| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Implementing OpenId with ASP.Net Mvc ... A tutorial on how to get started using OpenId with your ASP.Net Mvc site. | Go |
| .Net Membership Profile Administration Tool ... While looking for a simpler way to manage membership in an application, I decided I'd first have a look at CodePlex as see what it turned up. I was pleasently surprised and encouraged by what I found. I came accross an application called WSAT Membership Administration, which does exactly what I ... | Go |
| Search Engine friendly error handling ... Explains best practices of error handling in ASP.NET web application considering being search engines friendly. | Go |
| Getting Strongly Typed Profile Properties From a Class Library ... Separating your application layers into class libraries offers several advantages, but one of the disadvantages is that you lose access to ASP.NET's dynamically-compiled ProfileCommon class, which provides strong-typing for profile properties. Here's how to regain the advantage of strongly typed profile properties in a class library. | Go |
| Time released content in ASP.NET ... "While working on the PDC2008 website, we had several time-critical updates. There were some announcements that needed to go live on the website at specific times to coincide with other marketing, there were updates to the list of of software being given to attendees that needed to go live right after the keynotes in which they were announced, etc." | Go |
| Fire and Forget Email, Webservices and more in ASP.NET ... Ever want to send an email or make a web service call and not have it slow down the page load process? The author presents a simple method for doing so along with a clear description of what's going on under the hood. | Go |
| Microsoft released free Chart Controls for ASP.NET and Winforms ... Useful links to find the download information about the MS Chart Controls | Go |
| DotNetNuke Installation and Skinning: The basic steps ... A tutorial for getting started with DotNetNuke. | Go |
| Web Based Projects ... Nice blog.... | Go |
| Filter data dispalyed in a DataGridView using BindingSource ... In this article i will show you how to use the BindingSource or the DataView to filter data in a given data grid view. | Go |
| ASP.NET Social Networks - Making Friends - Part 2 ... In the first part of this article we concentrated on two aspects Problem and Design. We started with the Problem, that is, defining what we need to implement the Friends concept, finding and inviting friends to join our network and developing an alert system. We then moved to Design wherein we actually finalized the requirements. And finally we began with the Solution, that is, actually implementing the features. In this part of the article by Andrew Siemer, we will continue with the solution part. | Go |
| ASP.NET Social Networks - Making Friends - Part 1 ... In this article by Andrew Siemer, we will cover the most important aspect of any community site-making friends. We will divide this article in two parts. This part starts with the discussion of Problem, that is, what we need to do to achieve success for the article's topic-finding and inviting friends to your network on a community site. It then moves to Design part where we decide on our requirements, and finally the article reaches Solution part where we begin discussing how to actually implement the features. | Go |
| Free Microsoft Chart Control for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 ... Finally, Microsoft decided to provide a charting component for .NET Framework! It is called Microsoft Chart Control and it is based on Dundas Chart Control version 5.5. The Microsoft Chart Control is available as separate installation for .NET Framework 3.5 and will be included in .NET Framework 4.0. | Go |
| Size does matter ... Crunching JS and CSS files to speed up download time for pages. Beat the bulge! | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| xVal - a validation framework for ASP.NET MVC " Steve Sanderson's blog | Go |
| Alternate way to select ASP.NET server controls using jQuery | Go |
| ASP.NET Performance Tips | 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 |
| Adding multiple client-side event handlers to ASP.NET controls ... An article on using jQuery to attach multiple client side events handlers from code behind to ASP.NET server controls . | Go |
| How to make image thumbnail using ASP.NET(C#) ... This sample code shows you how to make image thumbnail in ASP.NET and C#. | 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. If you have started using Ajax, you may have noticed that during an Ajax postback, only items inside the updatepanel are refreshed. This is known as an Ajax Partial Postback or an Ajax Partial Page Rendering. If you are programatically inserting code such as custom javascript or css for a user control you have inside of an update panel, you may have noticed that the css or javascript was not sent back to the client's browser during the partial postback response. This would apply to new code being sent just in the partial postback response. | Go |
| How to encrypt a query string ? ... Encrypt/Decrypt a query string with 2 lines of code using TSHAK's free Secure String Component | Go |
| Making Asynchronous Calls to WCF Services from ASP.NET ... In this article, we will see how to create a WCF service and then consume it asynchronously using ASP.NET. Asynchronous tasks can be performing using AddOnPreRenderCompleteAsync or RegisterAsyncTask methods of the Page class. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| SharePoint Quick Start FAQ Part III ... SharePoint Quick Start FAQ Part III | Go |
| ASP.NET AJAX support in custom controls ... How to update your ASP.NET custom control to make it work with ASP.NET AJAX correctly. | Go |
