VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it. You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here.

Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables.

SQL CE – What is it and why should you care?

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.

Easy Migration to SQL Server

SQL CE is an embedded database – which makes it ideal for development, testing, and light-usage scenarios. For high-volume sites and applications you’ll probably want to migrate your database to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure. These servers enable much better scalability, more development features (including features like Stored Procedures – which aren’t supported with SQL CE), as well as more advanced data management capabilities.

We’ll ship migration tools that enable you to optionally take SQL CE databases and easily upgrade them to use SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or SQL Azure. You will not need to change your code when upgrading a SQL CE database to SQL Server or SQL Azure. Our goal is to enable you to be able to simply change the database connection string in your web.config file and have your application just work.

New Tooling Support for SQL CE in VS 2010 SP1

VS 2010 SP1 includes much improved tooling support for SQL CE, and adds support for using SQL CE within ASP.NET projects for the first time. With VS 2010 SP1 you can now:

• Create new SQL CE Databases
• Edit and Modify SQL CE Database Schema and Indexes
• Populate SQL CE Databases within Data
• Use the Entity Framework (EF) designer to create model layers against SQL CE databases
• Use EF Code First to define model layers in code, then create a SQL CE database from them, and optionally edit the DB with VS
• Deploy SQL CE databases to remote servers using Web Deploy and optionally convert them to full SQL Server databases

You can take advantage of all of the above features from within both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based projects.

Download

You can enable SQL CE tooling support within VS 2010 by first installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta).

Once SP1 is installed, you’ll also then need to install the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download. This is a separate download that enables the SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1.

Walkthrough of Two Scenarios

In this blog post I’m going to walkthrough how you can take advantage of SQL CE and VS 2010 SP1 using both an ASP.NET Web Forms and an ASP.NET MVC based application. Specifically, we’ll walkthrough:

• How to create a SQL CE database using VS 2010 SP1, then use the EF4 visual designers in Visual Studio to construct a model layer from it, and then display and edit the data using an ASP.NET GridView control.

• How to use an EF Code First approach to define a model layer using POCO classes and then have EF Code-First “auto-create” a SQL CE database for us based on our model classes. We’ll then look at how we can use the new VS 2010 SP1 support for SQL CE to inspect the database that was created, populate it with data, and later make schema changes to it. We’ll do all this within the context of an ASP.NET MVC based application.

You can follow the two walkthroughs below on your own machine by installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta) and then installing the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download (which is a separate download that enables SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1).

Walkthrough 1: Create a SQL CE Database, Create EF Model Classes, Edit the Data with a GridView

This first walkthrough will demonstrate how to create and define a SQL CE database within an ASP.NET Web Form application. We’ll then build an EF model layer for it and use that model layer to enable data editing scenarios with an <asp:GridView> control.

Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET Web Forms Project

We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET Web Forms project. We’ll use the “ASP.NET Web Application” project template option so that it has a default UI skin implemented:

Step 2: Create a SQL CE Database

Right click on the “App_Data” folder within the created project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command:

This will bring up the “Add Item” dialog box. Select the “SQL Server Compact 4.0 Local Database” item (new in VS 2010 SP1) and name the database file to create “Store.sdf”:

Note that SQL CE database files have a .sdf filename extension. Place them within the /App_Data folder of your ASP.NET application to enable easy deployment.

When we clicked the “Add” button above a Store.sdf file was added to our project:

Step 3: Adding a “Products” Table

Double-clicking the “Store.sdf” database file will open it up within the Server Explorer tab. Since it is a new database there are no tables within it:

Right click on the “Tables” icon and choose the “Create Table” menu command to create a new database table. We’ll name the new table “Products” and add 4 columns to it. We’ll mark the first column as a primary key (and make it an identify column so that its value will automatically increment with each new row):

When we click “ok” our new Products table will be created in the SQL CE database.

Step 4: Populate with Data

Once our Products table is created it will show up within the Server Explorer. We can right-click it and choose the “Show Table Data” menu command to edit its data:

Let’s add a few sample rows of data to it:

Step 5: Create an EF Model Layer

We have a SQL CE database with some data in it – let’s now create an EF Model Layer that will provide a way for us to easily query and update data within it.

Let’s right-click on our project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command. This will bring up the “Add New Item” dialog – select the “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” item within it and name it “Store.edmx”

This will add a new Store.edmx item to our solution explorer and launch a wizard that allows us to quickly create an EF model:

Select the “Generate From Database” option above and click next. Choose to use the Store.sdf SQL CE database we just created and then click next again.

