| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| C# scrollable Picturebox custom control ... This article discusses the construction of a custom control used to add a scrollable Picturebox control to a project. | Go |
| How to swap two rows of listview in Upward/Downward Direction ... How to swap two rows of listview in Upward/Downward Direction. | Go |
| How to Use Telerik RadEditor with DotNetNuke 5.0.0 Release ... RadEditor and DotNetNuke 5 does not work together for now. Until Telerik provides a fix, you can install RadEditor to DotNetNuke 5, after reading this tutorial. | Go |
| Fire Validator Controls Before JavaScript Confirm Box Fires in ASP.Net ... Consider, we have validator control on our page with a JavaScript Confirm box attached to a submit button. Clicking Submit will fire the Confirm box and if we select yes it will take us to the server without firing the validator control. | Go |
| Scheduled ASP.NET Task Manager ... In this article I'll talk about Scheduled Task Manager in a ASP.NET Environment. We often need to make scheduled tasks running in background but it's not very simple to make it with ASP.NET | Go |
| Data Validation Controls in ASP.NET 2.0 ... In this article, you will learn about the support that ASP.NET provides to you for performing data validation. | Go |
| ASP.NET Localization - Quick and Dirty ... Localization is becoming more and more popular as the applications we develop are becoming increasingly more so designed to reach the Global Marketplace. With this in mind, developers are being required to implement Localization to their web apps. | Go |
| Tip #40: Did you know.How to scope master pages? ... Master page is a template page that can be used to create a consistent layout for your application. First you create a master page to define the look & feel of the application and then you create the content pages that contains the content. | Go |
| Add LinkButton to Calendar Cell in ASP.NET ... how to dynamically add a link that will post back in a calendar cell in the DayRender event. | Go |
| Sexier URL' s with subdomains under IIS 7. ... A post on developing with cleaner URL's and particularly local subdomain under IIS 7. | Go |
| Configuration sections- Introducing the custom configuration section I ... The custom sections are customized sections that a developer configures by him self. In this case, the developer sets, also, their attributes and elements to suit special applications needs in term of settings. | Go |
| Directory & Files Lister using DirectoryInfo class in Asp.net 2.0 ... In this article we will see how we can display directories as well files in the browser based explorer, i have tryed to list directories and files even one can browse through inner directories on clicking particular folder, this can be enhanced to actual windows explorer. | Go |
| How to copy delete move a file using VB.NET ... Shows you how to copy delete and move files using vb.net easy to use reference page. | Go |
| Lesser Known ASP.NET Performance Tips ... A small collection of less-popular ASP.NET Performance Tips. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Design Gallery : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| N-Layered Web Applications with ASP.NET 3.5 Part 1: General Introduction - Imar.Spaanjaars.Com | Go |
| Dynamically Loading ASP.NET User Controls with jQuery | Go |
| ASP.NET Performance Tips | Go |
| Four Helpful Features to Add to Your Base Page Class | Go |
| Editing a variable-length list of items in ASP.NET MVC " Steve Sanderson's blog | Go |
| HighOnCoding: Get high on ASP.NET articles, videos, podcasts and more! | Go |
| 25+ Fresh Excellent ASP.NET Tutorials and Resources | AjaxLine | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery and Upcoming View Improvements with the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate ... Today we launched a new ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery on the www.asp.net site. The design gallery hosts free HTML design templates that you can download and easily use with your ASP.NET MVC applications. Included with each design template is a Site.master file, a CSS stylesheet, and optionally a set of images, partials, and helper methods that support them. The gallery allows you to preview each of the designs online, as well as download a .zip version of them that you can extract and integrate into your site. The gallery allows anyone to create and submit new designs under the creative commons license. Visitors to the gallery can vote to provide feedback on them (thumbs up/thumbs down). The most popular designs show up at the top of the gallery. We think this will provide a useful way for developers to more easily create attractive, standards compliant, sites. It will also hopefully encourage folks to create and share designs that can be easily re-used by others. Upcoming View Improvements with the Release Candidate While on the topic of UI, I thought I'd also share a few details about some of the View-related improvements that are coming with the new ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate (RC) build that will be shipping shortly. In addition to bug fixes, the release candidate incorporates a number of view-specific feature additions and community suggestions. Views without Code-Behind Files Based on feedback from a lot of people, we've decided to make a change so that MVC view files by default do not have code-behind files. This change helps to reinforce the purpose of views in a MVC world (which are intended to be purely about rendering and to not contain any non-rendering related code), and for most people eliminates unused files in the project: With