV:

1. Getting Started with Grid Data Binding
2. Configuring Grid Ajax Data Binding
3. Configuring Grid Web Service Data Binding
4. Getting Started with Grid Data Editing
5. Data Editing with Ajax
6. Getting Started with Grid Columns

These videos will guide you to a complete understanding of MVC Grid data binding and data editing, both "server-side" (in other words, using HTTP GETs) and using AJAX (or, binding to JsonResults). Enjoy!

Web optimization with MVC webinar this week

This week's Weekly Webinar puts me back in the driver's seat to take you on a tour of some very cool tools in Telerik's open source Extensions for MVC. We'll be taking an extended look at the web asset optimization components, ScriptRegistrar and StylesheetRegistrar. These tools have been around since the beginning of our efforts with MVC, but they have been significantly improved with the evolution of the Extension suite. In this webinar, we'll dive-deep and explore the various ways these two components make it easy to embrace the four "Cs" of web optimization:

• Combine (reducing initial requests)
• Cache (reducing follow-up requests)
• Compress (reducing bits over the wire)
• Content Delivery Network (reducing latency to bits)

If you're working with MVC, this will be an event you don't want to miss. The techniques I will demo will make it possible to optimize your JavaScript and CSS resources as much as technically possible. We'll also explore the new Telerik CDN (with support for MVC), and cover some future-looking topics about the next release of the Telerik Extensions. It will be a fast-paced, info-packed, Todd Anglin signature webinar. If you want to join, register now to save your spot and get a link to the live event. You must attend live to participate in the Q&A, and that is often where some of the best info gets shared. The live event happens this Thursday, February 4th at 11:00 AM EST (8:00 AM PST, 4:00 PM GMT). See you on Thursday!

Telerik Extensions for MVC Unofficial FAQs, Part II

After we released the first preview of our new UI Extensions for ASP.NET MVC in August, there were naturally many questions surrounding the release. Why is Telerik building MVC Extensions? What does this mean for WebForms? Are the Extensions for MVC really open source? To help address some of the burning questions, I created a complete list of answers in Part 1 of my "Unofficial FAQs" for MVC. Many of those answers remain valid today with the release of Q3 2009, but there are some new questions that I'm starting to see asked multiple times.

So, it's time for Part 2 of the Unofficial FAQs. In this post, I'll try to provide answers to many of the new questions surrounding Telerik's updated release of the Extensions for ASP.NET MVC and hopefully help curb the rumor mill. If you have an unanswered question, send it to me on Twitter (@toddanglin) and I'll update this post.

Q: What's new in this release of the Extensions for ASP.NET MVC?

The Q3 2009 release marks the introduction of the first Telerik UI Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. In our CTP, we introduced the core framework (the server-side fluent API) that the new Extensions are built on, but we did not introduce any Telerik crafted UI rendering. This release builds on the work of the CTP and ships four new UI Extensions for MVC: Grid, TabStrip, Menu, and PanelBar. You can see all of the new Extensions in action in the online demos.

Q: What does the "beta" tag mean on this release?

If you remember the transition for the RadControls for ASP.NET to the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX ("Prometheus"), you may remember that we kept the beta tag on the suite until our transition was complete. The beta tag in this case implies that the suite is not final. The controls in the suite are not beta quality. They are tested, production-ready UI components.

We will likely keep the beta tag on the suite for at least the next one or two releases. Once we have added more UI Extensions to the suite and it represents a more complete LOB toolbox offering, we'll remove the beta tag. Of course, these are open source controls, so you can always modify the current versions if you find some bug or issue you want changed during our "beta" period.

Q: What happened to the jQueryUI wrappers?

As we outlined in our CTP FAQs, the jQueryUI wrappers were merely proofs of concept, a way for us to show-off the more important server-side fluent API without building our own rendering. The jQueryUI wrapper source remains on CodePlex and we encourage the community to pick-up and extend the wrappers if they are valuable to MVC projects. Going forward, Telerik will not be actively updating or supporting the jQueryUI wrappers.

Q: Are the Extensions still open source?