| SharePoint Most Viewed Content Web Part ... Create a web part that displays the most viewed content | Go |
| WURFL ASP.NET Implementations ... A comparison of three WURFL ASP.NET Implementations | Go |
| Get Notified When Client Opens Email ... In this article we learn how to create a simple HttpHandler that will notify the sender when the email is opened. | Go |
| Error Handling Customization for ASP.NET UpdatePanel ... How to customize UpdatePanel client side error that is presented to the user. | Go |
| Paging in Grid View using Slider Extender ... This article demonstrates how to implement paging in GridView using Ajax Slider Extender. The Slider Extender has wide range of use. It allows users to choose a finite range of values by upgrading an asp:TextBox to a graphical slider. In this article I will show how Slider Extender helps the GridVie | Go |
| Exploring Session in ASP.Net ... This article describe about session in ASP.Net 2.0 . Different Types of Session , There Configuration . Also describe Session on Web Farm , Load balancer , web garden etc. | Go |
| Configuration Overview :ASP.NET ... This article is all about the configuration of an application and also securing it. | Go |
| SharePoint Page Navigation Web Part ... Web part for users to drop on their pages for navigation accross the site collection. | Go |
| Create a guestbook by using XML serialization ... This article shows an easy way to create a guestbook using ASP.NET and XML serialization. | Go |
| Running a ASP.NET MVC Beta site on IIS 5.1 and 6 ... Running a ASP.NET MVC Beta site on IIS 5.1 and 6 | Go |
| Number Speller COM-ponent ... Component used to convert a numeric value into English/Romanian words in Excel | Go |
| A Sortable XmlDocument Class ... Sort the nodes of XmlDocument by many methods easily | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Time released content in ASP.NET ... While working on the PDC2008 website, we had several time-critical updates. There were some announcements that needed to go live on the website at specific times to coincide with other marketing, there were updates to the list of of software being given to attendees that needed to go live right after the keynotes in which they were announced, etc. While some of the site ran on RSS feeds, on some pages we needed the flexibility of static HTML and CSS. While there were plenty of times where I made... 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 |
| Case Study: Helpdesk Web Application Moves to ASP.NET ... Rewriting an 8 year old website from classic ASP to ASP.NET is not easy. So when Gritware.com chose to upgrade their flagship helpdesk software, they had one key goal in mind: performance. With over 800 customers around the world, they needed a solid grid as the backbone for the project rewrite. And after comparing other grid options, Todd Hoese from Gritware, discovered the ASPxGridView. Here Todd describes how he chose DevExpress: I tested it with a database table of around 5000 records and... 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 |
| WURFL ASP.NET Implementations ... A comparison of three WURFL ASP.NET Implementations... 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 |
| Exploring Session in ASP.Net ... This article describe about session in ASP.Net 2.0 . Different Types of Session , There Configuration . Also describe Session on Web Farm , Load balancer , web garden etc.... 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 Tips ... For some interesting articles and tips for ASP.net programming http://techdotnets.blogspot.com/ ... 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 |
| FIX: The ASP.NET State Server Sessions Active counter may be incremented incorrectly if you change the ""Session.TimeOut"" value on a computer that is running the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 or the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 ... 954461 ... FIX: The ASP.NET State Server Sessions Active counter may be incremented incorrectly if you change the "Session.TimeOut" value on a computer that is running the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 or the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1This 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 |
| Monitoring HTTP Output with Fiddler in .NET HTTP Clients and WCF Proxies ... Http monitoring tools are essential when doing any kind of Web development whether its for plain Web development, Web Services or any sort of HTTP client work. When things go wrong it is often highly useful to take a look under the hood and dig into the raw HTTP request data to see what HTTP headers were sent from the client to server and what headers and responses come back. For plain Web development most of the time I actually use FireBug inside of FireFox, but when more detailed HTTP wire... 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 |
| SSL Certificates and WWW. Prefix on Domain Names ... Older readers can remember my post in the latest days of 2006 that showed how to implement a simple HttpModule to eliminate the WWW. prefix from domain names in ASP.NET applications to have unique and shorter URLs for all the pages on a site. Later in 2007 I also wrote a separate post emphasizing on some techniques to simplify URLs on a site and discussed why this technique should be considered by developers in their web applications, and how to use some common mechanisms to accomplish this goal.... 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 |
| A Sortable XmlDocument Class ... Sort the nodes of XmlDocument by many methods easily... 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 |
| HTTP Debugging Proxy ... I've long been a Fiddler fan. It's been a super valuable tool for debugging SOAP and
REST based code.
