| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Checklist for high quality websites part 2 ... The second part of the checklist is about server side code and security | Go |
| Using HttpHandlers to serve image files ... Using HttpHandlers to serve image files, based on the source code to BlogEngine.NET | Go |
| Making ASP .NET Gridview a little less painful ... Isn't it pain in the neck when you have to write the following for every input control whose value you want to extract from a Gridview: | Go |
| Open New Window in ASP.NET web page using JavaScript ... I have found much tricks in different tutorials and forums on opening new window in asp.net web page, using JavaScript, jquery etc. Here I have put most useful of ways to open new window (and pop-up window) in asp.net web page. I hope these tricks will be helpful. | Go |
| Updated CarTrackr to ASP.NET MVC RC ... As you may have noticed, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate has been released over the night. You can read all about it in ScottGu's blog post, covering all new tools that have been released with the RC.
Since I've been trying to maintain a small reference application for ASP.NET MVC known as CarTrackr, I have updated the source code to reflect some changes in the ASP.NET MVC RC. You can download it directly from the CodePlex project page at www.cartrackr.net. | Go |
| A Guide to Learning ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1 ... Now that the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate is available for download, how do you learn how to start using it to build applications? Here's Stephen Walther's guide to resources for learning about ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1. | Go |
| An easier way to write HTML input forms ... Utilzing ASP .NET server controls to prevent HTML code duplication when creating a input form. | Go |
| Slow Http client calls from ASP.NET 2.0? Make sure you check your Prox ... Useful information about how your proxy settings could slow down your web client calls. | Go |
| Sharing ASP.net Session State Between Web Applications With SQL Server ... Sharing ASP.net MVC Session State Between Web Applications With SQL Server | Go |
| SQL Cache Dependency with SQL Server, LINQ and ASP.NET 3.5 ... The following article demonstrates how to use SQL Cache Dependency with SQL Server 2005/2008, ASP.NET 3.5 and Extension Methods | Go |
| Introdduction to ASP.Net Session ... This article describes the ASP.net session to the beginners. | Go |
| Getting Browser Information and Capabilities in ASP.Net ... The HttpBroserCapability object has several properties which provide the information about the browser type, version and features supported by browser. This article explains how to use this object. | Go |
| Putting ASP.net Application In Offline Mode Using app_offline.htm ... When ASP.Net found a file names app_offlinne.htm in the root of a web application directory, it shut-down the application, unload the application domain from the server, and stop processing any new incoming requests for that application. ASP.NET also then respond to all requests for dynamic pages in the application by sending back the content of the app_offline.htm file (for example: you might want to have a "site under construction" or "down for maintenance" message). | Go |
| Implementing Delete Confirmation Dialog in ListView Control (ASP.Net) ... One of the lacking feature in the listview control is delete confirmation. If somebody clicks on the delete button by mistake, there is no way to cancel the delete action. To solve this issue, I used client side JavaScript and confirm function. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| 2009/01/27 - ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available - ScottGu's Blog | 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 |
| ASP.NET MVC Tip #46 – Don't use Delete Links because they create Security Holes | Go |
| A Guide to Learning ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1 | Go |
| How does ASP.NET MVC work? - gopalk | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1) - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| CodeProject: Exploring Session in ASP.Net. Free source code and ... | Go |
| jQuery, JSON and ASP.NET | .NET Zone | Go |