the ASP.NET MVC Beta, developers could eliminate the code-behind file by using the CLR syntax for generic types in a view's inherits attribute , but that CLR syntax is (to put it mildly) pretty undiscoverable and hard to use. The ASP.NET MVC team was able to combine a few extensibility features already in ASP.NET to now enable the standard VB/C# language syntax within the inherits attribute with the ASP.NET RC build: One other nice benefit of not using a code-behind file is that you'll now get immediate intellisense when you first add them to the project. With the beta you had to do a build/compile immediately after creating a view in order to get code intellisense within it. The RC makes the workflow of adding and immediately editing a view compile-free and much more seamless. Top-Level Model Property on Views With previous builds of ASP.NET MVC, you accessed the strongly typed model object passed to the view using the ViewData.Model property: The above syntax still works, although now there is also a top-level "Model" property on ViewPage that you can use: This property does the same thing as the previous code sample - its main benefit is that it allows you to write the code a little more concisely. HTML/AJAX Helpers Now Enable Expression Syntax One of the requests a few people have asked for is the ability to use strongly-typed expression syntax (instead of using strings) when referring to the Model when using a View's HTML and AJAX helper objects. With the beta build of ASP.NET MVC this wasn't possible, since the HtmlHelper and AjaxHelper helper classes didn't expose the model type in their signature, and so people had to build helper methods directly off of the ViewPage<TModel> base class in order to achieve this. The ASP.NET MVC RC build introduces new HtmlHelper<TModel> and AjaxHelper<TModel> types that are exposed on the ViewPage<TModel> base class. These types now allow anyone to build strongly-typed HTML and AJAX helper extensions that use expression syntax to refer to the View's model. For example, I could build a (very simple) strongly-typed "TextBox" helper method using | Go |
| Dec 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight/WPF ... I'm flying out later today on a pretty intense business trip (22,000 miles, 5 countries, 3 continents, 1 week, no sleep... :-), so my blog activity over the next week and a half will be pretty light. To keep you busy till I return, here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Geolocation/Geotargeting Reverse IP Lookup Code : Scott Hanselman has a cool sample that demonstrates how to perform IP address lookups on users visiting your site to determine where they are located on the globe (down to the latitude and longitude). Pretty cool stuff. Tracking User Activity : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to track end-user activity when visiting an ASP.NET web site. iTunes Data Grid Skin : Matt Berseth continues his cool series showing off cool new skins you can apply to ASP.NET controls (especially the GridView and DetailsView controls). This post shows off a pretty sweet iTunes like skin. Using ETW to Troubleshoot AppDomain Restarts and other Issues : Tess Ferrandez has another great post that demonstrates how to use the ETW tracing features built-into ASP.NET and Windows to trouble-shoot runtime issues. ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has 6 nice ASP.NET Dynamic Data "How Do I?" videos posted on www.asp.net that you can check out to learn about the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature in .NET 3.5 SP1. A "Many to Many" field template for Dynamic Data : David Ebbo has a great post that talks about how to enable Many To Many scenarios with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. Customizing ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Customizing a Template Field : Laurent Duveau has two nice posts in a series he is doing on using ASP.NET Dynamic Data and customizing the UI generated from it. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Routing : Rachel Appel has a nice post that talks about how to use the new ASP.NET routing features with ASP.NET Dynamic Data to enable customized URLs. Fun with T4 Templates and Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has a cool post on how to use the T4 templating engine built-into Visual Studio to automate ASP.NET Dynamic Data form generation. Using User Controls as Page Templates in Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has another nice post that talks about how to use user controls with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX - Observing Updates to Plain Old JavaScript Objects: Dave Reed has a great blog post about one of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX - support for observing updates on plain old javascript objects. Using the Power of Binding to Animate Changes : Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about the new ASP.NET AJAX binding features coming and how you can use them with jQuery to animate changes. Instantiating Components on template markup : Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about client-side AJAX templating approaches and some of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX. Putting more than one behavior on one element and Getting a Reference to a Behavior : Bertrand Le Roy has two nice articles that talk about how to use the client-side behaviors feature of ASP.NET AJAX. Check/Uncheck all Items in an ASP.NET Checkbox List using jQuery: A nice article by Suprotim Agarwal that shows how to write client-side jQuery code to enable check/uncheck for all items within a checkbox list. ASP.NET MVC How to Setup ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 : Phil Haack has a great post that walks-through how to enable ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 servers (including how to enable it on a hosting server that you can't install anything on). Fluent Route Testing in ASP.NET MVC : Ben Scheirman has a nice post where he blogs about new helper methods he is creating that make it easier to unit test ASP.NET MVC routes using a fluent API. Autocomplete using jQuery, ASP.NET MVC and JSON : Faraz Tabibian has a nice blog sample that demonstrates how to implement an autocomplete t | Go |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control: ... Microsoft recently released a cool new ASP.NET server control - <asp:chart /> - that can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios: Download the free Microsoft Chart Controls Download the VS 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Documentation Visit the Microsoft Chart Control Forum Once installed the <asp:chart/> control shows up under the "Data" tab on the Toolbox, and can be easily declared on any ASP.NET page as a standard server control: <asp:chart /> supports a rich assortment of chart options - including pie, area, range, point, circular, accumulation, data distribution, ajax interactive, doughnut, and more. You can statically declare chart data within the control declaration, or alternatively use data-binding to populate it dynamically. At runtime the server control generates an image (for example a .PNG file) that is referenced from the client HTML of the page using a <img/> element output by the <asp:chart/> control. The server control supports the ability to cache the chart image, as well as save it on disk for persistent scenarios. It does not require any other server software to be installed, and will work with any standard ASP.NET page. To get a sense of how to use the <asp:chart /> control I recommend downloading the Microsoft Chart Controls Sample Project . This includes over 200 ASP.NET sample pages that you can run locally. Just open the web project in VS 2008 and hit run to see them in action - you can then open the .aspx source of each to see how they are implemented. The below example (under Chart Types->Line Charts->3D Line and Curve Charts) demonstrates how to perform Line, Spline and StepLine charting: The below example (under Chart Types->Pie and Doughnut Charts) demonstrates a variety of pie and 3D doughnut options: The below example (under Chart Types->Advanced Financial Charts) demonstrates some graph charts: In addition to the above samples, you can download the Microsoft Chart Control Documentation or ask questions on the Chart Controls Forum to learn more. This should provide a useful (and free) addition to your standard ASP.NET toolkit of functionality, and enable you to easily add richer visualization and data workflow scenarios to your ASP.NET applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 ... Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery . Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use. Steps to Enable jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 To enable intellisense completion for jQuery within VS you'll want to follow three steps: Step 1: Install VS 2008 SP1 VS 2008 SP1 adds richer JavaScript intellisense support to Visual Studio, and adds code completion support for a broad range of JavaScript libraries. You can download VS 2008 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 here . Step 2: Install VS 2008 Patch KB958502 to Support "-vsdoc.js" Intellisense Files Two weeks ago we shipped a patch that you can apply to VS 2008 SP1 and VWD 2008 Express SP1 that causes Visual Studio to check for the presence of an optional "-vsdoc.js" file when a JavaScript library is referenced, and if present to use this to drive the JavaScript intellisense engine. These annotated "-vsdoc.js" files can include XML comments that provide help documentation for JavaScript methods, as well as additional code intellisense hints for dynamic JavaScript signatures that cannot automatically be inferred. You can learn more about this patch here . You can download it for free here . Step 3: Download the jQuery-vsdoc.js file We've worked with the jQuery team to put together a jQuery-vsdoc.js file that provides help comments and support for JavaScript intellisense on chained jQuery selector methods. You can download both jQuery and the jQuery-vsdoc file from the official download page on the jQuery.com site: Save the jquery-vsdoc.js file next to your jquery.js file in your project (and make sure its naming prefix matches the jquery file name): You can then reference the standard jquery file with an html <script/> element like so: Or alternatively reference it using the <asp:scriptmanager/> control, or by adding a /// <reference/> comment at the top of a standalone .js file. When you do this VS will now look for a -vsdoc.js file in the same directory as the script file you are referencing, and if found will use it for help and intellisense. The annotated For example, we could use jQuery to make a JSON based get request, and get intellisense for the method (hanging off of $.): As well as help/intellisense for the $.getJSON() method's parameters: The intellisense will continue to work if you nest a callback function within the method call. For example, we might want to iterate over each JSON object returned from the server: And for each of the items we could execute another nested callback function: We could use the each callback function to dynamically append a new image to a list (the image src attribute will point to the URL of the returned JSON media image): And on each