I had the fortune to join a cast of heavy hitters at the free DotNetConf live event. My session was a 50 minute primer on SPA that tells a story about what a SPA can do. Javier Lozano and Scott Hanselman hosted the free event through a Google Hangout, which turned out pretty cool. They have now made the videos freely available. You can see my video below. If you are looking to evaluate if SPA is right for you, I think you’ll enjoy this video. If you want more detail on “how” to build a SPA, you can check [...]

Add commanding, change tracking, and activity indicators to your web application when using Knockout and KoLite. KoLite (now v 1.1.0) contains a set of helpers to aid in creating data bound applications using JavaScript and Knockout. KoLite was spawned by some ideas from Hans Fjällemark and I when working on some Knockout applications. The key features are: async command binding command binding activity indicator change detection Get KoLite You can grab the KoLite library on github or grab KoLite on NuGet. New in KoLite 1.1.0 Command binding handler supports binding to native Knockout bindings as well as the Knockout event [...]

If you enjoy developing with Knockout.js, then you’ll be glad to hear that support has been added for Knockout Intellisense in Visual Studio 2012! These features are pretty cool and will save me and other developers from senseless typos. Developers who are newer to Knockout.js will enjoy the intellisense as an easy way to quickly learn the available built-in bindings. For this post I’ll explore these new features by using the new SPA Template included in the same release. You can read more about the SPA Template in my post Inside the ASP.NET SPA Template. The ASP.NET and Visual Web [...]

The Single Page App (SPA) template is now available in the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 (Release Candidate). This SPA template has been updated since its beta release which I blogged about here. Kudos to Mads Kristensen for spearheading this at Microsoft. I’ve been a big fan of SPA and of Mads for a while. I was thrilled to see some of my feedback (from my previous post/review) make it into this template. This post contains a complete walk through of all of the key pieces on the server and client side. What is the Intention of the Template? Since [...]

I’m working on a new course that will help folks get a jump-start on building a SPA. The course’s working title is SPA Fundamentals. I decided to present some of the early demos from this upcoming Pluralsight course at some recent events. These are early prototypes of the main app (titled “Code Camper JumpStart”)  that will be in my course, but they are a great starting point. This post contains the  Single Page Apps presentation I gave at DevConnections (Las Vegas, NV) and Tampa Code Camp (Florida) in October 2012. Thank you to the 600+ people who attended at both [...]

There are a bunch of shiny new toys, including a new Single Page App (SPA) template, inside the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update BUILD Prelease  ( Download link for it is on this page here ) . The original template for SPA made an appearance over a year ago in a preview and was later removed prior to VS 2012 being released. (You may recall Upshot.js was part of the former template before both of their demises) The first run at the former template wasn’t really a template, but rather a specific way to create a SPA. This new template is a template . Kudos to Mads [...]

Last week at Build, Scott Hanselsman and Jon Galloway presented a whirlwind tour of the new features coming to Visual Studio and ASP.NET. These features are meant to be additive to your experience as they will not impede any existing projects, but should help add more value moving forward. What’s the goal? Once a quarter they release some yummy goodies for Visual Studio that you can run with. Download it You can grab the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update BUILD Prelease (gotta love those names at Microsoft) now and they mentioned that the official release (non preview) will be coming in December. [...]

Special thanks to both Scott Guthrie and Pluralsight for pulling together a special promotion that allows you to get a free 1-month subscription to watch both my Knockout / MVVM course and my Single Page Apps with HTML5, ASP.NET Web API, Knockout, and jQuery at no cost!  That’s over 10 hours of material for free! For full details please see Scott Guthrie’s post about the promotion for details about how to sign up and get access to the course. Here is a quick quote I grabbed from Scott’s post: To get access to the course you simply follow @pluralsight and [...]

Saving data is simple, right? What app isn’t complete without some sort of saving mechanism? And while I’m at it, it’s nice to be able to track when changes occur so I can tell if a user can press the save button or even leave the current screen. Which bring me to making my buttons smart enough to know that they are already involved in a asynchronous process, so commanding would be nice. Finally, if I want to save data, it might be a good idea to validate the input on the client (and the server). There are a lot [...]

Interested in building web applications with rich client interaction? My latest Pluralsight course Single Page Apps with HTML5, ASP.NET Web API, Knockout, and jQuery is now available. In this post you can find links to the course, the topics the course covers, a preview video, and a live demo. Live Demo: You can check out a live demo of the Code Camper SPA online. The kind folks at Cytanium are hosting the Code Camper SPA for me. The site is fully functional so go ahead and try it out. I’ll reset the data every now and then Course Description: Single [...]