The wizard will then ask you what database objects you want to import into your model. Let’s choose to import the “Products” table we created earlier:

When we click the “Finish” button Visual Studio will open up the EF designer. It will have a Product entity already on it that maps to the “Products” table within our SQL CE database:

The VS 2010 SP1 EF designer works exactly the same with SQL CE as it does already with SQL Server and SQL Express. The Product entity above will be persisted as a class (called “Product”) that we can programmatically work against within our ASP.NET application.

Step 6: Compile the Project

Before using your model layer you’ll need to build your project. Do a Ctrl+Shift+B to compile the project, or use the Build->Build Solution menu command.

Step 7: Create a Page that Uses our EF Model Layer

Let’s now create a simple ASP.NET Web Form that contains a GridView control that we can use to display and edit the our Products data (via the EF Model Layer we just created).

Right-click on the project and choose the Add->New Item command. Select the “Web Form from Master Page” item template, and name the page you create “Products.aspx”. Base the master page on the “Site.Master” template that is in the root of the project.

Add an <h2>Products</h2> heading the new Page, and add an <asp:gridview> control within it:

Then click the “Design” tab to switch into design-view. Select the GridView control, and then click the top-right corner to display the GridView’s “Smart Tasks” UI:

Choose the “New data source…” drop down option above. This will bring up the below dialog which allows you to pick your Data Source type:

Select the “Entity” data source option – which will allow us to easily connect our GridView to the EF model layer we created earlier. This will bring up another dialog that allows us to pick our model layer:

Select the “StoreEntities” option in the dropdown – which is the EF model layer we created earlier. Then click next – which will allow us to pick which entity within it we want to bind to:

Select the “Products” entity in the above dialog – which indicates that we want to bind against the “Product” entity class we defined earlier. Then click the “Enable automatic updates” checkbox to ensure that we can both query and update Products. When you click “Finish” VS will wire-up an <asp:EntityDataSource> to your <asp:GridView> control:

The last two steps we’ll do will be to click the “Enable Editing” checkbox on the Grid (which will cause the Grid to display an “Edit” link on each row) and (optionally) use the Auto Format dialog to pick a UI template for the Grid.

Step 8: Run the Application

Let’s now run our application and browse to the /Products.aspx page that contains our GridView. When we do so we’ll see a Grid UI of the Products within our SQL CE database. Clicking the “Edit” link for any of the rows will allow us to edit their values:

When we click “Update” the GridView will post back the values, persist them through our EF Model Layer, and ultimately save them within our SQL CE database.

Learn More about using EF with ASP.NET Web Forms

Read this tutorial series on the http://asp.net site to learn more about how to use EF with ASP.NET Web Forms.

The tutorial series uses SQL Express as the database – but the nice thing is that all of the same steps/concepts can also now also be done with SQL CE.

Walkthrough 2: Using EF Code-First with SQL CE and ASP.NET MVC 3

We used a database-first approach with the sample above – where we first created the database, and then used the EF designer to create model classes from the database.

In addition to supporting a designer-based development workflow, EF also enables a more code-centric option which we call “code first development”. Code-First Development enables a pretty sweet development workflow. It enables you to:

• Define your model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes or visual designer required
• Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything
• Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping
• Optionally auto-create a database based on the model classes you define – allowing you to start from code first

I’ve done several blog posts about EF Code First in the past – I really think it is great. The good news is that it also works very well with SQL CE.

The combination of SQL CE, EF Code First, and the new VS tooling support for SQL CE, enables a pretty nice workflow. Below is a simple example of how you can use them to build a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application.

Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project

We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project. We’ll use the “Internet Project” template so that it has a default UI skin implemented:

Step 2: Use NuGet to Install EFCodeFirst

Next we’ll use the NuGet package manager (automatically installed by ASP.NET MVC 3) to add the EFCodeFirst library to our project. We’ll use the Package Manager command shell to do this. Bring up the package manager console within Visual Studio by selecting the View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console menu command. Then type:

install-package EFCodeFirst

within the package manager console to download the EFCodeFirst library and have it be added to our project:

When we enter the above command, the EFCodeFirst library will be downloaded and added to our application:

Step 3: Build Some Model Classes

Using a “code first” based development workflow, we will create our model classes first (even before we have a database). We create these model classes by writing code.

For this sample, we will right click on the “Models” folder of our project and add the below three classes to our project:

The “Dinner” and “RSVP” model classes above are “plain old CLR objects” (aka POCO). They do not need to derive from any base classes or implement any interfaces, and the properties they expose are standard .NET data-types. No data persistence attributes or data code has been added to them.

The “NerdDinners” class derives from the DbContext class (which is supplied by EFCodeFirst) and handles the retrieval/persistence of our Dinner and RSVP instances from a database.

