Pluralsight has developed a great training course on Building ASP.NET MVC Apps with EF Code First, HTML5 and jQuery. 

It is presented by the most excellent Dan Wahlin, and is really comprehensive.  Details of the course outline can be found here.

Free 1-Month Subscription to the Course

Pluralsight is offering a special promotion that allows you to get a free 1-month subscription to watch the above course as many time as you want at no cost.  There is no obligation to buy anything at the end of the offer and you dont need to supply a credit card in order to take part in it.

To get access to the course you simply follow @pluralsight on Twitter and then visit this page and enter your Twitter name using the form on it.  Pluralsight will then send you a private twitter message containing the access code that you can use to subscribe to the course.  Once you are subscribed to the course you have one month to watch the course (and you can watch it as many times as you want during the month). 

Pluralsight is running the promotion through April 27th so sign-up now to get access.  Once you are signed up you then have a month to watch the course.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. And if you are new to Twitter you can also optionally follow me: @scottgu

I'm excited to share news about a great new cloud capability we are announcing today - Windows Azure Media Services.

Windows Azure Media Services

Windows Azure Media Services is a cloud-based PaaS solution that enables you to efficiently build and deliver media solutions to customers. It offers a bunch of ready-to-use services that enable the fast ingestion, encoding, format-conversion, storage, content protection, and streaming (both live and on-demand) of video. It also integrates and exposes services provided by industry leading partners enabling an incredibly deep media stack of functionality that you can leverage.

You can use Windows Azure Media Services to deliver solutions to any device or client - including HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Windows 8, iPads, iPhones, Android, Xbox, and Windows Phone devices.  Windows Azure Media Services supports a wide variety of streaming formats - including Smooth Streaming, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), and Flash Media Streaming.

One of the unique aspects of Windows Azure Media Services is that all of its features are exposed using a consistent HTTP REST API. This is true both for the media services we've built, as well as the partner delivered media services that are enabled through it.  This makes it incredibly easy to automate media workflows and integrate the combined set of services within your applications and media solutions. Like the rest of Windows Azure, you only pay for what you use with Windows Azure Media Services making it a very cost effective way to deliver great solutions.

Windows Azure Media Services uses the same award-winning media backend that has been used to power some of the largest live sporting events ever broadcast on the web - including the 2010 Winter Olympics, 2010 FIFA World Cup, 2011 Wimbledon Championships, and 2012 NFL SuperBowl. Using Windows Azure Media Services you'll now be able to quickly standup and automate media cloud solutions of your own that are capable of delivering amazing solutions to an equal sized audience.

Learn More

We are introducing Windows Azure Media Services at the 2012 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show this week, and attendees can stop by the Microsoft booth there to meet the team and see live demonstrations of it in action.

You can also visit windowsazure.com/media to learn more about the specific features it supports, and visit the windowsazure.com media dev center to learn more about how to develop against it. You can sign-up to try out the preview of Windows Azure Media Services by sending email to mediaservices@microsoft.com (along with details of the scenario you'd like to use it for).

We are really excited about the capabilities Windows Azure Media Services provides, and are looking forward to watching the solutions that will soon be built on it.

Thanks,

Scott

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

Here is the latest in my link-listing blog series:

ASP.NET

• Easily overlooked features in VS 11 Express for Web: Good post by Scott Hanselman that highlights a bunch of easily overlooked improvements that are coming to VS 11 (and specifically the free express editions) for web development: unit testing, browser chooser/launcher, IIS Express, CSS Color Picker, Image Preview in Solution Explorer and more.

• Get Started with ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms: Good 5-part tutorial that walks-through building an application using ASP.NET Web Forms and highlights some of the nice improvements coming with ASP.NET 4.5.

• What is New in Razor V2 andWhat Else is New in Razor V2: Great posts by Andrew Nurse, a dev on the ASP.NET team, about some of the new improvements coming with ASP.NET Razor v2.

• ASP.NET MVC 4 AllowAnonymous Attribute: Nice post from David Hayden that talks about the new [AllowAnonymous] filter introduced with ASP.NET MVC 4.

• Introduction to the ASP.NET Web API: Great tutorial by Stephen Walher that covers how to use the new ASP.NET Web API support built-into ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4.

• Comprehensive List of ASP.NET Web API Tutorials and Articles: Tugberk Ugurlu links to a huge collection of articles, tutorials, and samples about the new ASP.NET Web API capability.

