Minggu, 23 Januari 2011

Uploading Packages To The NuGet Gallery


As David Ebbo blogged today, the NuGet Gallery is now open to the public. The goal of the NuGet Gallery is to be the hub for NuGet users and package authors alike. Users should be able to search and discover packages with detailed information on each one and eventually rate them. Package authors can register for an API key and upload packages.

We’re not quite where we want to be with the gallery, but we’re moving in the right direction. If you want to see us get there more quickly, feel free to lend a hand. The gallery is running on fully open source code!

In this blog post, I wanted to cover step by step what it takes to create and upload a package.

Create Your Package

Well the first step is to create a package so you have something to upload. If you’re well acquainted with creating packages, feel free to skip this section, but you may learn a few tips if you stick with it.

I’ll start with a simple example that I did recently. The XML-RPC.NET library by Charles Cook is very useful for implementing XML-RPC Services and clients. It powers the MetaWeblog API support in Subtext. As a courtesy, I recently asked Charles if he would mind if I created a NuGet package for his library for him, to which he said yes!

So on my machine, I created a folder named after the latest 2.5 release, xmlrpcnet.2.5.0. Here’s the directory structure I ended up with.

package-folder-structure

By convention, the lib folder is where you place assemblies that will get added as referenced assemblies to the target project when installing this package. Since this assembly only supports .NET 2.0 and above, I put it in the net20 subfolder of the lib folder.

The other required file is the .nuspec file, which contains the metadata used to build the package. Let’s take a look at the contents of that file.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<package>
 <metadata>
   <id>xmlrpcnet</id>
   <version>2.5.0</version>
   <authors>Charles Cook</authors>
   <owners>Phil Haack</owners>
   <description>A client and server XML-RPC library for .Net.</description>
   <projectUrl>http://www.xml-rpc.net/</projectUrl>
   <licenseUrl>http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php</licenseUrl>
   <tags>xml-rpc xml rpc .net20 .net35 .net40</tags>
   <language>en-US</language>
 </metadata>
</package>




There’s a couple of things I want to call out here. Notice that I specified Charles Cook in the authors element, but put my own name in the owners element. Authors represent the authors of the library within the package, while the owner typically represents the person who created the package itself. This allows people to know who to contact if there’s a problem with the package vs a problem with the library within the package.



In general, we hope that most of the time, the authors and the owners are one and the same. For example, someday I’d love to help Charles take ownership of his packages. Until that day, I’m happy to create and upload them myself.



If somebody creates a package for a library that you authored and uploads it to NuGet, assume it’s a favor they did to get your library out there. If you wish to take ownership, feel free to contact them and they can assign the packages over to you. This is the type of thing we’d like to see resolved by the community and not via some policy rules on the gallery site. This is a case where the gallery could do a lot to make this sort of interaction easier, but does not have such features in place yet.



With this in place, it’s time to create the package. To do that, we’ll need the NuGet.exe console application. Copy it to a utility directory and add it to your path, or copy it to the parent folder of the package folder.



nuget-dir



Now, open a command prompt and navigate to the directory and run the nuget pack command.



nuget pack path-to-nuspec-file



Here’s a screenshot of what I did:



nuget-pack



Pro tip: What I really did was add a batch file I call build.cmd in the same directory that I put the NuGet.exe file. The contents of the batch file is a single line:




for /r %%x in (*.nuspec) do nuget pack '%%x' -o d:\packages\



What that does is run the nuget pack command on every subdirectory of the current directory. I have a folder that contains multiple packages that I’m working on and I can easily rebuild them all with this batch file.



Ok, so now we have the package, let’s publish it! But first, we have to create an account on the NuGet Gallery website.



Register and Upload



The first step is to register for an account at http://nuget.org/Users/Account/Register. Once you have an account, click on the Contribute tab. This page gives you several options for managing packages (click to enlarge).



contribute-tab



To upload your package, click on the Add New Package link.



upload-package



Notice there’s two options. At this point, you can simply browse for the package you created and upload it and you’re done. In a matter of a few minutes, it should appear in the public feed.