dynamically created image we could wire-up a click event handler so that when it is pressed it will disappear via an animation: Notice how the jQuery intellisense works cleanly at each level of our code. JavaScript Intellisense Tips and Tricks Jeff King from the Web Tools team wrote up a great post earlier this week that answers a number of common questions about how JavaScript intellisense works with VS 2008. I highly recommend reading it. One trick he talks about which I'll show here is a technique you can use when you want to have JavaScript intellisense work within user-controls/partials (.ascx files). Often you don't want to include a JavaScript library <script src=""/> reference within these files, and instead have this live on the master page or content page the user control is used within. The problem of course when you do this is that by default VS has no way of knowing that this script is available within the user control - and so won't provide intellisense of it for you | Go |
| Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 ... We shipped Silverlight 2 last month. Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed. Silverlight 2 was a major release, and delivered an impressive set of cross-browser, cross-platform functionality for Media and Rich Internet Application experiences. It has been great watching new sites launch using it. Media Experiences Silverlight 2 enables the highest quality video on the web, and delivers it with the lowest TCO of any media platform. One of the capabilities built-into Silverlight 2 is its support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables video to be delivered at multiple bitrates (for example: 400Kbits, 800Kbits, 1.5Mbits, 2Mbits) with Silverlight dynamically choosing the optimal bitrate to use depending on the network bandwidth and CPU capability of the client (it can also automatically switch bitrates seamlessly if conditions change later). Silverlight's adaptive streaming support is extensible. Move Networks (who helped pioneer the concept of adaptive streaming) have already integrated their adaptive streaming solution with Silverlight. Silverlight 2 and Move were used to stream the Democratic National Convention live on the web this summer. Last month we announced that Microsoft will be adding adaptive streaming support as a free feature of our IIS7 web-server. IIS Smooth Streaming will provide an integrated way to deliver HD quality adaptive video over the web. Visit Akamai's www.smoothhd.com site to see some awesome examples of Silverlight 2 and IIS Smooth Streaming in action (with adaptive streaming up to 2.5Mbits). The NBC Olympics site used Silverlight 2 to serve more than 3,500 hours of live and on-demand Olympic coverage to over 60 million unique visitors this summer. Visitors to the site watched an average of 27 minutes of video - which is stunningly high for online video. The site used the new Silverlight adaptive streaming capability to support 1.5Mbit bitrates - which helped deliver an awesome video experience: In addition to powering the Olympics experience in the US, Silverlight was also used in France (by FranceTV ), the Netherlands (by NOS ), Russia (by Sportbox.ru ) and Italy (by RAI ). In addition to video quality, a big reason behind these broadcasters decision to use Silverlight was the TCO and streaming cost difference Silverlight provided. In the August 2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine (a Dutch publication) a NOS representative reported that they were able to serve 100,000 concurrent users using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media Servers, whereas it would have required 270 servers if they had used Flash Media Servers. Over the last month we've seen several major new deployments of Silverlight for media scenarios. For example: CBS College Sports is now using Silverlight to stream NCAA events from its 170 partner colleges and university. Blockbuster is replacing Flash with Silverlight for its MovieLink application. And Netflix two weeks ago rolled out its new Instant Watch service using Silverlight. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Experiences Silverlight 2 delivers a cross-browser, cross-platform subset of the .NET Framework, and enables developers to build Rich Internet Applications. Developers can use either VS 2008 or the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects, and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment. Designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the same projects and use a creative tool to sculpt and create rich user experiences. I recently blogged about the nice dev | Go |
| Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 ... Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications. One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt and create optimal user experience designs. The WPF UI framework shipped in Silverlight further enables a great designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts like layout management, controls, styles, templates, and resources - which help avoid scenarios where designers and developers end up tripping over each other when integrating functionality, behavior and expressive design. Silverlight 2 Twitter Sample Last month I posted an in-depth blog tutorial on how to build a Silverlight 2 Digg application which you can read here . This tutorial was aimed primarily at developers, and focused on introducing the fundamental programming concepts involved when building a Silverlight 2 application. Today Celso Gomes and Peter Blois posted a cool 10 minute video tutorial that shows off using Expression Blend to stylize a Silverlight 2 Twitter