• Async Mashups using ASP.NET Web API: Nice post by Henrik on how you can use the new async language support coming with .NET 4.5 to easily and efficiently make asynchronous network requests that do not block threads within ASP.NET.

ASP.NET and Front-End Web Development

• Visual Studio 11 and Front End Web Development - JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3: Nice post by Scott Hanselman that highlights some of the great improvements coming with VS 11 (including the free express edition) for front-end web development.

• HTML5 Drag/Drop and Async Multi-file Upload with ASP.NET Web API: Great post by Filip W. that demonstrates how to implement an async file drag/drop uploader using HTML5 and ASP.NET Web API.

• Device Emulator Guide for Mobile Development with ASP.NET: Good post from Rachel Appel that covers how to use various device emulators with ASP.NET and VS to develop cross platform mobile sites.

• Fixing these jQuery: A Guide to Debugging: Great presentation by Adam Sontag on debugging with JavaScript and jQuery. Some really good tips, tricks and gotchas that can save a lot of time.

ASP.NET and Open Source

• Getting Started with ASP.NET Web Stack Source on CodePlex: Fantastic post by Henrik (an architect on the ASP.NET team) that provides step by step instructions on how to work with the ASP.NET source code we recently open sourced.

• Contributing to ASP.NET Web Stack Source on CodePlex: Follow-on to the post above (also by Henrik) that walks-through how you can submit a code contribution to the ASP.NET MVC, Web API and Razor projects.

• Overview of the WebApiContrib project: Nice post by Pedro Reys on the new open source WebApiContrib project that has been started to deliver cool extensions and libraries for use with ASP.NET Web API.

Entity Framework

• Entity Framework 5 Performance Improvements and Performance Considerations for EF5:Good articles that describes some of the big performance wins coming with EF5 (which will ship with both .NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4). Automatic compilation of LINQ queries will yield some significant performance wins (up to 600% faster).

• ASP.NET MVC 4 and EF Database Migrations: Good post by David Hayden that covers the new database migrations support within EF 4.3 which allows you to easily update your database schema during development - without losing any of the data within it.

Visual Studio

• What's New in Visual Studio 11 Unit Testing: Nice post by Peter Provost (from the VS team) that talks about some of the great improvements coming to VS11 for unit testing - including built-in VS tooling support for a broad set of unit test frameworks (including NUnit, XUnit, Jasmine, QUnit and more)

Hope this helps,

Scott

April 16th Update: You can listen to an audio version of the talk I did online here. 

This coming Monday (April 16th) Im doing another online LIDNUG session.  The talk will be from 10am to 11:30am (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic or question is fair game.

You can learn more and register to attend the online event for free here. Ill update this post with a download link to a recorded audio version of the talk after the event is over.

Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there!

Scott

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

Microsoft has made the source code of ASP.NET MVC available under an open source license since the first V1 release. Weve also integrated a number of great open source technologies into the product, and now ship jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, jQuery Validation, Modernizr.js, NuGet, Knockout.js and JSON.NET as part of it.

Im very excited to announce today that we will also release the source code for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (aka Razor) under an open source license (Apache 2.0), and that we will increase the development transparency of all three projects by hosting their code repositories on CodePlex (using the new Git support announced last week). Doing so will enable a more open development model where everyone in the community will be able to engage and provide feedback on code checkins, bug-fixes, new feature development, and build and test the products on a daily basis using the most up-to-date version of the source code and tests.

We will also for the first time allow developers outside of Microsoft to submit patches and code contributions that the Microsoft development team will review for potential inclusion in the products. We announced a similar open development approach with the Windows Azure SDK last December, and have found it to be a great way to build an even tighter feedback loop with developers and ultimately deliver even better products as a result.

Very importantly - ASP.NET MVC, Web API and Razor will continue to be fully supported Microsoft products that ship both standalone as well as part of Visual Studio (the same as they do today). They will also continue to be staffed by the same Microsoft developers that build them today (in fact, we have more Microsoft developers working on the ASP.NET team now than ever before). Our goal with todays announcement is to increase the feedback loop on the products even more, and allow us to deliver even better products.  We are really excited about the improvements this will bring.

Learn More

You can now browse, sync and build the source tree of ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor on the http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com web-site. 

The Git repository on the site is the live RC milestone development tree that the team has been working on the last several weeks, and the tree contains both the runtime sources + tests, and is buildable and testable by anyone.  Because the binaries produced are bin-deployable, this allows you to compile your own builds and try product updates out as soon as they are checked-in.