The second option allows you to host your package file in a location other than the NuGet gallery such as CodePlex.com, Google Code, etc. Simply enter the the direct URL to the package and when someone tries to install your package, the NuGet client will redirect the download request to the external package URL.



Submit From The Command Line



Ok, that’s pretty easy. But you’re a command line junky, right? Or perhaps you’re automating package submission.



Well you’re in luck, it’s pretty easy to submit your package directly from the command line. But first, you’re going to need an API key.



Visit the My Account page (http://nuget.org/Contribute/MyAccount) and make a note of your API key (click image below to enlarge it).



nuget-gallery-api-key



Be sure to keep that API key secret! Don’t give it out like I just did. If you do happen to accidentally leak your API key, you can click the Generate New Key button, again like I just did. You didn’t really think I’d let you know my API key, did you?



Now, using the same NuGet.exe command line tool we downloaded earlier, we can push the package to the gallery using the nuget push command.



nuget push path-to-nupkg api-key –source http://packages.nuget.org/v1/




Here’s a screenshot of the exact command I ran.



publishing-nupkg



Shoot! There I go showing off my secret API key again! I better regenerate that.



As you can see, this command uploaded my package and published it to the feed. I can login and visit the Manage My Contributions page to see this package and even make changes to it if necessary.



Moving Forward



We’re still working out the kinks in the site and hopefully, by the time you read this blog post, this particular issue will be fixed. Also, we’re planning to update the NuGet.exe client and make the NuGet gallery be the default source so that the –source flag is not required.



As David mentioned, the site was primarily developed as a CodePlex.com project by the Nimble Pros in a very short amount of time. There’s two major components to the site. There’s the front-end Orchard Gallery built as an Orchard module. This powers the gallery website that you see when you visit http://nuget.org/. There’s also the back-end gallery server which hosts the OData feed used to browse and search for packages as well as the WCF service endpoint for publishing packages.



Each of these components are open source projects which means if you really wanted to, you could take the code and host your own gallery website. Orchard will be using the same code to host its own gallery of Orchard modules.



Also, these projects accept contributions! I personally haven’t spent much time in the code, but I hope to find some free time to chip in myself.



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ASP.NET MVC 3 and NuGet 1.0 Released (Including Source Code!)


The changing of the year is a time of celebration as people reflect thoughtfully on the past year and grow excited with anticipation for what’s to come in the year ahead.

Today, there’s one less thing to anticipate as we announce the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3 and NuGet 1.0!

double-rainbow
Oh yeah, this never gets old.

Install it via Web Platform Installer or download the installer directly to run it yourself.

Here are a few helpful resources for learning more about this release:

Those links will provide more details about what’s new in ASP.NET MVC 3, but I’ll give a quick bullet list of some of the deliciousness you have to look forward to. Again, visit the links above for full details.

  • Razor view engine which provides a very streamlined syntax for writing clean and concise views.
  • Improved support for Dependency Injection
  • Global Action Filters
  • jQuery based Unobtrusive Ajax and Client Validation.
  • ViewBag property for dynamic access to ViewData.
  • Support for view engine selection in the New Project and Add View dialog
  • And much more!

For those of you wishing to upgrade an ASP.NET MVC 2 application to ASP.NET MVC 3, check out Marcin Dobosz’s post about our ASP.NET MVC 3 Projct upgrader tool. The tool itself can be found on our CodePlex website.

NuGet 1.0 RTM

Also included in this release is the 1.0 release of NuGet. I’ll let you in on a little secret though, if you upgraded NuGet via the Visual Studio Extension Gallery, then you’ve been running the 1.0 release for a little while now.

If you already have an older version of NuGet installed, the ASP.NET MVC 3 installer cannot upgrade it. Instead launch the VS Extension manager (within Visual Studio go to the Tools menu and select Extension Manager) and click on the Updates tab.

