Online MVC 4 Cheat sheet

 

Nice work by Brij Mohan on MVC 4 cheat sheet

jQuery 1.10.2 and 2.0.3 Released

jQuery team released jQuery 1.10.2 and 2.0.3 on July 3, 2013. These releases fix a few pesky bugs that have been reported over the past month, but the list is refreshingly small. Since some of the bugs spanned both the 1.x and 2.x branches we’re releasing new versions of both to keep them in sync

You can get the latest files from the jQuery download page, including sourcemap files and links to helpful tools such as jQuery Migrate. If you’re upgrading from a version of jQuery before 1.9, please do read through that page carefully to make your migration as pain-free as possible. Remember that it may take a few days for the CDNs at Google, Microsoft, and CDNJS to respond to the rocket’s red glare and post the latest versions. In the meantime, use the copy on the jQuery CDN.

jQuery 2.0 Released

jQuery team releases v.2 on 19-Apr-2013. This version leaves behind the older Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 browsers. In return it is smaller, faster, and can be used in JavaScript environments where the code needed for old-IE compatibility often causes problems of its own. But don’t worry, the jQuery team still supports the 1.x branch which does run on IE 6/7/8. You can (and should) continue to use jQuery 1.9 (and the upcoming 1.10) on web sites that need to accommodate older browsers.

http://blog.jquery.com/2013/04/18/jquery-2-0-released/

jQuery 1.8.1 Released

 

jQuery 1.8.1 is released on 30th Aug, 2012. This version fixes the issues reported by the community following the final release of 1.8.0. Here are the files, ready for you to use:

• http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8.1.min.js (production, compressed)
• http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8.1.js (development, uncompressed)

The Google and Microsoft CDNs will also have copies available soon.

The final set of bugs that were fixed are listed below. Don’t forget, folks, we love to hear about bugs in the betas and release candidates too! You don’t have to wait for a final release to test with your code. The earlier we can fix these bugs, the smoother things go for both the team and the jQuery community.

Use jQuery UI 1.8.23 and jQuery Mobile 1.1.1 or later for best compatibility with jQuery core 1.8.1.

jQuery 1.8 Released

 

jQuery 1.8.0 is released by jQuery on 09-Aug-2012 by jQuery team.

New Features:

Sizzle re-architected: jQuery’s selector engine is faster than ever, thanks to a rewrite (well, reallytwo rewrites) by Timmy Willison. Sure, most browsers have querySelectorAll nowadays, but nearly every implementation falls short in one way or another, creating a road full of cross-browser potholes. Sizzle smoothes that road for you. Plus, you may want those useful jQuery selector extensions like :has() with a complex selector or :contains(). Oh yeah, and there’s still IE6/7 support.

Animations re-imagined: Over time, the animation code in jQuery had become kind of messy. Corey Frang took a head-first dive into that swamp and managed to remove most of the alligators, um, bugs. Most of the changes are under the covers, so existing animations should just work (and work better). But there are also some awesome additions to make animations more general and extendable. One notable and very cool feature is the use of the progress callbacks in Promises. We’re still working on detailed documentation, but we do have a draft. Also, here’s an example of the new code in action: http://jsbin.com/odocid/1/edit.

Automatic CSS prefixing: When you use a CSS property, in either .css() or .animate(), we’ll use the correct prefixed property (when appropriate) for that browser. For example, take.css("user-select", "none"); in Chrome/Safari we’ll set the value as "-webkit-user-select", Firefox will use "-moz-user-select", and IE10 will use "-ms-user-select".

More flexibility with $(html, props): In jQuery 1.8, you can use any jQuery method or plugin in the object passed to $(html, props). Before, you could only use a short list of method names, and there was no documented way to add to the list. Now there doesn’t need to be a list at all! Be aware, however, that this can cause the behavior of your code to change if plugins are added later that have the same names as HTML attributes.

More than 160 bugs closed: The Sizzle and animation rewrites in particular provided the impetus to fix several long-standing bugs–some of which have been around for two or three years. Mike Sherov tackled most of the open CSS and positioning issues, getting us down to near-zero bugs there. We also haven’t given up and are still pounding away to eliminate annoying differences between IE 6/7/8 and modern browsers, so you don’t have to deal with them.

Smaller code size: Despite all the code cleanup, new features, and bug fixes, the gzipped file size of jQuery 1.8 is actually a few hundred bytes smaller than jQuery 1.7.2. Size reduction wasn’t our primary goal in this version, but we felt it was important to hold the line on code growth, and we definitely achieved that. Many thanks to Richard Gibson for leading the code-crunching charge across the entire project.

