Just finished RSVP'ing for SoCal Code Camp! It will be held on Jan. 26 and 27 at the University of California Fullerton (UCF). Head over to the website (below) and sign up! Hope to see you there!

From the email:

If you haven't already registered at http://www.socalcodecamp.com for the upcoming Rock & Roll Code Camp to be held in Fullerton - why not take a minute to do it now!?!?

We already have 50 sessions and counting. Many of your favorite speakers are returning to provide you with great new content including Kevin McNeish, Paul Sheriff, Daniel Egan, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Mickey Williams, Woody Pewitt, David McCarter and more! Imagine, many of these internationally known speakers frequent conferences like Tech Ed, PDC, MIX, Dev Connections, VSLive and more! And you get to see them talk for FREE!!!!

There are also some budding new speakers that offer great sessions based on their real world experiences in the local community. You could even be one of them - feel free to add more sessions to the site, we have room for more!

The schedule will be posted one week before Code Camp so you can plan your attack!

So I recently picked up a copy of Camtasia Studio (www.techsmith.com) and wanted to give it a shot by creating my first screen cast.

This screen cast is going to show you how to create an MVC application that uses jQuery (http://www.jquery.com/) to do some AJAX calls against a REST url. You should be familiar with jQuery and the MVC framework but I tried to keep it as simple as possible. The screen cast runs for about 25 minutes - Click the image below to start watching.

Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome...

You can download the sample project here: MVCjQueryREST.zip (41.41 kb)

Finally some great news! Scott Gu officialy announced the ASP.NET MVC Framework on his blog. I'm so anxious to get my hands on the framework! If you're not familiar with MVC I would suggest reading Scott's post, he explains it briefly.

However there are some really cool features... for example you can use both MVC and WebForm frameworks. You can also continue to use Master Pages, ASCX controls, <%=%> snippets and plenty more. The MVC framework will not use the existing post-back model, instead you route all end-user interaction to a Controller (no viewstate or page lifecycle - a great approach).

What about ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels? Scott mentions this in his comments:

UpdatePanel does use postback, so you won't use that control directly within a MVC based view.  But there will be a control (and optional helper method) with capabilities very similar to it.  It will invoke an action on a controller and allow you to incrementally update a portion of HTML really easily.  It will enable you to use the ASP.NET AJAX libraries really easily.

Curious to see the "optional helper method."

My biggest frustration has been with the difficulty in mashing JavaScript with ASP.NET WebForm's rendered output. With the MVC Framework it seems like I'll finally have the control I want to use JavaScript frameworks and server-side controls seamlessly.