| whitehouse.gov Website Code | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available ... Today we shipped the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate (RC). Click here to download it (note: the link just went live so if it isn’t working wait a few minutes for the server you are hitting to refresh). It works with both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 (which is free). Today’s RC is the last public release of ASP.NET MVC that we’ll ship prior to the final “1.0” release. We expect to ship the final ASP.NET MVC 1.0 release next month. In addition to bug fixes, today’s build includes several new features. It also includes some refinements to existing features based on customer feedback. Please read the release notes that ship with the ASP.NET MVC download for full details on all changes. The release notes include detailed instructions on how to upgrade existing applications built with the ASP.NET MVC Beta to the RC. Visual Studio Tooling Improvements The RC includes several new Visual Studio tooling features (above and beyond the existing support in the beta – which I won’t cover here). These features include: Add Controller Command You can now type Ctrl-M, Ctrl-C within an ASP.NET MVC project, or right-click on the /Controller folder and choose the “Add->Controller” context menu item to create new controller classes: This will cause an “Add Controller” dialog to appear that allows you to name the Controller to create, as well as optionally indicate whether you wish to automatically “scaffold” common CRUD methods: Clicking the “Add” button will cause the controller class to be created and added to the project: Add View Command You can now type Ctrl-M, Ctrl-V within a Controller action method, or right-click within an action method and choose the “Add View” context menu item to create new view templates: This will cause an “Add View” dialog to appear that allows you to name and create a new view (it is pre-populated with convention-based options). It allows you to create “empty” view templates, or automatically generate/scaffold view templates that are based on the type of object passed to the view by the Controller action method. The scaffolding infrastructure uses reflection when creating view templates – so it can scaffold new templates based on any POCO (plain old CLR object) passed to it. It does not have a dependency on any particular ORM or data implementation. For example, below we are indicating that we want to scaffold a “List” view template based on the sequence of Product objects we are passing from our action method above: Clicking the “Add” button will cause a view template to be created for us within the \Views\Products\ directory with a default “scaffold” implementation: We can then run our application and request the /products URL within our browser to see a listing of our retrieved products: The RC ships with a number of built-in scaffold templates: “Empty”, “List”, “Details”, “Edit” and “Create” (you can also add your own scaffold templates – more details on this in a moment). For example, to enable product editing support we can implement the HTTP-GET version of our “Edit” action method on our Products controller like below and then invoke the “Add View” command: Within the “Add View” dialog we can indicate we are passing a “Product” object to our view and choose the “Edit” template option to scaffold it: Clicking the “Add” button will cause an edit view template to be created with a default scaffold implementation within the \Views\Products\ directory: We can then run our application and request the /products/edit/1 URL within our browser to edit the Product details: To save edit changes we can implement the HTTP-POST version of our “Edit” action method on our Products controller: Notice in the code above how in the case of an error (for example: someone enters a bogus string for a number value) we redisplay the view. The “edit” and “create” scaffold templates contain the HTML validation helper methods necessary to pr | Go |
| 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Dynamically Adding Controls to ASP.NET Page ... This article demonstrates how to dynamically create a control for an .aspx page.The sample project has the following:
1. Panel
2. TextBox , Label and Button added at Runtime to Panel.
This is achieved through the Class Controls in Visual Studio | Go |
| Export GridView to Pdf using iTextSharp in ASP.NET ... In this example i m exporting Gridview populated with SqlDataSource to Pdf using iTextSharp in click event of Button
This is the html source of the page in which i've created a gridview,Sqldatasource and a Button to export GridView to Pdf | Go |
| Referencing Master Page Members in ASP.NET 2.0 ... Master pages in ASP.NET 2.0 applications are the pages that enable you to provide a consistent look to your web application. In ASP.NET 1.1, to achieve a consistent look across a website, you need to use User controls and place them on each page. The master pages eliminate the need to place the header, footer, or other important sections on each page of your website repeatedly.
The master pages are programmable and contain methods, properties, and controls that can be made visible in all other content pages. However, these elements need to be declared with the Public scope in the master pages. You can build your content pages, which have a unique content of their own and then merge the master page with it to provide the page a consistent look.
