| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Generating Excel Reports from ASP.NET applications ... There are plenty of ways to export reports (CSV, Flat file and XML to name a few), but whether you like it or not most people use Excel or open source offerings like Open Office. Excel will open various file formats and you can trick excel by saving CSV files or even html tables with a .xls extension. If you have access to an ms office license, you can access the office com interop objects and generate spreadsheets that way. Lastly and perhaps the neatest of the solutions is to buy one of the out of the box solutions which provide standalone assemblies. | Go |
| Mobile ASP.NET Development: Indentifying the main Japanese carriers ... This article describes a way of identifying the main Japanese carriers so that you can handle the user experience accordingly. | Go |
| Master Pages The n Commandments ... Used properly the ASP.NET Master Page can be a useful and time saving mechanism, but there are some pitfalls which developers should be aware of and some common architectural mistakes which can render them more trouble than they are worth. Hopefully by reading this you can avoid some of the common (cough?*$ mistakes I already made) problems. | Go |
| Using The ASP.NET RSS Toolkit to quickly include syndicated content ... For those of you who are delving into the possibilities of utilising syndicated content in ASP.NET, the ASP.NET RSS Toolkit is a very powerful yet simple tool which will help you quickly integrate content syndicated from other sites | Go |
| Using GZip or Deflate in ASP.NET ... GZip and Deflate are compressions used to send data over Http, the majority of browsers now support the decompression of these formats and so they are the best choice for us to use, we can use the System.IO.Compression assembly to perform the compression at the application level. | Go |
| A different solution to display user messages in web apps ... Web apps are very different from windows apps. One big difference is displaying messages to the user. In a windows app you can easily popup a message box and allow the user to click ok it or you can change the text in a status bar to let the user know something happened. Web apps don't have status bars and popup messages are difficult to do across pages. This solution is a mix between popup messages and a status bar for the web. Using a master page, some jquery JavaScript, and a few classes, you can easily and consistently display information and error messages to your users. | Go |
| Multi Web.config files ... Can we have multi web.config files in the same website?!
Yes you can "for example one web.config for root website and another one for a subfolder"
How can we do so with out conflict or getting errors? | Go |
| Web Part to show upcomming birthdays in SharePoint ... SPOShowBirthdayWebPart is a SharePoint webpart that will display all users whose birthday is coming up in x days. | Go |
| ASP.Net Maker intro ... ASP.Net maker is a product for e.World Technology Limited, and they are creating some other makers such as ASP Maker, JSP Maker, PHP Maker,...
You can download from there a trial version for 30 days, and also try to check the prices, its really cheap comparing to the tools power.
The following video shows how you can create a website fast and manipulate it. "Better Video" | Go |
| Exposing user control client events to host page server side ... Handling your user control events in your hosting page server side | Go |
| Upload and Crop Images with jQuery, JCrop and ASP.NET ... Nice article that explains how to upload and crop images using jQuery and ASP.NET FileUpload. Very easy to follow. | Go |
| How to render content in custom control ... When you develop a custom control you may override Render() method that is defined by System.Web.UI.Control class.You can change the output in two ways.
1. use RenderBeginTag() and RenderEndTag() methods
2. user WriteBeginTag() method | Go |
| 6 basic steps of how to create a WebPart in SharePoint ... This is beginners tutorial of how to deploy a WebPart in SharePoint. It is a 6 step procedure and this tutorial will walk through the same. In case you are fresher to SharePoint you can read my FAQ articles listed below. I am sure within an hour you can get acquainted to SharePoint and get started. | Go |
| SharePoint Quick Start FAQ Part 2 ... In the previous session of SharePoint article we had discussed about the basics of SharePoint. In this session we will:-
. create site / site collection
. Understand the ready made functional reusable modules
. Learn how we can display a simple page and later apply master pages of SharePoint.