http://www.fiddlertool.com/
It rocks, but I often need to debug on the Mac, especially now when doing network
programming in Silverlight.
So I recently found WireShark.
It's free, runs on Windows and Mac, is Open Source, and there are 3rd party builds
for other operating systems.
http://www.wireshark.org/... 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 |
| Beware of Fear-Driven Architecture (do you fear deployments?) ... At Headspring, we joke about PDD, or pain-driven development. We consider PDD to be a good thing. If there is pain, we do a root-cause analysis and solve the pain. If there is no pain, we call "yagni" and move on. If we are in a design discussion and we realize that we are proposing a solution without pain existing, we stop and move on. Pain can be a good indicator of a specific problem that needs to be solved. Beware of fear, however. Often, fear of something... 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 |
| Case Study: Raindrops Server from Prognex ... New startup Prognex has created Raindrops, a slick web application that uses just about every DevExpress ASP.NET control. The web app is loaded with enterprise goodness, it packs in the functionality of a CRM, ERP, and more! Yang Yu, Prognex CEO and Cofounder, sent us a special Raindrops demo login just for DevExpress blog readers so you can check it out. Use these credentials below to login and experience the slick Raindrops web client: URL: http://raindrops.prognex.com... 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 |
| Paging without a Wizard (SqldataSource Control) ... How to use Paging without a Wizard in ASP.NET... 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 |
| Introducing Microsoft Velocity ... In this article Andrea examines the newly distributed cache framework code named Velocity. After a brief introduction he provides the required steps to setup and configure a cache cluster and the usage of distributed cache from an ASP.NET web application. He also demonstrates the procedure to integrate the Velocity SessionProvider in an existing web application with the help of relevant source code and screen shots. Andrea lists a few reference links including that of the feature matrix which he created for this article. 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 |
| ORM Technology - nHibernate vs Linq ... I'm back after some time away from my blog ;).. This time i would like to tell about my favourite "nHibernate" and ORM Technology. Not So Long Ago, i’ve attended a microsoft seminar on Visual Studio 2008 & VSTS .
It was a nice presentation and we have had a delicious lunch
too;)…Presentation on VSTS was amazing. The presenter, Tejsvi
Kumar(Technology specialist from microsoft) , who provided clear idea
on how we can handle a big project by Only using VSTS.Then he
had shown demo on VSTS how Project manager can assign tasks, view
status or create test cases on the fly etc. In between he also
mentioned on visual studio 2008 features. i would to like express my
appreciation to them for sharing their exp with us. And more than that,
they’ve come up with more knowledge by replying our queries. Me too
sent a mail regarding some queries on LINQ. I got a very detailed reply
on this. I would like to share their reply with everyone since it
provides a neat explaination on LINQ n other technologies.
Q : Can u differentiate between Ado.Net and LINQ
A : ADO.NET is a mechanism to connect to the data source (like
ODBC) whereas LINQ is a query mechanism to query *any* kind of data not
necessarily data from a database. As an example try the following
simple LINQ program:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
int[] numbers = { 3, 5, 6, 1 };
var exp = from n in numbers
where n < 5
orderby n ascending
select n; foreach(var e in exp )
{
Console.WriteLine(e);
}
}
This program demonstrates the following:
- LINQ is a language concept (integrating queries in the programming language)
- LINQ queries can be quite expressive including joins, where clauses, grouping etc.