A single website can have more than one master page. To use master page in your content page, you need to reference the master page that you want to use. This article discusses the way that you can use to reference a master page in your content page. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Configuration Overview :ASP.NET ... This article is all about the configuration of an application and also securing it. | Go |
| JavaScript Image Popup ... A simple way to show pop up image on mouse over of a smaller image | Go |
| How To Update Assembly Version Number Automatically ... A small utility which allows to modify AssemblyVersion attribute specified in AssemblyInfo.cs files | Go |
| Drawing Names (A Christmas Name Drawing Application) ... A Christmas Name Drawing Application Using DHTML JavaScript XML C# FORMS VS2008 .NET 3.5 ENCRYPTION | Go |
| ASP.NET Content Editor Control For Basic Content Management ... A web control that lets you maintain page content using a comprehensive HTML editor, persisting the content to a database. | Go |
| H_3D_Engine ... Simple 3D Engine draws 3D shapes in wireframe | Go |
| File Uploader in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC ... A class to upload files in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| FCKEditor – SharePoint Integration, Creating a Custom Field Type ... How to create a new field type in SharePoint. An HTML multi-line field which uses FCKEditor as the editor. | Go |
| Constructing Web Interfaces on the Fly ... Real-world Use Case: a flexible approach to present dynamic content with SQL Server, ASP.NET, and XSLT. | Go |
| Automatic Site Translation Using HTTPModules and Machine Translation (MT) ... HTTP module and machine translation for automatic site translation. | Go |
| One web setup project for deploying on multiple environments ... A solution to create one web setup project for multiple environements | Go |
| jQuery Based Ajax.Net library ... jQuery Based Ajax.Net library | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Themes ... Implement Theme selection in ASP.NET MVC. | Go |
| Check, Unchek the CheckBoxes of DataGrid using Java Script ... the code handles any DataControl's CheckBoxes Check, Unchek on Client Side | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| ASP.NET MVC RC Released! ... The new version of ASP.NET is very, very close. Scott Guthri just announced that the RC was publicly available. I'm pumped about this release not only because of my book, but also because this new release makes delivering with ASP.NET sooooooooooooo much easier than WebForms. One piece of functionality that is not spoken about so much is the ability for a partial view to use a layout (Master Page). That's right, folks. You can have a partial that only displays a snippet... 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 1.0 Release Candidate ... ScottGu has written a long blog post describing the enhancements found in the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/01/27/asp-net-mvc-1-0-release-candidate-now-available.aspx... 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 |
| Interested in an updated Club Starter Kit? ... Are you interested in an updated Club Starter Kit?Do you wish to participate either as a developer and/or tester for an
updated version of the Club Starter Kit? Do you wish to see new features
in it? If so please post your suggestions to the thread.Please see the thread at http://forums.asp.net/t/1375611.aspx for the background to this project.This will a project (or projects, possible one per edition of Visual Studio) on CodePlex ... 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 Content Editor Control For Basic Content Management ... A web control that lets you maintain page content using a comprehensive HTML editor, persisting the content to a database.... 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 |
| RedirectButton - Redirect Users With the Click of a Button ... Virtually every ASP.NET developer has, at one point or another, created a page with a Button control that, when clicked, redirects the user to
some other page, perhaps sending along a value entered by the user through the querystring. The typical pattern for implementing such behavior is to
add a Button to the page and create a Click event handler that executes a Response.Redirect(url ) . If the redirect
incorporates some input from the user, then this pattern is expanded to include the addition of a TextBox or some other control to the page and
a Response.Redirect(url ) statement that includes this control's value.
While this approach certainly works, it's not without a couple of flaws. Firstly, this approach involves a needless round-trip to the server: clicking
the Button causes the browser to re-request the page and the response from the server is simply, "Please go to url ." Ideally, when the Button
was clicked the browser would immediately request the final destination URL rather than have to do a postback to find out the final destination URL.
Second, this approach can lead to a confusing user experience in scenarios where there are multiple TextBoxes on the page and multiple Buttons because
there may not be the expected correspondence between hitting Enter in a TextBox and having the associated Button control "clicked." Consider a website
with a master page that has a TextBox and Button for searching the site. Now imagine an ASP.NET page that uses this master page and includes a number of
TextBoxes and a Button. If the user hits enter after typing in a search query there is a postback, what Button does ASP.NET consider has been "clicked,"
the search query button or the submit button in the web page? (See Enter and the Button
Click Event for a more in-depth look at this undesirable behavior.)
I've created a custom ASP.NET server control I call RedirectButton that offers a simple way to create a Button control that, when clicked, redirects
a user to a specified URL and avoids those shortcomings just discussed. This article examines how this control works and shows how to use it in an
ASP.NET web application. The complete source code for RedirectButton, along with a demo application, is available for download at the end of this
article. Read on to learn more!
