| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Unifico Load Tested with and without WCF Remoting ... This is rather exciting to me; I just ran a few load tests on Unifico with and without remoting the services with WCF bindings. I knew the application could remote. The concern was how efficient. I created a quick web test that simply goes through the admin, lists the admin lists, performs a filter, edits and saves an item, then logs out. Roughly every action was hit (eh, it's a spike :)). I then setup the bindings and ran a load test remotely and locally (remotely being hosted on 127.0.0.1). | Go |
| Populating a DropDownList in a Telerik RadGrid FromTemplate ... How to fill a DropDownList (or other control) in a RadGrid Edit Template. | Go |
| Telerik ASP.Net RadGrid Event Signature Reference ... A quick reference listing all of the event signatures for the Telerik RadGrid control. | Go |
| ModalPopupExtender to show a MessageBox ... How you can use a ModalPopupExtender to display a MessageBox | Go |
| ASP.Net GridView Event Signature Reference ... A quick reference listing all of the event signatures for the ASP.Net GridView control. | Go |
| Using a RadGrid FormTemplate to edit with Code-Behind Update ... How to update data in code-behind using a Telerik RadGrid FormTemplate. | Go |
| Improved SaveAs() Method on the FileUpload Control ... This extension handles things such as duplicate filenames and on-the-fly directory creation
Previously I showed how to save multiple files of the same name which I have used many times, so much in fact that I figured I would make a universal drop-in extension for it. | Go |
| Simple Dynamic Sorting Headers for GridView using indication arrows ... A simple centralized way to make a nice flipping indicator (arrow) of which way you are sorting on a GridView
When sorting with gridviews, it is nice to have an indicator of which direction you are sorting on which field like the use at Yahoo! Autos. | Go |
| Localization in Asp.Net ... A post about how to localize a single webpage in a masterpage, in a fast and simple way. | Go |
| Folders in ASP.NET 2.0 ... There are seven new folders introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 | Go |
| Page Directives in ASP.NET 2.0 ... Page Directives in ASP.NET 2.0 Assembly,Control,Implements etc... | Go |
| Enable Disable RequiredFieldValidator with Javascript ... Sometimes we need to Enable or Disable validation on client side.For that use ValidatorEnable function in the Asp.net javacsript Script Library.
For that set EnableClientScript property of validator to True. | Go |
| Exporting paging enabled GridView to pdf using iTextSharp ... In my previous post Export GridView to pdf using iTextSharp in ASP.NET , i explained how to write Grid View contents to a PDF file , but this code has some bugs
1. Code doesn't work if paging is enabled in GridView
2. Cloumns become of variable width in PDF documnt as shown in the image below
To fix these problems we need to write code without using xmlTextReader and HtmlParser.
for this we need to create a table in PDF document and then fill the cells of table from GridView
And the new html and codebehind would become like this | Go |
| Optimize asp.net web application ... As title suggests, useful tips to optimize ASP.NET applications. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| ASP.NET Performance Tips | Go |
| Design Gallery : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery and Upcoming View Improvements with the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate ... Today we launched a new ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery on the www.asp.net site. The design gallery hosts free HTML design templates that you can download and easily use with your ASP.NET MVC applications. Included with each design template is a Site.master file, a CSS stylesheet, and optionally a set of images, partials, and helper methods that support them. The gallery allows you to preview each of the designs online, as well as download a .zip version of them that you can extract and integrate into your site. The gallery allows anyone to create and submit new designs under the creative commons license. Visitors to the gallery can vote to provide feedback on them (thumbs up/thumbs down). The most popular designs show up at the top of the gallery. We think this will provide a useful way for developers to more easily create attractive, standards compliant, sites. It will also hopefully encourage folks to create and share designs that can be easily re-used by others. Upcoming View Improvements with the Release Candidate While on the topic of UI, I thought I'd also share a few details about some of the View-related improvements that are coming with the new ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate (RC) build that will be shipping shortly. In addition to bug fixes, the release candidate incorporates a number of view-specific feature additions and community suggestions. Views without Code-Behind Files Based on feedback from a lot of people, we've decided to make a change so that MVC view files by default do not have code-behind files. This change helps to reinforce the purpose of views in a MVC world (which are intended to be purely about rendering and to not contain any non-rendering related code), and for most people eliminates unused files in the project: With the ASP.NET MVC Beta, developers could eliminate the code-behind file by using the CLR syntax for generic types in a view's inherits attribute , but that CLR syntax is (to put it mildly) pretty undiscoverable and hard to use. The ASP.NET MVC team was able to combine a few extensibility features already in ASP.NET to now enable the standard VB/C# language syntax within the inherits attribute with the ASP.NET RC build: One other nice benefit of not using a code-behind file is that you'll now get immediate intellisense when you first add them to the project. With the beta you had to do a build/compile immediately after creating a view in order to get code intellisense within it. The RC makes the workflow of adding and immediately editing a view compile-free and much more seamless. Top-Level Model Property on Views With previous builds of ASP.NET MVC, you accessed the strongly typed model object passed to the view using the ViewData.Model property: The above syntax still works, although now there is also a top-level "Model" property on ViewPage that you can use: This property does the same thing as the previous code sample - its main benefit is that it allows you to write the code a little more concisely. HTML/AJAX Helpers Now Enable Expression Syntax One of the requests a few people have asked for is the ability to use strongly-typed expression syntax (instead of using strings) when referring to the Model when using a View's HTML and AJAX helper objects. With the beta build of ASP.NET MVC this wasn't possible, since the HtmlHelper and AjaxHelper helper classes didn't expose the model type in their signature, and so people had to build helper methods directly off of the ViewPage<TModel> base class in order to achieve this. The ASP.NET MVC RC build introduces new HtmlHelper<TModel> and AjaxHelper<TModel> types that are exposed on the ViewPage<TModel> base class. These types now allow anyone to build strongly-typed HTML and AJAX helper extensions that use expression syntax to refer to the View's model. For example, I could build a (very simple) strongly-typed "TextBox" helper method using | Go |