. Host a Inline code and behind code page in SharePoint
. Understand the concept of features and understand step by step how to enable / disable a feature
. How do display a feature in Admin | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| CodeProject: Exploring Session in ASP.Net. Free source code and programming help | Go |
| N-Layered Web Applications with ASP.NET 3.5 Part 2: Introducing the Validation Framework - Imar.Spaanjaars.Com | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| Silverlight and the 2009 Presidential Inauguration ... Tomorrow’s presidential inauguration of Barack Obama will be a truly historic event. Silverlight is being used as an enabling technology on several sites that will allow those of us who can’t be there in person to share the experience online. Presidential Inaugural Committee The Presidential Inaugural Committee has worked with iStreamPlanet to enable live and live and on-demand video streaming of the Inauguration events at the official Presidential Inaugural Committee web site: www.pic2009.org . It streamed its first live video on Saturday, with the train ride that took President-elect Obama from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. The official Inaugural swearing-in ceremony, speeches and parade will also be streamed live online on Tuesday, January 20. You can read more about the Presidential Inaugural Committee here . Update : The site was viewable not just on Windows and Mac systems with Silverlight, but also on Linux systems using Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight built by Novell), You can learn more about the Linux support here . CNN and MSNBC with Photosynth CNN and MSNBC are both launching Photosynth viewers that will help capture the Oath of Office experience. They will combine pictures takes from professional photographers with pictures uploaded from people in the crowd to create an interactive Photosynth experience of the event using Silverlight’s built-in DeepZoom feature to deliver an amazing 3D viewing of it. Check out CNN’s and MSNBC’s pages a few hours after viewers send in their pictures of the inauguration crowd, the President-elect’s raised hand, and everything in between. You can learn more about Photosynth and Silverlight from the Photosynth team blog here . CBS Television Stations CBS Television Stations will be leveraging Silverlight and Move Networks’ streaming services to deliver a live HD streaming experience (up to 2.4 Mpbs) for online viewers. CBS will roll out the experience to a number of major market stations including: Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and New York. Visitors to the CBS sites will be able to watch a variety of inaugural activities, with up to seven camera feeds for live events, as well as reports from CBS reporters on site, and real-time Twitter integration. You can watch the CBS experience here . This week will be an exciting part of history. Hope you get a chance to enjoy experiencing it with Silverlight! Scott | Go |
| 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Prevent access to restricted page when clicking back button of a browser ... This method of not caching the pages on browser, prevents the user to access the restricted page when original user has already logged out. See yourself... | Go |
| Create a TextBoxWatermark Extender Functionality using ASP.NET and jQuery ... had recently written an article Creating CollapsiblePanelExtender Functionality using ASP.NET and jQuery to use the ASP.NET and jQuery to create a functionality similar to that provided by the CollapsiblePanelExtender. In this article, I will show you how to create functionality similar to the TextBoxWatermark using jQuery with ASP.NET. | Go |
| Unit testing of ASP.NET pages, Http Handlers and Http modules ... Explains how to and provides a simple framework to execute asp.net web pages and http handlers without a web server, useful for writing and executing self contained tests. | Go |
| N-Layered Web Applications with ASP.NET 3.5 Part 2: Introducing the Validation Framework ... This is part 2 in a series of 6 articles on designing and building N-Layered web applications using ASP.NET 3.5. This part shows you how to implement a Validation Framework in your business entities. | Go |
| Creating CollapsiblePanelExtender Functionality using ASP.NET and jQuery ... In this article, we will see how to use ASP.NET and jQuery to build functionality similar to what the ASP.NET AJAX CollapsiblePanelExtender provides. | Go |
| Visual Studio 2008 Tips & Tricks Every developer must know ... This article shows important Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio 2008 most of them are common with VS2005, which every developer should know to increase his productivity while coding. | Go |
| User validation across pages after login using session in ASP.NET ... In this example i m showing how to validate a user across different pages whether user is logged in or not using session variables in Global.asax through Session_Start event and Application_OnPostRequestHandlerExecute event which checks for the login validation which occurs when ant asp.net event handler finish execution
Here is my login page , i've used hard coded values to login | Go |
| Understanding the What and Why of the MVC Pattern ... The Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern is becoming more popular and some software developers are still confused by what it is and how it benefits them. In this article, Brendan explains those two things using language which should be easy for people to understand. | Go |
| Check/Uncheck all Items in an ASP.NET CheckBox List using jQuery ... In this article, we will explore how to use jQuery to select unselect all the checkboxes in an ASP.NET CheckBoxList. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Configurable Silverlight Image Rotator ... Using Silverlight 2.0 and C# to build an image rotator that has a useful set of basic features and is easy to setup and deploy. | Go |
| SharePoint Customization Tricks – Part 2 ... Another two tricks for SharePointers :) | 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 |