Messenger application. You can watch the video here . You can download the source code for the completed Silverlight Twitter application here . The video does a nice job demonstrating how designers can re-style a Silverlight application without having to mess with the code behind it. In the process it shows some of the power and capability that Expression Blend 2 provides to build really rich user experiences. Celso starts with a developer version of the application, and then customizes and sculpts the UI to have a fun twitter character theme: The Application Model The Silverlight Twitter client is hosted within an ASP.NET server application that exposes a web service that enables the Silverlight Twitter application to communicate to the Twitter service (since Twitter does not allow direct access from client applications). Communication between the Silverlight client and the ASP.NET web server is done using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The client application uses a Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern (also known as the Model-View-ViewModel pattern) which is commonly used in large WPF applications. Even though this is a fairly simple application they wanted to take advantage of the flexibility that MVP allows and allow room for future growth. Maintaining the separation between the visuals and the application logic also enables designers to make fairly complex visual changes without impacting the basic application flow. The video goes through some examples of the styling flexibility this architecture facilitates. The Styling Process In the video, Celso highlights how Resources can help designers quickly change colors. A common Brush Resource, for example, can be used to change the color of all the text elements in the application: Celso shows how easy is to create new User Controls from graphics using Expression Blend 2 SP1 (just select multiple elements in the designer, right-click, and choose the "Make Control" menu option): And also how to create new states inside this new User Control (using the Visual State Manager feature - which is also now supported with WPF), to animate the bird (fly, blink, etc...) Celso also shows how to create animations for each state, changing advanced properties like Key Spline curves, and Repeat Behavior: He also shows how to create custom buttons from drawings (which can come from XAML or any other design tool like Photoshop or Illustrator). All the states of a Button Control are available out of the box. Expression Blend also enables you to easily change complex controls like List Boxes. Designers have acce | Go |
| Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF ... Last week was our big PDC conference, and I've been busy catching up back at work this week. I'm hoping to publish a bunch of new posts soon (including some on the PDC announcements we made). Until then, here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos : Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1. Download Hotfix: False C# Compilation Errors for ASP.NET Code Behind Files with VS 2008 SP1 : The C# team added support for live semantic errors with background compilation in VS 2008 SP1. There were a few cases where this caused false errors to be shown with ASP.NET Web site projects. You can fix these either by disabling live semantic errors (tools->options allows you to disable this), or by downloading a recent hotfix patch which is now public. Omar Khan has a useful blog post with more details on it. Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13 : Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles. This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database. For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos . ASP.NET Patterns Developers Should Know : Alex Homer from the Patterns and Practices (PAG) team at Microsoft has a nice article that introduces a number of common design patterns (MVC and MVP, Repository, Singleton, etc) and how you can apply them within ASP.NET applications. If you are interested in learning more about pattern based development I also highly recommend reading the Head First Design Patterns book (which has more than 250 positive reviews on Amazon). ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008 : Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery. Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today. ASP.NET and jQuery : Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free. Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation. jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2 : Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery. Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial. ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples. Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX : Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution. ASP.NET MVC Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC. This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work). Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC : Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC. I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms. Phil cove | Go |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Search Engine Optimization - Moving View State to the bottom of the page ... One of the greatest problems when trying to optimize an ASP.NET page to be more search engine friendly is the view state hidden field. Most search engines give more score to the content of the firsts thousands of bytes of the document so if your first 2 KB or more are view state junk your pages are penalized. This article explains how to avoid that without making replacements in the resulting HTML. | Go |
