Professional ASP.NET MVC 4

Other Useful NuGet Packages

As mentioned earlier, the lessons learned and the tools we used to build NuGet Gallery could fill a book. The previous sections covered features needed by nearly every web application, such as an admin section, profiling, error logging, and so on.

In this section I'll quickly cover a smattering of useful packages used in NuGet Gallery that aren't necessarily needed by most applications, but which are very useful when you do need them. Each section begins with the command to install the package.

T4MVC

Install-Package T4MVC

T4MVC (http://nuget.org/packages/T4MVC), authored by David Ebbo, installs a T4 template that generates strongly typed helpers for ASP.NET MVC. For example, when you want an action link, instead of writing:

@Html.ActionLink("Delete Book", "Delete", "Books", new { id = Model.Id}, null)

you can write:

@Html.ActionLink("Delete Book", MVC.Books.Delete(Model.Id))

That's pretty handy if you love IntelliSense, as it can provide a list of the available controllers and actions.

WebBackgrounder

Install-Package WebBackgrounder

WebBackgrounder (http://nuget.org/packages/WebBackgrounder) is a package for safely running recurring background tasks in an ASP.NET application. ASP.NET and IIS are free to tear down (that is, stop) your application's AppDomain at any time. There are mechanisms that ASP.NET provides to notify code when this happens. WebBackgrounder takes advantage of this to try and safely run a background timer for running tasks that ...