Read More > Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| RedirectButton - Redirect Users With the Click of a Button ... Virtually every ASP.NET developer has, at one point or another, created a page with a Button control that, when clicked, redirects the user to
some other page, perhaps sending along a value entered by the user through the querystring. The typical pattern for implementing such behavior is to
add a Button to the page and create a Click event handler that executes a Response.Redirect(url). If the redirect
incorporates some input from the user, then this pattern is expanded to include the addition of... 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 Releases RC1 of ASP.NET MVC ... Microsoft today made available Release Candidate 1 of its ASP.NET Model View Controller, a design pattern for test-driven development of enterprise-scale Web applications.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| File Uploader in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC ... A class to upload files in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC... 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 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available ... Today we shipped the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate (RC). Click here to download it (note: the link just went live so if it isnt working wait a few minutes for the server you are hitting to refresh). It works with both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 (which is free). Todays RC is the last public release of ASP.NET MVC that well ship prior to the final 1.0 release. We expect to ship the final ASP.NET MVC 1.0 release next month. In addition to bug fixes,... 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 Release Candidate ... At long last I am happy, relieved, excited to announce the release candidate for ASP.NET MVC. Feel free to go download it now (NOTE: The download page is having technical difficulties, so I linked to the MSI directly here). Ill wait right here patiently. There have been a lot of improvements made since the Beta release so be sure to read the release notes. Ive tried very hard to be thorough in the notes so do let me know if anything is lacking. We are also pushing new tutorials up to the 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 |
| Controls Collection Cannot Be Modified Issue with ASP.NET MVC RC1 ... In my last post, I announced the happy news that the Release Candidate for ASP.NET MVC is available. In this post, I say mea culpa for a known bug within this release. This bug is a consequence of a change we made in our default template. We know have a content placeholder in the <head> section of the Site.master page. <head runat="server">
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="head" runat="server">
<title></title>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
... 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 1.0 Release Candidate ... As Scott announced a few minutes ago, finally ASP.NET MVC 1.0 went to Release Candidate stage and the first and most likely the only release candidate build is now available for public access. Scott has gone over all the details about the new features and feature improvements in RC and also has pointed that the release notes contain a full list along with the procedure to upgrade a Beta application to RC. Weve been waiting for this build earlier in the latest months of 2008, but ASP.NET MVC 1.0... 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 |
| Where Does ASP.NET Belong? And What ASP.NET Should I Use? ... It really does not seem like that long ago I found the Beta 1 bits of ASP.NET 1.0 and started tinkering and created the first of several hundred ASP.NET sites. That was May 2001 and everything I had created up to that point was in Classic ASP, at the...(read more)... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Sending Mail via GMail with AspNetEmail and .NET ... Periodically, I need to send out announcements to a list of emails pulled from a database. This is a pretty common problem, and a long time ago I found RapidMailer from Dave Wanta aka AdvancedIntellect which does a pretty good job and has all the source. However, Id been using it with my web host provided SMTP/POP3 provider for years, but since I recently moved my accounts to Google Apps (for the tons of free storage), I had to figure out how to configure RapidMailer to work with GMail. After some searching, I found a post by Dave himself describing the necessary pieces for sending mail via GMail and AspNetMail .. Specifically, since Google requires TLS security, or Transport Level Security, it turns out that this is really just a fancy way of saying SSL (Secure Socket Layer). In this post, The code looks pretty much like this: EmailMessage m = new EmailMessage( "smtp.gmail.com" );
m.Username = "test@gmail.com" ;
m.Password = "test" ;
//create the ssl socket
AdvancedIntellect.Ssl.SslSocket ssl = new AdvancedIntellect.Ssl.SslSocket();
m.LoadSslSocket( ssl );
//logging on the ssl socket
ssl.Logging = true ;
ssl.LogPath = "c:\\ssl.log" ;
//rest of aspNetEmail properties
m.Port = 587;
m.To = "test@123aspx.com" ;
m.FromAddress = "test@gmail.com" ;
m.Subject = "test" ;
m.Body = "test" ;
m.Logging = true ;
m.LogPath = "c:\\email.log" ;
m.Send();
However, I couldnt get this to compile because my project had no idea what AdvancedIntellect.Ssl.SslSocket was. A little bit more digging yielded the fact that this was a separate DLL, available from AdvancedIntellect.com for free.