| Creating a Custom View Engine in ASP.NET MVC ... ASP.NET is an awesome web development platform that many developers wouldn't ever want to part with. However, if given the option, there are definitely parts of the package that you may want to swap out. This article will show you how easy it can be to break away from the "inline-ASP" or "Web Forms" world, and delve into your own custom ViewEngine. | Go |
| Using Filter Expressions with an SQL Data Source in ASP.NET VB 2008 ... This article describes the use of filter expressions in junction with an SQL Data Source. | Go |
| Creating an ASP.NET GridView Custom Field of type DropDownList ... Sometimes, you need to use a DropDownList in a GridView in a way to see the text of fields and save values in to your database. Here, we have extended the “BoundField” class and added features to create a column type of “DropDownList”. | Go |
| Common Language Runtime Beginner Series Part 1:-CLR Basics ... CLR or Common Language Runtime is a very important part of whole .net Framework and its utter importance is not seen by most of us as it works behind the scenes.This beginner series of my articles will help you to know what actually CLR is in simple terms and what are its basic features.
Remember this is for beginners, or people who are not as much familiar with CLR. | Go |
| EntityDataSource Control in ASP.NET 3.5 ... In this article I am going to discuss how to use EntityDataSource control step by step. | Go |
| Protecting Email Addresses Using Response Filters ... In this article we will see how we can change the email addresses written on a website to images on the fly. The general opinion about this task is to revamp the form where we are asking user to input the email address and then generate an image which will display later instead of email address. | Go |
| Create an ASP.NET Dynamic Data Website Using ADO.NET Entity Framework ... This article will demonstrate how to create an ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET Dynamic Data framework. Dynamic Data provides a scaffolding framework that enables you to create a data-driven application within minutes using either the LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework data model. | Go |
| Access an AJAX Enabled WCF Service using ASP.NET and Client Script ... In this article, we will see how to create an AJAX-enabled WCF Service and how to consume it using client-side script in an ASP.NET page. I have kept the example quiet simple so in order to keep our focus on creating and consuming AJAX Enabled WCF Services. | Go |
| Filtering Responses Using ASP.NET Response Filters ... It would be really nice if somehow we can capture the entire HTML that is being sent to the browser. This will allow us to perform last second changes to the
HTML. Fortunately, ASP.NET include Response Filters. Response Filters allows to intercept the response and give you the opportunity to alter the response. In this article we are going to create a ViewStateMover ResponseFilter which will move the ViewState from the top to the bottom of the page. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks ... 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks | Go |
| Sample Starter Project Using WCF and MSMQ ... This project is provided as a starter application to get you started with WCF and MSMQ. It uses MsmqIntegrationBinding. The sample messages borrow their structure from the Northwind database, but that database is not a requirement. | Go |
| Dating Website MailBox with Full Features ... GridView with AJAX Delete Confirmation, Select / Delete ALL with Memory Paging | Go |
| K-Means Clustering Used in Intention Based Scoring Project ... the use of K-Means Clustering for data mining purposes | Go |
| Ajax Tutorial for Beginners with XML & JSON: Part 2 ... This article will give you a brief idea about Ajax with XML & JSON | Go |
| Deployment of a Website on IIS ... This article tries to dig into IIS and explore it. | Go |
| Custom paging for Gridview, DataGrid, DataList and Repeater Control in ASP.Net with C# ... with the help of following code, you can ao=pply custom paing in | Go |
| The Localizable Dropdown for ASP.NET 2.0 ... Simple way of binding dropdown control to resource files | Go |
| Masked Div Or Modal Popup Window ... A Masked div or modal popup window is a child window created from the parent window which prevents the user from interacting with it before they can return to the parent application. Modal windows are commonly used in applications to control user awareness and to display critical notices. This maske | Go |
| AJAX enabled collapsible form section ... An AJAX control that can hide or show a form section including handling validators nested in the section. | Go |
| Cross Domain/Platform Authentication and Data Transfer ... Introduces a methodology for authenticating user in cross domain/platform and transferring user data from one site to another during the authentication process. | Go |
| Beginner's Guide To ASP.NET Cookies ... This article describes Cookies, Persistent and Non-Persistent cookies, their uses, cookie Munging etc. | Go |
| Send Mail and Print Report in Report Viewer Control ... This article demonstrates the implementation of Print and Send Mail operation in Report Viewer | Go |
| Zeta Resource Editor ... A small utility application to edit .NET string resources inside multiple resource files (.resx) in parallel. | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Useful RSS feeds for .NET developers ... RSS feeds are very very useful.Here are some feeds I use. Share your feeds also. That will help some other developers also.
