MVC3 asp.net 4.0 Entity Framework 4.02 SQLCE 4 and SEO part 2 MVCSitemapProvider

I am currently playing around with the MVC Sitemap provider for my new website bankrutt.se and have discovered the easiest way to create a top menu in MVC3.

The top menu shipped in the default MVC3 template don’t have support for highlighting the selected node in the menu.

This is a must and the easiest way to achieve this is to do the following:

Download the MVC Sitemap provider using GitHub in Visual studio, its important to do this with GitHub because it will install a lot of the configuration and a couple of razor/ascx helper methods.

Edit the Mvc.sitemap file so it corresponds to your web site.

Find the <ul id=menu> </ul> in the _layout.cshtml and replace it with

   @Html.MvcSiteMap().Menu() 

If you would like to have a bread crumb trail you could easily achive this by adding  

<div id="breadCrumbs">@Html.MvcSiteMap().SiteMapPath()</div>

Now to the selected part
You have got a lot of helper files installed under Shared/Display Templates (you can delete all the .ascx if you are running razor)
Open up MenuHelperModel.cshtml
Alter it to look like this

@model MvcSiteMapProvider.Web.Html.Models.MenuHelperModel
@using System.Web.Mvc.Html
@using MvcSiteMapProvider.Web.Html.Models

<ul id="menu">
    @foreach (var node in Model.Nodes) { 

          if (node.IsCurrentNode) { 
             <li class="selected">@Html.DisplayFor(m => node) </li>
             }

        else{
      <li>
        @Html.DisplayFor(m => node) 
            @if (node.Children.Any())
            {
                @Html.DisplayFor(m => node.Children)
            }
        </li>
        }
    }
</ul>

Now your good to go!
You got a nice top menu and a nice bread crumb trail with no effort at all!
Remeber you MUST use GitHub pm Install-Package MvcSiteMapProvider in Visual studio to get this working.