- LINQ has nothing to do with databases in particular – however you can
build LINQ based extensions that enable you to to query any kind of
database using LINQ queries (e.g. LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to
datasets, LINQ to Entities, LINQ to Objects)
Q : Is LINQ is nothing but a copy of nHiberante ?
A : I disagree - LINQ is NOT copied from nHiberbate. The
example in point 1 will explain that nHibernate has nothing similar.
However you can definitely compare LINQ-to-SQL with nHibernate. Now
nHibernate itself is no new technology – both nHibernate and
LINQ-to-SQL are products that make use of the Object Relational Mapping
(ORM) Technology. There are pro and cons of ORM technology and they are
very widely discussed in the technology circles. You can get an insight
into them on the net. The important thing to remember is that there are
definitely some very important benefits (inspite of some disadvantages)
of ORMs and if as an architect your analysis proves that ORM wil
benefit your project you should go for it. Generally every technology
has its pros and cons (like any other thing in life) and as a smart
Architect you need to understand your requirements in nicely and then
choose the technology that suits you best.
Q : LINQ(nHiberante) causes difficulty while debugging the code. Its very difficult to find which line throws exception.
A : This statement confirms my comment in point 3. Pro of
LINQ-to-SQL(nHibernate) – faster code development; Con of LINQ-to-SQL
(nHibernate) – possibly more extensive debugging. However, if you make
you of some best practices for debugging you can reduce the time.
Q : Its very difficult to make changes according to Database changes..
A : Actually, with ORMs it becomes easier to abstract the
Database changes from Application changes. So if your application is
architected correctly and there are DB changes – with LINQ-to-SQL (or
nHibernate) you will need to do NO or almost minimum changes in your
code (all you have to do is change the mapping layer)
Q : Performance is slow compared to ado.Net(i’ve checked wit nHibernate, not wit LINQ)
A : Please read my blog post on performance generally:
http://blogs.msdn.com/bsinghal/archive/2007/07/16/there-is-a-performance-p | Go |
| Vista, Visual Studio and Dotnetnuke development ... I had been using Vista on a Virtual PC to slowly become acquainted and I had refused to own a notebook, until I was sucked into reality when my wife asked me to take a week off or else... Long story short, I looked for and bought a laptop in less than an hour. I configured it with 4GB RAM an Vista Business 32-bit, since I wasn't prepared to spend more on a 64 bit machine for my first purchase. After installing Office, it was time to set up my development environment for my DotNetNuke projects. VS 2008, SQL 2005 and Virtual PC 2007. After set up, I started to configure my DotNetNuke environment and experienced issues when trying to install DotNetNuke. I had two specific issues: The install would hang. After several attempts and getting help from Charles Nurse I realized it was that VS2008 only installed the latest MS AJAX version, and DotNetNuke uses AJAX v 1. After installing it everything was OK After successfully installing DNN4 it was time to play with DNN5 Betas. With Vista's IIS version you can create sites, not just virtual directories and I was happily trying to create one called http://donetnuke_2 to follow the practice for core modules. For some reason after installing the beta successfully I could not login into DNN. With help from Sebastian Leupold, Erik Van Ballegoij , Charles, Chris Hammond and Shawn Mehaffie, I finally pinpointed the error to the fact that you cannot use dashes in the domain part of the URL. After switching to http://dotnetnuke2 I was back in the game. This are just two issues I came across and so far I have been coding away without any issues in Vista and VS2008. I plan to start testing Windows 7 and VS2010 CTP in my first attempt to be an early adopter. Of course, I will post my findings here, stay tuned. Have you found other issues with Vista and VS2008? Let me know. | Go |
| Five steps to more successful SharePoint solutions ... Some points about how to succeed in SharePoint projects. Nothing special but my little experiences. Create a prototype. It is always good idea to go step by step through analysis document and think how to solve different problems and how to build up the solution. If there is something you are not sure about – try to solve the problem. It is cheap thing to do when you have no deadlines, it is highly risky and maybe very expensive thing to do when you have deadlines. If you have prototype it is easier for you to detect the parts of solution where workarounds are needed or where additional decisions from customer are needed. Don’t go too far. Use as much that SharePoint has to offer as