| Dec 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight/WPF ... I'm flying out later today on a pretty intense business trip (22,000 miles, 5 countries, 3 continents, 1 week, no sleep... :-), so my blog activity over the next week and a half will be pretty light. To keep you busy till I return, here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Geolocation/Geotargeting Reverse IP Lookup Code : Scott Hanselman has a cool sample that demonstrates how to perform IP address lookups on users visiting your site to determine where they are located on the globe (down to the latitude and longitude). Pretty cool stuff. Tracking User Activity : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to track end-user activity when visiting an ASP.NET web site. iTunes Data Grid Skin : Matt Berseth continues his cool series showing off cool new skins you can apply to ASP.NET controls (especially the GridView and DetailsView controls). This post shows off a pretty sweet iTunes like skin. Using ETW to Troubleshoot AppDomain Restarts and other Issues : Tess Ferrandez has another great post that demonstrates how to use the ETW tracing features built-into ASP.NET and Windows to trouble-shoot runtime issues. ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has 6 nice ASP.NET Dynamic Data "How Do I?" videos posted on www.asp.net that you can check out to learn about the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature in .NET 3.5 SP1. A "Many to Many" field template for Dynamic Data : David Ebbo has a great post that talks about how to enable Many To Many scenarios with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. Customizing ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Customizing a Template Field : Laurent Duveau has two nice posts in a series he is doing on using ASP.NET Dynamic Data and customizing the UI generated from it. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Routing : Rachel Appel has a nice post that talks about how to use the new ASP.NET routing features with ASP.NET Dynamic Data to enable customized URLs. Fun with T4 Templates and Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has a cool post on how to use the T4 templating engine built-into Visual Studio to automate ASP.NET Dynamic Data form generation. Using User Controls as Page Templates in Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has another nice post that talks about how to use user controls with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX - Observing Updates to Plain Old JavaScript Objects: Dave Reed has a great blog post about one of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX - support for observing updates on plain old javascript objects. Using the Power of Binding to Animate Changes : Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about the new ASP.NET AJAX binding features coming and how you can use them with jQuery to animate changes. Instantiating Components on template markup : Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about client-side AJAX templating approaches and some of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX. Putting more than one behavior on one element and Getting a Reference to a Behavior : Bertrand Le Roy has two nice articles that talk about how to use the client-side behaviors feature of ASP.NET AJAX. Check/Uncheck all Items in an ASP.NET Checkbox List using jQuery: A nice article by Suprotim Agarwal that shows how to write client-side jQuery code to enable check/uncheck for all items within a checkbox list. ASP.NET MVC How to Setup ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 : Phil Haack has a great post that walks-through how to enable ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 servers (including how to enable it on a hosting server that you can't install anything on). Fluent Route Testing in ASP.NET MVC : Ben Scheirman has a nice post where he blogs about new helper methods he is creating that make it easier to unit test ASP.NET MVC routes using a fluent API. Autocomplete using jQuery, ASP.NET MVC and JSON : Faraz Tabibian has a nice blog sample that demonstrates how to implement an autocomplete t | Go |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control: ... Microsoft recently released a cool new ASP.NET server control - <asp:chart /> - that can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios: Download the free Microsoft Chart Controls Download the VS 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Documentation Visit the Microsoft Chart Control Forum Once installed the <asp:chart/> control shows up under the "Data" tab on the Toolbox, and can be easily declared on any ASP.NET page as a standard server control: <asp:chart /> supports a rich assortment of chart options - including pie, area, range, point, circular, accumulation, data distribution, ajax interactive, doughnut, and more. You can statically declare chart data within the control declaration, or alternatively use data-binding to populate it dynamically. At runtime the server control generates an image (for example a .PNG file) that is referenced from the client HTML of the page using a <img/> element output by the <asp:chart/> control. The server control supports the ability to cache the chart image, as well as save it on disk for persistent scenarios. It does not require any other server software to be installed, and will work with any standard ASP.NET page. To get a sense of how to use the <asp:chart /> control I recommend downloading the Microsoft Chart Controls Sample Project . This includes over 200 ASP.NET sample pages that you can run locally. Just open the web project in VS 2008 and hit run to see them in action - you can then open the .aspx source of each to see how they are implemented. The below example (under Chart Types->Line Charts->3D Line and Curve Charts) demonstrates how to perform Line, Spline and StepLine charting: The below example (under Chart Types->Pie and Doughnut Charts) demonstrates a variety of pie and 3D doughnut options: The below example (under Chart Types->Advanced Financial Charts) demonstrates some graph charts: In addition to the above samples, you can download the Microsoft Chart Control Documentation or ask questions on the Chart Controls Forum to learn more. This should provide a useful (and free) addition to your standard ASP.NET toolkit of functionality, and enable you to easily add richer visualization and data workflow scenarios to your ASP.NET applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 ... Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery . Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use. Steps to Enable jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 To enable intellisense completion for jQuery within VS you'll want to follow three steps: Step 1: Install VS 2008 SP1 VS 2008 SP1 adds richer JavaScript intellisense support to Visual Studio, and adds code completion support for a broad range of JavaScript libraries. You can download VS 2008 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 here . Step 2: Install VS 2008 Patch KB958502 to Support "-vsdoc.js" Intellisense Files Two weeks ago we shipped a patch that you can apply to VS 2008 SP1 and VWD 2008 Express SP1 that causes Visual Studio to check for the presence of an optional "-vsdoc.js" file when a JavaScript library is referenced, and if present to use this to drive the JavaScript intellisense engine. These annotated "-vsdoc.js" files can include XML comments that provide help documentation for JavaScript methods, as well as additional code intellisense hints for dynamic JavaScript signatures that cannot automatically be inferred. You can learn more about this patch here . You can download it for free here . Step 3: Download the jQuery-vsdoc.js file We've worked with the jQuery team to put together a jQuery-vsdoc.js file that provides help comments and support for JavaScript intellisense on chained jQuery selector methods. You can download both jQuery and the jQuery-vsdoc file from the official download page on the jQuery.com site: Save the jquery-vsdoc.js file next to your jquery.js file in your project (and make sure its naming prefix matches the jquery file name): You can then reference the standard jquery file with an html <script/> element like so: Or alternatively reference it using the <asp:scriptmanager/> control, or by adding a /// <reference/> comment at the top of a standalone .js file. When you do this VS will now look for a -vsdoc.js file in the same directory as the script file you are referencing, and if found will use it for help and intellisense. The annotated For example, we could use jQuery to make a JSON based get request, and get intellisense for the method (hanging off of $.): As well as help/intellisense for the $.getJSON() method's parameters: The intellisense will continue to work if you nest a callback function within the method call. For example, we might want to iterate over each JSON object returned from the server: And for each of the items we could execute another nested callback function: We could use the each callback function to dynamically append a new image to a list (the image src attribute will point to the URL of the returned JSON media image): And on each dynamically created image we could wire-up a click event handler so that when it is pressed it will disappear via an animation: Notice how the jQuery intellisense works cleanly at each level of our code. JavaScript Intellisense Tips and Tricks Jeff King from the Web Tools team wrote up a great post earlier this week that answers a number of common questions about how JavaScript intellisense works with VS 2008. I highly recommend reading it. One trick he talks about which I'll show here is a technique you can use when you want to have JavaScript intellisense work within user-controls/partials (.ascx files). Often you don't want to include a JavaScript library <script src=""/> reference within these files, and instead have this live on the master page or content page the user control is used within. The problem of course when you do this is that by default VS has no way of knowing that this script is available within the user control - and so won't provide intellisense of it for you | Go |
| Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 ... We shipped Silverlight 2 last month. Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed. Silverlight 2 was a major release, and delivered an impressive set of cross-browser, cross-platform functionality for Media and Rich Internet Application experiences. It has been great watching new sites launch using it. Media Experiences Silverlight 2 enables the highest quality video on the web, and delivers it with the lowest TCO of any media platform. One of the capabilities built-into Silverlight 2 is its support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables video to be delivered at multiple bitrates (for example: 400Kbits, 800Kbits, 1.5Mbits, 2Mbits) with Silverlight dynamically choosing the optimal bitrate to use depending on the network bandwidth and CPU capability of the client (it can also automatically switch bitrates seamlessly if conditions change later). Silverlight's adaptive streaming support is extensible. Move Networks (who helped pioneer the concept of adaptive streaming) have already integrated their adaptive streaming solution with Silverlight. Silverlight 2 and Move were used to stream the Democratic National Convention live on the web this summer. Last month we announced that Microsoft will be adding adaptive streaming support as a free feature of our IIS7 web-server. IIS Smooth Streaming will provide an integrated way to deliver HD quality adaptive video over the web. Visit Akamai's www.smoothhd.com site to see some awesome examples of Silverlight 2 and IIS Smooth Streaming in action (with adaptive streaming up to 2.5Mbits). The NBC Olympics site used Silverlight 2 to serve more than 3,500 hours of live and on-demand Olympic coverage to over 60 million unique visitors this summer. Visitors to the site watched an average of 27 minutes of video - which is stunningly high for online video. The site used the new Silverlight adaptive streaming capability to support 1.5Mbit bitrates - which helped deliver an awesome video experience: In addition to powering the Olympics experience in the US, Silverlight was also used in France (by FranceTV ), the Netherlands (by NOS ), Russia (by Sportbox.ru ) and Italy (by RAI ). In addition to video quality, a big reason behind these broadcasters decision to use Silverlight was the TCO and streaming cost difference Silverlight provided. In the August 2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine (a Dutch publication) a NOS representative reported that they were able to serve 100,000 concurrent users using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media Servers, whereas it would have required 270 servers if they had used Flash Media Servers. Over the last month we've seen several major new deployments of Silverlight for media scenarios. For example: CBS College Sports is now using Silverlight to stream NCAA events from its 170 partner colleges and university. Blockbuster is replacing Flash with Silverlight for its MovieLink application. And Netflix two weeks ago rolled out its new Instant Watch service using Silverlight. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Experiences Silverlight 2 delivers a cross-browser, cross-platform subset of the .NET Framework, and enables developers to build Rich Internet Applications. Developers can use either VS 2008 or the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects, and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment. Designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the same projects and use a creative tool to sculpt and create rich user experiences. I recently blogged about the nice dev | Go |
| Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 ... Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications. One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt and create optimal user experience designs. The WPF UI framework shipped in Silverlight further enables a great designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts like layout management, controls, styles, templates, and resources - which help avoid scenarios where designers and developers end up tripping over each other when integrating functionality, behavior and expressive design. Silverlight 2 Twitter Sample Last month I posted an in-depth blog tutorial on how to build a Silverlight 2 Digg application which you can read here . This tutorial was aimed primarily at developers, and focused on introducing the fundamental programming concepts involved when building a Silverlight 2 application. Today Celso Gomes and Peter Blois posted a cool 10 minute video tutorial that shows off using Expression Blend to stylize a Silverlight 2 Twitter Messenger application. You can watch the video here . You can download the source code for the completed Silverlight Twitter application here . The video does a nice job demonstrating how designers can re-style a Silverlight application without having to mess with the code behind it. In the process it shows some of the power and capability that Expression Blend 2 provides to build really rich user experiences. Celso starts with a developer version of the application, and then customizes and sculpts the UI to have a fun twitter character theme: The Application Model The Silverlight Twitter client is hosted within an ASP.NET server application that exposes a web service that enables the Silverlight Twitter application to communicate to the Twitter service (since Twitter does not allow direct access from client applications). Communication between the Silverlight client and the ASP.NET web server is done using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The client application uses a Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern (also known as the Model-View-ViewModel pattern) which is commonly used in large WPF applications. Even though this is a fairly simple application they wanted to take advantage of the flexibility that MVP allows and allow room for future growth. Maintaining the separation between the visuals and the application logic also enables designers to make fairly complex visual changes without impacting the basic application flow. The video goes through some examples of the styling flexibility this architecture facilitates. The Styling Process In the video, Celso highlights how Resources can help designers quickly change colors. A common Brush Resource, for example, can be used to change the color of all the text elements in the application: Celso shows how easy is to create new User Controls from graphics using Expression Blend 2 SP1 (just select multiple elements in the designer, right-click, and choose the "Make Control" menu option): And also how to create new states inside this new User Control (using the Visual State Manager feature - which is also now supported with WPF), to animate the bird (fly, blink, etc...) Celso also shows how to create animations for each state, changing advanced properties like Key Spline curves, and Repeat Behavior: He also shows how to create custom buttons from drawings (which can come from XAML or any other design tool like Photoshop or Illustrator). All the states of a Button Control are available out of the box. Expression Blend also enables you to easily change complex controls like List Boxes. Designers have acce | Go |
| Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF ... Last week was our big PDC conference, and I've been busy catching up back at work this week. I'm hoping to publish a bunch of new posts soon (including some on the PDC announcements we made). Until then, here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos : Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1. Download Hotfix: False C# Compilation Errors for ASP.NET Code Behind Files with VS 2008 SP1 : The C# team added support for live semantic errors with background compilation in VS 2008 SP1. There were a few cases where this caused false errors to be shown with ASP.NET Web site projects. You can fix these either by disabling live semantic errors (tools->options allows you to disable this), or by downloading a recent hotfix patch which is now public. Omar Khan has a useful blog post with more details on it. Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13 : Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles. This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database. For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos . ASP.NET Patterns Developers Should Know : Alex Homer from the Patterns and Practices (PAG) team at Microsoft has a nice article that introduces a number of common design patterns (MVC and MVP, Repository, Singleton, etc) and how you can apply them within ASP.NET applications. If you are interested in learning more about pattern based development I also highly recommend reading the Head First Design Patterns book (which has more than 250 positive reviews on Amazon). ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008 : Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery. Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today. ASP.NET and jQuery : Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free. Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation. jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2 : Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery. Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial. ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples. Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX : Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution. ASP.NET MVC Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC. This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work). Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC : Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC. I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms. Phil cove | Go |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Save Changes on Close of Browser or when exiting the page. ... This article describes on how you can implement the functionality of saving changes on close of the browser or navigating away from the current web application. It also discusses on various ways that the user can exit the page how data be saved on those events. | Go |
| Caching Data During the Lifespan of a Request ... Monthly tip #1: Scott Mitchell shows how to use caching data during the lifespan of a request | Go |
| Exploring the Global.asax file in ASP.NET ... Have you ever felt the need of writing logic at the application level; precisely a location or a file where you could handle events or errors at the application level? Well if yes, then enter the Global.asax. Using this file, you can define event handlers with application-wide or session-wide scope. In this article, we will explore the application and session level events exposed in the Global.asax file and how we can utilize these events in our applications. | Go |
| Error Logging using ASP.NET 2.0 ... Errors and failures may occur during development and operation of a website. ASP.NET 2.0 provides tracing, instrumentation and error handling mechanisms to detect and fix issues in an application. In this article, we will adopt a simple mechanism to log errors and exceptions in our website. | Go |
| Search records in GridView and highlight result using C sharp ASP .NET and AJAX ... In this example i am searching records of gridview and highlighting the results based on search criteria user enter in textbox ,
This example is using AJAX and C# asp.NET | Go |
| Search within records in GridView with searchbox in footer and highlight results using AJAX and C# ASP.NET ... In this example i am populating gridview without using sqlDataSource but by creating Sqlconnection and SqlCommand, i've put a textbox for text to search in footer of gridview using footer template , and the search results are highlighted using regular expression, i m using AJAX for partial postback and update progress template to show search progress | Go |
