HTML5 Development For ASP.NET Developers

Wednesday, May 02, 2012 by Kendo UI Team Blog | Comments 21

This week I diverted all available memory from my Mac to my Windows 7 Virtual Machine. I opened up Visual Studio, fired up Camtasia and let the cameras roll. Today marks the first in a long series of posts and screencasts that will eventually be aggregated in a central place with the rest of our documentation. We are pleased to be bringing you a broadly requested topic from top to bottom.

HTML5 Development For ASP.NET Developers

While Kendo UI is a platform agnostic HTML5 web and mobile application development toolkit, chances are that you are working with some sort of server technology - especially if you are doing data rich enterprise development. This series is meant to help ASP.NET Developers (both WebForms and MVC) to know how to incorporate Kendo UI into the platform that they are using today. If you are using WebForms, there is no need for you to switch platforms just to do HTML5 development. WebForms is a robust and extremely mature web platform that is ripe for HTML5 Development.

ASP.NET MVC has gotten a bit more attention lately in the open web community and the HTML5 community at large. It’s widely recognized as a fantastic framework for building rich, RESTful applications and even ships with jQuery and jQuery UI components for developing the interface.

I have broken down the course into several modules. I am going to start at the very beginning to make sure that I don’t throw things at you in later modules that I didn’t cover first. Here is your syllabus for the course:

Hello jQuery

In this module I will do a very brief introduction to jQuery and how we will be using it in later modules. Everyone has heard of jQuery, but if JavaScript is a new and daunting thing for you, this module will show you how to integrate it in with Visual Studio for Intellisense support, debug it in your browser and use it with ASP.NET WebForms. I’ll also leave you with some resources that can turn you into a jQuery expert in 30 days flat.

Hello Services

Who is this Jason guy and why do I need him? Architecting good services is key to HTML5 development and in this section I will go over several strategies for creating services that your UI can consume including WCF, Page Methods, Controller Methods and maybe even some WebAPI if time permits. The goal here is for you to see how you can easily expose your SQL Server data to your UI as JSON, demystify this whole AJAX thing and show you how to use F12 Developer tools in IE to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Hello Kendo UI

This is an introduction to Kendo UI and how it’s different pieces fit together. There will be a strong focus here on not just Kendo UI, but HTML5 itself. There is quite a bit of confusion around what HTML5 is and what it isn’t. While I expect that if you are reading this blog you are somewhat familiar with Kendo UI, this module should put the pieces together and give you a good overall view of the tools that are at your disposal in Kendo UI and a better, more concise understanding of HTML5.

Kendo UI + WebForms

This will be a two part screencast where I dive into creating applications with HTML5 / Kendo UI and ASP.NET WebForms. I’ll wire up to a SQL Server database and we’ll discuss local and server data manipulation as well as how you can integrate Kendo UI directly into your existing WebForms projects today.

Kendo UI + MVC

Similar to the WebForms modules, this will be a two part module which will go through using Kendo UI in depth with ASP.NET MVC. I expect that MVC developers have a better idea of how to get rolling with Kendo UI as much of the abstraction between .NET and the raw web is removed in the MVC pattern.

Final Product

I plan to write a blog post that essentially goes over the exact same content as each video, so if you prefer to consume your content by reading, I’ve got you covered. At the end, I’ll compile all of my learning blog posts into a concise and clear publication for ASP.NET Developers to refer to for not just how to get rolling with Kendo UI, but also with HTML5 in general. I’ll include all of the handy links, tips, tricks and other pieces of awesomeness that I use every day in my HTML5 Development, as well as some workflow tips when using Visual Studio.

The first module, Hello jQuery will post tomorrow right here on the Kendo UI blogs. I will publish a subsequent module each week in the same format.

What Do You Want To See?

If there are things that you would love to see in these screencasts and posts, now is the time to ask! I’m open to anything. I want to create the content that will be most useful for you, so please weigh in with what you would like to see covered.

About the Author
Burke Holland is a web developer living in Nashville, TN. He enjoys working with and meeting developers who are building mobile apps with jQuery / HTML5 and loves to hack on social API's. Burke works for Telerik as a Developer Evangelist focusing on Kendo UI. Burke is @burkeholland on Twitter.

21 Comments

1 Bizmar 02 May 2012
Where is the documentation for this? We need reference guides, like MSDN.

Thanks
2 Dr. YSG 02 May 2012
The dual part to dealing with Rich and Big Data on the server, is the aggragates and filtering in the TableControl in KendoUI. So if you could cover how to do more sophisticated sums, max, counts, etc on group headers, etc. that would be great, and then, how that can also be doing with the DataViz stuff.