possible. When customers needs something special then think how to solve the problem using SharePoint features. Don’t start thinking how to hack and code. There are many ways how to solve different problems on SharePoint. You can also suggest your customers to do things a little bit differently – as long as customer doesn’t have to go too far from his or her logic of solution. Don’t hack if there are better ways. It is always easy to make fast modifications through SharePoint Designer without analyzing if this modification is just exceptional case or is it better to develop some new field type or feature or workflow that you can use also in other parts of current solution (or in any other solution). Keep your code close to SharePoint. It is not hard to write code that does exactly what customer needed. It is a little bit harder to write the same code in SharePoint way using SharePoint classes. If you add new functionality by extending existing SharePoint classes then your code stays safely close to SharePoint and you don’t have to struggle through creating functionalities that SharePoint already offers. Test your code under different accounts. In your own development machine you are usually administrator and you have access to all features that SharePoint provides. If your code has to run also for users with another permissions then always test your code also under the other user accounts. This way you can discover all permissions related problems early and you have time enough to change your code or update administrators guide so they know what permissions one or another user group needs. That’s all for now. Of course, it is possible to write a long list of best practices but I consider these ones as basic ones that must be followed in every project your are participating. If you think I am missing something then please feel free to add your ideas to comments block of this blog entry. :) | Go |
| Refactoring: extract method ... Extract method is one of the most popular refactoring method when dealing with legacy code . In legacy code we can often find methods that are very long. My favorite findings methods about 2000 lines of code. Cool, isn’t it? Those methods have usually many responsibilities and they are hard to debug. Having more than one responsibility in one method leads also to duplicated code because some responsibility is required in more than one place in code. As an example let’s see the following code written in PHP. function get_active_users( ) { // find active users $query = mysql_query ( "select * from plah where id=$id" ) ; while ( $result = mysql_fetch_assoc ( $query ) ) { if ( $result [ 'sec_code' ] ==security_code( $result [ 'id' ] ) ) $results [ ] = $result ; } // create options array $options = array ( ) ; foreach ( $results as $val ) { $optid = $val [ 'id' ] ; $opttext = $val [ 'title' ] ; $options [ ] = "<option value='$optid'>$opttext</option>" ; } return $options ; } This method is useful for sure and it works like expected but it does more then expected. What if we want to use array of active users elsewhere in the code? This may be not new need. We have to search through code to see if this code is duplicated also in some other method. What we have to do is to move code that finds active users to another method. This way we have one method that returns users array and the other that creates list of options based on it. After extracting active users finding code to another method we have code like this. function get_active_users( ) { $query = mysql_query ( "select * from plah where id=$id" ) ; while ( $result = mysql_fetch_assoc ( $query ) ) { if ( $result [ 'sec_code' ] ==security_code( $result [ 'id' ] ) ) $results [ ] = $result ; } return $results ; } function get_active_users_options( ) { $active_users = get_active_users( ) ; $options = array ( ) ; foreach ( $active_users as $val ) { $optid = $val [ 'id' ] ; $opttext = $val [ 'title' ] ; $options [ ] = "<option value='$optid'>$opttext</option>" ; } return $options ; } Now we have two methods instead of one. This may seem like bad idea because the number of methods grows. But there is no problem because we have now two methods and both of them have only one responsibility. All we have to do now is to find out other parts in code where list of active users is needed and replace the code with method call. When logic of finding active users changes we have to make the change only in one method. | Go |
| One of the best tips for browsing msdn… ... I like MSDN I really do but when you want to increase the font size the thing just breaks and looks awful. Recently I’ve found that switching to the loband version of a MSDN page is far better when increasing the font size so its more comfortable to read. Originally I found this suggestion posted by Jon Galloway here . Definitely helps if you are staring at MSDN for the best part of the day.