| A Virtual Form Web Custom Control ... Ever think "wouldn't it be nice if there was a control - like a panel control - that you could simply use to wrap some input controls, set a single property (to the id of the control that should be 'clicked' when the enter key is pushed), and that was all you needed to do?". Well now there is such | Go |
| GeoLocation by Radius Using Google Maps and .Net ... This article shows you how to geocode existing addresses, then run distance calculations for geolocation within a given radius. | Go |
| Send scheduled Reminder/Alerts by email in SharePoint ... Learn how to create a SharePoint Job that queries lists and sends results via email. | Go |
| ASP.NET GridView delete confirmation using asp:CommandField ... ASP.NET GridView delete confirmation using asp:CommandField with LINQ to SQL. | Go |
| Using CascadingDropDown with a Database ... How to use CascadingDropDown and AjaxToolKit | Go |
| Error Handling Customization for ASP.NET UpdatePanel ... How to customize an UpdatePanel client side error that is presented to the user. | Go |
| Web User Forms ... User driven runtime dynamic ASP.NET Web Forms | Go |
| Access Sessions from Silverlight and ASP.Net ... Add or Retrieve Session Object from Silverlight and ASP.Net | Go |
| HTML5 Introduction ... An introduction to the new HTML5 features | Go |
| Visual Studio Add-In for Web Parts Generation ... A Visual Studio add-in that allows generation of Web Parts based on prepared ASCX controls/templates. | Go |
| Base class for skinned Web Parts and generator tool ... Base class for skinned Web Parts and a tool that will generate Web Part code based on previously made layout (ASCX) | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Routing for Web Forms in ASP.NET 4.0 ... A while back on a lark, I posted a prototype demonstrating how one could use Routing within Web Forms. This is something you can do today with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, because of the work we did to separate Routing from ASP.NET MVC. I would have liked to include Web Form Routing as part of the Routing feature when we were working on SP1, but we didnt have the time to do so in a robust manner before SP1 was locked down. Since then, Scott Galloway, who just happens to be my office mate, has taken the reigns... 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 Mask Edit Preview ... Want to get the first look at our upcoming ASP.NET Mask editors? Check out this preview image that shows many of the different masks. Versatile Mask Editors The new mask will support literals, digit and letter placeholders, ranges, enums, and date format specifiers (yyyy, MM, dd, etc). Attention To Detail The R&D team has paid special attention to the details for this control. I had a chance to try an early prototype and the demo is very impressive. One feature that you'll love is 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 |
| Redirecting with the Click of a Button ... Every ASP.NET developer, at some point or another, has created a page with a Button that, when clicked, redirects the user to some other page. This is typically implemented by adding a Button control to the page, creating a Click event handler, and addinga Response.Redirect , perhaps passing along some user input through the querystring. There are two shortcomings with this approach:
It involves an extra round trip to the server for the Button postback, which just generates a redirect message.
If there is an associated TextBox where the user enters some value and that is transmitted via the querystring, you need to worry about what happens if the user presses the Enter key while focused in this TextBox. There's a postback, most likely, but what Button is considered clicked? This issue becomes more apparent if you have several TextBoxes on a page, each with a Button, that, when clicked, takes the user to some other page passing along the related TextBox's value through the querystring. See Enter and the Button Click Event for a thorough discussion on this topic...
The good news is that a jot of JavaScript can help surmount both of these shortcomings. I've created a simple custom server control that packages this JavaScript and behavior into a single, easy to use control, which I callRedirectButton . You can learn more about this control, as well as download the complete source code, at RedirectButton - Redirect Users With the Click of a Buton .
Happy Programming!
Check out more of my free ASP.NET server controls at My Code Projects page ! 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 |
| DevExpress Plans for ASP.NET in 2009 ... Check out this list of the planned features and controls for our ASP.NET products in 2009. The ASP.NET team has put together an aggressive list of items and it looks to be an exciting year. Along with the new controls like the mask editor, check combobox/listbox, rating control, there's also major features added. Two major features of ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 are Dynamic Data and the ASP.NET MVC framework and we're going to be supporting both. Stay tuned for more news on these features in the 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 |
| Microsoft offers download tool for Web developers ... Microsoft is offering a free download manager, Web Platform Installer (PI) 1.0, intended to make it simpler to install Microsoft Web developer technologies ranging from .Net Framework 3.5 to ASP.Net to Silverlight and more, the company said this week.... 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 |
| Do Not Blame ASP.NET WebForms ... As much as we get closer to the final release of the first version of ASP.NET MVC by Microsoft, the number of community debates about the advantages of ASP.NET MVC over ASP.NET WebForms increases. In the past week we saw some reactions by the community arguing that ASP.NET WebForms is weak, and somehow implying that ASP.NET WebForms is something terrible and developers shouldnt use it. Its really interesting to see such turning points by those who have been using a technology for at least a few... 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 Azure Issue Tracker Sample Application ... The Azure Services Evangelism team is pleased to announce the release of the Azure
Issue Tracker sample application.