Definitely! Keeping the UI Extensions for ASP.NET MVC open source has always been a primary goal for our project. We know that the MVC community thrives on open source projects and software, so as a good .NET citizen we wanted to ensure our time saving UI Extensions were freely available to this community. With the Q1 2010 release, the Telerik Extensions will ship under a dual licensing model:

• GPLv2 - This is a very popular and common open source license (I've seen some stats that say 70% of OSS is GPL licensed). It allows you to freely use the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC in any project. The only restriction is that you cannot redistribute software that uses GPL code under a more restrictive license (like a "proprietary" license). For that, we offer a...
• Commercial License - The commercial license provides you (today) with at least two very important benefits: 1) it grants you access to Telerik's legendary support, and 2) it gives you a legal (and lawyer pleasing) way to use the Telerik Extensions in proprietary, redistributed software.

Q: Why did you go with the GPL license vs. alternatives like MIT or LGPL?

We spent a long time evaluating all open source license alternatives. We had many lengthy internal discussions, and at the end of the day we settled on the GPL for a few key reasons:

• GPL is a popular and widely used open source license (Linux is licensed under the GPL) that many businesses already know how to understand (read: the lawyers have already approved the GPL)
• GPL has a good "philosophy." It basically says, if you want to use our generosity to build software, all we require is that you pay it forward (i.e. keep your software free). If you instead want to make money off of your software, then we are now in a commercial relationship, and we simply ask that you pay us for our work just as you expect to be paid for your proprietary software.
• GPL is the most community friendly open source license in that it ensures the "intent" of open source developers is respected. That is, open source licenses are for open source developers. If you are a commercial developer, you need a commercial license.

Other OSS licenses like LGPL and MIT are good and definitely more liberal, but they can more easily be abused. Our goal is to support the OSS community with free software, and continue to provide well supported, commercial software to commercial developers.

Q: I still don't get the GPL. Is my software "infected" or not if I use the Extensions?

The best way to understand the impact of GPL on your software is to follow this simple decision tree:

1. Do you plan to redistribute your software? -->NO: GPL will have no impact on your software -->YES: ====>Commercial? GPL is not ideal. Purchase a Telerik Commercial license. ====>Open source? GPL is fine as long as your OSS license is compatible.

Q: Is the commercial license for the Extensions part of my Premium Collection?

Yes! So, if you're a Premium Collection subscriber, you don't have to worry about the GPL vs. Commerical license question. You've already got a commercial license (when it's introduced in Q1), so feel free to use the Telerik Extensions wherever you need them.

Q: Why would I buy the commercial license? How much is it on its own?

As we've outlined above, the commercial license is for commercial software first and foremost. There are other reasons you may want to buy a license, though, such as:

• Access to Telerik's premium support
• Access to Major Release and Service Pack builds (OSS project will only receive Major release builds)
• Ability to use Extensions in closed-source/proprietary projects

Pricing will be set in Q1 2010, but it will likely be on par with the other UI suite licenses.

Q: Is the standalone commercial license available with Q3?

Since we only have four controls in this release, we have decided to wait for the Q1 2010 release before offering a standalone (i.e. not part of the Premium Collection) license for MVC.

Q: So, there is no commercial license in Q3? What is the "Beta Go-Live" license?

Correct, the Q1 2010 release will be the first to ship with the commercial standalone license. In Q3, the Extensions ship as both GPLv2 and "Beta Go-Live." The Beta Go-Live license allows you to use the Extensions in your project while you wait for the Q1 2010 release.

Please see the official licensing FAQ on Telerik.com for more details about the Extensions licensing.

Q: Is the source available for the latest release?

Yes. The full source for the Telerik Extensions ships with every download. You can find the source in the Source > Telerik.Web.Mvc folder. The Q3 2009 are also available on CodePlex if you prefer to download from that location.

Q: Do you ship any themes with the Telerik Extensions?

Definitely. We have prepared 13 common skins for all UI Extensions that have been designed to closely match the skins of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. The AJAX and MVC controls do not share skins, but we have created skins with the same names and look-and-feel so that you can easily build "hybrid" applications that leverage the best of MVC and WebForms.

Q: What version of the ASP.NET MVC framework to the Extensions require?

The current Extensions target the officially release ASP.NET MVC v1 framework. That means you need .NET 3.5 and ASP.NET MVC 1.0 to use the Telerik Extensions. We are already experimenting with the ASP.NET MVC 2 betas, and we plan to target that framework after it is released by Microsoft.

Q: Is there an installer for the Q3 2009 MVC release?

