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I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 30 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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Greatness is far too difficult, too abstract, too daunting. Being good—consistently good—is the real goal, and that takes hard work and discipline. Being good—that's something concrete you can roll up your sleeves and accomplish.

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First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 11/30/2023

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Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 12:23 AM Pacific


  12:21 PM

Here's the first of a couple of tips that are gleaned from the WebMatrix/ASP.NET Razor Beta 2 readme file. But who reads the readme? :-)

Tip: Helpers don't work in Beta 2 until you install them. Helpers like Twitter and Video and so on were broken out into a separate library (package) that you have to explicitly install before you can use them.[1] To do that you use the new package manager in Beta 2.

Say you try to run this code, which seems to be everyone's example of basic helpers:

@Twitter.Search("#WebMatrix", caption: "#WebMatrix", width: 740, height: 150)

Wham! You see something like this:


IOW, you see a "The name xxxx does not exist in the current context" error, where xxxx is the helper you're after.

Here's the process. Create a simple cshtml page (blank is ok). Inside WebMatrix, run it by clicking Run. This starts IIS Express and runs the page under localhost:8080, like this:


In the URL, remove the name of the file and substitute _Admin:


This invokes the package manager, which asks you to create a password:


Do that, and you'll get to the actual manager. There, click the Install button for microsoft-web-helpers 1.0:


When the install finishes, the helpers are installed and you're good to go.

Note that the assembly is installed in the bin folder of the current site, so it's not a global installation. You'll need to do this again in other sites. The package installs aother stuff too, primarily in the App_Data folder, plus a config file:


Hope this helps. More tips coming.

[1] I'm not actually 100% clear on why we did this. If I find out, I'll post about it.

Update Ok, got it. The idea is that by putting the helpers into a separate package, then can rev them outside the normal product release cycle much more easily. Makes sense, I guess.

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