You can also now contribute directly to the development of the products by reviewing and sending feedback on code checkins, submitting bugs and helping us verify fixes as they are checked in, suggesting and giving feedback on new features as they are implemented, as well as by submitting code fixes or code contributions of your own. Note that all code submissions will be rigorously reviewed and tested by the ASP.NET MVC Team, and only those that meet an extremely high bar for both quality and design/roadmap appropriateness will be merged into the source.

Summary

All of us on the team are really excited about todays announcement it has been something weve been working toward for many years.  The tighter feedback loop is going to enable us to build even better products, and take ASP.NET to the next level in terms of innovation and customer focus.

Thanks,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu

Earlier this week I blogged about the release of the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta.  ASP.NET MVC 4 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great new features and capabilities.  One of the improvements Im most excited about is the support it brings for creating Web APIs.  Todays blog post is the first of several Im going to do that talk about this new functionality.

Web APIs

The last few years have seen the rise of Web APIs - services exposed over plain HTTP rather than through a more formal service contract (like SOAP or WS*).  Exposing services this way can make it easier to integrate functionality with a broad variety of device and client platforms, as well as create richer HTML experiences using JavaScript from within the browser.  Most large sites on the web now expose Web APIs (some examples: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, etc), and the usage of them is going to accelerate even more in the years ahead as connected devices proliferate and users demand richer user experiences.

Our new ASP.NET Web API support enables you to easily create powerful Web APIs that can be accessed from a broad range of clients (ranging from browsers using JavaScript, to native apps on any mobile/client platform).  It provides the following support:

• Modern HTTP programming model: Directly access and manipulate HTTP requests and responses in your Web APIs using a clean, strongly typed HTTP object model.  In addition to supporting this HTTP programming model on the server, we also support the same programming model on the client with the new HttpClient API that can be used to call Web APIs from any .NET application.

• Content negotiation: Web API has built-in support for content negotiation which enables the client and server to work together to determine the right format for data being returned from an API.  We provide default support for JSON, XML and Form URL-encoded formats, and you can extend this support by adding your own formatters, or even replace the default content negotiation strategy with one of your own.

• Query composition: Web API enables you to easily support querying via the OData URL conventions.  When you return a type of IQueryable<T> from your Web API, the framework will automatically provide OData query support over it making it easy to implement paging and sorting.

• Model binding and validation: Model binders provide an easy way to extract data from various parts of an HTTP request and convert those message parts into .NET objects which can be used by Web API actions.  Web API supports the same model binding and validation infrastructure that ASP.NET MVC supports today.

• Routes: Web APIs support the full set of routing capabilities supported within ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET today, including route parameters and constraints. Web API also provides smart conventions by default, enabling you to easily create classes that implement Web APIs without having to apply attributes to your classes or methods.  Web API configuration is accomplished solely through code leaving your config files clean.

• Filters: Web APIs enables you to easily use and create filters (for example: [authorization]) that enable you to encapsulate and apply cross-cutting behavior.

• Improved testability: Rather than setting HTTP details in static context objects, Web API actions can now work with instances of HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage two new HTTP objects that (among other things) make testing much easier. As an example, you can unit test your Web APIs without having to use a Mocking framework.

• IoC Support: Web API supports the service locator pattern implemented by ASP.NET MVC, which enables you to resolve dependencies for many different facilities.  You can easily integrate this with an IoC container or dependency injection framework to enable clean resolution of dependencies.

• Flexible Hosting: Web APIs can be hosted within any type of ASP.NET application (including both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms based applications).  Weve also designed the Web API support so that you can also optionally host/expose them within your own process if you dont want to use ASP.NET/IIS to do so.  This gives you maximum flexibility in how and where you use it.

Learning More

Visit www.asp.net/web-api to find tutorials on how to use ASP.NET Web API.  You can also watch me talk about and demo ASP.NET Web API in the video of my ASP.NET MVC 4 Talk (I cover it 36 minutes into the talk). 

In my next blog post Ill walk-through how to create a new Web API, the basics of how it works, and how you can programmatically invoke it from a client.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu

A few days ago we released the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta.  This is a significant release that brings with it a bunch of great new features and capabilities. 

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta release works with VS 2010 and .NET 4.0, and is side-by-side compatible with prior releases of ASP.NET MVC (meaning you can safely install it and not worry about it impacting your existing apps built with earlier releases).  It supports a go-live license that allows you to build and deploy production apps with it. 

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