Modularity: If you know your project’s jQuery dependencies well, you can use the new grunt-based build system to strip out parts of jQuery that you know you don’t need. What we’ve done here for 1.8 is really just a beginning, you’ll see even more flexibility as we move to later versions.

SQL Server 2012 Released

Microsoft released SQL Server 2012 on 02-Apr-2012. Those wanting to get their hand on the bits can follow this link. However, it leads to an evaluation copy of SQL Server 2012, which is good for six months

Microsoft changed the product editions with this release. Enterprise edition is now the top-of-the-line product that comes with "unlimited" virtualization rights. The BI edition is a new product for organizations interested in using Microsoft's business intelligence improvements in SQL Server 2012. Finally, Microsoft offers a Standard edition.

On top of the evaluation edition, Microsoft offers a free SQL Sever 2012 Express edition for lightweight use, which can be downloaded here.

JQUERY 1.6.2 RELEASED

jQuery 1.6.2 is now out! This is the second minor release on top of jQuery 1.6 and lands a number of fixes for bugs.

As usual, two copies of jQuery, one minified and one uncompressed (for debugging or reading).

• jQuery Minified (for production)
• jQuery Regular (for development and testing)

Attributes

• #9286: Using live submit on forms
• #9298: $(elem).attr(eventName) not working properly in IE7
• #9329: attr(“title”) issue in ie7
• #9362: .attr(“value”) does not work for meter elements
• #9468: $(‘form’).attr(‘class’) always return undefined in IE 6
• #9499: removeClass will only remove the first instance of a class

Core

• #9301: Setting data() via an object with hyphenated keys create inaccessible data.
• #9368: jQuery.camelCase() defined in css.js, but used more widely
• #9471: memory leak noticed when loading jquey.1.6.1.min.js included html pages in the iframe

CSS

• #7557: outerWidth()
• #9237: .css() doesn’t work with relative values on hyphenated properties

Dimensions

• #9300: outerWidth(true) issue

Effects

• #9220: Animation Callbacks fire AFTER the next queue function executes.
• #9678: setInterval cleared by animation

Event

• #9285: custom trigger

Manipulation

• #8950: (Chrome, Firefox) Second argument (event empty) in jQuery throws error while creating <input>
• #9370: Compatibility Issue with jQuery 1.6 and IE6

Support

• #9239: Version 1.6.0 breaks the background behavior on body element
• #9440: v1.6.1 messes up layout in IE8

jQuery 1.5.2 Released

jQuery 1.5.2 is released on 31-Mar-2011. This is the second minor release on top of jQuery 1.5 and lands a number of fixes for bugs.

Downloading

As usual, we provide two copies of jQuery, one minified and one uncompressed (for debugging or reading).

• jQuery Minified (29kb Gzipped)
• jQuery Regular (214kb)

You can feel free to include the above URLs directly into your site and you will get the full performance benefits of a quickly-loading jQuery.

Additionally you can also load the URLs directly from Microsoft and Google’s CDNs:

Microsoft CDN: http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.2.min.js

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta

Microsoft published Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta on 03-Dec-2010. To download click here.

jQuery 1.4.4 Released

The fourth minor release of jQuery 1.4 is now available — less than one month after 1.4.3 was released.

Unsurprisingly, version 1.4.4 is primarily a set of bug fixes following feedback from the user community. There is only one new feature…

 

jQuery.fadeToggle()

The .fadeToggle() method provides fade-in and fade-out animation. If an element is visible, it’s opacity is reduced and, when it reaches zero, the display property is set to none so the element disappears from the page layout.

Calling .fadeToggle() on an invisible element (where display:none is set) makes the item visible and fades it back in.

 

Major bug fixes

If you’ve been struggling to make your code work, you’ll be pleased to know that the following issues have been fixed:

• The .width() and .height() of hidden elements are reported correctly (in some situations, previous versions would return negative values). This is likely to be the cause of most 1.4.3 to 1.4.4 update compatibility issues.
• Host and protocol names are now compared case-insensitively when determining whether an Ajax request is local or remote.
• Computed CSS for elements now returns “auto” consistently rather than an empty string.
• A function bound to the document ready event will now fire once (it was firing twice).
• The .removeData() failure has been fixed.
• The attribute not equals selector ([foo!=bar]) now works in Firefox.
• Child (>), next sibling (+), and previous sibling (~) selectors now work when combined with pseudo-selectors (such as :last).
• .show() will not fail if .hide() was initially called on a hidden element.