The Azure Issue Tracker demonstrates a real-world ISV scenario where you want to create
and host a SaaS application for your consumers. This sample is being released in two
versions: Standard and Enterprise. The Standard version allows ad-hoc users to use
Windows LiveID federation with the .NET Access Control Service and authorize other
Windows LiveID users. This allows small groups... 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 MVC Plan 9 Sample ... The attached sample implements simplified Web application paradigm (called Plan 9 MVC) based on ASP.NET MVC. It is page-centric (it hides Controllers) but it retains many of the benefits of ASP.NET MVC. The package contains a Visual Studio solution with two projects (the standard ASP.NET MVC starter template rewritten as a Plan 9 Web Site, and the library implementing Plan 9 framework), the license document, and README document.
ASP.NET MVC provides many benefits including:
Separation of Concerns... 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 |
| Giving my ""TDD, DI, and SoC with ASP.NET MVC"" talk at Houston TechFest this Saturday ... I'm giving my "TDD, DI, and SoC with ASP.NET MVC" talk at Houston TechFest this Saturday. This will be the 6th time I've given this same talk. I gave this talk the first time at Tech Ed 2008 when I pinch-hit for Phil Haack when he found out he wasn't going to make it. This talk has had great-reviews my several user groups, such as the ADNUG, TRINUG, NWANUG, SDNUG, and WINUG, and it is code-based, not powerpoint-based. One lucky audience member will also get to come up on... 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 |
| ViewState: Handle with care ... I’m refactoring an ASP.NET application and I’ve already found several times – too many – code similar to the following: <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlTimeZone" runat="server" /> <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlCultures" runat="server" /> protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) { if(IsPostBack == false) { ddlTimeZone.DataSource = GetTimeZones(); ddlTimeZone.DataBind(); ddlCultures.DataSource = Globalization.GetOrderedCultures(); ddlCultures.DataBind(); } base.OnLoad(e); } This code is going to serialize several kilobytes of ViewState data in the page ( > 10Kb with both controls declared). There’s almost never a valid reason to increase the page size in this way. A possible fix: 1. Disable ViewState on the controls by setting EnableViewState=”false”. You avoid serializing bound data to the page. 2. Get rid of the IsPostBack check and move the databinding logic in the Init stage. You bind the controls every time, but you don’t override the posted value (which hasn’t been loaded, yet). SelectedValue still works. A very good reference for ViewState handling is this post by Dave Reed . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! 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 |
| Announcing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 1.0 ... This is always something that I hear people ask for
The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft's entire Web Platform, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installers user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform.
Available here 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 |
| Web Platform Installer 1.0 released! ... How cool is 1 installer that installs the Microsoft Web platform? Well, you decide I guess. What do you get? The Web Platform Installer can install: Internet Information Services 5.1 on XP SP3 Internet Information Services 6.0 on Server 2003 SP2 Internet Information Services 7.0 on Vista SP1 and Server 2008 SQL Server 2008 Express .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 ASP.NET, Complete and Custom installation options XML-based... 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 |
| DotNetShoutOut.com was released today. ... DotNetShoutout is a Web 2.0 style social news site for .NET developers running on our open source project KiGG. Find the announcement here. From their announcement: KiGG was started as a fun project to get familiar with the new ASP.NET MVC framework and with no exception I started to hear terms like DDD, BDD, SOLID, DRY, Law of Demeter, Testability etc etc which brings me a new world of learning. I found, following alt.net community is the best way to lean these stuffs, I followed them... 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 |
| Truncate a Path String ... Currently, there is no .NET class that provides this functionality. The workaround is to use the Windows Shell function (PathCompactPathEx).... 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 |
| The Future Operating System ... Months ago I’ve been discussing this with attendees over at the PDC. Now it’s here, and no it’s not Windows 7. The future operating system gOS , a browser based cloud operating system. It boots a browser which is everything I need today. | Go |
| Conditional Formatting in the Silverlight DataGrid ... I’ve been an asp.net developer for some time now and I was excited to jump on to Silverlight when it 2.0 was released a few months ago. One thing I really struggled with was applying conditional formatting to the individual cells in the DataGrid control. Coming from an asp.net background, I carried a lot of assumptions with me (big mistake). I thought I could get a hold of the rows or cells collection and have my way with it, but no such luck. I stumbled down several paths which all ultimately lead to dead ends. After killing hours (maybe days) on trying to figure this out, I had to let it go and move on. Now a month later I decided to give it another shot and I finally got it. The answer was right in front of me all along. I knew about the IValueConverter interface, but I didn’t fully understand it’s capabilities. I thought it was only used for converting an object into a text representation or vice versa. Actually, you can return anything you want from it. So you can return a Button, Grid, or whatever. Another aspect I couldn’t figure out was how to get access to page members from within the Convert method. For example, I wanted to render a button in the cell and wire up the button’s click event to a method in the page. Sure, you could do this to a certain extent using templates, but then I couldn’t find a way to change the template conditionally based on a value in the bound data item. The solution I came up with was to create a delegate along with a class which implemented the IValueConverter interface and exposed two events. One for converting and the other for converting back. I can then declare this converter in the resources collection and setup a handler in the page as shown below. < UserControl.Resources > < local:UniversalConverter x:Key ="ageConverter" Converting ="ConvertAge" /> < local:UniversalConverter x:Key ="nameConverter" Converting ="ConvertName" /> </ UserControl.Resources >
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
Here is the markup i used in the “First Name” column of the DataGrid.
