This topic contains information about key features and improvements in the .NET MVC . This topic does not provide comprehensive information about all new features and is subject to change. In case you are looking for ASP.NET MVC Hosting, you can always consider HostForLife.eu and you can start from our lowest Standard Plan € 3.00/month to host your ASP.NET MVC site.

Model binding in the ASP.NET MVC framework is simple. Your action methods need data, and the incoming HTTP request carries the data you need. The catch is that the data is embedded into POST-ed form values, and possibly the URL itself. Enter the DefaultModelBinder, which can magically convert form values and route data into objects. Model binders allow your controller code to remain cleanly separated from the dirtiness of interrogating the request and its associated environment.

Tip 1 : Prefer Binding Over Request.Form

If you are writing your actions like this ..

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Create()
{
    Recipe recipe = new Recipe();
    recipe.Name = Request.Form[“Name”];

    // ...

    return View();
}

.. then you are doing it all wrong. The model binder can save you from using the Request and HttpContext properties – those properties make the action harder to read and harder to test. One step up would be to use a FormCollection parameter instead:

public ActionResult Create(FormCollection values)
{
    Recipe recipe = new Recipe();
    recipe.Name = values[“Name”];

    // ...

    return View();
}

With the FormCollection you don’t have to dig into the Request object, and sometimes you need this low level of control. But, if all of your data is in Request.Form, route data, or the URL query string, then you can let model binding work its magic:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Create(Recipe newRecipe)
{
    // ...

    return View();
}

In this example, the model binder will create your newRecipe object and populate it with data it finds in the request (by matching up data with the recipe’s property names). It’s pure auto-magic. There are many ways to customize the binding process with “white lists”, “black lists”, prefixes, and marker interfaces. For more control over when the binding takes place you can use the  UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel methods.

Tip 2 : Custom model binders

Model binding is also one of the extensibility points in the MVC framework. If you can’t use the default binding behavior you can provide your own model binders, and mix and match binders. To implement a custom model binder you need to implement the IModelBinder interface. There is only method involved - how hard can it be?

public interface IModelBinder
{
    object BindModel(Controller Context controllerContext,
                     ModelBindingContext bindingContext);
}

Once you get neck deep into model binding, however, you’ll discover that the simple IModelBinder interface doesn’t fully describe all the implicit contracts and side-effects inside the framework.  If you take a step back and look at the bigger picture you’ll see that model binding is but one move in a carefully orchestrated dance between the model binder, the ModelState, and the HtmlHelpers. You can pick up on some of these implicit behaviors by reading the unit tests for the default model binder.

If the default model binder has problems putting data into your object, it will place the error messages and the erroneous data value into ModelState. You can check ModelState.IsValid to see if binding problems are present, and use ModelState.AddModelError to inject your own error messages.

Both the controller action and the view can look in ModelState to see if there was a binding problem. The controller would need to check ModelState for errors before saving stuff into the database, while the view can check ModelState for errors to give the user validation feedback. One important note is that the HtmlHelpers you use in a view will require ModelState to hold both a value (via ModelState.SetModelValue) and the error (via AddModelError) or you’ll have runtime errors (null reference exceptions). The following code can demonstrate the problem:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Create(FormCollection Form0
{
    // this is the wrong approach ...
    if (Form[“Name”].Trim().Length == 0)
        ModelState.AddModelError(“Name”, “Name is required”);

    return view();
}

The above code creates a model error without ever setting a model value. It has other problems, too, but it will create exceptions if you render the following view.

<%= Html.TextBox(“Name”, Model.Name) %>

Even though you’ve specified Model.Name as the value for the textbox, the textbox helper will see the model error and attempt to display the “attempted value” that the user tried to put in the model. If you didn’t set the model value in model state you’ll see a null reference exception.

Tip 3 : Custom Mode Binding via Inheritance

If you’ve decided to implement a custom model binder, you might be able to cut down on the amount of work required by inheriting from DefaultModelBinder and adding some custom logic. In fact, this should be your default plan until you are certain you can’t subclass the default binder to achieve the functionality you need. For example, suppose you just want to have some control over the creation of your model object. The DefaultModelBinder will create object’s using Activator.CreateInstance and the model’s default constructor. If you don’t have a default constructor for your model, you can subclass the DefaultModelBinder and override the CreateModel method.

Tip 4 : Using Data Annotations for Validation

.NET 3.5 SP1 shipped a System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations assembly that looks to play a central role as we move forward with the .NET framework. By using data annotations and the DataAnnotationsModelBinder, you can take care of most of your server-side validation by simply decorating your model with attributes.

public class Recipe
{
    [Required(ErorrMessage=”We need a name for this dish.”)]
    [Regular Expression(“^Bacon”)]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    // ...
}

The DataAnnotationsModelBinder is also a great sample to read and understand how to effectively subclass the default model binder.

Tip 5 : Recognize Binding and Validation As Two Phases

Binding is about taking data from the environment and shoving it into the model, while validation is checking the model to make sure it meets our expectations. These are different different operations, but model binding tends to blur the distinction. If you want to perform validation and binding together in a model binder, you can – it’s exactly what the DataAnnotationsModelBinder will do. However, one thing that is often overlooked is how the DefaultModelBinder itself separates the binding and validation phases. If all you need is simple property validation, then all you need to do is override the OnPropertyValidating method of the DefaultModelBinder.

Tip 6 : Binders Are About The Environment

Earlier we said that “model binders allow your controller code to remain cleanly separated from the dirtiness of interrogating the request and its associated environment”. Generally, when we think of binder we think of moving data from the routing data and posted form values into the model. However, there is no restriction of where you find data for your model. The context of a web request is rich with information about the client.

Conclusion

Model binding is beautiful magic, so take advantage of the built-in magic when you can. We think the topic of model binding could use it’s own dedicated web site. It would be a very boring web site with lots of boring code, but model binding has many subtleties. For instance, we never even got to the topic of culture in this post.

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

Controller’s best practices

1. Delete the account controller
You will never use it and it’s a super-bad practice to keep demo code in your applications.

2. Isolate controller from the outside World
Dependencies on the HttpContext, on data access classes, configuration, logging, clock, etc… make the application difficult (if not impossible) to test, to evolve and modify.