Links

Grab jQuery 1.4.4 from:

• Uncompressed version (179kB) –
  http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.js
• Minified version (26kB gzipped / 76kB non-gzipped) –
  http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.min.js
• Microsoft CDN –
  http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js
• jQuery 1.4.4 documentation –
  http://api.jquery.com/category/version/1.4.4/

Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta

THE SIMPLEST WAY TO BUILD BUSINESS APPLICATIONS FOR DESKTOP AND CLOUD.
Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta helps you solve specific business needs by enabling you to quickly create professional-quality business applications, regardless of your development skills. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family. Visit this page often to learn more about this exciting product.
Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta will be available on August 23.
You can find introduction to LightSwitch video here.

Microsoft Introduces IIS Express

Developers today build and test ASP.NET sites and applications using one of two web-servers:

• The ASP.NET Development Server that comes built-into Visual Studio
• The IIS Web Server that comes built-into Windows

Both of the above options have their pros and cons, and many ASP.NET developers have told us: “I wish I could have the ease of use of the ASP.NET Development Server, but still have all the power and features of IIS”.  Today I’m happy to announce a new, free option that we are enabling – IIS Express - that combines the best characteristics of both, and which will make it easier to build and run ASP.NET sites and applications.
IIS Express will work with VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, will run on Windows XP and higher systems, does not require an administrator account, and does not require any code changes to use.  You will be able to take advantage of it with all types of ASP.NET applications, and it enables you to develop using a full IIS 7.x feature-set.

How Things Work Today

Before I get into the details of IIS Express, let’s first quickly review how the ASP.NET Development Server and IIS options work today.

ASP.NET Development Server

Visual Studio’s built-in ASP.NET Development Server (also known as “Cassini”) has the benefit of being light-weight and easy to quickly run.  It doesn’t listen on remote ports (which makes it easier to get approved for many corporate security environments), works even when you are running under a non-administrator account, and doesn’t require a separate installation step.

The fact that it is so easy to get running is a huge positive of it – and the reason it is the default web-server used by ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio when you press F5 to run them:

The downside with the ASP.NET Developer Server, though, is that it does not support a full set of web-server features.  For example, it doesn’t support SSL, URL Rewriting Rules (like the SEO URL Rewrite Rules I blogged about here), Custom Security Settings, and other richer features now offered with IIS 7.

IIS Web Server

IIS is the other option developers use when running and testing their applications with Visual Studio.  You can configure a web project within Visual Studio to use IIS by right-clicking on the project and pulling up its properties (and then by clicking on the “Web” tab within the properties window)":

Using IIS as your development server allows you to take full advantage of all web-server features (SSL, URL Rewrite Rules, etc).  IIS is a full-fledged web-server – which means you’ll get an experience closer to what it will work like when you deploy the application on a production server.

The downside with using the IIS option today, though, is that some companies don’t allow full web-servers to be installed on developer machines. IIS also requires administrator account access to setup and debug projects.  Different versions of Windows also support different versions of IIS.  For example, if you are running on Windows XP you have to use the IIS 5.1 web-server that comes with it – which doesn’t support all the new features of IIS 7.x.  Configuring a web project within VS to use IIS also requires some extra installation and configuration steps.

IIS Express – The Best of Both Options

We have been working on a new flavor of IIS 7.x that is optimized for developer scenarios that we are calling “IIS Express”. We think it combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server with the full power of IIS.  Specifically:

• It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 10Mb download and a super quick install)
• It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio
• It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, Media Support, and all other IIS 7.x modules
• It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support
• It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all)
• It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all OS platforms

IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.

VS 2010 Integration

We are enabling IIS Express so that it can be easily used with Visual Studio 2010. You’ll be able to configure VS 2010 to use it instead of the ASP.NET Web Server as the default web-server on ASP.NET Projects.  Like the ASP.NET Development Server today, you won’t need to register a site or virtual directory to use IIS Express. It will support the same usage-model as the ASP.NET Development Server today – just with more feature support.

When you press F5 to run an ASP.NET project, Visual Studio can automatically launch IIS Express and use it to run/debug the application (no extra configuration required).  Like the ASP.NET Web Server, IIS Express will show up in your task-bar tray when running:

You can right-click and click “exit” on the icon above to quickly shutdown IIS Express.  You can also right-click and pull up a list of all sites running with it, as well as the directory location and .NET versions they are running under:

Two cool things to notice above:

1) The “Test Site” we are running, as well as IIS Express itself, live under the c:\users\[username] folder on disk. This enables non-administrator usage of IIS Express and sites – and enables a bunch of scenarios not possible with the full IIS today (including the ability to run IIS Express in both a locked-down enterprise environment as well as a locked-down school shared computer environment).