Step 4: Listing Dinners

We’ve written all of the code necessary to implement our model layer for this simple project.

Let’s now expose and implement the URL: /Dinners/Upcoming within our project. We’ll use it to list upcoming dinners that happen in the future.

We’ll do this by right-clicking on our “Controllers” folder and select the “Add->Controller” menu command. We’ll name the Controller we want to create “DinnersController”. We’ll then implement an “Upcoming” action method within it that lists upcoming dinners using our model layer above. We will use a LINQ query to retrieve the data and pass it to a View to render with the code below:

We’ll then right-click within our Upcoming method and choose the “Add-View” menu command to create an “Upcoming” view template that displays our dinners. We’ll use the “empty” template option within the “Add View” dialog and write the below view template using Razor:

Step 4: Configure our Project to use a SQL CE Database

We have finished writing all of our code – our last step will be to configure a database connection-string to use.

We will point our NerdDinners model class to a SQL CE database by adding the below <connectionString> to the web.config file at the top of our project:

EF Code First uses a default convention where context classes will look for a connection-string that matches the DbContext class name. Because we created a “NerdDinners” class earlier, we’ve also named our connectionstring “NerdDinners”. Above we are configuring our connection-string to use SQL CE as the database, and telling it that our SQL CE database file will live within the \App_Data directory of our ASP.NET project.

Step 5: Running our Application

Now that we’ve built our application, let’s run it!

We’ll browse to the /Dinners/Upcoming URL – doing so will display an empty list of upcoming dinners:

You might ask – but where did it query to get the dinners from? We didn’t explicitly create a database?!?

One of the cool features that EF Code-First supports is the ability to automatically create a database (based on the schema of our model classes) when the database we point it at doesn’t exist. Above we configured EF Code-First to point at a SQL CE database in the \App_Data\ directory of our project. When we ran our application, EF Code-First saw that the SQL CE database didn’t exist and automatically created it for us.

Step 6: Using VS 2010 SP1 to Explore our newly created SQL CE Database

Click the “Show all Files” icon within the Solution Explorer and you’ll see the “NerdDinners.sdf” SQL CE database file that was automatically created for us by EF code-first within the \App_Data\ folder:

We can optionally right-click on the file and “Include in Project" to add it to our solution:

We can also double-click the file (regardless of whether it is added to the project) and VS 2010 SP1 will open it as a database we can edit within the “Server Explorer” tab of the IDE.

Below is the view we get when we double-click our NerdDinners.sdf SQL CE file. We can drill in to see the schema of the Dinners and RSVPs tables in the tree explorer.

Notice how two tables - Dinners and RSVPs – were automatically created for us within our SQL CE database. This was done by EF Code First when we accessed the NerdDinners class by running our application above:

We can right-click on a Table and use the “Show Table Data” command to enter some upcoming dinners in our database:

We’ll use the built-in editor that VS 2010 SP1 supports to populate our table data below:

And now when we hit “refresh” on the /Dinners/Upcoming URL within our browser we’ll see some upcoming dinners show up:

Step 7: Changing our Model and Database Schema

Let’s now modify the schema of our model layer and database, and walkthrough one way that the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE can make this easier.

With EF Code-First you typically start making database changes by modifying the model classes. For example, let’s add an additional string property called “UrlLink” to our “Dinner” class. We’ll use this to point to a link for more information about the event:

Now when we re-run our project, and visit the /Dinners/Upcoming URL we’ll see an error thrown:

We are seeing this error because EF Code-First automatically created our database, and by default when it does this it adds a table that helps tracks whether the schema of our database is in sync with our model classes. EF Code-First helpfully throws an error when they become out of sync – making it easier to track down issues at development time that you might otherwise only find (via obscure errors) at runtime. Note that if you do not want this feature you can turn it off by changing the default conventions of your DbContext class (in this case our NerdDinners class) to not track the schema version.

Our model classes and database schema are out of sync in the above example – so how do we fix this? There are two approaches you can use today:

• Delete the database and have EF Code First automatically re-create the database based on the new model class schema (losing the data within the existing DB)
• Modify the schema of the existing database to make it in sync with the model classes (keeping/migrating the data within the existing DB)

There are a couple of ways you can do the second approach above. Below I’m going to show how you can take advantage of the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE to use a database schema tool to modify our database structure. We are also going to be supporting a “migrations” feature with EF in the future that will allow you to automate/script database schema migrations programmatically.

