Using MVVM on the Web with KnockoutJS
As most of you know, I have been in the Silverlight space for quite a while. (And to be clear to the chicken-little amongst you, no I am not leaving the Silverlight community.) I’ve been building a web application for consumers so that HTML + JavaScript represents the right solution to building a project like we’re building (more on what I am building in the near future).
One of the things I wanted to be able to do is to build longer-lived pages where it made sense without having to resort to post-backs or hacked together JavaScript. In fact, what I really wanted was a client-side ViewModel (e.g. MVVM) for my web page. After looking at several of the existing frameworks for the job, I settled on KnockoutJS as a great solution. The currently released version (1.21) is a good solution, but the developers of the framework have released a Beta (1.3Beta) version that greatly simplifies what I needed. If you want to follow along, make sure you download that version here.
What I've Been Doing...
It’s been a long nine-months and I am excited to be able to talk about what I’ve been working on for the first time. I am working with a small team of people to build a new set of products. But unlike what I’ve been doing in the past, this new set of products is not for developers...
New Cities and New Courses
My company, AgiliTrain, has created its spring schedule and we are happy to announce that we’re going to be expanding with new courses and new cities. Let’s take the courses first.
Modern Web Development - Part 1
This is the first of ten parts of this blog post. The topics will be:
In the past year I’ve had a side project. FirstInked’s Beta recently shipped and I wanted to share with you what I’ve learned. To start out, I want to specifically thank two people who were really great in helping me formulate the strategies I’ll talk about. They are:
I'm Coming to Belgium to Teach Web Development
As many of you know, I am heading out on World Tour this June and heading across Europe and Asia for a year. For the first stop, I’ve partnered with Sparkles to do a training in Belgium this June. If you’re in Europe and you’ve been looking for a way to easily take my web development course, this is your opportunity. We’re only holding it once in Northern Europe.
The course takes place from June 23-25th, 2014. If you’re in the area, this is a great opportunity to learn how to build websites using the ASP.NET on the back-end and open source tools like Bootstrap 3 and AngularJS on the front-end.
ASP.NET 5 Identity and REST APIs
As I’ve been digging into building apps with ASP.NET 5, I’ve had to get used to some of the new metaphors. Some of these make sense (especially if you’ve used Node before), but some are brand new to me. One of these metaphors I ran into was the idea of Identity notifications.
The problem I was running into was one I thought many people would run into: using Identity (e.g. authentication/authorization) with REST APIs. Here is the scenario:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 4 - MVC 6
I had planned on finishing these a long time ago, but working on my Pluralsight course about ASP.NET 5 distracted me. Sorry about that.
If you’ve been doing web development in .NET, you probably have at least a passing experience with ASP.NET’s MVC framework. At it’s core, it’s a common way to build and architect web applications. The new stack is built on the same metaphors from the older versions. If you’ve been using MVC before, you won’t be lost and some of the additions are welcome.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 5 - The API
The more I work with ASP.NET 5, the more it looks and feels like the old ASP.NET stack except for the hosting. That’s a good thing in most cases, but writing the API that changes.
New Course on ASP.NET 5!
If you read my blog, you probably already know how excited I am about ASP.NET 5. To dovetail with that, I’ve created a nine-hour course on Pluralsight that covers this brand-new technology from Redmond.
This new course is similar to my end-to-end course on ASP.NET 4/MVC5 that I released a couple of years ago. The goal of the course is to teach you all the concepts while helping you build a simple web app.
Upgrading from ASP.NET 5 Beta 7 to Beta 8
If you’ve been following along, you know by now that I’m investing my time into learning ASP.NET 5. Now that the ASP.NET team have released a new version, let me help you move your code to the new version.
The update this time includes some simple package changes but also some major API changes. I am sure I can’t cover them all here, but hopefully I’ll help you avoid the major ones.
The Week at DEVIntersection
I want to thank all the great attendees I met at this week’s DEVIntersection (Fall 2015) conference in Vegas! Richard Campbell and company put on a great show!
I had the opportunity to do three talks and two of them went well (if you were at my Bootstrap talk, you know what I’m talking about). In any case, I wanted to share the slide and code with the attendees so here it is:
ASP.NET 5 and Bower
As most of you already know, I have a new course on ASP.NET 5. I’ve just released a teaser video that shows how the Bower.json editor in Visual Studio works.
The course was recently updated to use the ASP.NET Beta 8 bits. I am looking forward to the next update of ASP.NET and expect to continue to update the course all the way through the RTM.