3. Use an IoC Container
To make it easy to adhere to Best Practice #2, use an IoC Container to manage all that external dependencies.

4. Say NO to “magic strings”
Never use ViewData[“key”], but always create a ViewModel per each View, and use strongly-typed views ViewPage<ViewModel>.

Magic strings are evil because they will never tell you whether your view is failing due to a misspelling error, while using a strongly-typed model you will get a compile-time error when there is a problem. And as bonus you get Intellisense.

5. Build your own “personal conventions”
Use ASP.NET MVC as a base for your (or your company’s) reference architecture. Enforce your own conventions having controllers and maybe views inherit from your own base classes rather then the default ones.

6. Pay attention to the verbs
Even without going REST (just RESTful) use the best Http Verb for each action.

Model’s best practices

7. DomainModel ! = View Model
The DomainModel represents the domain, while the ViewModel is designed around the needs of the View, and these two worlds might be (and usually are) different. Furthermore the DomainModel is data plus behaviours, is hierarchical and is made of complex types, while the ViewModel is just a DTO, flat, and made of strings.

8. Use ActionFilters for “shared” data
This is our solution for the componentization story of ASP.NET MVC, and might need a future post of its own. You don’t want your controllers to retrieve data that is shared among different views. My approach is to use the Action Filters to retrieve the data that needs to be shared across many views, and use partial view to display them.

View’s Best Practices

9. Do NEVER user code-behind

10. Write HTML each time you can
We have the option that web developers have to be comfortable writing HTML (and CSS and JavaScript). So they should never use the HtmlHelpers whose only reason of living is hiding the HTML away (like Html.Submit or Html.Button). Again, this is something that might become a future post.

11. If there is an if, write an HtmlHelper
Views must be dumb (and Controllers skinny and Models fat). If you find yourself writing an “if”, then consider writing an HtmlHelper to hide the conditional statement.

12.Choose your view engine carefully
The default view engine is the WebFormViewEngine, but IMHO it’s NOT the best one. We prefer to use the Spark ViewEngine, since it seems to me like it’s more suited for an MVC view. What we like about it is that the HTML “dominates the flow and that code should fit seamlessly” and the foreach loops and if statements are defined with “HTML attributes”.

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

Are you looking for an affordable hosting service? Are you looking for good service at affordable prices? Try HostForLife.eu, only with € 3.00/month, you can get a reasonable price with best service. This topic contains only brief information about ASP.NET MVC, if you want to be more familiar with ASP.NET MVC, you should try HostForLife.eu.

Introduction

Overall, ASP.NET is one of the most popular web application frameworks along with PHP, Java and others. However, the classic ASP.NET WebForms style of application development also has its limitations. For instance, cleanly separating the user interface from the application logic and database access can be a challenge in WebForms applications. Thus, Microsoft created ASP.NET MVC. MVC stands for Model View Controller.

The ASP.NET MVC technology has already been introduced earlier (see the Resources section at the end of this article), and thus this article focuses on the new and improved features planned for .NET Framework version 4.0 that should become available in Spring, 2010. Originally Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2010 would launch on March 22nd, 2010, but most recent announcements indicate delays. As far as version numbers are concerned, the next version of ASP.NET MVC will be assigned the version number 2.0. In this article, you will learn what's new and improved in the newest Release Candidate (RC) version of ASP.NET MVC 2. At the time of this writing (late December, 2009) the latest beta version of Visual Studio 2010 is Beta 2, and it doesn't yet come with the ASP.NET MVC 2 RC. The unfortunate thing is that if you are using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, you cannot yet test MVC 2 RC with that version (you can naturally continue to use the older Beta 2 version). Instead, you must test the MVC 2 RC on Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Of course, the final versions of ASP.NET MVC 2 are planned to work with both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010, so the current is only an interim situation.

Exploring the New Features

ASP.NET MVC 2 is an evolutional update to the framework. The basic features of the original version 1.0 are intact, but new features make development easier and result in cleaner code. The following list summarizes the key new features:

1. Area support and multi-project routing
2. Improved syntax for handling posts (form submits) in controllers
3. HtmlHelper object improvements
4. Attribute support for field validation in models
5. Globalization of validation messages
6. Field templates with custom user controls, and more.

Let's walk through each of these in more detail, starting from the top. In MVC 1.0, each view page was thought of as being a separate unit, and served to the browser as a single unit, possibly combined with a master page. However, if you wanted to combine, say, two views into a single page, you either had to manually render one of the pages or create a user control (.ascx) from one of the views, and then use that control inside the main view page. Although user controls are a fine solution, they break out of the MVC pattern.

In MVC 2, you can utilize so-called areas to solve the problem. With area support, you can combine different view pages into a single, larger view similar to the way you can build master pages (.master) and designate parts of them to be filled with content at run-time. It is possible to combine areas into views both inside a single MVC web project ("intra-project areas"), or combine areas in different projects into views ("inter-project areas"), accessible through direct URLs in the same scope.project ("intra-project areas"), or combine areas in different projects into views ("inter-project areas"), accessible through direct URLs in the same scope.

The following paragraphs walk you through using areas inside a single project. If you wanted to combine multiple MVC web projects into a single larger application, you would need to manually edit the .csproj project files of each project part of the overall solution (the edits you need to do are documented in the .csproj XML comments), add proper project references from the child projects to the master project, and then register routes using the MapAreaRoute method of the Routes object in the Global.asax file. In this article, focus is on single-project area support.

To get started with the areas, right-click your project's main node in Solution Explorer, and select the Add/Area command from the popup menu. This will open a dialog box asking for the name of your new area. Unlike with controller names, you don't need to append the word "Area" to the name, but you can if you prefer. However, bear in mind that intra-project areas will be accessed using the default route of /areaname/controllername/action/id. Because of this, you might not want to suffix the word "Area". In this article however, the word "Area" is appended for clarity.

Once you have created your area, Visual Studio will add a new folder called "Areas" in your project. This folder will contain a sub-folder with the name of your area, and inside that you will see a familiar layout of folders for controllers, views and models. In fact, you would add controllers, views and models to this area folder just the same as you would add them to your "master" MVC project. All in all, an area is like a mini MVC application inside another. Note also the AreaRegistration.cs code file. This file's definitions are referenced to from the Global.asax.cs file.