< data:DataGridTemplateColumn Header ="First Name" > < data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate > < DataTemplate > < ContentControl Content ="{Binding Converter={StaticResource nameConverter}}" HorizontalContentAlignment ="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment ="Stretch" /> </ DataTemplate > </ data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate > </ data:DataGridTemplateColumn >
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre | Go |
| Free Webinar – Increase Productivity with .NET and LINQ ... I’ll be giving a free Webinar titled “Increase Productivity with .NET and Language Integrated Query (LINQ)” next week so if you have 40 minutes and are interested in learning more about LINQ feel free to sign-up and attend. Here are more details about the event: Date: Feb. 5, 2009, 1:00 P.M. EST Time: 50 minutes (40 minutes lecture/demos, 10 minutes question and answer) Abstract: Interested in increasing developer productivity? This webinar from ROI Training and The Wahlin Group will introduce .NET developers to Microsoft’s Language Integrated Query (LINQ) technology and show how it can be used to minimize code and application maintenance costs. The webinar is presented by Dan Wahlin who will introduce several LINQ technologies including LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. Learn to query object collections and XML and see how data from a database can be automatically mapped to custom data entity objects with minimal coding. Sign-Up Here | Go |
| I’m sorry for the lack of posts… ... Sorry folks for the lack of posts but ever since I’ve moved to Australia I seem to have had very little time to actually post something of any calibre. At the moment I am actually working on some writing commitments I have so I will post about them when they appear online. In the meantime I’ve resurrected my Twitter account in a hope to micro-blog more in an effort to make up for my blog shortcomings as of late. I can’t promise it will be pretty but you are more than welcome to follow my ramblings on Twitter .
Originally posted at http://msmvps.com/blogs/gbarnett . Please post all comments there. Thanks, Granville. | Go |
| IE Image Bug = Website Performance Hit ... While troubleshooting a site I'm developing, I noticed that a page was double posting. After a little brute force diagnostics, (comment everything out, bring things in one-at-a-time), I was able to isolate the issue.
My company has a couple of ImageButtons that are wired up as hover buttons. We have a control that you set the on & off images on and it does the rest. For some reason (Murphy's Law I suppose), we weren't sending out the ImageButton's ImageUrl as the off image. We just let the startup javascript assign that client side. This resulted in an input type=image form field with an empty src attribute being sent to the client. That seems benign right? Well it isn't...
If you have on your page one image field with a valid src attribute and another with no src attribute, IE interepts the src of the missing attribute to be the url of the current page and then IE will proceed to request the current page again in hopes of displaying an image for the missing scr attribute. Ouch right?
This means that if you have any control, image button, asp:image, etc on you site that is sending out src="", which you might not, IE will perform a double post to your page. Yes a double post and all form fields are sent, it is a full blown duplicate request. This means performance * .5...
This is easily tested in your ASP.NET application. All you need is a page with the following markup and a wired up Page_Load with a breakpoint on string Foo = "Bar";. Run the debugger an enjoy...
<img src="" /><img src="valid.jpg" />
Disclamier: I haven't tested to see if the non-blank src must be valid... When I say IE I have only tested IE7 and it fails. I did test Google Chrome and it did not create a duplicate request.
