While my solution compiles, 80 projects, I started working on ASP.NET MVC CodeTemplates for Spark View Engine. They are available in my GitHub repo. Feel free to fork and extend! http://github.com/detroitpro/spark/tree/master/src/CodeTemplates/

ASP.NET MVC 2 supports Spark! What? hear me out. The release of ASP.NET MVC 2 includes an amazing hidden gem. You see the “Add View/Controller” dialog now takes into account a T4 directive “output extension”. Getting started with Custom CodeTemplates To get started with Custom CodeTemplates check out this excellent article by K. Scott Allen Getting started with Custom CodeTemplates and Spark At the top of your templates add the output extension as shown below. Modify the template to use spark.

ASP.NET MVC 2 was RTM’ed today and with the help of Jay Harris – @jayharris we upgraded our rather large codebase to not only ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM but also a new drop of the Spark View Engine built against the RTM. Since the release of Spark View Engine 1.1 RC a few weeks ago there have been some minor bugs/enhancements identified but no blockers. The update to RTM was nothing more then changing the assembly reference, build number and running the build script. These changes are not yet reflected in on the GitHub source. I’m sure there will be a pull request or Lou – @loudej will...

THIS IS NOT AN OFFICAL RELEASE…YET I spent the evening updating the spark source to support ASP.NET MVC RC/RC2. Well, actually I simply applied the changes that were posted to either the mailing list or codeplex. All the tests pass: Download it here: Binaries: Spark-1.0.1.0-release.zip Source: Spark-1.0.1.0-source.zip This post, hopefully, won’t be up long.

Ok, that might be going a little too far but it sounds like the barrier I wrote about a few weeks ago might be going away. Earlier this evening Phil Haack posted this tweet: Excited to hear this I asked a leading implementation question about honoring the output extension directive in T4 templates. Us old-timer remember the almost year before ASP.NET MVC 1.0, when we had not tooling support inside visual studio. Right before 1.0 was released we got right-click view/controller support and it made a world of difference. I honestly believe that without the GUI integration, that pushed us to use...

ASP.NET MVC has one small hook into Visual Studio, the ability to right click and add views and controllers. This feature is small, hell since I’ve been using spark I almost forgot about it, that is until I started working on a simple administration section. The application has enough entities that “Right Click –> Crud” would make just the right tool. Idea ASP.NET MVC provides customizable code templates for the view/controller content. There are a few really good articles on how to get started. Plan Include the CodeTemplates in my project Change the output extention to .spark...

Outline: Status of using spark in a VB.NET project Bugs from Spark Demo #1 Strongly Typed Views

Most of my work so far this year has been with one client. This client was a Java shop for quite some time and is pretty green to Microsoft. Also, they don’t seem to ever have had real success with building enterprise class systems. That’s not to say that they haven’t wrote very large and very complex systems. They have done it all with either the bare minimum in tooling or a incorrect implementation of the tooling. In fact; one of their primary reasons for moving to .NET was to perform a tooling reset. They decided it was too hard to use technology like OR/M, DI, Messaging, and MVC. The...

Note: This demo is in VB.NET and based on my use of spark on a real project; I can say that this will be the first of a few Spark MVC for VB.NET developers. Spark uses C# in the views; I think its going to be a good way, for me at least, to keep up to speed with both syntax. It seems that bootstrapping Spark in the global.asa (code in general) is not working for namespaces. I’ll have another post early next week about all my next steps but for now just know you need to add your namespaces to a _global.spark This demo is the process of getting running with spark and replacing the webforms...