Originally posted at http://msmvps.com/blogs/gbarnett . Please post all comments there. Thanks, Granville. | Go |
| SSIS Package - User Variables ... A SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) package is very useful if you want to export data from your database. Recently I wanted to pass some input parameters to my SSIS package and had to struggle to figure out how this can be done. This really isn't very well documented and you can't find detailed instructions on the Internet so I thought I'd blog about it. Get a load of how complicated it turned out to be!
The first step is to add a variable to your SSIS package. In the Business Intelligence Development Studio (Visual Studio 2005), select SSIS > Variables
The first button on the left is for Add Variable . Enter the variable name, scope, data type, and value. The variables will be added to the DTSX file:
1: < DTS:Variable > 2: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="Expression" ></ DTS:Property > 3: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="EvaluateAsExpression" > 0</ DTS:Property > 4: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="Namespace" > User</ DTS:Property > 5: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="ReadOnly" > 0</ DTS:Property > 6: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="RaiseChangedEvent" > 0</ DTS:Property > 7: < DTS:VariableValue DTS:DataType ="7" > 1/1/1950</ DTS:VariableValue > 8: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="ObjectName" > varBirthDate</ DTS:Property > 9: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="DTSID" > {6CE1ED2D-3720-4FDB-9590-FEDC2D78C797}</ DTS:Property > 10: < DTS:Property DTS:Name ="Description" ></ DTS:Property >< DTS:Property DTS:Name ="CreationName" ></ DTS:Property > 11: </ DTS:Variable >
The next step is to map a parameter in your SQL statement to the variable.
Select the Data Flow tab.
Right click on the Source Query
Select Edit
Replace a hard coded value in the SQL statement with a question mark to create a parameter
Click the Parameters... button
Select the variable from the drop down list
Enter the parameter name in the format @Name for a stored procedure parameter or the field name
The third step is to add this variable to the package configuration so you can easily change the value in an XML configuration file.
Select SSIS > Package Configurations
Click the Edit button and then the Next button
In the Select Properties to Export dialog box, check the Value property of the variable (which will not appear unless you complete the previous steps to create it first).
The variables will be added to the .dtsConfig file:
1: < Configuration ConfiguredType ="Property" Path ="\Package.Variables[User::varBirthDate].Properties[Value]" ValueType ="DateTime" > 2: < ConfiguredValue > 1/1/1950</ ConfiguredValue > 3: </ Configuration >
The SSIS package can be run by an ASP.NET page or a web service by importing the Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime namespace. The input parameter can easily by changed in the package configuration file by loading it as an XML document and editing the appropriate node.
You can use SSIS packages to do very complicated data transformations and exports. Basically it automates everything the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard does. So you can export your database to Access or Excel without repeating that whole process of going through the wizard steps. I've found this particularly useful to set up my own scheduled back up of a remote SQL Server database used by a hosted web application. | Go |
| Free E-Book for SQL Server 2008 ... Learn about the major new features in SQL Server 2008 including security, administration and performance with this FREE E-Book from Microsoft Press. | Go |
| VSTS and TFS 2008 virtual images ... If you want to test Team System 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2008 in a virtual environnement or if you need virtual machines with these product pre-installed for presentations, Microsoft has made available a series of virtual machines that you can download for testing purposes. Note that they will expire on December 31 2009.
Read all about these on Brian Randell 's blog:http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/brian/archive/2008/12/24/happy-holidays-and-look-what-santa-s-brought.aspx | Go |
| How to get your Quick Launch Toolbar back in Windows 7 ... Right click on taskbar and select Toolbars > New Toolbar Browse to: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch Hit: Select Folder -or- you can just download and install a much better version of Quick Launch called Free Launch Bar . It is free (as the name implies) and has more features the old Quick Launch. | Go |
| BAM whitepaper available on MSDN ... After presenting our session about BizTalk Server Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) at Teched 2008, my partner in crime and CTO of Tellago Joe Klug and I decided to coauthor a paper that highlighted the capabilities and architecture of BAM from a developer perspective. The final result is an 87 pages paper that is now available both for download and online on MSDN. The paper goes beyond the basic functionalities of BAM and explores the internals of its architecture and extensibility model. It also...(read more ) | Go |