Thanks
3 Dr. YSG 02 May 2012
Oh yes, I am not using MVC or WebForms, but straight WCF and JSON, and I find it simple and clear, so I would like you to explain why I want MVC (especially since I can run this outside of IIS and all the mess that goes with IIS).
4 Vesselin Obreshkov 02 May 2012
Definitely want to see more RESTful stuff with JSON - WebAPI, WCF, etc. We're building a JSON API with WebAPI right now and would like to see different interpretations.
5 Bryan 02 May 2012
With a week spread between parts this series will end around the same time as the Q2 release?
6 Dan 02 May 2012
Thank you for developing this series...this is the type of information we have been waiting for. In our case, we have WebForms applications that are built using n-tier (business logic, repository, data layer, etc.) modeled after the Open Access SDK. We have been monitoring Kendo and are very intrigued with the capabilities it provides. However, we have not moved forward because we need to know how to migrate our current WebForms to use HTML5 / Kendo and still use the rest of our existing architecture. In our case, we use a lot of forms in our LOB applications (CRUD). We also have code behind (for example, read a specific record in Page_Load and then display in a form that is an edit only user control). We would like to have your series explain how to update your app to use Kendo and how you handle common tasks we currently handle in code behind. Even better would be to show a Best Practice for how to accomplish this using MVVM so we can learn a better approach to building our applications. One last point: we have to stay with WebForms (meaning no MVC) because we incorporate our user controls into Sitefinity - otherwise we would switch to MVC. Again, looking forward to this series...wish you had more time so you could get more than one per week done.
7 Michael Martinez 02 May 2012

I agree with Dan, a much needed series. I am going full steam ahead with Kendo for MAJOR projects, so the more info the better. If there was a book I would buy it now. I would love a buffet of video tutorials.

Finally, best practices guidelines are paramount.

Thanks !
8 Ben Hayat 02 May 2012
Thank you guys for starting these series. Now KendoUI will begin it's way into million of ASP.Net sites...
..Ben
9 najam 03 May 2012
I am more interested in combination of kendoui+web forms+web api [Restt]

Waiting for your screencasts.
10 tony 03 May 2012
I know you guys are tired of me harping on this, but this is exactly what your PHP developers need to make full use of Kendo UI in our projects. I would suggest a parallel track for these kinds of tutorials. With over 75% and growing of the sites on the web using PHP it would make a lot of sense to make this framework as or more friendly to PHP developers as .net developers.

I know there is a built-in ASP.net clientel for telerik and I understand keeping existing customers happy, but the growth market is PHP, not ASP.net and the stats bear that out. I hope we'll see a lot more effort put into PHP in the coming months.

Thanks for the great work and a great framework!
11 Burke 03 May 2012
Hi all! Thanks for the feedback and I hear you loud and clear. This will help me craft the upcoming modules to suite your needs better as a community.

A couple of things...

1. This series will wrap up around the time of Q2 and will be neatly packaged as a core resource for Q2.

2. I am not going to insinuate that you should or need to move to MVC for HTML5 Development as that is categorically incorrect. I will meet you where you are and discuss how you can do things in WebForms. You can of course switch if you want to, but its not necessary and I want that to be clear.

3. We will revisit other platforms after wrapping this series up. We realize other platforms needs the same love we are giving ASP.NET. We don't want anyone to be left out and that's for sure.

The first module is live and as always, I love feedback!
12 Neil 03 May 2012
Burke,
This is really exciting! I have struggled to figure out how DataSource works with non-Restful web services (json) in performing Inserts/Updates. There are a few gaps in the existing documentation. I look forward to becoming enlightened!
13 Neil 03 May 2012
Burke,
This is really exciting! I have struggled to figure out how DataSource works with non-Restful web services (json) in performing Inserts/Updates. There are a few gaps in the existing documentation. I look forward to becoming enlightened!
14 development services 06 May 2012
good information about asp.net <a href="http://www.ingeniouszone.com">development services</a>
15 Burke 11 May 2012
@Neil

I am going to be focusing a lot on REST during these screencasts because it's actually a more difficult nut to crack, but provides better long-term app architecture.

If you would like, you can email me directly at burke@kendoui.com and we'll work through your issues.
16 Guy..L 11 Jun 2012
Can you update this blog with links to the videos in the series? Or a link to a directory?
17 a 11 Jul 2012
I agree with Dan, a much needed series. I am going full steam ahead with Kendo for MAJOR projects, so the more info the better.
18 Peter 16 Jul 2012
Well this is nice, if there were a way to find the screencasts... like, some kind of links.
19 Eric Lewis 05 Nov 2012
Thanks for sharing information of Kendo UI + MVC and understanding of HTML5 for asp.net developers to better performance.
20 John Holliday 23 Nov 2012
So...where are the actual links?
21 Mike 02 Dec 2012
@John Holliday - When you have Google to find everything you need, Do you still need links. As a .net developer I can share one link with you .NET Code Coverage for .NET Developers http://www.ncover.com/

Thanks

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