| Search Engine Optimization - Moving View State to the bottom of the page ... One of the greatest problems when trying to optimize an ASP.NET page to be more search engine friendly is the view state hidden field. Most search engines give more score to the content of the firsts thousands of bytes of the document so if your first 2 KB or more are view state junk your pages are penalized. This article explains how to avoid that without making replacements in the resulting HTML. | Go |
| Creating a Custom View Engine in ASP.NET MVC ... ASP.NET is an awesome web development platform that many developers wouldn't ever want to part with. However, if given the option, there are definitely parts of the package that you may want to swap out. This article will show you how easy it can be to break away from the "inline-ASP" or "Web Forms" world, and delve into your own custom ViewEngine. | Go |
| Using Filter Expressions with an SQL Data Source in ASP.NET VB 2008 ... This article describes the use of filter expressions in junction with an SQL Data Source. | Go |
| Creating an ASP.NET GridView Custom Field of type DropDownList ... Sometimes, you need to use a DropDownList in a GridView in a way to see the text of fields and save values in to your database. Here, we have extended the “BoundField” class and added features to create a column type of “DropDownList”. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| How to: Use TreeView in current navigation in SharePoint ... This article shows how to use the ASP.NET TreeView control in SharePoint | Go |
| Convert aspx pages to pdf ... This article show how to render an aspx page as pdf to the client | Go |
| Adding javascript and css during an Ajax Partial Postback ... This article will show how to inject javascript and css into an ajax partial postback response | Go |
| Creating a DotNetNuke Module with Custom Permissions ... Tutorial on how to add custom permissions to a module's settings | Go |
| Load automatically the references of a script ... It is a framework for managing your and third-part JavaScript? libraries. It will make you easier to import any script library (your or third-part) without injecting any dirty code. For that, you just need to configure some info in a configuration file. | Go |
| Custom controls in ASP.NET MVC ... Control library for rendering custom HTML in ASP.NET MVC applications | Go |
| SQLite membership, profile, role, personalization providers ... This is a SQLite based Profile,Membership,Role,Personalization Providers written in C# | Go |
| WSS Event Calendar Listing Web Part ... Displays SharePoint events (or any calendar list) in a compact widget style calendar | Go |
| Handle multiple client callbacks in ASP.NET ... A smart way to handle multiple client callbacks in ASP.NET pages and controls. | Go |
| .NET 2.0 REST service ... A working implementation of a REST service in .NET fx 2.0 | Go |
| DayPilot Scheduler Control for ASP.NET ... Flexible open-source scheduler control (resource booking, project management, timeline and free/busy visualization). | Go |
| Using Oracle Stored Procedures in SqlDataSource Select command ... How to use Oracle (and other non Microsoft) SP in SqlDataSource Select command | Go |
| N-Tier development with ASP.NET MVC, WCF & LINQ ... This article is presenting a demo bugtracking application build on ASP.NET MVC, WCF & LINQ to SQL | Go |
| The Silverlight homepage great navigation bar only with javascript ... Building a nice animation bar for your website with javascript & script.aculo.us | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| How to: Use TreeView in current navigation in SharePoint ... This article shows how to use the ASP.NET TreeView control in SharePoint... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Just Released: Validation Application Block Hands-On Lab ... Reposting Grigoris announcement in case you missed it: Heres a gift for the New Years. We have produced a new hands-on lab on validation with Enterprise Library. It contains 13 exercises that walk you through capabilities of the Validation Application Block in various application contexts: The first 11 deal with a Windows Forms data processing application that takes the information entered by the user to populate and process business entities. The Validation Application Block is used to validate the created business objects before processing them in gradually more sophisticated ways. Starting with Lab 7, the Windows Forms validationintegration feature is used to directly validate the input for the form's controls. Labs 8 through 11 deal with the extensibility of the application block. Lab 12 shows how to use the ASP.NET validation-integration feature of the application block to validate the ASP.NET control's values, using a Web forms version of the simple data entry application from the previous labs. Finally, for Lab 13, the ASP.NET application works as a front-end for a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service while the WCF validationintegration feature of the application block is used to declaratively validate the service parameters on the server side. The lab instructions are available as a CHM for easy navigation and as a PDF for printing. There are two ways you can complete this lab set: you can manually complete it from start-to-finish or you can use the starter solutions to complete only the labs you want to. By using the provided starter solutions, you can complete any of the labs in the order you prefer. Download Validation HOL Next up is our new Interception hands-on lab. You may expect to see it released in January. Thanks to the EntLib team for keeping the good stuff coming! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Some interesting links for ASP.NET ... Its been a while since I have done any technical stuff as I have been on holidays, relaxing, and generally a lot of nothing. Certainly nothing technical related and have really enjoyed spending time with friends and family. Over this period, Wally has produced some good material around ASP.NET which I feel obligated to share with you.. (ok, so maybe Wally coerced me a bit.) Firstly, Wally has done a new ASP.NET Podcast: ASP.NET Podcast Show #134 - General Thoughts on Windows Azure - Audio only Some good discussion around Cloud computing and Windows Azure in there. Also, Wally has produced an e-Book on some of the ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 features and its located here . Go check em out. Make Wally a happy Wally . Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Introduction to HealthVault Development #2: Hello World ... In this post, well create an account on the HealthVault system, open up the HelloWorld sample application, and verify that it works on our system.
There are two live HealthVault platforms.
A developer platform at http://www.healthvault-ppe.com . This platform is intended to store test data rather than real consumer data, and is the one that should be used to develop an application. When an application is all done, there is a process to deploy (aka go live) with the application, and it will then be able to run against
The consumer platform (which we sometimes confusingly refer to as the live platform) lives at http://www.healthvault.com .
All of our tutorial examples will be talking to the developer platform.