Download AdvancedIntellect.Ssl.dll
Once I grabbed the DLL and added a reference to it in my RapidMailer project, everything was happy and I was able to send emails through GMail. The only other thing I had to do was get the program to send attachments, and that turned out to be only a couple more lines of code.
All in all, if you need to do anything in .NET surrounding email, you really should start with Daves tools at AdvancedIntellect.com. Hes been doing this stuff for nearly 10 years now and even owns the leading help web sites for SystemNetMail and SystemWebMail problems. 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 |
| Client side devevelopment in ASP.NET ... We ASP.NET developers know how much of a pain it is writing javascript in any app we have today because of naming container madness! You've probably done something like this:
function DoSomeThingCool() { var textBox = document.getElementById('ct100_contentplaceholder1_TextBox1' ); }
or something not so hardcoded
function DoSomeThingCool() { var textBox = document.getElementById('<%= TextBox1.ClientID %>' ); }
Matthew Osborn , QA on the ASP.NET team has a great post on a new ASP.NET 4.0 feature that gives developers more control over how ClientIDs are generated. | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Data Form - Episode 6: "C" is for Create ... In this episode, you build a XAML form that acts like a popup, modal window. The form validates user input with WCF callbacks to ensure that the customer ID is unique. By the end of the episode, you're able to add a customer to the NorthWind database using Silverlight, VB, ADO.NET Data Services and the Entity Framework. Here's a reminder: this series is sequential. If you haven't worked through the first five episodes , you'll find this one tough sledding because of the prerequisites. BTW, if you...(read more ) | Go |
| The Adventures of VMWare, Windows 7, Web Platform Installer, SQL Server 2008 Express, IIS 7 and installing DNN, otherwise known as HELL ... So I had this bright idea, I'd setup VMWare on my desktop here at home and start playing with Windows 7, then I thought I would get a DNN website up and running in Windows 7, and record the whole thing with Camtasia. 24 hours later I've given up and am ready to go into manual labor! :) VMWare's installation went great, Windows 7 installation went great, and was AMAZINGLY fast, under 20 minutes and the OS was installed in a new VM, and I was logged in. It went downhill from there. I downloaded Microsoft...(read more ) | Go |
| Life changer XAML tip for Visual Studio ... If you've worked with XAML in Visual Studio 2008 (SP1), either for WPF or Silverlight work, you know how painful it is. Of course, the first thing to do is to get rid of the design view . It's slow as a snail and it's pretty useless anyway. Make yourself a favor, and check "Always open documents in full XAML view" in "Tools | Options | Text Editor | XAML | Miscellaneous" . Even if this a great improvement, you'll soon realize that Visual Studio still sucks up a lot of your time and energy when you switch to a XAML file in the text editor. The same happens when you switch back to Visual Studio from another application. Now, try to open two XAML files side-by-side and the time to display them doubles. Same thing when you switch between two XAML files. What the heck, there's gotta be a solution to this damnation! How could we develop good WPF or Silverlight applications if this XAML editor keeps getting on our nerves? I've been enduring this for a long time. I had tried to edit the XAML file as an XML file, but this disabled IntelliSense, for some reason. So the XML editor was not an option. Microsoft doesn't seem to be in a hurry to provide a fix... Luckily, today I found an unexpected solution : use the "Source Code (Text) Editor" . It doesn't seem obvious based on its name, but this editor provides XAML IntelliSense, XML collapsing, and the XAML context menu. To use this, it's quite simple: Right-click on a XAML file in the Solution Explorer Select "Open With..." Select "Source Code (Text) Editor" Click on "Set as Default" Click OK You're done! The cherry on the cake: If you want to use the default XAML editor (with its split view, navigator, etc.), you just have to select "View Designer" in the text editor's context menu or use SHIFT+F7. Enjoy your newly gained life! | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC RC1 Is Out! ... Twitter reference... After being in Beta for a month or two, the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1 is out and ready to download. Scott Guthrie put together a gigantic post on the features of this release - which heavily focuses on tooling support and bug fixes. You can read that here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/01/27/asp-net-mvc-1-0-release-candidate-now-available.aspx . After a day of people playing around with the new Release Candidate there appears there could be a slight regression...(read more ) | Go |