Areas can be used in multiple ways. Because they are directly accessible using the previously mentioned default route, you can utilize them like any other link inside your application. Or, if you had an area controller action that would return a snippet of HTML code to be used inside a larger HTML page (a normal view page), you could use HtmlHelper.RenderAction as follows:

<% Html.RenderAction("NetworkStatus", "Application", new { Area = "StatusArea" }); %>

Notice how there's an anonymous object being used to specify which area you want to use. Because areas can be completely independent of the master project, you can easily create usable parts or building blocks from your MVC applications and then combine them into larger solutions.

Area support is a very welcome addition to the framework. Luckily to us developers, area support is by no means the only new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2, like the next sections show.

Handling posts and encoding

When you need to handle form posts in your MVC applications, you generally write a new, overloaded controller action method to process the submitted data, and store it for example in a database. Since you only want these methods to be called using the HTTP protocol POST verb, you add an attribute at the beginning of the method like this:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult MyAction(MyObject data)
...

Although there's nothing wrong in the AcceptVerbs attribute, ASP.NET MVC 2 allows you to achieve the same thing with a shorter attribute declaration:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult MyAction(MyObject data)
...

Even though this is a small improvement, it is very likely that all MVC developers give it a warm welcome. Another useful new improvement is the support for automatically encoded output tags in view pages. Strictly speaking, this is not a new ASP.NET MVC feature, but instead a feature in ASP.NET 4.0. Even so, this new tag type is especially useful in MVC applications.

To illustrate the new tag, consider the following very common need to encode output for HTML:

<%= Model.CustomerName %>

This is a very simple tag, and works well in many situations. However, if the customer name were to contain certain special characters, you would need to encode the output to avoid user interface mess-ups and cross-site scripting attacks. A straightforward MVC method would do the trick:

<%= Html.Encode(Model.CustomerName) %>

All these ways to encode output are not inconvenient, but a shorter syntax would be great. This is what the nifty new “code block” tag does:

<%= Model.CustomerName %>

Notice the colon (:) immediately after the opening tag. It is a new way to encode output. The old equal sign syntax (which itself is a shortcut for Response.Write) is not going away. You can continue to use the old way, but the colon-syntax encoding is there to make the view page syntax cleaner.

Note that at this writing, you cannot use ASP.NET MVC 2 RC within Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Thus, you cannot effectively use this combination to test these code block tags, but you can test them in regular ASP.NET 4.0 applications (or with the older MVC Beta 2).

Using lamda expressions with the HtmlHelper object

If you have used ASP.NET MVC 1.0, then you've most probably also created a model object and enabled editing of its details with HTML code similar to the following:

<%= Html.TextBox(“Name”, Model.Name) %>

Although this is fine for many purposes, the problem is that you still have to enter a string constant. Because it is a string, the compiler will not complain if you later change the property name in the model class, but forget to change the HTML tag. Also, the syntax is somewhat verbose (at least to some developers), and requires you to manually create one field per model object property.

In ASP.NET MVC 2, you can use the new TextBoxFor method. Just like the previous HtmlHelpers methods like Label, ListBox, and so on, there are now multiple *For methods that all accept a lambda expression returning the correct object value.

Thus, to create a new editing control for the Name property, you could write code like this:

<%= Html.TextBoxFor(c => c.Name %>

Here, the lambda expression parameter "c" is replaced at runtime with the model object instance, and in addition to getting rid of the string value, you will get full IntelliSense support just like before with the model object.

ASP.NET MVC 2 also brings support for a convenient way to create editing forms for complex objects quickly. For instance, if you had a model object with three fields, you could either manually create labels and text boxes for each of the three fields, or use a new extension method called EditorForModel. This method will create form fields for each visible property in the model:

<%= Html.EditorForModel() %>

This method is really convenient, if you don't have special formatting requirements for your editing forms.

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

Are you looking for an affordable hosting service? Are you looking for good service at affordable prices? Try HostForLife.eu, only with € 3.00/month, you can get a reasonable price with best service. This topic contains only brief information about ASP.NET MVC, if you want to be more familiar with ASP.NET MVC, you should try HostForLife.eu.

Extending HtmlHelper Class Using Extension Method:

Creating ASP.NET MVC Helper is not rocket science and can be performed just by extending the HtmlHelper class using extension methods. Inside the extension method you can return the HTML of the control you are trying to build. The View will consume the HTML and display the control. The main part of this process is to generate the HTML for the control. Let's take a look at different ways you can accomplish it.

Building HTML String Manually:

The easiest and the simplest way to create a new HTML helper is to return a string from the extension method. The code below shows how to implement a simple HTML helper to create a customized Blue TextBox control.

public static string BlueTextBox(this HtmlHelper helper)
      {
          return “<input type=’text’ style =’background-color:blue’/>”;
      }

In the above code we are simply creating the HTML for the control by returning the string back to the view. The view will use the BlueTextBox as shown below:

<%= Html.BlueTextBox() %>

As, expected the HTML generated by the BlueTextBox will be the same HTML that you have returned from the BlueTextBox extension method as shown below:

<input type=’text’ style=’background-color:blue’/>

This was just one of the ways to develop your HTML helpers. In the next section we will demonstrate how you can use the TagBuilder class to create HTML helpers.

Using TagBuilder Class to Construct HTML:

The TagBuilder class is part of the System.Web.Mvc assembly and it allows you to create HTML tags. The purpose of the TagBuilder class is to provide extra assistence when developing HTML controls. It removes the string concatenation problems from the equation and provide an easy way to construct HTML. The code below shows how to use the TagBuilder class to construct the BlueTextBox control.

public static string BlueTextBox(this HtmlHelper helper)
       {
           var tagBuilder = new TagBuilder(“input”);
           tagBuilder.Attributes[“style”] = “background-color:blue”;
           return tagBuilder.ToString();
       }

Since, the input type HTML elements can be of different type namely radio, checkbox, textbox, password etc. You can specify the "type" attribute to represent the type of the control you want to create.

public static string BlueTextBox(this HtmlHelper helper)
      {
          var tagBuilder = new TagBuilder(“input”);
          tagBuilder.Attributes[“style”] = “background-color:blue”;
          tagBuilder.Attributes[“style”] = “radio”;
          return tagBuilder.ToString();
      }

The above code will produce the following HTML:

<input style=”background-color:blue” type=”radio”></input>

The next method uses the Webforms control to render the HTML to the client.