There is no installer for the Telerik Extensions in Q3. The download is a simple ZIP archive that contains all required assemblies, documentation, examples, and source. To work with the Telerik Extensions in Visual Studio, simply add the DLLs to your project and follow the guidance in the docs for configuring your MVC web.config file.

We do plan to ship a simple installer by Q1 2010, but for Q3 we wanted to focus our efforts on the completeness and quality of the shipping UI Extensions (primarily, Grid).

Q: What's next for the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC?

Now that we have released our first four UI components, we will continue to build on this progress to ship a more complete LOB toolbox for MVC in Q1 and Q2 2010. First-up will be a focus on delivering editing support in the Grid, which will also force us to address a number of controls required to serve as column editors (such as date pickers, calendars, input controls, etc.). Plans for Q1 and Q2 are still being discussed, though, so make sure you share your feedback on the Telerik MVC forums! Your feedback will have a huge impact on our direction for the next release.

Understanding Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC webinar replay

Did you miss today's Weekly Webinar? If you did, you missed a fun event talking about the new open source Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. In an hour, we covered everything from the root reason web developers need somthing like ASP.NET MVC to how Telerik's Extensions work in Visual Studio to what you can expect in the next Extensions release. There was even a good Q & A session at the end of today's event, but that's a perk for those people that attend the event live (thanks, by the way, to all of you that joined me today!).

If you want to catch the content on-demand, the recording of today's session is now on Telerik TV (and embeded above), so start it in the background and enjoy some Telerik MVC information. Meanwhile, Telerik is working hard to prepare some great MVC UI components for our Q3 2009 release, so stay tuned to Telerik Watch and the Telerik Blogs for more details very soon!

Watch recorded webinar in full resolution on Telerik TV

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC Unofficial FAQs (updated)