| Using Inheritance with Generic Collection ... This is just a random tip about Generic Collections. Sometimes it’s common for me to create a class which can be used in a collection. In most cases I use a generic collection of this type as a data source and such things and instead of typing everywhere List<T> and replacing T with the type I just created; I create a new class which extends from this a generic collection of this type. Just a sample: public class Subscriber {
public string FirstName { get ; set ; }
public string LastName { get ; set ; }
public string EmailAddress { get ; set ; }
public string IssueId { get ; set ; }
public string FullName {
get { return string .Format("{0} {1}" , this .FirstName, this .LastName); } }} Now, every time I need to instantiate a collection of Subscriber I will have to type something like this: List <Subscriber > list = new List <Subscriber >(); The idea here is simple. We can write a code as simple as this: public class Subscribers : List <Subscriber > { } And now I can use the following code to create an instance of our collection of Subscriber : Subscribers list = new Subscribers (); In the end of the day, it’s just the same thing, but the advantage this is that with inheritance and polymorphism you can add other methods to your collection to handle the needs of your custom type. Of course there are other ways of to do this, however I just wanted to comment about this one, which is the one I use in most "quick" cases. | Go |
| Much Ado About Monads – Maybe Edition ... In the past I’ve extensively talked about creating monads, but not as much more around them in terms of why you might use them and what problems they are trying to solve. Since that time, I’ve been challenged by others to actually prove not only that it can be understood by everyone, but they are very useful as well. It’s been a form of geekery among us software professionals to say, “Whoopee! I’ve learned how to implement a monad to do x” without really explaining the reason why people should care.
This series of posts is set to dispel some of those qualms people have with the word monad and why it might be useful in other languages besides Haskell, from which the term in the computer science world came. In the past here, I’ve talked extensively about them, so I won’t necessarily bore you with the excruciating details, but I still have to answer the question in a brief and to the point answer, what exactly is a monad anyways?
What is a Monad?
For those not really interested in category theory and such, let’s get to a basic definition instead. Think of it as a basic abstract data type used to represent computations. We can abstract away complex behavior, such as IO actions, asynchronous behavior uniformly in such a way that we can sequence these operations together. Here’s the best definition of all, “We can abstract the complicated things out of the way so that we can write a program that we want to read it instead of how it really works”. I’d rather see the focus not on the category theory part, as that is interesting and a key to what’s going on here, but instead as a nice design pattern for abstracting complexity.
Now the question arises, how and when do we use them? When does it make sense? To understand that, we need to look at the problems we’re facing. Let’s take an example of chaining conditionals together which may or may not succeed.
What’s the Problem?
To really understand why it’s useful, we first have to understand the problem we’re trying to solve. As I stated above, let’s first take a look at chaining together conditional operations which may or may not succeed. Let’s take for example a series of lookups against some hash tables in a way where one lookup depends on another. Typically in C#, our code might look like the following. It’s naive code in terms of the style but I’ve seen this pattern time and time again in code:
class Program
{
private static readonly Dictionary<string ,string > employeeDept = new Dictionary<string , string >
{
{"John" , "Sales" },
{"Bob" , "IT" }
};
private static readonly Dictionary<string , string > deptCountry = new Dictionary<string , string >
{
{"IT" , "USA" },
{"Sales" , "France" }
};
private static readonly Dictionary<string , string > countryCurrency = new Dictionary<string , string >
{
{"USA" ,"Dollar" },
{"France" ,"Euro" }
};
public static string GetEmployeeCurrency(string name)
{
string dept;
string country;
string currency;
if (!employeeDept.TryGetValue(name, out dept))
return null ;
if (!deptCountry.TryGetValue(dept, out country))
return null ;
return !countryCurrency.TryGetValue(country, out currency) ? null : currency;
}
static void Main(string [] args)
{
var johnCurrency = string .Format("John's currency: {0}" , GetEmployeeCurrency("John" ));
var peteCurrency = string .Format("Pete's currency: {0}" ,
GetEmployeeCurrency("Pete" ));
Console.WriteLine(johnCurrency);
Console.WriteLine(peteCurrency);
}
}
As you’ll notice from the above code, we have three dictionaries of various information that we’re using as lookups. And you’ll also note that we have to go through a bit of hassle just to determine if one’s in a list, and if so, continue onto the next. Similarly, in F#, we run into that same issue as well, with an example of how that could be a problem.