Just recently we announced the Beta release of our NuGet Gallery. Opening the door to the gallery will make it very easy to publish packages, so what are you waiting for!?

At this point I’m obligated to point out that everything about NuGet is open source and we’re always looking for contributors. If you’re interested in contributing, but are finding impediments to it, let us know what we can improve to make it easier to get involved. Here’s the full list of OSS projects that make up the NuGet client and the server piece:

Show Me The Open Source Code!

As we did with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and ASP.NET MVC 2, the source for the ASP.NET MVC 3 assembly is being released under the OSI certified Ms-PL license. The Ms-PL licensed source code is available as a zip file at the download center.

If you’d like to see the source code for ASP.NET Web Pages and our MVC Futures project, we posted that on CodePlex.com too.

What’s Next?

So what’s next? Well you can probably count as well as I can, so it’s time to start getting planning for ASP.NET MVC 4 and NuGet 2.0 in full gear. Though this time around, with NuGet now available, we have the means to easily distribute a lot of smaller releases throughout the year as packages, with the idea that many of these may make their way back into the core product. I’m sure you’ll see a lot of experimentation in that regard.

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ASP.NET MVC3, WebMatrix, NuGet, IIS Express and Orchard released - The Microsoft January Web Release in Context


image At PDC10 last November I did a talk on the "Unnamed Package of Web Love", showing ASP.NET MVC3 and Razor Syntax, the NuGet Package Manager, as well as SQL Compact Edition and a little "Entity Framework Magic Unicorn." I make up my own names when I don't like what Microsoft names things, as you may notice.

Today Microsoft announced the (actual, final, honest) releases of:

  • ASP.NET MVC3 with Razor
    • Lots of new features, the new Razor syntax, more extensibility hooks, new JavaScript features, better validation, easier caching, better dynamic support, and lots more.
    • This includes the NuGet package manager and the NuGet gallery is also in early beta at http://nuget.org for folks who want to create and publish their own packages)
    • MVCScaffolding
      • Remember all that fun we had with the scaffolding experiment at PDC? Well, my teammate Steve Sanderson has taken the prototype up to version 0.8, and it's pretty fabulous. Go read his blog post, then enjoy "Install-Package MvcScaffolding." You can scaffold views, controllers, repositories, database contexts or even make your own custom scaffolder. Look for more built on scaffolding from Steve and I in the coming months.
    • Updated Beginner Tutorials for ASP.NET MVC 3 in both C# and in VB
  • NuGet
    • NuGet is a package manager for .NET. It ships with ASP.NET MVC, but you can go get it separately if you like. Installing open source libraries is as simple as "install-package elmah" - it's great fun.
  • WebMatrix (also with Razor)
    • WebMatrix is a small development environment that uses the simple Razor syntax to create websites really quickly. You can start from a gallery of existing open source applications or start from scratch. For example, Rob Conery and I wrote the little podcast site and feed for http://thisdeveloperslife.com in a day with WebMatrix.
    • NuGet package management is built into WebMatrix, too! Make a new site, run it, and hit /_admin. Dance.
  • IIS 7.5 Express
    • Yes, you can install it on its own. It's IIS, except it runs as a user process rather than a service. Cassini (Visual Developer Web Server) is dead! It's "just in time" IIS. There when you need it, and not running when it's not used.
    • This is the web server that Web Matrix uses today, but it'll be enabled in Visual Studio 2010 when SP1 comes out.
  • SQL Compact Edition 4
    • SQL Compact Edition is sweet because is a tiny in-process (no services, don't need to be admin) database that's great for small sites that aren't ready for SQL Server proper. It's xcopy-deployable and runs nicely on hosted sites. It's the default database for WebMatrix and I'm using it in Visual Studio for sites where my database isn't big enough to justify a SQL license.
    • You can use SQL Compact today in Visual Studio at runtime, much like I did in my PDC talk, but you won't be able to design and open your database in VS until SP1. (You can use this Non-MS CodePlex project temporarily, but I didn't tell you.)
  • Web Farm Framework 2.0 and Web Deploy
    • Makes setting up multiple servers way easier. Treat and manage groups of servers, use ARR for load-balancing (or use 3rd party balancers), and upgrade, switch, and add servers with PowerShell. Mmm....PowerShell.
  • Orchard 1.0
    • This free, open-source content management system is ready to go. The release is published on the Orchard CodePlex website and Microsoft Web Application Gallery. You can use Orchard all up, or you can take it apart and just use pieces. Mix and match as you like.