With the introduction of our brand new Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, I know there are a lot of questions in the community about this new product. New products always generate questions, but when you factor in the CTP nature of this release and the fact that this is Telerik's first open source product, the questions abound. To help ensure you get answers to all of your burning questions, I've compiled some answers to the most common questions I'm seeing (or expect to see) in the community. The "unofficial FAQs." If you have a question not answered, be sure to add it to the comments and I'll update the post with an answer (if I can). Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC Unofficial FAQs Q: Why did Telerik build these extensions? ASP.NET MVC represents a very different way of building standards-based websites with .NET, and Telerik recognized that the current efforts to provide UI "components" for MVC were not fully embracing the principles of the platform. Telerik is providing a UI Extension framework for deploying reusable UI components in MVC views that is purpose built for the ASP.NET MVC platform- no postbacks, no Viewstate, no page life cycle. These new UI extensions will finally give MVC developers more productivity while creating views without sacrificing the concepts (like testability, clean HTML, SoC) that make MVC an important step forward for ASP.NET developers. Continue reading Telerik Extension Unofficial FAQs Q: Is Telerik transitioning to ASP.NET MVC? How does this affect the future of WebForms components? Definitely not! Just as Microsoft makes clear with the ASP.NET MVC framework, MVC is an option, not a replacement for ASP.NET WebForms. Telerik remains fully committed to the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and has a great road map of planned features for those controls. We are offering the Extensions for MVC for those developers that have decided to use MVC and want a more productive way to create rich views with .NET. Q: Are the Telerik Extensions really open source? Yes! In fact, they're licensed with the same OSI-approved license that covers the ASP.NET MVC framework- the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). This is one of the simplest open source licenses out there, and one of the most "open." You are free to use the Telerik Extensions in any open source or commercial product. Q: What if I want support? What do I do if my company doesn't allow open source software? Telerik will make a commercial license for the Telerik Extensions available with the official release. This license will include Telerik's "legendary" dedicated support and it will make it possible for you to use the Extensions in an environment where open source software is hard to get approved. Pricing and additional commercial license details are not available at this time. Q: What's so special about the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC? How are they different from other UI components for MVC? The Telerik Extensions are the first UI "components" natively built for MVC. These are not "ports" of WebForms controls. Many of the solutions for MVC you see available today are trying to cram the WebForms model (or some hybrid version of it) in to MVC. The Telerik Extensions are built from scratch to embrace ASP.NET MVC. The Extensions are designed to easily work with MVC controllers and they render lightweight, clean HTML. They also work with any ASP.NET MVC view engine! Q: What are these wrappers for jQueryUI? Why would I use them? For this CTP release, we did not have time to begin building custom UI rendering on top of our new UI Extension framework. To show-off the framework's power, though, we created wrappers for several jQueryUI components. These wrappers demonstrate how the server-side API works and give you a sense for how our "homegrown" components will work in the official release. The wrappers are also open source and you can use them to gain a native .NET approach for adding jQueryUI components to your MVC views. Q: Will the jQuery wrappers be updated in the future? Will you cover more controls? Not by Telerik. These wrappers are "proofs of concept" designed to show-off the framework. Their source will be published and we encourage the community to adopt and enhance the wrappers to make jQueryUI as accessible as possible to MVC developers. Future releases of the Telerik Extensions will feature new UI components not built on jQueryUI. Q: When will we see Telerik components built-on the Extensions framework? In our next release, you will begin to see new, homegrown components added to the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. Our plans are to start with three components for the first release: Grid, Menu, and TabStrip. These UI components will more closely match the skins of the existing RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and will offer more rich functionality that Telerik customer's expect. Q: Wait! Telerik is building a TabStrip? I thought there was already a Tab component in the CTP?! True, but remember that the CTP components are simply previews of the framework's power. The components themselves are jQueryUI components, not custom designed Telerik UI Extensions. The CTP wrappers are not considered components in the official release of the Telerik Extensions. Custom-built Telerik UI Extensions not based on jQueryUI will be built for all MVC components, including TabStrip. Q: Will the Telerik components be based on ASP.NET AJAX? Will they use the same rendering as the WebForms controls? No on both accounts. The Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC will be built on jQuery, the popular JavaScript library supported (officially) by Microsoft. The new UI Extensions will have a brand new HTML rendering model that is a clean as possible and that exclusively leverages jQuery on the client. The skins will be crafted to look identical to the skins for the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX (for consistency), but the renderings will be different. We are working hard to leave as much control as possible in the developer's hands over what gets rendered to the page. Q: Can I use the Telerik Extensions in multiple ASP.NET MVC View Engines? Absolutely! Since these UI Extensions are built from the ground-up to support ASP.NET MVC, they are fully desiged to work with any ASP.NET MVC View Engine. In fact, the downloads on Telerik.com include two sample projects showing the Telerik Extensions used in the Spark and NHaml MVC view engines, in addition to the default ASPX view engine. Q: Where can I download the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC? You can download the source, binaries, sample projects, and documentation from Telerik.com. The complete source (and the source only) is also published on CodePlex. You can submit contributions through CodePlex if you want to help extend this open source project. Q: I don't see the MVC download in my Telerik.com account. How do I get it? If you do not see the download for the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC on your downloads page on Telerik.com, it means you have not yet accepted the "community license" for this download. Simply accept the license and the download link will be added to your list of available Telerik downloads. Q: Where can I offer my 2 cents on these new Extensions? There are official forums on Telerik.com dedicated to the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. We are eager to hear your feedback and get your suggestions as we start the push towards the first official release of this product. Speak now or...speak later. But we'd prefer you speak-up early and often! Q: What's next for the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC? We are now turning our full attention to building the first three UI Extensions that will be part of the official release this fall. There will be at least one more preview release before the first version ships, and that will be your first chance to see some of the Telerik Extensions in action. Stay tuned to Telerik Watch and the Telerik Blogs for updates.

New Telerik ASP.NET MVC UI Extensions CTP launched today

Ready for some big news? If you're on Twitter then you've probably already seen this announcement (hint, hint), but I know from surveys that many of you are not in to the whole "Twitter-thing" (and I don't blame you). So, on to the news... Today Telerik announced (and released) the brand new Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, a completely open source and purpose built UI "component" suite for MVC. The announcement of this new product is significant for (at least) two reasons:

1. This is the first UI "component" approach built natively for ASP.NET MVC. These are not WebForms controls "hacked" or "squeezed" in to an MVC environment. This is a brand new UI Extension framework that fully embraces the values of ASP.NET MVC - lightweight rendering, clean HTML IDs, clear separation of concerns, easy testability, etc.- while helping make you more productive building MVC views. Our UI Extensions will work in any ASP.NET MVC View Engine, too, and the downloadable samples include projects using both Spark and NHaml.
2. This is Telerik's first open source product. As a small commercial company, it's obviously a big step to introduce a truly open source product. We have a strong desire to support the ASP.NET MVC community, though, and we know open platforms are important to many MVC developers. The source for the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC will be hosted on CodePlex (binaries on Telerik.com) and licensed under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL) - the same license that governs the ASP.NET MVC framework. That means these UI Extensions are 100% free to use, modify, and do with what you please.