2) The “Test Site” we are running above using IIS Express supports both HTTP and HTTPS access.  IIS Express automatically installs a “self-signed certificate” and enables URL ACLs and SSL Certificates for ports so that developers (running as non-administrators on a machine) can use SSL without needing to elevate their accounts or setup any additional configuration.  This enables you to configure secure pages within your applications (like Logon forms) for SSL and run/test them at development time just like they’ll work on your real web-server.

IIS 7.x Feature Set

IIS Express is as easy to run and use as the ASP.NET Web Server you are familiar with today.  But because IIS Express is based on the IIS 7x codebase, you have a full web-server feature-set that you can use.  This means you can build and run your applications just they’ll work on a real production web-server.  In addition to scenarios like SSL, you can take advantage of the IIS 7.x URL Rewriter module, Media Extensions, Dynamic Compression, Advanced Logging, Custom Security and other rich modules now available.

In addition to supporting ASP.NET, IIS Express also supports Classic ASP and other file-types and extensions supported by IIS – which also makes it ideal for sites that combine a variety of different technologies.

Summary

IIS Express makes it even easier to build, run and test web applications.  It works with all versions of ASP.NET and supports all ASP.NET application types (including obviously ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications).  Best of all – you do not need to change any code to take advantage of it.  You’ll be able to optionally use it with all your current projects today.

Microsoft WebMatrix

• IIS Developer Express: A lightweight web-server that is simple to setup, free, works with all versions of Windows, and is compatible with the full IIS 7.5.

• SQL Server Compact Edition: A lightweight file-based database that is simple to setup, free, can be embedded within your ASP.NET applications, supports low-cost hosting environments, and enables databases to be optionally migrated to SQL Server.

• ASP.NET “Razor”: A new view-engine option for ASP.NET that enables a code-focused templating syntax optimized around HTML generation.  You can use “Razor” to easily embed VB or C# within HTML.  It’s syntax is easy to write, simple to learn, and works with any text editor.

Microsoft introduces a new lightweight web development tool that also integrates the above technologies, and makes it even easier for people to get started with web development using ASP.NET.  This tool is free, provides core coding and database support, integrates with an open source web application gallery, and includes support to easily publish/deploy sites and applications to web hosting providers.

Microsoft calling this new tool WebMatrix, and the first preview beta of it is now available for download.

What is in WebMatrix?

WebMatrix is a 15MB download (50MB if you don’t have .NET 4 installed) and is quick to install.

The 15MB download includes a lightweight development tool, IIS Express, SQL Compact Edition, and a set of ASP.NET extensions that enable you to build standalone ASP.NET Pages using the new Razor syntax, as well as a set of easy to use database and HTML helpers for performing common web-tasks.  WebMatrix can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.

Note: Razor support within ASP.NET MVC applications is not included in this first beta of WebMatrix – it will instead show up later this month in a separate ASP.NET MVC Preview - which will also include Visual Studio tooling support for it.

For more information please visit http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/06/introducing-webmatrix.aspx

Pinning Projects and Solutions with Visual Studio 2010

Scott Guthrie did a blog post that covers a very small, but still useful, feature of VS 2010 – the ability to “pin” projects and solutions to both the Windows 7 taskbar as well VS 2010 Start Page.

http://bit.ly/cfeIRC

Creating MVC web applications in F#

Here is the nice blog by Tomas Petricek on developing MVC web applications in F# using ASP.NET. http://tomasp.net/blog/fsharp-mvc-web.aspx

jQuery UI 1.8.1 Released

The first maintenance release for jQuery UI 1.8 is out. This update brings a bunch of fixes to Autocomplete and a few fixes to other plugins. For the full list of changes, see the changelog. You can download it here:

Download

File Downloads

• Development Bundle: http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery-ui-1.8.1.zip
• Themes Package: http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery-ui-themes-1.8.1.zip

Google Ajax Libraries API (CDN)

• Uncompressed: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.1/jquery-ui.js

Developing your Data Access Layer with ADO.NET Entity Framework 4

Please visit http://tinyurl.com/37jqqfx for an excellent article by Amirthalingam Prasanna on developing data access layer with ADO.NET entity framework 4.0

Top 10 reasons to go for Visual Studio 2010

Quickly interpret your code: The new code editor makes it easy to zoom in on your code, highlight method references, and overlay powerful features.

Create rich user experiences: Use new visual designers for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight™ to target Windows® 7 and the Web.

Customize Visual Studio to fit your style: Key IDE enhancements–including support for multiple monitors and improved readability–that make the familiar environment even more productive.

Use your existing skills: SharePoint development, including tooling for Web Parts, Lists, Workflows, Events and more, bring great new customized collaboration tools to your company.