Step 8: Modify our SQL CE Database Schema using VS 2010 SP1

The new SQL CE Tooling support within VS 2010 SP1 makes it easy to modify the schema of our existing SQL CE database. To do this we’ll right-click on our “Dinners” table and choose the “Edit Table Schema” command:

This will bring up the below “Edit Table” dialog. We can rename, change or delete any of the existing columns in our table, or click at the bottom of the column listing and type to add a new column. Below I’ve added a new “UrlLink” column of type “nvarchar” (since our property is a string):

When we click ok our database will be updated to have the new column and our schema will now match our model classes.

Because we are manually modifying our database schema, there is one additional step we need to take to let EF Code-First know that the database schema is in sync with our model classes. As i mentioned earlier, when a database is automatically created by EF Code-First it adds a “EdmMetadata” table to the database to track schema versions (and hash our model classes against them to detect mismatches between our model classes and the database schema):

Since we are manually updating and maintaining our database schema, we don’t need this table – and can just delete it:

This will leave us with just the two tables that correspond to our model classes:

And now when we re-run our /Dinners/Upcoming URL it will display the dinners correctly:

One last touch we could do would be to update our view to check for the new UrlLink property and render a <a> link to it if an event has one:

And now when we refresh our /Dinners/Upcoming we will see hyperlinks for the events that have a UrlLink stored in the database:

Summary

SQL CE provides a free, embedded, database engine that you can use to easily enable database storage. With SQL CE 4 you can now take advantage of it within ASP.NET projects and applications (both Web Forms and MVC).

VS 2010 SP1 provides tooling support that enables you to easily create, edit and modify SQL CE databases – as well as use the standard EF designer against them. This allows you to re-use your existing skills and data knowledge while taking advantage of an embedded database option. This is useful both for small applications (where you don’t need the scalability of a full SQL Server), as well as for development and testing scenarios – where you want to be able to rapidly develop/test your application without having a full database instance.

SQL CE makes it easy to later migrate your data to a full SQL Server or SQL Azure instance if you want to – without having to change any code in your application. All we would need to change in the above two scenarios is the <connectionString> value within the web.config file in order to have our code run against a full SQL Server. This provides the flexibility to scale up your application starting from a small embedded database solution as needed.

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

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.

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.

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:

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).

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

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).

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.

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.

Tags: nuget, orchard, nuget-gallery

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!

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:

• What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 3
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Notes
• MSDN Documentation
• NuGet Project Homepage
• The MVC Music Store Tutorial and associated CodePlex project.

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!?

• Introducing the NuGet Gallery
• Uploading Packages to the NuGet Gallery

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:

• http://nuget.codeplex.com/ This the project I run.
• http://orchardgallery.codeplex.com/ This project is an Orchard module that powers the front-end of Nuget.org (and the upcoming Orchard Gallery). Brad Millington of the Orchard Project heads that up.
• http://galleryserver.codeplex.com/ powers the back-end services such as our OData package feed and the WCF endpoints for publishing packages.

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.

Tags: asp.net, aspnetmvc, nuget-gallery, oss

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

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
    • Are you just getting started with MVC 3? Rick Anderson, Mike Pope and I have updated the beginner Movie App tutorials up on http://www.asp.net/mvc, and Jon Galloway has updated his Music Store to MVC 3 as well.
• 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

• If you don't already have Visual Studio 2010, one Web Platform link gets you Visual Web Developer Express, SQL Express, SQL Management Studio, and ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor
• If you already have VS, you can get everything mentioned above as it's included with WebMatrix plus ASP.NET MVC 3 via the Web Platform Installer.
• Or get the stuff on your own:
  • ASP.NET MVC 3
  • NuGet (included in ASP.NET MVC 3)
  • IIS 7.5 Express

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

• Scott Gu on VS 2010 SP1 (Beta) and IIS Express
• ScottGu on VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE
• Integrating ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing upgraded ASP.NET 4 Web Forms applications
• Visual Studio Explosion! - VS2010 SP1 *BETA* Released and Context
• PDC10: Building a Blog with Microsoft "Unnamed Package of Web Love"
  • Low Bandwidth MP4 Video (about 120 megs)
  • High Bandwidth MP4 Video (I dunno, it's big and HD)
• Introducing NuGet Package Management for .NET - Another piece of the Web Stack
  • Simple Code First with Entity Framework 4 - Magic Unicorn Feature CTP 4
  • "Razor" Page Syntax
  • SQL 4 Compact Edition
• Random Community Wallpapers because they are fun. Woot.
  • http://vs2010wallpapers.com/

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© 2010 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.

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

• Introducing Razor
• New @model keyword in Razor
• Layouts with Razor
• Server-Side Comments with Razor
• Razor’s @: and <text> syntax
• Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor
• Layouts and Sections with Razor

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:

• Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C#
• Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store

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:

• Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework
• Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy

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