Using Webforms ASP.NET Controls:

You can always use Webform controls to render the HTML of the control to a TextWriter and return the generated HTML to the view. The implementation is shown below:    

public static string BlueTextBox(this HtmlHelper helper)
       {
          var sb = new StringBuilder();
          var sw = new StringWriter(sb);
          var htw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw);

          var tb = new TextBox();
          tb.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Blue;

          tb.RenderControl(htw);

          return sb.ToString();
       }

If you are not looking for much customization then you can use the above method and use the already existing Webforms controls in your ASP.NET MVC application.

Conclusion:

HTML helpers are easy to create and there are multiple ways to implement them. Depending on the scenario you can choose any of the above methods to create your Html helpers. In the next article we will implement the SelectList HTML helper which can be used to create RadioButtonList, CheckBoxList etc.

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

This topic contains information about key features and improvements in the .NET MVC 2. This topic does not provide comprehensive information about all new features and is subject to change. In case you are looking for ASP.NET MVC Hosting, you can always consider HostForLife.eu and you can start from our lowest Standard Plan @$4.99/month to host your ASP.NET MVC site.

For those that don't know what ASP.NET MVC 2 is. ASP.NET MVC 2 is a framework for developing highly testable and maintainable Web applications by leveraging the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The framework encourages developers to maintain a clear separation of concerns among the responsibilities of the application – the UI logic using the view, user-input handling using the controller, and the domain logic using the model. ASP.NET MVC applications are easily testable using techniques such as test-driven development (TDD).

The installation package includes templates and tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 to increase productivity when writing ASP.NET MVC applications. For example, the Add View dialog box takes advantage of customizable code generation (T4) templates to generate a view based on a model object. The default project template allows the developer to automatically hook up a unit-test project that is associated with the ASP.NET MVC application.
Because the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5 SP 1, developers can take advantage of existing ASP.NET features like authentication and authorization, profile settings, localization, and so on.

New Features in RC 2

Default validation system validates entire model
The default validation system in ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and in previews of ASP.NET MVC 2 prior to RC 2 validated only model properties that were posted to the server. In ASP.NET MVC 2, the new behavior is that all model properties are validated when the model is validated, regardless of whether a new value was posted. Applications that depend on the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 behavior may require changes.

Other Improvements

The following changes have been made to existing types and members for the ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2 release.

- The MicrosoftAjax.js script file in new projects has been updated to the version of ASP.NET Ajax that is included in ASP.NET 4. The new script file is compatible with both ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and ASP.NET 4.

- Many areas of the framework have had performance improvements.

- The TempDataDictionary type has a new Peek method that reads values from TempData without removing the values from the dictionary.

- Templated helpers such as Html.EditorFor and Html.DisplayFor show only simple properties by default. If you need to show complex properties, you can create a custom template to show any set of properties.

- The Add View context menu in Visual Studio lets you create a view to delete items. The existing List template has a new Delete link for each item in the list.

- The validation helpers no longer render a default “form0” prefix for the id attribute.

- Expression-based helpers that render input elements generate correct name attributes when the expression contains an array or collection index. For example, the value of the name attribute rendered by Html.EditorFor(m => m.Orders[i]) for the first order in a list would be Orders[0].

- The new UrlParameter type allows default values in routes to be removed after URL routing runs. If an incoming route parameter has a value of UrlParameter.Optional, the MvcHandler instance will remove it from RouteData.Values collection before the controller action is executed. The Global.asax file in new projects uses UrlParameter.Optional in the default route definition. This makes it easier to bind to models that have a property named ID, because the default ID route parameter will not conflict with the binding operation.

- The empty project template includes a small Site.css file that contains styles that are used by validation helpers such as Html.ValidationSummary and Html.ValidationMessage.

- T4 template files can use the <#@ output extension=".ext" #> directive to specify the file extension for the generated file.

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

Option 1: Use a wildcard mapping for aspnet_isapi.dll

This tells IIS 6 to process all requests using ASP.NET, so routing is always invoked, and there’s no problem. It’s dead easy to set up: open IIS manager, right-click your app, go to Properties, then Home Directory tab, then click Configuration. Under Wildcard application maps, click Insert (not Add, which is confusingly just above),  then enter C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll for “Executable”, and uncheck Verify that file exists.

Done! Routing now just behaves as it always did in VS2008’s built-in server.

Unfortunately, this also tells IIS to use ASP.NET to serve all requests, including for static files. It will work, because ASP.NET has a built-in DefaultHttpHandler that does it, but depending on what you do during the request, it might use StaticFileHandler to serve the request. StaticFileHandler is much less efficient than IIS natively. You see, it always reads the files from disk for every request, not caching them in memory. It doesn’t send Cache-Control headers that you might have configured in IIS, so browsers won’t cache it properly. It doesn’t do HTTP compression. However, if you can avoid interfering with the request, DefaultHttpHandler will pass control back to IIS for native processing, which is much better.

For small intranet applications, wildcard mappings are probably the best choice. Yes, it impacts performance slightly, but that might not be a problem for you. Perhaps you have better things to worry about.

For larger public internet applications, you may need a solution that delivers better performance.

Option 2: Put .aspx in all your route entries’ URL patterns

If you don’t mind having .aspx in your URLs, just go through your routing config, adding .aspx before a forward-slash in each pattern. For example, use {controller}.aspx/{action}/{id} or myapp.aspx/{controller}/{action}/{id}. Don’t put .aspx inside the curly-bracket parameter names, or into the ‘default’ values, because it isn’t really part of the controller name - it’s just in the URL to satisfy IIS.

Now your application will be invoked just like a traditional ASP.NET app. IIS still handles static files. This is probably the easiest solution in shared hosting scenarios. Unfortunately, you’ve spoiled your otherwise clean URL schema.

Option 3: Use a custom filename extension in all your patterns

This is the same as the above, except substituting something like .mvc instead of .aspx. It doesn’t really create any advantage, other than showing off that you’re using ASP.NET MVC.