Upgrading ASP.NET 5 Beta 8 to RC1
UPDATED: Missed fixes.
It’s that time again. ASP.NET 5 has a new release and this one has a go-live license! As announced today, the RC1 is available and a new RC2 is coming in the future.
ASP.NET 5 Webinar
I had a great time today talking about ASP.NET 5 on a Pluralsight webinar. Over 1,000 people were able to attend. Thank you all for tuning in!
The webinar showed the very basics of what ASP.NET 5 is and why it exists. I had fun answering all the questions and wish we had time to answer more.
Upgrading ASP.NET 5 Beta4 to Beta5
For my upcoming course, I have a decent sized example that I’ll be teaching from. In the process of watching ASP.NET 5 go through the sprints, I have to upgrade the project at every step. I feel at some point I should be getting better at dealing with the sprints, but not yet ; )
Here is a short post that includes the different things I had to deal with in upgrading the project. It’s not just the ASP.NET 5 update, but also EF7 and a couple of small details.
My Entities, Validation and View Models Course
A few weeks back, I released a new course on Pluralsight. This new course talks through what I consider “Best Practices” (though there are no absolutes) for ASP.NET Entities, View Models, and Validation.
I was tremendously pleased to find it made it into the top ten courses for a few days. It seems to be resonating with some students and that makes me really happy. If you’re writing ASP.NET code, this course could make your job easier!
ASP.NET 5: First Impressions
I’ve been working on a new web site wholly using the ASP.NET 5 (e.g. vNext, MVC6, etc.) for the past couple of weeks. This means using Visual Studio 2015 Preview and the new project types in ASP.NET 5.
The idea around the site is to be an example of an ASP.NET 5 site using MVC6, EF7, and Visual Studio 2015. It’s not perfect and ASP.NET 5 isn’t ready yet so I expect to continue to fix and remove hacks for quite a while, but it’s been fun to dig into a whole new stack while it’s still getting the kinks worked out. Here are some of my first impressions.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 1 - Getting Started
Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with the new ASP.NET 5 (also known as ASP.NET vNext) bits using Visual Studio 2015. I’m trying to make sense of the new changes and how they will affect how I build websites. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned about the new stack.
I’m going to do this by talking through an example website I wrote using the new bits. Do know that we’re still pretty early and Visual Studio 2015 (CTP6 as of this writing) and ASP.NET 5 Beta 3 are both in a state of flux. This is definitely about what’s coming, not what is here so far.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 2 - Startup
In this second post in my six-part series on ASP.NET 5, we’ll take a look at how your ASP.NET 5 applications will be configured upon startup. The startup in this new version of ASP.NET 5 is very different, but hopefully is clearer and easier to debug. At least that’s my impression so far.
If you haven’t read the prior topics, it would probably be helpful to start with the earlier articles. You can see a list of the links to the articles below:
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 3 - EF7
NOTE: This post has been updated for changes in Beta 7 and later.
Every web project needs some sort of data framework and ASP.NET 5 is no exception. Like it’s forbearers, ASP.NET 5 uses Entity Framework, but this version of the Entity Framework is different. It’s being re-engineered from the ground up just like the ASP.NET 5 stack.
Atlanta Code Camp Wrap-up
I had the pleasure of joining many of the Atlanta .NET community for the annual Atlanta Code Camp. If you didn't get a chance to join us, you missed a great time. The attendees were enthusiastic and friendly. Thanks to everyone who attended!
I promised the people who attended my sessions I'd post the slides and example code so here you are:
aspConf was fun!
I had a good time doing a couple of talks today. If you joined me online, thanks for coming. For those who missed my talks, they will be posting the videos on Channel 9. As promised you can get the slides and examples here for my talks:
I hope you enjoyed the talks!
Modern Web Development - Part 3
This is the third of ten parts of this blog post. The topics will be:
What’s Wrong with CSS?
Modern Web Development - Part 4
This is the fourth of ten parts of this blog post. The topics will be:
Debugging
WebAPI for the MVC Guy
So as some of you know, I’ve spent a lot of the last year working on a web project. I’ve been using ASP.NET MVC3 and it’s going well. I am at the point where we are creating the mobile apps. I service them, I need an API (which will eventually be available as a public API too). I had started creating using MVC and simple routes but I was urged to look at the new Web API stack that is installed with the new ASP.NET MVC4 installer.
NOTE: To write this blog post, I got a lot of Twitter help from Glenn Block, Darrel Miller and and Rick Strahl!
My Courses