This first release is a CTP and only a preview of the power of the underlying UI Extension framework. To show-off the framework, we have included wrappers for some of the jQueryUI client-side components. These wrappers are "proofs-of-concept" meant only to highlight the framework's approach to defining UI in MVC, and in our next release you'll start to see new, custom-built Telerik UI Extensions, like Grid, Menu, and TabStrip. For now, be sure to read the full announcement post by Team Lead Atanas Korchev for all the important details and then jump-over to Telerik.com to download the CTP bits. We hope you enjoy this new open source product from Telerik and we look forward to hearing your feedback!

Telerik Watch Minute: RadMVC

No, there is no new product called RadMVC- that's just my "catchy" title for this episode of Telerik Watch Minute. As you might have guessed, though, this episode is focused on showing you how you can get started using the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX in ASP.NET MVC. Telerik is one of the only ASP.NET component vendors supporting MVC and we're doing it without requiring you to learn a whole new set of controls. You can use the same RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q3 2008 SP2 that you use today in ASP.NET MVC. This is a big concept, though, so this is a longer than usual Telerik Watch Minute. Hopefully the extra time spent in the demo will help you gain a complete understanding of how you can get started with the RadControls in MVC and set you up for success on Microsoft's latest incantation of ASP.NET. Enjoy! Watch this epsidoe in full HD on Telerik TV (makes it easier to read the code)

Telerik MVC demo app now available

Hopefully you know by now that Telerik's RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX fully support ASP.NET MVC. That's right. You can use the same RadControls that you know and love today in Microsoft's latest incantation of the ASP.NET framework. But since this is such a new feature, and since we know many of you are still trying to wrap your mind around MVC, we've built a full ASP.NET MVC demo application that uses many of the RadControls so you can see how this is all supposed to work. The demo is a simple- and stylish - forums application. It uses 9 of the RadControls, including RadGrid, RadEditor, RadChart, RadTreeView and RadUpload, to build a forum site that has basic thread/post navigation, formatted forum posting, user authentication (with support for custom avatars), and a site activity "Statistics" view. Everything you need to have a fully functional MVC forums app. The source is available for immediate download, so I encourage anyone interested in learning more about MVC or the RadControls in MVC to grab the bites and study the example. Hopefully this will help those of your adopting MVC find ways to use the RadControls in new and creative ways. We'll continue to expand our documentation and support for MVC as adoption continues, so let us know what you think! We want to know your thoughts on MVC and our current support for it. Is MVC starting to "woo" you away from WebForms? View the Telerik MVC Forums demo now

ASP.NET MVC RC1 coming in January

So by now, you've probably heard of this thing called "ASP.NET MVC." A little more than a year ago I first mentioned it on this blog, and then about 6 months ago I introduced you to MVC Preview 3. Now we have official word from "The Gu" himself that the MVC release candidate will be shipping in 3 - 6 weeks time. When it does ship, we should be seeing bits that are feature complete with no known bugs, and pending a short "reality check" period, the final bits should be shipping shortly there after. There are a number of new (significant) things coming in the RC that weren't available in the Beta. Scott has (of course) detailed them in more detail than anyone else can, so for the "skimmers" out there, here's the Reader's Digest version:

• Views (i.e. ASPX files) will now be created by default with no code behind file. This is designed to reinforce the MVC separation of concerns and reduce "file clutter."
• You'll be able to access your strongly-typed model in Views via a new "Model" property (as in, Model.CustomerId) in addition to the old ViewData property (ViewData.Model.CustomerId).
• HtmlHelper and AjaxHelper methods can now be "model aware," enabling powerful strongly-type, IntelliSense-assisted Helper syntax. The OTB (out of the box) helpers will NOT use this functionality in V1, though.
• One of the coolest new features: MVC in Visual Studio will now support "auto scaffolding." In short, you'll be able to use wizards to automatically generate Views designed to view, edit, list, and create data. The wizards will interrogate your model and automatically add the necessary inputs and validation to your Views, too! Pretty cool time saver.

