I was fortunate enough to attend Microsoft’s MIX conference for the first time this year. I learned a ton, jotted down hundreds of ideas for my projects, and had some valuable discussions with a lot of smart people.

Obviously you have to attend in person to network, but fortunately all the videos and slides are being made available online. Even for attendees this is great for review, but also because you inevitably miss a ton of sessions because of the schedule.

At the very end, I attended a great session by the co-founder and developer of Agile Zen, Nate Kohari. It’s a unique project management web app written in ASP.NET MVC 2 and jQuery.

In this post I’ll go through the controller classes and how to use jQuery and AJAX to update the database with the position (or state) of where each section and item is moved to.

Every section can be dragged and dropped into any of the 4 columns and in any position within that column. This is the reason for both the ColumnNum and SortOrder fields of the Sections table described in part 2.

First we’ll dive into jQuery. Going back to our sortable() call for the sections, we need to add code that fires after an update event. The important thing to note here is that the update event will fire for both the column moving from and to. If moving within the same column, it’ll fire only once.

In this post I’ll go through each of the Views (and the List controller). We already have the three repository classes in the Models folder. Now we need to add three controller classes to the Controllers folder: ListController.cs, SectionController.cs (for categories) and ItemController.cs.

In this part I’ll describe the database structure and create the model classes needed for basic database interaction. To keep things simple, I went with a SQL Server 2005 Express database as it’s free and easy to create within Visual Studio 2008.