Examine the source code
Start Visual Studio, then open the HelloWorld application at C:\Program Files\Microsoft HealthVault\SDK\DotNet\WebSamples\HelloWorld\website.
In the solution explorer, expand Default.aspx and double-click on default.aspx.cs. This shows the code for the main page. Notice that the page class is derived from HealthServicePage that class handles the initial communication handshake between your application and HealthVault, sending the user to the right page to log into the system, etc. That all happens behind the scenes before the Page_Load handler is called.
Open web.config, and browse through it.
ApplicationId specifies a GUID that uniquely identifies a specific application to the platform. ShellUrl and HealthServiceUrl define which instance of the platform to talk to.
Theres also a proxy setting at the end of the file if you are running on a network with a proxy server, you will need to change this so that the application can get outside the firewall.
Run the application
Hit <F5> to start the program in the debugger.
That will build the solution, start up the asp.net development web server, and start debugging default.aspx. A browser session will open up, and youll find yourself on the login page for the HelloWorld application.
All authentication and authorization in HealthVault applications is performed by a set of web pages that live on the HealthVault server. These web pages are collectively known as the HealthVault Shell.
When you ran the application, the startup code in HelloWorld realized that it didnt know who the current user was, and redirected off to the appropriate HealthVault shell page.
At this point, you will need to create a test HealthVault account. For authentication, you can either use Windows live or Live ID. If you need to create an authentication account and for test purposes its probably a good idea not to use an account you use for something else go do that now.
Once youve created that account, enter the credentials on the login screen. You will be prompted to create a HealthVault account, and then (when you click continue), will be prompted to authorize the Hello World application to access the information in your record.
Before an application can run against the HealthVault platform, it must be configured on that platform. That configuration stores some descriptive information about the application (name, etc.), and also the precise data type access that the application is required. For example, an application that tracks a persons weight might need to be able to store and retrieve weight measurements, but only read height measurements.
The authorization page that you are currently looking at details this information for the user, who can then make a decision about whether to grant the application that access. This page is atypical because the Hello World application asks for access to all types to make things more convenient, but real applications will only specify the subset of access required.
Choose approve and continue, and you will be redirected back to a page on your system.
This will be a page that says Server error in /website application. If you dig a little more, in the exception text you will find:
SecurityException: | Go |
| FIX: Error message when you try to apply a theme to an ASP.NET 2.0 Web page that contains a control that has the ToolboxBitmap attribute defined: ""GDI+ is not properly initialized (internal GDI+ error)"" ... 954316 ... FIX: Error message when you try to apply a theme to an ASP.NET 2.0 Web page that contains a control that has the ToolboxBitmap attribute defined: "GDI+ is not properly initialized (internal GDI+ error)"This RSS feed provided by kbAlerz.com.Visit kbAlertz.com to
subscribe. It's 100% free and you'll be able to recieve e-mail or RSS updates for the technologies you pick
from the Microsoft Knowledge Base.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Custom controls in ASP.NET MVC ... Control library for rendering custom HTML in ASP.NET MVC applications... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Getting Started with Web Slices for Internet Explorer 8 ... What is a Web Slice? One of the most interesting features in Internet Explorer 8 is the ability to subscribe to information you frequently check on a website. This is called a web slice (). I find myself frequently checking sports scores and news on ESPN , weather on the Weather Channel , stocks at various online sites (and searches), and auctions at eBay . Now these sites could easily serve content without me having to visit the site. If you have Internet Explorer 8 installed, you can visit a website such as msn.com to see what a Web Slice looks like to the end user. Ive attached two screenshots below to show how one would subscribe to a webslice: Notice in the top image, theres a green box around the center news item. This is web slice content that will be displayed. You can subscribe by clicking the green icon or by clicking the feed with the green icon under the Feeds menu item shown in the second image. After we subscribe, we can then see the content from any instance of Internet Explorer by clicking on the web slice: Building Our Own Web Slices So, now that you understand what a web slice is, youre probably thinking its really difficult to create one, right? Not exactly. In fact, web slices are quite easy to build and they are independent on the language you are using for your web site or web application. I wanted to see how difficult it was for myself, so I created a basic HTML page with the two necessary attributes: a parent element with hslice specified as the value of the class attribute and a sub-element with entry-title specified as the value of the class attribute. I also added a third element and attribute to my source, which ended up like this: <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
< html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
< head >
< title > My First Web Slice</ title >
</ head >
< body >
< div class ="hslice" id ="firstSlice">
< h3 class ="entry-title"> My First Web Slice</ h3 >
< div class ="entry-content">
The content of my first Web Slice would go here. For now,
because I'm boring, nothing will be placed here. Too bad.
</ div >
</ div >
</ body >
</ html >
In the browser, it looks like this:
As a Web Slice, it looks like this:
Thats It?
Of course not! Theres tons of options when building Web Slices such as specifying alternative update sources, the ttl (time to live) value for the content, and more! For a more in depth look, be sure to check out the Internet Explorer 8 Web Slice overview and tutorials found on the MSDN website.
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Practical ASP.NET: Supporting Routing ... Want to make life easier for your users? NET 3.5 SP1's routing technology has some extra features to let you do just that.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Updates to the TextBox Word / Character Counter Control ... When storing user-supplied text data into a database, it is essential that the length of the user's input does not exceed the size of the corresponding
database table field. To ensure that a user's input is within the legal bounds, you can: set the TextBox control's MaxLength property (although
this does not work for multi-line textboxes); use a validation control, such as my TextBoxLengthValidator
control or a RegularExpressionValidator; use server-side code to check the Length property of the string before storing it in the database;
or some combination of the above. The problem with these solutions is that they are not very interactive. The user doesn't know how close she is to
hitting the maximum number of characters.