There's more, and if you're interested you should definitely read Scott's post. In case you missed it, Telerik is already supporting ASP.NET MVC (as of Q3), and you can be sure that we'll make sure our controls continue to work with the ASP.NET MVC RC. It's been a long time in the making, and it's definitely not a tech that is for everybody, but for the fans, it'll be here soon! In the mean time, what do you think of MVC now that it's (almost) fully baked? Is it enough to make you leave WebForms?

ASP.NET MVC Beta now available

This is a busy week for Microsoft releases. With Silverlight 2's official arrival still hot out of the oven, Microsoft appears to have today released the ASP.NET MVC Beta. I say "appears" because none of the "big" MS bloggers have yet to comment on this release. In fact, as of this moment, the Beta is not even announced on CodePlex. Fellow Telerik Evangelist Kevin Babcock pointed the release out to me, and sure enough, it's live and ready for downloading on Microsoft's servers. This is the sixth "release" of the fledging MVC framework, and with it we get slightly more polish than what Preview 5 provided. Among some of the changes from Preview 5:

• TempData is now interfaced so different TempData providers can be used (and so TestData can be more easily tested). The default TempData provider is backed by ASP.NET session.
• Fixed OutputCacheFiltering so that it works correctly in authorization scenarios (i.e. the user is always authenticated for methods with the Authorization attribute).
• New namespace created for HTML helper methods: System.Web.Mvc.Html
• New default model binder added to handled complex model types (saving you the need to create lots of custom binders).
• Template now creates a Scripts folder by default to store all JavaScript files

For the complete list of changes in the beta, be sure to read the helpful 14 page release notes. No word yet on when we can expect the final release of ASP.NET MVC, but enjoy the beta bits. Maybe we'll get more details at PDC in a couple weeks.

Download ASP.NET MVC Beta now

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 released today

For all of you MVC fans out there, listen up: the third preview release of the ASP.NET MVC Framework has just dropped and is now available for download at the normal locations. This release comes about two months after the last "official" release (Preview 2 - released March 18th) and continues the iterative release trend Microsoft has adopted for the MVC project. Under this model, Microsoft is releasing bits for its new framework much earlier than it normally would and relying heavily on community feedback to guide the direction of the product. The approach has its pros and cons- we get to play with code earlier (pro) but lots of incorrect (a.k.a. outdated) information about the framework floods the internet (con). I'll reserve my judgment on this "experimental" product development approach 'til we see what the MVC team ultimately produces, but in the mean time, use caution when searching the interwebs for ASP.NET MVC help. It's likely already out of date.

Point in case, the new Preview 3 release makes a number of fundamental changes to the way ASP.NET MVC works. These changes are to be expected as the MVC team tweaks the Framework's API to "feel right," but if you've been dipping your toes in the MVC pool with Preview 2 be preparred to make some code changes. Among the key changes in this release:

• Action methods in MVC Controllers no longer rely on the static RenderView() method to render a view. Instead, a more flexible ActionResult is now returned by action methods. There are 6 enumerated ActionResult types, easily enabling you to do everything from render HTML (ViewResult) to redirecting the users (RedirectResult). This change will affect Preview 2 apps.
• The ViewData property of ViewPage no longer returns T. Instead, a new property has been added to the page's ViewDataDictionary to handle that task: Model. Call the Model property to access a strongly typed collection of data passed to the page.
• Routing has changed a lot in in Preview 3. The most significant change is the way routes are defined in the Global.asax file. A new MapRoute extension method makes the process much simpler than Preview 2, significantly reducing the number of lines of code it takes to define routes. This is a welcome change, but it will also require you to update your Preview 2 apps.
  

For a complete overview of the changes in Preview 3, be sure to review the release notes (caution: Word link). You can also find an exhaustive post covering all of the changes in Preview 3 from the master of increbile blogging, ScottGu.

Many of these changes are going to make MVC more enjoyable to use. The new ActionResult, for instance, is going to dramatically simplify MVC unit testing by removing the previously painful mocking required to test views. We also get the impression from Scott's post that the MVC team is "starting to feel good" about the MVC URL routing and controller/action components, so we may start to see these APIs stabilize in future releases. Scott's also indicating that future MVC releases will focus more on delivering improved HTML Helpers and better Ajax integration, two areas that are very interesting to those of us that spend a lot of time in the UI. I guess we'll find out in another couple of months.

Until then, enjoy the new preview and let us know what you think. Is ASP.NET MVC something that you'd consider using instead of WebForms in your organization?