let employe | Go |
| Employers Should Promote Fitness Because Fit Programmers Program Better ... Employers should encourage programmers to exercise and be fit, as a recent study found that those who are fit have four times less brain shrinkage than those who aren't. And seriously, that can only help you be a better programmer, right? A recent Reader's Digest blurb in the Health section tells of an Alzheimer's study. "A University of Kansas study found that patients who were fit had four times less brain shrinkage (meaning cell death) than those who were out of shape. The benefits of exercise...(read more ) | Go |
| Claims negotiation between a consumer, STS and Relying Party in WCF ... According to the WS-Trust specification, a service consumer has a way to negotiate or ask for specific claims to the STS. Those claims (or some of them) will be generally used by the service implementation running on the relying party.
They are negotiated through an "claims" element in the RST message,
<wst:RequestSecurityToken xmlns:wst="...">
<wst:TokenType>...</wst:TokenType>
<wst:RequestType>...</wst:RequestType>
...
<wsp:AppliesTo>...</wsp:AppliesTo>
<wst:Claims Dialect="...">...</wst:Claims>
<wst:Entropy>
<wst:BinarySecret>...</wst:BinarySecret>
</wst:Entropy>
<wst:Lifetime>
<wsu:Created>...</wsu:Created>
<wsu:Expires>...</wsu:Expires>
</wst:Lifetime>
</wst:RequestSecurityToken>
The "wst:claims" is an optional element for requesting a specific set of claims. Typically, this element contains required and/or optional claim information identified in a service's policy.
Based on these facts, we can elaborate some possible scenarios for claims negotiation between these three parties.
1. No negotiation at all
The STS might just ignore these claims requirements in the RST message and always returns a fixed claim set according to the consumer identity, or the service might not express what claims it expects at all. This scenario might be suitable for a local STS in small-sized or medium-sized organizations, where the IT department has a complete control over the client applications and services that interact with that STS. This kind of solution is easier to implement, and quite rigid too, a change in the claims required by the service will also require changes in the STS implementation. As you see, this solution does not scale at all for a high number of applications or relying party services.
Many of the STS examples you will find today are implemented like this.
2. Negotiation based on the AppliesTo header .
This solution present a subtle difference with the one discussed before, the claims vary according the relying party that will make use of them. The STS ignores the claims requirements in the RST messages and returns a claim set based on the received AppliesTo header. An existing agreement must exist between the STS and the relying party, which will include in addition to the key for encrypting the tokens, a number of expected claims. Again, easy to implement, difficult to scale up.
3. Manual negotiation based on the "Claims" header .
In this scenario, the consumer sends the expected claims in the "claims" header and the STS makes use of them for generating the resulting token. However, the negotiation of those claims between the consumer and the relying party is manual, a previous agreement must exist, the service does not express those requirements through metadata. This means that the claims are hard-coded during development in the client configuration. If the service requires additional claims, only the client configuration will have to be changed, the STS does not have to be touched at all.
If you are implementing a custom STS with the latest Microsoft Geneva bits, there is a property "Claims" in the RequestSecurityToken for getting access to these values.
protected override IClaimsIdentity GetOutputClaimsIdentity(IClaimsPrincipal principal, RequestSecurityToken request, Scope scope)
{
IClaimsIdentity outputIdentity = new ClaimsIdentity ();
foreach (Claim claim in request.Claims)
{
//Do something...
outputIdentity.Claims.Add(...);
}
return outputIdentity;
}
The client can specify those claims through configuration as well, < wsFederationHttpBinding >
< binding name = "ServiceBinding "> < security mode = "Message ">
< message issuedTokenType = "http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/oasis-wss-saml-token-profile-1.1#SAMLV1.1 " negotiateServiceCredential = "false "> < claimTypeR | Go |
| What’s new in jQuery 1.3? Drew Douglas Answers ... This is well worth your time, Drew Douglass spends a few minutes creating a very detailed post about what’s new in jQuery. http://nettuts.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/everything-you-need-to-know-about-jquery-13/ | Go |
