Ahmadreza's Notes

WEBCAMP was a 2 days event that provides a chance to learn and build projects based on Microsoft Web Platform. WEBCAMPS is held in different cities around the word and I had chance to participate in Sydney WEBCAMP event in 28 and 29 of May 2010. Interesting point is performers of this event in Sydney were Scott Hanselman and James Senior who I really wanted

to be in one of their presentations specially Scott that you’ll never be tired in a conference in case Scott is one of presenters.

This presentation is held on Powerhouse museum in Ultimo.  Seminar star ted at 9:00 and in day one approximately 400 attendees was in event. However, in day 2 number of attendee had dropped sharply to less than half of day one. But that was predictable because day 2 you could participate in lab or build your own application or even participate in a group to develop an application based on what you’ve learned in first day.

Day 1 Contents:

Day 1 started with introduction of Microsoft Web platform installer.

Microsoft Web Platform Installer or Web PI is a free installation application which based on your requirements installs services, frameworks, tools or databases you need to install a specific application. Web PI helps you prevent redundant task which is common in installation different project. Web PI check you system and depending on your machine configuration suggest Framework, Servers, Databases and available applications. By aid of Microsoft Web PI you can install Web application like DotNetNuke or

Umbraco CMS or even Jumla! The good point is some application like Jumla is php based and Web PI know their installation requirements and install selected program based on setting. No need to say that depending of operating system and system Web PI suggest different set of application.

In day 1 James Senior tried to install Umbraco CMS in demo Umbraco CMS with database and other requirements was installed on demo machine.

Good point is Web PI installs on a machine as well as IIS and user can run it repeatedly to configure server and installed application and components.

In day 1 presentation has slides to justify that MVC is not a replacement for Microsoft web solution and MVC is just another approach for web development. ASP.Net MVC is an open source project done by Microsoft and you can find it here.

As the seminar continued one of features of ASP.Net 4.0 was introduced named “ASP.Net Dynamic Data Entities Web Application” Or “ASP.Net Dynamic Data Linq to SQL Web Application”. The first one uses entity framework for data layer but second uses Linq to SQL as data layer.

As far as I remember these two ASP.Net Extension projects was introduced by Visual Studio 2008 SP1 in 2008. Here is some useful videos for creating and customizing Dynamic Data web applications.

http://www.asp.net/dynamicdata

These project types are useful for creating administration pages from scratch. All you need to do is create your database and relations. Create a project type either Entity of Linq to SQL and select entities you want. Suddenly you find that All CRUD (Create/Remove/Update/Delete) of your entities is created in user friendly URL by using “DynamicDataRoute” class.

Following is steps to create an administration web site for Northwind in less than 2 minutes:

1. Create a new web project type Asp.net Dynamic Data Entities Web application.

2. Copy Nothwind Database files (MDF and LDF) in APP_DATA folder.

3. Right click on project and new data item type ADO.Net Entity Data Model.

4. In wizard form select “Generate from database” item.

5. And then select NORTWIND as data connection.

6. Select tables you want to be added to Entity Data Mod and then click finish.

7. Open Global.asax and then remark line starting with DefaultModel change this line as follow.

DefaultModel.RegisterContext(typeof(NorthwindEntities), new ContextConfiguration() { ScaffoldAllTables = true });

8. Press F5 and run the application.

Simple, Easy and beautiful, It’s a good solution for quick data administration generation. And the good thing is all templates are editable and you can change them.