Just update your route entries as described above, except putting .mvc instead of .aspx. Next, register a new ISAPI mapping: Open IIS manager, right-click your app, go to Properties, then Home Directory tab, then click Configuration. On the Mappings tab, click Add, then enter C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll for “Executable”, .mvc (or whatever extension you’re using) for “Extension”, and uncheck Verify that file exists. Leave Script engine checked (unless your app has Execute permission) and leave All verbs selected unless you specifically want to filter HTTP methods.

That’s it - you’re now using a custom extension. Unfortunately, it’s still a bit of an eyesore on your otherwise clean URL schema.

Option 4: Use URL rewriting

This is a trick to make IIS think there’s a filename extension in the URL, even though there isn’t. It’s the hardest solution to implement, but the only one that gives totally clean URLs without any significant drain on performance.

We are adapting the technique slightly so as to avoid needing to change our routing configuration in any way. Here’s how it works for us:

1. As an extensionless request arrives, we have a 3rd-party ISAPI filter that rewrites the request to add a known extension: .aspx.

2. IIS sees the extension, and maps it to aspnet_isapi.dll, and hence into ASP.NET

3. Before routing sees the request, we have an Application_BeginRequest() handler that rewrites the URL back to its original, extensionless form

4. Routing sees the extensionless URL and behaves normally.

Since the URL gets un-rewritten in step 3, you don’t have to do anything funny to make outbound URL generation work.

Bonus Option 5: Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7

Of course, it’s much easier with IIS 7, because it natively supports .NET IHttpModules, so by default you’ll have UrlRoutingModule plugged right into the server, and you don’t have to do anything weird to make it work perfectly.

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

As many of you already know Microsoft is working on a MVC Framework for ASP.Net. MVC stands for “Model View Controller”. The Model View Controller is a design pattern and the idea is to separate business logic from the View (The View is the page that will display content, for example an .aspx page). The MVC in general maintain a clean separation of concerns, it will be easier to test business logic because it’s separated from the View and the View will not have any knowledge of the underlying model. Today when we build ASP.Net applications we have a code-behind which is a partial class of the “View”. With the code-behind model we can’t easy use Test Driven Development (TDD) or unit-test, at least is not easy. We can use the MVP (Model View Presenter), but that require us to write some extra code. With the MVC Framework it will be much easier to apply TDD.

The ASP.Net MVC Framework is integrated with ASP.Net and can use existing infrastructure like caching, session and profile etc. It will also support static and dynamic languages. The MVC Framework will only as it looks now work on ASP.Net 3.5. The .Net 3.5 will be released within any weeks now. The final build of the framework was done only some days ago. With the MVC Framework we will get a Project Template and great tool support. The MVC Framework is extensible and pluggable, so we can replace any system components, it also support Inversion Of Control (IoC)/Dependency Injection (DI). It’s the lifecycle that makes the model extensible. It looks like this:

Request -> Route (IRouteHandler) –> ControlFactory (IControllerFactory) -> Controller (IController) -> ViewFactory (IViewFactory) -> View (IView) -> Response

The Web Server gets browser request, for example http://localhost/Product, the Route to Controller is determined. The Controller is activated and the “Action” method on Controller is invoked. The Controller will then access the model. The Controller will then render View and passing in custom ViewData to the View. The View is rendered.
When we use the MVC Framework we will not specify an URL to a specific page and pass QueryStrings etc. Instead we use a cleaner URL. For example: http://localhost/Products or http://localhost/Producsts/Edit/4 etc.
We will map this URL to a specific controller which will be executed when we enter the URL. In the Global.asax we can create routes, which will be handled by an IRouteHandler. The following is the default way to add a route:

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
            RouteTable.Routes.Add(new Route {
                Url = "[controller]/[action]/[id]",
                Defaults = new { action = "Index", id = (string)null },
                RouteHandler = typeof(MvcRouteHandler)
            });
 }

The Route that is added to the RouteTable will use an URL with the following format “[controller]/[Action]/[id]”. The controller is the controller that should be used, the action is the method in the controller that should be executed and the id is a value that can be passed to the controller’s method. If we use this format and enter a URL like the following: http://localhost/Product, the MVC Framework’s IControlleFactory will create and return the controller that belongs to the Product. It will try to locate a controller with the name ProductController. So if you enter an URL like http://localhost/Customer, it will try to instantiate a controller with the name CustomerController. When the controller is instantiated the Index method of the controller will be executed. The Defaults property of the Route class specify the default settings for the route, such as which action method of the controller is the default action (in this case the Index is the default one specified, this can also be specified on a controller with an attribute.), and the default values of the action method’s parameters that should be passed to the method. If we specify a URL like this one: http://localhost/Product/List the List method of the ProductController will be executed instead of the one that is default specified on the Route. The format of the URL specified for the Route was [controller]/[action]/[id], and the [action] in the format specifies which part of the URL is the name of the action method that should be executed. The [id] in the URL is the name of the action method’s parameter and the value enter at this location of an URL will be passed to the action method. If we enter a URL like this one: http://localhost/Product/Edit/4, the Edit method of the ProductController will be executed and the value 4 will be passed as a value to the Edit method’s id argument. The interface of the action method will look like this:

public void Edit(int? id)

We can of course change the format of the URL if we want to pass more values to a controller’s action method, for example:

“[controller]/[action]/[id]/[pageIndex]”.

The RouteHandler property of the Route specifies which IRouteHandler we want to use.

If we don’t need to use the format “[controller]/[action]/[id]”, for example instead of letting the URL have the name of the controller we can skip the [controller] from the URL and instead specify the type of the controller we want to use when we setup the Route. For example:

RouteTable.Routes.Add(new Route {
        Url = "products/[category]",
        Defaults = new {
               controller = "Product",
               action = "Index"
          },
          RouteHandler = typeof(MvcRouteHandler)
});

Now when we have looked at how we can map a URL to a controller we can take a look at how we can implement a controller. A controller is a normal class that inherits the base class Controller located in the System.Web.Mvc namespace:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace MyControllers
{
    public class ProductController : Controller
    {
    }
}

An action method is a normal method that has the ControllerActionAttribute specified. The ControllerActionAttribute is used because of security reason so not anyone can enter an action in the URL and execute it. The ControllerActionAttbibute has some properties also, for example the DefaultAction which can be used to specify the default action method of the controller.

