ASP.NET MVC4 and Web API

I will be speaking this evening, March 15 at the WNC .NET Developers Guild in Asheville, NC on ASP.NET MVC4 and Web API. I will also be doing the same presentation on Thursday, March 22 at the Triad Developers Guild in Greensboro, NC and also on Wednesday, April 11 at the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild in Columbia, SC.

Here is my presentation summary:

Microsoft likes big stacks! Look at Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or, better yet, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). With either of these “foundations”, you start out a noob and you come out the other side a freak’in Ph.D in Quantum Physics. It doesn’t have to be that hard! There has to be a better way.

Well, Microsoft has been definitely been going the right direction. If you have followed any of the work on the WCF Web API, then you know how awesome this stuff is. This is its new home but you can still self host just like you could before. We are talking about a Web API that is heavily Convention-Over-Configuration based! Gone are the days of looking through a myriad of documentation as to how to setup your web.config file. Those days are over and you will be surprised at how nice the new stack is.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Good-bye WCF Web API…Hello ASP.NET Web API

With the new beta release of ASP.NET MVC 4, the old WCF Web API has now been moved to ASP.NET. We are still able to use the Web API without any dependence on MVC. You can even self host your Web API to remove even the need for IIS.

I have written a series of posts that cover the WCF Web API asd it is the transportation mechanism that I have chosen for my ORM-less data access framework called, Gofer. I am in the process of porting Gofer over to the ASP.NET Web API and I will have a series of posts that will cover and show the differences between the old and the new. I will also be adding some more advanced posts on using Gofer and taking full advantage of the library.

Finally, with this release, I will be making Gofer open-sourced as well as continue to release it via NuGet and will have SpecFlow tests for you to see the library and how it works.

If you want to make sure you are ready, I recommend you download SpecFlow and NUnit so that you can play with the code.

There is a lot going on right now and plenty of “goodness” to use in your next project, so stay tuned!