Learning by example

It is time for me to learn ASP.NET and AJAX.

Why ASP.NET? Because it is C# and it works well. Because there is a huge MS behind the technology. Because it works well and it is easy to get started with it (there is a Visual Studio Express). Because it is simple.

So to start I went to http://asp.net and started looking at the tutorials. It definitely helps, but you cannot learn programming by reading a book (or a web site). So I fired up VS and created an ASP.NET project.

The first question is whether to use MVC or WebForms:

Since I do believe Scott Hanselman and I am a freak of lower-level and finer control it is MVC for me.

The first steps feel fine, the integration with VS is great: there are actually “Create a view/model/controller” there! However, the problem began when I try to play with AJAX a little bit.

I have started with this tutorial and immediately ran into a problem: what should my partial page to inherit from? No matter what I have tried to do: either “compilation error” or the page “does not implement method” error.
In better cases, I get “unhandled exception”.

In the end, it turned out that when you want to use

Html.RenderPartial("ListContentView", Model);

Your “ListContentView” should be a partial view and not a regular view:

Otherwise, life is not good