[ControllerAction(DefaultAction = true)]
 public void Index()
 {
        RenderView("MyView");
 }

The RenderView method will render the specified view. In this case the view with the name “MyView”. The RenderView will not do a call to Response.Redirect; instead it will use the Server.Execute method. By default the RenderView will look into a sub folder of your project with the name Views and then the sub folder with the name of the controller attached to the view.

/root
    /Views
          /Product
             MyView.aspx

The RenderView method is located in the Controller’s base class. This method will execute the IView’s RenderView method. We can create our own IViewFactory which will return our IView representation where we can create our own implementation of the RenderView. For example if we want to render a view based on another format than HTML, for example a jpg or gif image etc. We can create our own IView and make sure our RenderView will render binary data to the output stream instead of text.

The code-behind of the View inherits form the ViewPage instead of the Page object.

To send data to the View that should be displayed we can use the ViewData property of the Controller base class, or we can pass our data to the RenderView method:

[ControllerAction]
public void List(int? page)
 {
       PagedList<Product> products = repository.GetProducts(page ?? 0, 10);
       RenderView("List", products);
 }

 [ControllerAction]
 public void Edit(int id)
 {
        Product product = repository.GetProductByID(id);
         RenderView("Edit", product);
 }

[ControllerAction]
public void ShowCustomer(int? id)
{
    ...
    ViewData["CustomerName"] = customer. Name;
    RenderView("ShowCustomer");
}

To display this information in our View we can user server side script block:

<table class="product_listing">
        <tr>
            <th></th>
            <th>Product Name</th>
            <th>Unit Price</th>
        </tr>
       
        <% foreach(var p in ViewData) { %>
       
            <tr>
                <td>
                    <%=Html.Link("Edit", "Products", new { Action="Edit", ID=p.ProductID }) %>
                </td>
                <td><%=p.ProductName %></td>
                <td><%=p.UnitPrice.ToCurrency() %></td>
            </tr>
       
        <% } %>
       
</table>

<h2><%=ViewData.ProductName %></h2>

<h1><%=ViewData["CustomerName"] %></h1>

By using the ViewData collection we can pass several of objects to our view that should be displayed. If we want to pass typed data to the View, we can inherit the Controller<T> where ViewData will be of type T. If we use the Controller<T>, the page which uses the Controller<T> needs to inherit the ViewPage<T> instead of ViewPage.

The MVC Framework doesn’t support postbacks and the use of ViewState, so most of the Controls shipped with ASP.Net can’t be used. Microsoft will probably add new Controls for the MVC Framework.

The MVC Framework will be added to the SP1 of VS 2008. This framework is for people that would like to use this MVC design pattern instead of the postback model. The MVC Framework will work better with Test Driven Development and unit-testing, so people that will make it easier to test web apps will also probably use this model. We will use it in every Web project in the future. With this model it would also be easier to maintain applications because we will have more control over the HTML. We don’t need to hook up to an event of a control and try to figure out how to add extra data into a GridView if we want to extend it etc. This model reminds of the old classic ASP, and it will be easier for people that work with classic ASP to move to ASP.net if they start using the MVC Framework.

Testing with MVC will as we mentioned before be much easier. We have several of interfaces that we can use. The Mockable intrinsic objects are IHttpContext, IHttpResponse and IHttpRequest. Because the MVC Framework have interfaces for IRouteHandler, IController, IControllerFactory, IView and IVewFactory we have more extensibility options. If we want to test a Controller’s action we can for example create our own IViewFactory and IView, by doing this we can change the implementation of the RenderView method.

[TestMethod]
Public void TestTheEditActionFotTheProductContoller()
{
    ProductController controller = new ProductController(mpr);

    TestViewEngine testView = new TestViewEngine();
    controller.ViewFactory = testView

    controller.Edit(5);

    Assert.Equal(testView.Template, "Edit");
    Asssert.Equal(testView.GetViewData<Product>().ProductID, 5);
}

Top Reasons to host your ASP.NET MVC Website with HostForLife.eu

There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added-benefits you can find when hosting with us:

1. World-class 24x7 Customer Support
Will your hosting company promptly answer questions and resolve issues - at 3 am on a Sunday? Even some providers claiming “24x7” support will not - but HostForLife will. Our outstanding uptime is backed by true 24x7 customer support. An expertly trained technician will respond to your query within one hour, round the clock. You will also get qualified answers. Other hosting companies typically have very low - level support staff during the night or weekends. HostForLife always has knowledgeable, top - level  support standing by, day or night, to give you the answers you need.

2. Commitment to Outstanding Reliability
Reliability, Stability, and Performance of our servers remain out TOP priority. Even our basic service plans are equipped with standard service level agreements for 99.99% uptime. Advanced options raise the bar to 99.99%. Our state-of-the-art data centers combine servers and SAN storage with full redundancy and operational tools with proprietary service management techniques. Full backup and recovery capabilities are implemented, including redundant power supplies, cooling and connectionsto major data networks.

3. “Right-size” plans for maximum value
HostForLife offers a complete menu of services. IT professionals select only what they need - and leave behind what they don’t. The result is an optimal blend of cost and performance. We offer IT professionals more advanced features and the latest technology - ahead of other hosting companies.

4. Profitable, Stable, Debt-free Business
Financial stability is the bedrock of a hosting provider’s ability to deliver outstanding uptime, cost-effective service plans and world-class 24x7 support.  HostForLife’s customers are assured of our financial integrity and stability - a stark contrast to the ups and downs they may have experienced with other providers.

5. The Best Account Management Tools
HostForLife revolutionized hosting with Plesk Control Panel, a Web-based interfaces that provides customers with 24x7 access to their server and site configuration tools. Some other hosting providers manually execute configuration requests, which can take days. Plesk completes requests in second. It is included free with each hosting account. Renowned for its comprehensive functionally - beyond other hosting control panels - and ease of use, Plesk Control Panel is available only to HostForLife’s customers.

6. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
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If you have a model object with a property named id, you may have run into an issue where your model state is invalid when binding to that model even though you don’t have an “Id” field in your form.

The following scenario should clear up what we mean. Suppose you have the following simple model with two properties.

public class Product {
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

And you are creating a view to create a new Product. In such a view, you obviously don’t want the user to specify the Id.