It's the January Web Release, say I, and the easiest way to get it is with Web Platform Installer 3.0, which also went live today. Using direct links to products within the Web Platform installer will automatically add any dependencies you might need.

Now what? I'm freaking out!

Folks sometimes say "slow down, you're freaking me out, this is too much new stuff. What about my current stuff?" Here's a few statements from me personally on today's releases.

  • Just because ASP.NET MVC 3 came out today, doesn't mean WebForms doesn't have some cool features coming. Remember that "ASP.NET > ASP.NET MVC". You'll see features and improvements from both technologies move between MVC and WebForms.
  • IIS Express will integrate with VS2010 in SP1 and work with both WebForms and MVC.
  • You can mix Razor Views and Web Forms Views within MVC. The creation/existence of Razor doesn't obviate your existing work.
  • SQL Compact works great with WebForms as well as ASP.NET MVC, not to mention any .NET project. Ever want a tiny database for a command-line app and didn't want the headache? Bam.
  • SQL Compact database can be upgraded into full SQL Server databases when/if you outgrow SQL Compact.
  • While NuGet is bundled with ASP.NET MVC in today's release, you can use it for any .NET project type. Most NuGet libraries are not specific to ASP.NET MVC.

As I've said before, Microsoft is creating new LEGO pieces for software development to round our existing collection of bricks out. Be exited about these bricks, but remember they augment the existing ones, not replace them.

What now?

I'd recommend you go get MVC3 and WebMatrix, preferably at the same time via one of these Web Platform links. That should get you all these other nice things chained in. In the spring when VS2010 SP1 comes out, the tooling and management bits for SQL Compact and IIS Express will be enabled.

Stuff to Get

ReSharper Updated

One other note, the folks at JetBrains were ready for this and spun a new build of ReSharper, so ReSharper 5.1.2 doesn’t interfere with Visual Studio IntelliSense in ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor syntax. Earlier ReSharper 5.x builds had certain issues with Razor IntelliSense that are addressed in 5.1.2. Specifically, ReSharper 5.1.2 doesn’t prevent Visual Studio from automatically providing its own IntelliSense in .cshtml and .vbhtml web pages anymore: both code completion and Parameter Info work as expected. Other than that, ReSharper 5.x doesn’t provide any additional support for Razor: only ReSharper 6 will bring full support for this view engine. Pre-release ReSharper 6 builds are currently available via Early Access Program, so if you're a ReSharper user, be aware!

Enjoy.

Related Links


© 2010 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.
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Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix


I’m excited to announce the release today of several products:

  • ASP.NET MVC 3
  • NuGet
  • IIS Express 7.5
  • SQL Server Compact Edition 4
  • Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0
  • Orchard 1.0
  • WebMatrix 1.0

The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack.

ASP.NET MVC 3

Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3. You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here. The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here.

ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features. Some of the improvements include:

Razor

ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine). Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow.

Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.

You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months

Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.

JavaScript Improvements

ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities.

The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach. Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries.

ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server. This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends. We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project).

Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library. ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios). We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects).

Improved Validation

ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data.

Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation). Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client.

The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3. This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model.

ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4. ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated. This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model. We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values.

You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC. This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications. These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support). The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks.

Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project. It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers). You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post.

Output Caching

Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level.

With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing. This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server.

The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site. It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached.

I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future.

Better Dependency Injection

ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers.

With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers. You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application.

This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects.

Other Goodies

ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner. Here are just a few examples:

  • Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates.
  • Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates.
  • New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views.
  • Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app.
  • New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models.
  • Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller.
  • New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios.
  • New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded.
  • New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords.
  • And much, much more…

Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3

We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead. Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today:

We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published.

How to Upgrade Existing Projects

ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3.

The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release. MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones.

You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes. Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your existing projects.

Localized Builds

Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English. We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days. I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available.

NuGet

Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries). You can download and install it here.

NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable. The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on.

NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects.

Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects.

NuGet Gallery

This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet. The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others. You can learn more about how to create and share a package here.

There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today. We hope to have thousands there in the future.

IIS Express 7.5

Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5. IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios. It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types.

We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS. Specifically:

  • It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install)
  • It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio
  • It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules
  • It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support
  • It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all)
  • It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms

IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk. It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios. You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server. The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights.

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express. Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables.

SQL Server Compact Edition 4

Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4). SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage.

No Database Installation Required

SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it. You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine. No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment.

SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded. SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications.

Works with Existing Data APIs

SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax. This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE. This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today.

Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios

SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios. With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET). This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments. Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well.

There are no license restrictions with SQL CE. It is also totally free.

Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects. Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables.

Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0

Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2. These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines.

You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them:

Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free.

Orchard 1.0

Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0.

Orchard is a free, open source, community based project. It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard). Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site.

Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage). Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.

WebMatrix 1.0

WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development. It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla). Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch.

WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites. WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination. It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers.

You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer. Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today.

Summary

I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better.

A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them!

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu
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Link Rollup: New Documentation and Tutorials from Web Platform and Tools


Lots of cool stuff was released yesterday that I mentioned in the post ASP.NET MVC3, WebMatrix, NuGet, IIS Express and Orchard released - The Microsoft January Web Release in Context. The Web Platform & Tools Content Team has been working hard on new content and tutorials to get you up to date on all this fun new stuff.

Here's a link rollup from Wade's documentation team. Congratulations to Mike Pope, Tim Teebken, Rick Anderson, Tim Ammann, Keith Newman, Erik Reitan and Tom Dykstra on a great set of content.

Read on!

Web Matrix

Tim Amman (Lead Writer), Erik Reitan and Mike Pope (Editor)

ASP.NET Web Pages with Razor Syntax

Tim Teebken (Lead Programming Writer), Erik Reitan, and Mike Pope (Editor)

Intro to ASP.NET MVC 3 onboarding series.

Scott Hanselman and Rick Anderson collaboration and Mike Pope (Editor)

Both C# and VB versions:

MVC 3

Updated and new tutorials/ API Reference on MSDN

Rick Anderson (Lead Programming Writer), Keith Newman and Mike Pope (Editor)

Orchard

Keith Newman (Lead Programming Writer), Tom FitzMacken and Mike Pope (Editor)

NuGet

Tom Dykstra, Tim Teebken and Mike Pope (Editor))

Website Panel

Mike Pope provided editing support for the WebsitePanel Guide, authored by the Website Panel development team.

Enjoy!


© 2010 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.
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Building a Self Updating Site Using NuGet


For those of you who enjoy learning about a technology via screencast, I’ve recorded a video to accompany and complement this blog post. The screencast shows you what this package does, and the blog post covers more of the implementation details.

A key feature of any package manager is the ability to let you know when there’s an update available for a package and let you easily install that update.

For example, when we deployed the release candidate for NuGet, the Visual Studio Extension Manager displayed the release in the Updates section.