MSDN subscriptions: With Visual Studio 2010 MSDN subscriptions, you have access to specified servers and clients for development and test purposes, in addition to all the other MSDN subscription benefits such as support resources, Windows® Azure™ compute hours, learning tools, and high quality information resources.

Database Development Made Easy (Premium): Apply the same life-cycle tools to your database code and your application code. This includes offline development of database schema, use of source code control to persist versioned schema information, participation in Agile methodologies and use of the associated work items.

Identify Test Impact from Code Changes (Premium): Test Impact Analysis provides a list of recommended tests to run after code changes are made. Developers know immediately which tests are impacted by a given change and testers know which tests to run to verify a given build.

Understand Existing Architectures (Ultimate): The Architecture Explorer and UML sequence diagrams help you explore and understand your existing code assets and their inter-dependencies.

IntelliTrace™ Eliminates ‘No Repro’ (Ultimate): Easily step through code that was previously executed on the same or another machine in order to identify what happened during the code execution and significantly cut down on time spent reproducing a bug.

Prototype Ideas Quickly (Ultimate): With Sketch Flow in Expression Studio you can quickly deliver a functioning prototype that looks and feels like handwritten mock-ups.

6 Cool Features of Visual Studio 2010

1 - Generating Sequence Diagrams To Inspect And Document control flow

Another cool feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to generate Sequence diagrams. You may right click inside a method and select “Generate the sequence diagram”  from the pop up menu, to generate the diagram. In this example, you may see that my SubmitOrder method in OrderViewModel class is instantiating an OrderServiceClient, to call AddOrderAsync method inside the same.

2 - Architecture Explorer

A cool addition in VS2010 is the Architecture Explorer (Click View->Architecture Explorer). The Architecture Explorer will provide you a very friendly interface to browse through and navigate to your solution assets. You can right click on an item (Namespace, Class Name, or Class Member etc) and select ‘View Content’ to navigate to the definition as well.

Also, you can export the selected items to a graph document from the Architecture explorer. You can do this by selecting the members, and clicking the ‘Create new graph document’ button (in top left corner) of the Architecture Explorer. Let me export some of the members in my OrderViewModel class, and have a look at the generated graph. You can also use the graph document to understand your code members in a better way, to analyze circular references, un referenced nodes etc (see the image below.)

3 – Code Navigators

Visual Studio 2010 has a number of useful code navigators. A simple yet useful code navigation/identification feature is ‘Highlight Reference’ - you can double click on any member to view the references highlighted, and can navigate across references using the Ctrl + Shift + Up/Down arrows.

Another cool code navigator is the ‘Navigate To’ window. You can use ‘Navigate To’ to search code members quickly when you work with the editor.

You can bring up the “Navigate To” window using the shortcut Ctrl , (press Ctrl and comma). You can search by any term, and you can even search using camel case. See that I’m searching for ‘OV’, to get a list of all code members following the OV convention.

Another cool code navigation feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ‘Call Hierarchy’ window. You may right click any member to bring up the popup menu, to select ‘Find All References’ to bring up the call hierarchy window. So, next time when you change a method, you can have a look at where all you are going to impact. You can also view all overrides of your method, if you have any.

4 – Pinning Data Tips While Debugging

When you are debugging, you can pin variable values, so that they’ll be there for you to see later.

Also, you can even enter comments for a pinned data tip, so that you can view the comment later.

VS 2010 has also got a tone of other Debugger Enhancements, read about them from Scott Gu’s blog if you are interested.

5 - Consume First Development

Visual Studio is so smart that it can stub your classes, members etc on the go, when you type the code. For example, assume that you have a customer class, and you thought it should have a new method while doing something. You can just type the member name (method, property etc), rest your mouse on top of the tiny blue line under your new method to bring up the popup menu.

Click that, and you’ll see VS stubbing the method for you, as shown below. Note that VS has inferred the parameter type.

You can do that with constructors, properties, method overloads etc as well. That is super cool, especially if you are a TDD guy.

6 – Extension Manager for downloading and installing plugins

The Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010 will allow you to download and install cool plug-ins for your VS IDE. You can bring up the extension manager window by clicking Tools->Extension Manager. Extension Manager will connect to Visual Studio 2010 online Extension library, and you can search and find cool plug-ins there.

Once installed, you may also Disable or Uninstall your plug-ins from the extensions manager.

VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)

Scott Guthrie did a blog post that talks about a bunch of small, but really nice, new VS 2010 debugger features: Click here to view.

• Breakpoint Labels
• Importing/Exporting Breakpoints
• Pinned DataTips
• See the Value from Last Debug Session (Great Code Editor Feature)
• Importing/Exporting Pinned DataTips