In October 2007 I created a custom ASP.NET server control that uses JavaScript to interactively display the number of characters and/or words a user
has typed into a textbox, and wrote about it in an article titled Creating a TextBox
Word / Character Counter Control . In the TextBoxCounter control's initial implementation is simply reported how many words or characters the user
had entered. Because this control is most useful in scenarios where there is a limit to the number of characters or words allowed, a natural enhancement
would be to allow the page developer to specify a maximum number of characters or words allowed. With this information, the control could be updated
to show how many characters or words remain. Moreover, the appearance of the TextBoxCounter could be modified based on how close the user was to reaching
the word or character limit.
Recently, 4Guys reader David Dude implemented these future enhancements and shared his code changes with me; I've since integrated them into the code
base. This article looks at the enhancements to the TextBoxCounter control class and demonstrates how to use them in an ASP.NET page. Read on to learn more!
Read More > Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Updates to the TextBox Word / Character Counter Control ... When storing user-supplied text data into a database, it is essential that the length of the user's input does not exceed the size of the corresponding
database table field. To ensure that a user's input is within the legal bounds, you can: set the TextBox control's MaxLength property (although
this does not work for multi-line textboxes); use a validation control, such as my TextBoxLengthValidator
control or a RegularExpressionValidator; use server-side code to check the Length property of the... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Handle multiple client callbacks in ASP.NET ... A smart way to handle multiple client callbacks in ASP.NET pages and controls.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Handling Formats Based On Url Extension ... Rob pinged me today asking about how to respond to requests using different formats based on the extension in the URL. More specifically, hed like to respond with HTML if there is no file extension, but with JSON if the URL ended with .json etc... /home/index > HTML /home/index.json > JSON The first thing I wanted to tackle was writing a custom action invoker that would decide based on whats in the route data, how to format the response. This would allow the developer to simply return... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Free Entity Framework eBook ... Zeeshan Hirani has written a 500 pages book about the Entity Framework and has released it as a free eBook. Wow!
http://weblogs.asp.net/zeeshanhirani/archive/2008/12/18/my-christmas-present-to-the-entity-framework-community.aspx#comments... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Trimming Items in a String Array ... When you use a For Each loop to iterate through a String Array and perform some action with each item, the change doesn't affect the String Array itself.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Display Summary in the Footer of the GridView Control ... After getting information from a database, you may also want summary information about the data (totals, averages, counts, etc.).
Note: If the GridView has more than one page, only the data on the current page can be summarized using this technique.
This Example uses the OrderDetails table from the NorthWind database.
ASP code:
< asp : GridView ID ="GridView1" runat ="server" AutoGenerateColumns ="False" DataKeyNames ="OrderID,ProductID" DataSourceID ="SqlDataSource1" ondatabinding ="GridView1_DataBinding" ondatabound ="GridView1_DataBound" onrowdatabound ="GridView1_RowDataBound"> < Columns > < asp : BoundField DataField ="OrderID" HeaderText ="OrderID" ReadOnly ="True" SortExpression ="OrderID" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="ProductID" HeaderText ="ProductID" ReadOnly ="True" SortExpression ="ProductID" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="UnitPrice" HeaderText ="UnitPrice" SortExpression ="UnitPrice" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="Quantity" HeaderText ="Quantity" SortExpression ="Quantity" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="Discount" HeaderText ="Discount" SortExpression ="Discount" /> </ Columns > </ asp : GridView >
C# Code:
private Decimal OrderTotal; // holds total price of order // ---- the grid is about to start getting data...initialize protected void GridView1_DataBinding(object sender, EventArgs e) { OrderTotal = 0.0M; } // ---- Each row is data bound ------------------------------ protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType .DataRow) { DataRowView DRV = e.Row.DataItem as DataRowView ; // price is in column 2 // quantity is in column 3 Decimal Price = (Decimal )DRV.Row.ItemArray[2]; short Quantity = (short )DRV.Row.ItemArray[3]; Decimal RowTotal = Price * Quantity; OrderTotal += RowTotal; } } // ---- The grid is done getting data, show the Order Total -------- protected void GridView1_DataBound(object sender, EventArgs e) { LabelOrderTotal.Text = OrderTotal.ToString("C" ); } Hope this helps Good Luck | Go |
| Public download link for Windows 7! ... I just found the download link for Windows 7 on the Windows 7 site , it is hidden with css. :-) Good job, Microsoft! ;-) | Go |
| Control Output Caching and RegisterClientScriptInclude ... Always remember that if you are using Control output caching, RegisterClientScriptInclude will NOT run if the used control is returning a cached version. This also goes for any controls (user or custom) nested within your ascx. The workaround? You need to add the <script> tage manually in the markup, or, if you want to have the <script> in the header, put it into your aspx or master page. Just a heads up - joel | Go |
| Enabling ASP Classic error messages in IIS7 and Windows Web Server 2008 ... I recently moved my asp classic code from my windows 2000 web server to my windows 2008 web server. But alas, error messages are turned off by default. I got a whole lot of blank pages with grinding hour glasses.
To turn back on the error messages, I found two invaluable posts on the web:
The first post covered about everything I needed:
ASP Detailed Error Messages . From this post, these are the three things that are required for turning on error messages. Most developers will likely already have the first step done.