<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%>

   <fieldset>
     <legend>Fields</legend>

     <div class=”editor-label”>
       <%= Html.LabelFor (model => model.Name) %>
     </div>
     <div class=”editor-field”>
       <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %>
       <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) %>
     </div>

     <p>
       <input type=”submit” value=”Create” />
     </p>
   <fieldset>

<% } %>

However, when you post it to an action method like so:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Index(Product p)
{
    if (!ModelState.IsValid) {
        throw new InvalidOperationException(“Modelstate not valid”);
    }
    return View();
}

You’ll find that the model state is not valid. What gives!?

Well the issue here is that the id property of Product is being set to an empty string. Why is that happening when there is no “Id” field in your form? The answer to that, my friend, is routing.

When you crack open a freshly created ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application, you’ll notice the following default route defined.

routes.MapRoute(

    “Default”
    “{controller}/{action}/{id}”;
    new { controller = “Home”, action = “Index”, id = “” }
);

To refresh your memory, that’s a route with three URL parameters (controller, action, id), each with a default value ("home", "index", "").

What this means is if you post a form to the URL /Home/Index, without specifying an “ID” in the URL, you’ll still have an empty string route value for the key “id”. And as it turns out, we use route values to bind to action method parameters.

In the scenario above, it just so happens that your model object happens to have a property with the same name, “Id”, as that route value, so the model binder attempts to set the value of the id property to empty string, and since id is non-nullable int, we get a type conversion error.

In ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2, we added an MVC specific means to work around this issue via the new Url.Parameters.Optional. If you set the default value for a URL parameter to this special value, MVC makes sure to remove that key from the route value dictionary so that it doesn’t exist.

Thus the fix to the above scenario is to change the default route to:

Routes.MapRoute(

    “Default”,
    “{controller}/{action}/{id}”,
    new { controller = “Home”, action = “Index”, id =
UrlParameter.Optional }
);

With this in place, if there’s no ID in the URL, there won’t be a value for ID in the route values and thus we’ll never try to set a property named “Id” unless you have a form field named “Id”.

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There are many reasons why so many people choose HostForLife over any other web hosting provider each year. Whether you’re beginner or an experience webmaster, HostForLife offers the perfect solution for everyone.

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HostForLife 30 day money back guarantee ensures you have the ability to cancel your account anytime within your first 30 days under our full 30 day money back guarantee (less one-time account setup free). So what are you waiting for? Sign up today, risk free…

7. Simplicity with FREE 1-Click Installation
HostForLife was designed with ease of use in mind. From one click installations of your favourite website applications to our much talked about drag and drop website builder, you can rest assure your stay with us is going to be a smooth one. HostForLife offers the most extensive set of scripts on the web allowing you to build complicated websites with little or no programming knowledge at all. From blogs to forums to powerful e-commerce solutions, Super Green has something that is right for you.

Introduction

Beyond a doubt, it was a great revolution that the ASP.NET technique substituted the traditional ASP approach in constructing web applications. Later, the full-fledged framework, Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 came into being, which brought many wonderful and excellent features as well as efficient tools to developers so that they can succeed in building a basic ASP.NET web application in just a few minutes.

At the same time as it provides popular object-oriented programming features, ASP.NET delivers a wealth of goodies, tools, and powerful system features. For example, lots of programmer-friendly classes let you develop pages using typical desktop-like methods, and the Web Forms model supplies an overall event-driven approach which seems quite comfortable to desktop application developers.

However, in November 2007, a group of ASP.NET guys invented some new ASP.NET MVC stuff. And shortly after the announcement of the new framework, millions of ASP.NET programmers from all over the world published their blogs focusing upon this framework by presenting elementary sample projects, digging into the components of the MVC architecture, introducing other related third party helper or extension tools, and so forth.

Now, let's first recall and enumerate the main strong points that ASP.NET Web Forms gives us.

The Strong Points of ASP.NET Web Forms

In general, the Web Forms-based framework offers the following advantages:

1. The Event Model

Web Forms supports an event model that preserves state over HTTP, which benefits line-of-business related web applications development. The Web Forms-based application provides dozens of events that are supported in hundreds of server controls. As you've seen, because the Windows Forms model stems from the typical event-driven desktop programming style, it facilitates millions of developers from the VB6 world.

2. The Page Controller Pattern

Web Forms uses a Page Controller pattern that adds functionality to individual pages. As you've also seen, an ASP.NET page is divided into two parts: the .aspx itself, and the relevant CodeBehind .aspx.cs (or .aspx.vb) file, with the former acting as the front view and the latter as the controller (which resembles the View and the Controller in the ASP.NET MVC term). Similar to the controller in the MVC case, the CodeBehind .aspx.cs (or .aspx.vb) file plays the role of a broker (the controller) that schedules the .aspx view page and the back end business logic (which in turn attaches to the various database storage areas).

We can say that, although the new ASP.NET MVC provide a clearer division for the Model, View, and Controller, the Page Controller pattern of Web Forms is still good. Under the .NET platform, we don't need to implement the MVC pattern by ourselves. As for the View, ASP.NET already provides the common Web controls, and also, we can define the custom user controls by deriving them from System.Web.UI.UserControl, or create our own Web controls from System.Web.UI.WebControl. Then we can assemble the UserControl or Web controls with an .aspx Page.

On the other hand, ASP.NET defines the System.Web.UI.Page class which, to some degree, acts as the Controller of the MVC pattern, which can deal with user requests. In addition, the code-behind technique can completely separate the rendering of the user interface from the implementation of the UI logic, which greatly facilitates handling the code.

As for the Model component, it should include the field objects of the business logic tier, as well as the data objects of the data access tier. And moreover, the .NET platform provides the DataSet-like objects through ADO.NET, which facilitates the binding with the data source of the Web controls.

3. The ViewState and Server-based Forms

Web Forms uses ViewState or server-based forms, which, to a great degree, make managing state information easier. As is well known, HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means two successive requests across the same session have no knowledge of each other. By introducing the re-entrant form mechanism, ASP becomes successful in working around such a system limitation. What was once an ASP best practice has been standardized and integrated into the ASP.NET runtime to become the key feature of ASP.NET applications with automatic state maintenance.