I realize that this might not be a big deal because I'm the only person out there sending out empty src attributes, but I thought I'd share the find. | Go |
| EOAST #4 – Evolution of a software thingy Part 4 ... So its been ages since my last post on this pet project of mine. Its time to get down to the nitty gritty on this and see if it is actually working the way I want it to. Hopefully, you have read parts one , two and three in previous posts to get a good idea on what I am trying to achieve. Basically, its a collect, store and display mechanism to store almost any information in a SQL database. You only need concentrate on implementing collection logic, or only display logic or both if you so choose. Its up to you. The storage and querying of this information is done for you, as is the scheduling of collection. Additionally, its gotta be real robust. If someone writes a crappy information provider, the system should not die. Also, I want to be able to map an information provider to one or more display providers, all easily. I have dubbed this the InformationAggregator . So I am happy to say its actually working reasonably well at the moment. Since its a pet project of mine, the fact it is actually up to a reasonable level of functionality is quite an achievement. Normally I kinda let things go once I have satisfied my initial curiosity, or whatever it was that got me interested in doing it. What I haven’t really spent much time with is the user interface. Its really just a set of buttons on a form to exercise the API. At any rate, the basic details are as follows. There are 2 main assemblies: InformationAggregator.Core.dll and Information.Aggregator.Engine.dll . If you want to implement an information collection provider or an information display module, you only need to reference the Core assembly. The Engine assembly contains all the functionality to start the hosting and collection engine. Note: Since this codebase is always being revised, its prone to change so there maybe much refactoring in the future. In fact, part of it will be happening after this post ":-) Writing an Information Collection provider Say you want to write a module which collects email, accepts user input, reads a users twitter entries, or some other information collection mechanism. You only need to Implement 2 interfaces: IPluginModule , & IInformationProvider . IPluginModule has only 1 method, QueryPluginResponse QueryPluginModule() which acts to provide some metadata around itself. Here is an example: public QueryPluginResponse QueryPluginModule() { QueryPluginResponse response = new QueryPluginResponse(); response.MajorVersion = 1; response.MinorVersion = 0; response.PluginDescription = "Test Manual Collection. Only sends information to engine once collected from keyboard entry"; response.PluginName = "ManualCollector"; response.Publisher = "Glav"; response.PublisherLink = " http://www.theglavs.com"; response.RevisionNumber = 0; response.SupportsCollectionNotification = false; response.TypeOfService = ServiceType.InformationProvider; return response; } IInformationProvider also requires the implementation of only 1 method, List<GenericInformationItem> GetAllInformation() Here is an example: public List<GenericInformationItem> GetAllInformation() { List<GenericInformationItem> list = new List<GenericInformationItem>(); Random rnd = new Random(DateTime.Now.Millisecond); for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { GenericInformationItem item = new GenericInformationItem(); item.Author = "Paul Glavich"; item.BodyTextData = string.Format("This is dummy body entry ID:# {0}. The current date is {1} and the time is {2}", rnd.Next(1,200),DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString(), DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString()); item.InformationSource = "Unit Test"; item.ReceivedDateTime = DateTime.Now; item.Originator = "TestInformationProvider"; item.PublishDate = DateTime.Now; item.SourceProvider = PROVIDER_NAME; item.Summary = "Just a test item"; item.Title = string.Format("Test Item #{0}", i); list.Add(item); } return list; } This implementation simply sends 3 items of information to the InformationAggregator engine when its asked to do so. This particular implementat | Go |
| How to display URL Rewrite ETW Events in the Event Viewer ... IIS Failed Request Tracing is a powerful way to troubleshoot Web Requests, it provides an easy way to track each execution step for one specific request. URL Rewrite Module provides several events that can be tracked using Failed Request Tracing, here Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more ) | Go |
| remove malicious script tags from file ... Just want to share a "simple" Windows Forms application that I created to automate removal of malicious SCRIPT tags inserted into some web files. Read full article on .NET Developer Notes on remove malicious script tags from file | Go |
| WindowsPrincipal.IsInRole doesn't reflect changes until restart ... Just an observation sometime ago that if you create a new Windows Role
and add a user to it and create a WindowsPrincipal using that user, the
IsInRole method doesn't reflect the membership change made until a
restart is made. Read the full article from .NET Developer Notes on WindowsPrincipal.IsInRole doesn't reflect changes until restart | Go |
| Follow me on twitter! ... I've finally got sucked into twitter after avoiding it for many months. Check me out:http://twitter.com/davidfowl/
Since my name is so common it really annoys me when I sign up for any new service because I have to get accept some partially mangled version of my name (i.e. davidfowl).
Anyways, stay tuned! | Go |