"Turn off HTTP Friendly Errors in your web browser.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294807
To revert back to IIS6- behavior, simply run the following command:%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:asp -scriptErrorSentToBrowser:true
You also have to configure IIS custom-error to allow detailed errors to be sent to remote clients.%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/httpErrors -errorMode:Detailed (default is DetailedLocalOnly). "
I wanted to see if there was a GUI method of doing the above two commands, and found a screenshot for scriptErrorSentToBrowser in this second post.
I couldn't find a GUI method of doing the errorMode, and you'll notice that AnilR recommends "Note that you would never want to do the last step on a production server." If anyone knows where this can be setup via the GUI, please let us know.
The second post lists Tips for Classic ASP Developers . Scroll down to the section on "Script errors no longer shown in browser by default." There you'll see screenshots of how to set the "scriptErrorSentToBrowser" setting via the GUI. This second post doesn't mention the "errorMode" but I found that doing the first command without the errorMode command was useless. I had to have the second command before messages were sent to the screen.
You may also wish to look at the next section on preventing errors due to the "Parents paths disabled by default" setting.
I also should mention that you may need to run your commands as Administrator, from this post on "Classic ASP: Security is Painful " we read these steps on running as administrator:
"1) Start an elevated command prompt. Right-click the command shell item in the Start-Accessories menu and select "Run as Administrator".
2) Run the following command: %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:asp -scriptErrorSentToBrowser:true"
May your dreams be in ASP.NET and your classic applications magically converted to .NET while you sleep,
Nannette Thacker | Go |
| Windows 7 Beta - Acer AspireOne Performance - OMG! ... I installed Windows 7 Beta on my Acer AspireOne netbook and OMG! It runs in 1/2 Gig of RAM!!! And look at the CPU usage: 1%!!!
And this is on a tiny Acer AspireOne netbook with a Windows Experience Index of 2.2!!! | Go |
| Some interesting links for ASP.NET ... Its been a while since I have done any technical stuff as I have been on holidays, relaxing, and generally a lot of nothing. Certainly nothing technical related and have really enjoyed spending time with friends and family. Over this period, Wally has produced some good material around ASP.NET which I feel obligated to share with you….. (ok, so maybe Wally coerced me a bit….) Firstly, Wally has done a new ASP.NET Podcast: ASP.NET Podcast Show #134 - General Thoughts on Windows Azure - Audio only Some good discussion around Cloud computing and Windows Azure in there. Also, Wally has produced an e-Book on some of the ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 features and its located here . Go check em out. Make Wally a happy Wally . | Go |
| Happy to NOT Be an MVP!!! ... Wait, it's not what you think. This isn't some "sour grapes" post where I bitch and complain about not getting awarded the MVP this year. I'm not tossing Vista out the window for penguin software nor am I going to start abbreviating Microsoft with M$. It was actually my choice.
Receiving the MVP award is a great honor, and one that has to be earned each year. I was very proud of having received it for the past four years and appreciated Microsoft recognizing the support I gave the community. But this past year I've been buried with work in my new job and just didn't have the time to speak and write as much as I should have (as the lack of blog posts here shows). So this year I didn't ask to be renewed, preferring instead to step down and make room for some other more deserving folks like Rob Marshall and Chris Hay .
I want to thank my US MVP Lead Ed Hickey for supporting me all those years as well as Akim Boukhelif for supporting me on this side of the big pond. Best of luck to all of the new MVPs and maybe when my work life settles down I'll once again be worthy of the MVP title. | Go |
| Microsoft strengthens relationship with Facebook ... AllFacebook reports that ‘Microsoft strengthens relationship with Facebook’ . This looks very promising. | Go |
| XAML - Direto ao ponto ! ... 1) O que significa a sigla ?eX tensible A pplication M arkup L anguage
2) O que é ?Um arquivo XML com a extenção .xaml que tem associado um arquivo de code behind.
3) O que não é ?Um substituto do HTML.
4) Como se pronuncia ?Pronuncia-se "zamel"
5) Para que serve ?Definir a UI (camada de apresentação), tanto na WEB, através do Silverlight, quanto no desktop, através do WPF.
6) Por onde começo ?http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752059.aspx
7) Um exemplo ?Ver um xaml na prática é a melhor maneira de compreende-lo, como desenvolvo para Web sugiro um exemplo bem básico de Silverlight 2.0:http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/pages/silverlight-2-end-to-end-tutorial-building-a-digg-search-client.aspx | Go |
| Setting Maximum Failures: Windows 2008 and IIS7 Application Pool Stopped ... In IIS7, when your application pool errors so many times, it will automatically stop the application pool, thus taking your web application off line.
Service Unavailable
HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.
In your system events log, you will also have an error:
'A process serving application pool 'Pool Name' terminated unexpectedly...'
To restart it, go to the application pool in IIS7 and select the stopped pool and restart it.
This can be a real nuisance when you're debugging code and getting a lot of errors. To change the number of allowed failures, go to the application pool for the website you are working on in IIS7. Select it in the application pool list. Select "Advanced Settings" from the Actions panel on the right. Scroll down to Maximum Failures and change the number to a larger number. Mine was 5 by default and below I changed it to 50.
Then when you're done debugging/developing, change it back to a lower number as desired.
This is great because you can create a pool for different applications and only increase this setting on the application that you're working on that is causing the failures. So be sure to assign your "buggy" application to its own pool, rather than having it share a pool with your "behaved" applications.
May your dreams be in ASP.NET!
Nannette Thacker | Go |