The ASP.NET runtime carries the page state back and forth across page requests. When generating HTML code for a given page, ASP.NET encodes and stuffs the state of server-side objects into a few hidden, and transparently created, fields. When the page is requested, the same ASP.NET runtime engine checks for embedded state information-the hidden fields-and uses any decoded information to set up newly created instances of server-side objects. However, it's just such kinds of ViewState-related items that brought ASP.NET Web Forms plenty of issues when it's compared with ASP.NET MVC. This will be discussed in just a few moments. 

4. A Large Share of The Component Marketplace

Web Forms works well for small teams of Web developers and designers, who want to take advantage of the large number of components available for rapid application development. As is the case with Visual Basic (under which a large number of third-party components came into existence), mature ASP.NET techniques have resulted in a large marketplace of third-party server controls and components.

Therefore, it's a very real advantage that, with the already-existing ASP.NET solutions and various third-party components, a medium-sized ASP.NET application may be built within just a few days. 

5. Less Complex

In contrast to the newly-introduced ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms is less complex for application development, because the components (the Page class, controls, and so on) are tightly integrated and usually require less code than the MVC model.

At the same time, however, ASP.NET Web Forms has also produced some real problems, mainly centering around low response speed and inefficiency in setting up large web applications.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu .NET MVC Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLife will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in .Net MVC Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!

One of the main design principles ASP.NET MVC has been designed with is extensibility. Everything (or most of) in the processing pipeline is replaceable so, if you don’t like the conventions (or lack of them) that ASP.NET MVC uses, you can create your own services to support your conventions and inject them into the main pipeline.

In this post we are going to show 13 extensibility points that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know, starting from the beginning of the pipeline and going forward till the rendering of the view.

1. RouteConstraint

Usually you could put some constrains on url parameters using regular expressions, but if your constrains depend on something that is not only about the single parameter, you can implement the IRouteConstrains’s method and put your validation logic in it.

One example of this is the validation of a date: imagine an url that has year, month and date on different url tokens, and you want to be able to validate that the three parts make a valid date.

2. RouteHandler

Not really specific to ASP.NET MVC, the RouteHandler is the component that decide what to do after the route has been selected. Obviously if you change the RouteHandler you end up handling the request without ASP.NET MVC, but this can be useful if you want to handle a route directly with some specific HttpHanlders or even with a classic WebForm.

3. ControllerFactory

The controller factory is the component that, based on the route, chooses which controller to instantiate and instantiate it. The default factory looks for anything that implements IController and whose name ends with Controller, and than create an instance of it through reflection, using the parameter-less constructor.

But if you want to use Dependency Injection you cannot use it, and you have to use a IoC aware controller factory: there are already controller factory for most of the IoC containers. You can find them in MvcContrib or having a look at the Ninject Controller Factory.

4. ActionInvoker

ActionInvoker is responsible for invoking the action based on it’s name. The default action invoker looks for the action based on the method name, the action name and possibly other selector attributes. Then it invokes the action method together with any filter defined  and finally it executes the action result.

If you read carefully you probably understood that most of the execution pipeline is inside the logic of the default ControllerActionInvoker class. So if you want to change any of these conventions, from the action method’s selection logic, to the way http parameters are mapped to action parameters, to the way filters are chosen and executed, you have to extend that class and override the method you want to change.

5. ActionMethodSelectorAttribute

Actions, with the default action invoker, are selected based on their name, but you can finer tune the selection of actions implementing your own Method Selector. The framework already comes with the AcceptVerbs attribute that allows you to specify to which HTTP Verb an action has to respond to.

A possible scenario for a custom selector attribute is if you want to choose one action or another based on languages supported by the browser or based on the type of browser, for example whether it is a mobile browser or a desktop browser.

6. AuthorizationFilter

These kind of filters are executed before the action is executed, and their role is to make sure the request is “valid”.

There are already a few Authorization filters inside the framework, the most “famous” of which is the Authorize attribute that checks whether the current user is allowed to execute the action. Another is the the ValidateAntiForgeryToken that prevents CSRF attacks. If you want to implement your own authorization schema, the interface you have to implement is IAuthorizationFilter. An example could be the hour of the day.

7. ActionFilter

Action Filters are executed before and after an action is executed. One of the core filters is the OutputCache filter, but you can find many other usages for this filter. This is the most likely extension point you are going to use, as, IMHO, it’s critical to a good componentization of views: the controller only has to do its main stuff, and all the other data needed by the view must be retrieved from inside action filters.

8. ModelBinder

The default model binder maps HTTP parameters to action method parameters using their names: a http parameter named user.address.city will be mapped to the City property of the Address object that itself is a property of the method parameter named user. The DefaultModelBinder works also with arrays, and other list types.

But it can be pushed even further: for example you might use it to convert the id of the person directly to the Person object looking up on the database. This approach is explained better in the following post Timothy Khouri (aka SingingEels): Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC. The code is based on the preview 5, but the concept remains the same.

9. ControllerBase

All controllers inherit from the base class Controller. A good way to encapsulate logic or conventions inside your actions is to create you own layer supertype and have all your controllers to inherit from it.

10. ResultFilter

Like the ActionFiters, the ResultFilters are execute before and after the ActionResult is executed. Again, the OutputCache filter is an example of a ResultFilter. The usual example that is done to explain this filter is logging. If you want to log that a page has been returned to the user, you can write a custom RenderFilter that logs after the ActionResult has been executed.

11. ActionResult

ASP.NET MVC comes with many different kind of results to render views, to render JSON, plain text, files and to redirect to other actions. But if you need some different kind of result you can write your own ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method. For example, if you want to send a PDF file as result you could write your own ActionResult that use a PDF library to generate the PDF. Another possible scenario is the RSS feed: read more about how to write a RssResult in this post.

Look at implementing a custom action result when the only peculiarity is how the result is returned to the user.

12. ViewEngine

Probably you are not going to write your own view engine, but there are a few that you might consider using instead of the default WebForm view engine.

13. HtmlHelper

Views must be very dumb and thin, and they should only have html markup and calls to HtmlHelpers. There should be no code inside the views, so helpers come very handy for extracting the code from the view and putting it into something that is testable.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu .NET MVC Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLife will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in .Net MVC Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!