Extension Manager Displaying NuGet as an Available Updates

Likewise, NuGet lets you easily see updates for installed packages. You can either run the List-Package –Updates command:

list-package-updates

Or you can click on the Updates node of the Add Package dialog:

updates-tab

This feature is very handy when using Visual Studio to develop software such as Subtext, an open source blog engine I run in my spare time. But I started thinking about the users of Subtext and the hoops they jump through to upgrade Subtext itself.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Subtext could notify users when a new version is available and let them install it directly from the admin section of the running website completely outside of Visual Studio? Why yes, that would be nice.

NuGet to the Rescue!

Well my friends, that’s where NuGet comes into play. While most people know NuGet as a Visual Studio extension for pulling in and referencing libraries in your project, there’s a core API that’s completely agnostic of the hosting environment whether it be Visual Studio, PowerShell, or other. That core API is implemented in the assemly, NuGet.Core.dll.

This assembly allows us to take advantage of many of the features of NuGet outside of Visual Studio such as within a running web site!

The basic concept is this:

  1. Package up the first version of a website as a NuGet package.
  2. Install this package in the website itself. I know, crazy talk, right?
  3. Add a custom NuGet client that runs inside the website and checks for updates to the one package that’s installed.
  4. When the next version of the website is ready, package it up and deploy it to the package feed for the website. Now, the users of the website can be notified that an update is available.s

I should point out a brief note about step #2, because this is going to be confusing. When I say install the package in the website, I mean to contrast that with installing a package into your Web Application Project for the website.

When you install a package into your Web Application Project, you use the standard NuGet client within Visual Studio. But when you deploy your website, the custom NuGet client within the live website will install the website package into a different location. In the example I’ll show you, that location is within the App_Data\packages folder.

The AutoUpdate Package

Earlier this week, I gave an online presentation to the Community For MVC (C4MVC) user’s group on NuGet. During that talk I demonstrated a prototype package I wrote called AutoUpdate. This package adds a new area to the target website named “Installation”. It also adds a nuspec file to the root of the application to make it easy to package up the website as a NuGet Package.

The steps to use the package are very easy.

  1. Install-Package AutoUpdate.
  2. In Web.config, modify the appSetting PackageSource to point to your package source. In my demo, I just pointed it to a folder on my machine for demonstration purposes. But this source is where you would publish updates for your package.
  3. In the Package Console, run the New-Package script (This creates packages up the website in a NuPkg file).
  4. Copy the package into the App_Data\Packages folder of the site.
  5. When you are ready to publish the next version as an update, increment the version number in the nuspec file and run the New-Package script again.
  6. Deploy the updated package to the package source.
  7. Now, when your users visit /installation/updates/check within the web site, they’ll be notified that an update is available and will be able to install the update.

The Results

Lets see the results of installing the AutoUpdate package and I’ll highlight some of the code that makes the package work. The following screenshot shows a very basic sample application I wrote.

home-page

The homepage here has a link to check for updates which links to an action within the area installed by the AutoUpdate package. That action contains the logic to check for updates for this application’s package.

Clicking on that link requires me to login first and then I get to this page:

update-available

As I mentioned in the steps before, I packaged up the first version of the application as a package and “installed” it into the App_Data folder.

That yellow bar above is the result of an asynchronous JSON request to see if an update is available. It’s a little redundant on this page, but I could have it show up on every page within the admin as a notification.

Under the Hood

Let’s take a look at the controller that responds to that asynchronous request.

public ActionResult Check(string packageId) {
 var projectManager = GetProjectManager();
 var installed = GetInstalledPackage(projectManager, packageId);
 var update = projectManager.GetUpdate(installed);

 var installationState = new InstallationState {
   Installed = installed,
   Update = update
 };

 if (Request.IsAjaxRequest()) {
   var result = new {
     Version = (update != null ? update.Version.ToString() : null),
     UpdateAvailable = (update != null)
   };
   return Json(result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
 }

 return View(installationState);
}




The logic here is pretty straightforward. We grab a project manager. We then grab a reference to the current installed package representing this application. And then we check to see if there’s an update available. If there isn’t an update, the GetUpdate method returns false. There’s a couple of methods here that I wrote we need to look at.



