Using RazorJS with MVC3

I've been working on a project where I've managed to accumulate 1200+ lines of javascript in my View file. There are two reasons for this:

1. Since the application is still in development I don't have to worry about the browser caching JS files if the code is in the View.
2. I often have Url.Action and other snippets of Razor mixed in with my javascript. 

I was just getting to the point where I was ready to move this code to its own .js file but I was worried about how to deal with the Razor that was mixed in. Thanks to John Katsiotis's (aka djsolid) RazorJS project I now have a solution!

Installation is easy, just use Nuget to add RazorJS to your solution in Visual Studio. The command line to do is:

Install-Package RazorJS

By default @Url.Action will not work and you'll get the error:

error CS0103: The name 'Url' does not exist in the current context

To get it to work add the following at the top of your javascript file.

@{
    var Url = new System.Web.Mvc.UrlHelper(System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.RequestContext);
}

If you run into other errors you should be able to use similar workarounds. If you do use other workarounds, let me know and I can add them to this post.

UPDATE: In version 0.4.2 you no longer need this work around for the UrlHelper. Thanks to John for adding this so fast!

WatchedIt - An MVC3, Razor, EF4 Code First Production

One of the features I love about applications like Boxee is it treats the content you're watching like email. Instead of "read" and "unread" it's "watched" and "unwatched". This is great if you don't have a significant other who tends to watch all of your shows before you. ;)

So I decided to make an application I call WatchedIt to track where I left off watching shows. What a perfect opportunity to try out some new technologies! For this project I used the following fairly new technologies:

• MVC 3 Beta
• Entity Frame 4 Code First
• Razor
• HTML 5

So what did I think of the experience? MVC3 is a promising improvement over MVC2 and Web Forms. Outside of a radical paradigm change (like being more dynamic like Ruby) I'd pick MVC3 for my next project without hesitating. It integrated nicely with jQuery by offering ways to produce and consume JSON.

HTML5 gets a big thumbs up! I've already begun using as many features as I can that are backward compatible with older browsers. If you want to know what you can and can't use now, I recommend HTML5 and CSS3 by Brian Hogan.

I really liked Razor! But the lack of intellisense (auto completion, etc) in Visual Studio was a bit painful. Hopefully this will get added soon and it will be my preferred View Engine hands down. It was a little hard to figure out when you don't have to use the @ symbol to prefix code but the error messages were very helpful.
UPDATE 11/9/2010: And 3 hours after posting this, Intellisense has been added in MVC 3 RC!

EF4 Code First didn't go nearly as smooth as the other new features even though I love the concept. The parts that worked are great but it still has a few too many limitations for me to pick it again without hesitation over other options. Some of the limitations:

• I couldn't find a simple, elegant way to do a cascading delete of all child objects when you delete a parent.
• You can't have more then one DbContext share the same database (not a major issue)
• Deploying to production didn't go very smoothly. I had to configure the connection string to use the "sa" account to get the DB created.

Keep in mind these .NET offerings are all fairly new and I think Microsoft is on the right track with all of them.

I've decided to give back to the community and put the source code on GitHub. I'm sure there are some things I could have done better or that didn't follow best practice so if you find something that would have been much easier to do another way let me know. I'd love to hear it.

Some 3rd party libraries that made this application possible:
Elmah - my favorite error logging library
tvdblib - they did an awesome job of wrapping the TVDB API!
TheTVDB - without this DB this application wouldn't be possible. Please consider contributing info and artwork.