The first method very simply retrieves a project manager. I encapsulated it into a method since I call it in a couple different places.





private WebProjectManager GetProjectManager() {
 string feedUrl = @'D:\dev\hg\AutoUpdateDemo\test-package-source';
 string siteRoot = Request.MapPath('~/');

 return new WebProjectManager(feedUrl, siteRoot);
}




There’s a couple things to note here. I hard coded the feedUrl for demonstration purposes to point to a directory on my machine. This is a nice demonstrations that NuGet can simply treat a directory containing packages as a package source.



For your auto-updating web application, that should point to a custom feed you host specifically for your website. Or, point it to the official NuGet feed and put your website up there. It’s up to you.



This method returns an instance of WebProjectManager. This is a class that I had to copy from the System.Web.WebPages.Administration.dll assembly because it’s marked internal. I don’t know why it’s internal, so I’ll see if we can fix that. It’s not my fault so please direct your hate mail elsewhere. Smile



What is the web project manager? Well the WebMatrix product which includes the ASP.NET Web Pages framework includes a web-based NuGet client for simple web sites. This allows packages to be installed into a running website. I’m just stealing that code and re-purposing it for my own needs.



Now, we just need to use the project manager to query the package source to see if there’s an update available. This is really easy.





private IPackage GetInstalledPackage(WebProjectManager projectManager,
   string packageId) {
 var installed = projectManager.GetInstalledPackages('AutoUpdate.Web')
   .Where(p => p.Id == packageId);

 var installedPackages = installed.ToList();
 return installedPackages.First();
}




What’s really cool is that we can just send a LINQ query to the server because we’re running OData on the server, it’ll run that query on the server and send us back the packages that fulfill the query.



That’s all the code necessary to check for updates. The next step is to write an action method to handle the upgrade. That’s pretty easy too.





public ActionResult Upgrade(string packageId) {
 var projectManager = GetProjectManager();
 var installed = GetInstalledPackage(projectManager, packageId);
 var update = projectManager.GetUpdate(installed);
 projectManager.UpdatePackage(update);

 if (Request.IsAjaxRequest()) {
   return Json(new {
     Success = true,
     Version = update.Version.ToString()
   }, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
 }
 return View(update);
}




This code starts off the same way that our code to check for the update does, but instead of simply returning the update, we call projectManager.UpdatePackage on the update. That method call updates the website to the latest version.



The rest of the method is simply concerned with returning the result of the upgrade.



Try it Yourself



If you would like to try it yourself, please keep a one big caveat in mind. This is rough proof of concept quality code. I hope to shape it into something more robust over time and publish it in the main package feed. Until then, I’ll post it here for people to try out. If there’s a lot of interest, I’ll post the source on CodePlex.com.



So with that in mind, give the AutoUpdate package a try




install-package AutoUpdate




and give me some feedback!



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Running an ASP.NET MVC 3 app on a web server that doesn’t have ASP.NET MVC 3 installed


Last week we released several new web products – including ASP.NET MVC 3. We’ve had a bunch of great feedback and a ton of downloads since then.

One question a few people have asked me recently is: “My web hosting provider doesn’t yet support ASP.NET MVC 3 - any idea when they will install it?”

The good news is that you don’t need to wait for them to install anything on their web-servers. As long as your web hosting provider supports .NET 4, then you can build and deploy ASP.NET MVC 3 applications on it today – without the hosting provider having to do anything to enable it. The below post describes how you can enable this.

Some Background

We support two ways for you to install and use the assemblies that implement ASP.NET MVC 3 on a machine:

  1. Have the ASP.NET MVC 3 assemblies installed in a central place on a machine, and have web projects reference/use the assemblies from there
  2. Copy the ASP.NET MVC 3 assemblies into the \bin folder of your web project, and have your web project reference/use the assemblies from there

The first approach is the default approach we use with Visual Studio, and has the benefit of enabling us to easily service the ASP.NET MVC 3 assemblies using Windows Update (in the event of a bad bug).

The second approach is also fully supported, and has the benefit of not requiring ASP.NET MVC 3 to be explicitly installed on a machine in order for it to be used. Instead you can just copy/ftp your web application onto a server (with the ASP.NET MVC assemblies contained within the \bin directory of the application) and it will just work. You should use this second approach if your web hosting provider hasn’t explicitly installed ASP.NET MVC 3 yet on their servers.

Approach 1: GAC Based Referencing of ASP.NET MVC Assemblies

When you install ASP.NET MVC 3 on a machine, a number of assemblies are automatically registered in the GAC (global assembly cache) as part of the installation process. The GAC provides a central place that .NET assemblies can be installed and serviced (via Windows Update). Because it provides an easy way for us to update/service assemblies, ASP.NET MVC projects - by default - reference the assemblies that implement ASP.NET MVC 3 from it.

If you copy a vanilla ASP.NET MVC 3 project – that uses the default approach of referencing the ASP.NET MVC 3 runtime assemblies using the GAC – onto a machine that has not had ASP.NET MVC 3 installed on it, then you will see an error message like below when you run your application:

image

The above error indicates that one of the assemblies required to run ASP.NET MVC 3 from the GAC cannot be found. Installing ASP.NET MVC 3 on the machine will fix it and allow your application to be run.

Approach 2: \Bin Directory Based Referencing of ASP.NET MVC Assemblies

The alternative approach your projects can use is to distribute and reference the ASP.NET MVC 3 runtime assemblies from the \bin directory of your web application. The benefit of this approach is that you do not need to explicitly install ASP.NET MVC 3 on a machine in order to run your web application. Instead, you can just copy/ftp your web application onto an existing .NET 4 server and it will work. This approach works for both “full trust” and “medium trust” scenarios – which means it will even work with low-cost shared hosting offers. No addition registration/installation/action is required by the hosting provider in order to enable this.

Enabling your web project to “bin deploy” the ASP.NET MVC 3 assemblies is easy and only takes about 2 minutes to do. Here are the steps to follow:

Once configured for \bin based deployment, an application you build with ASP.NET MVC 3 will work on any web server that has .NET 4 installed on it. Just copy/ftp it up to the web-server and it will run. You don’t need the hosting provider to do anything to enable it – this is true even for low-cost shared hosting accounts.

Finding a ASP.NET Web Hosting Provider

You can browse the Windows Web Hosting Gallery to find good ASP.NET based Windows Hosting Providers (all of which support ASP.NET 4):

image

The Windows Web Hosting Gallery allows you to filter/browse hosting offers by different countries and service level offerings. It also allows you to easily filter by “Shared Hosting”, “Virtual Hosting” and “Dedicated Hosting” offers.

“Shared Hosting” refers to an offer where many customers run on a single web-server and you do not have admin access on the remote server. “Virtual Hosting” offers provide you with your own Virtual Machine image on a remote-server – typically with OS admin rights and remote terminal server access to manage it. “Dedicated Hosting” offers provide you an entire physical server, and also typically provide OS admin rights and remote terminal support to it.

The prices for Windows based web hosting are now very cost effective, and start from as little as $2.75/month for a shared hosting offer and $23/month for a virtual hosting offer. All of the above offers are capable of running ASP.NET MVC 3 using the \bin deployment approach.

Summary

You can deploy ASP.NET MVC 3 based applications to any web-server that has .NET 4 enabled on it – without having to wait for the hosting provider to explicitly install ASP.NET MVC 3 on it. Simply use the steps above to convert your project to use \bin based deployment of the ASP.NET MVC 3 assemblies, and then you can copy your application onto any ASP.NET 4 based server and it will just work.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu
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