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... 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 |
| Rick Strahls view on the Oil is the best perspective I have seen, ... This post has nothing to do with any geeky stuff, even if Rick Strahls is attached to it. He normally posts solutions for common development problems and he explains step by step a way to resolve them. Since the oil prices started claiming down, the arguments and the discussions for a new source of clean energy seem to stop and people are happy again. Seems like they wanted us to stop looking for better energy sources and purchasing better cars. Now Rick Strahl posted 2 days ago, a great read for... 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 Channel - 2008 Year In Review ... Check out this short, fun 3 minute video that Jeff put together just for you. It shows outtakes, clips, and various other items from 2008 DevExpress Channel videos. The video also shows how hard we work to get these videos to you. Ok, we're actually having a ton of fun bringing them to you. Based on your feedback, you find the videos very helpful. So in 2009, you'll see even more videos on our products, technology, and other topics. Click the image below and watch the video. And be sure... 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 |
| Collecting Twitter stats using a Twitter Bot ... I have been playing with the Bot to get some information out of Twitter, the main problem the restriction of 100 requests per hour, means that could take a few hours to get the information of a user with lots of followers. I used Robert Scoble and Scott Hanselman for the test. Total Network: the number of followers and one level in the followers of those. Follower used in December: The followers that sent an update on the month of December. Not used in December: The followers that didnt use Twitter... 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 |
| Looking at Oxite the “glass half full” way ... Today is a sunny (even if damn cold) day in Milano so while I was coming to work I decided I wanted write something good about Oxite, the CMS built by the MIX Online team. The point I want to make is: Oxite is the best example to show how bad WebForms are when it comes to rendering standard compliant HTML. There has been a lot of negative talking about Oxite: its not working out-of-the-box, its not such a good example of how to implement something with the ASP.NET MVC framework, people looking... 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 |
| EF Designer Bug Workaround for 0..1 Associations to Derived Types (Error Code 3034) ... After a lot of head scratching, I was finally able to accidentally duplicate a mapping
issue reported to me by a reader of the Rough
Cuts version of my book, Programming Entity Framework. Then after a lot more head
scratching, I was able to discover the pattern and workaround for this problem, which
has also surfaced a number of times in the forums.
The issue is when creating associations where one of the ends is a 0..1 (zero or one)
and one of the entities involved is derived from another entity.... 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 |
| Wii games for young kids 2008. ... I have received lots of emails about an updated list for games for young children from people reading my 2007 list of games for kids for the Wii. The Nintendo Wii, as if you are the owner of one, is the perfect game console for kids, easy to use and keeps them moving instead of sitting with sore thumbs. I have been purchasing a few games or renting them from Blockbuster to find out what games my kids like. I am the proud father of a 5,3, 0.7 years old girls and they are my testers, my QA department... 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 |
| Cross Domain/Platform Authentication and Data Transfer ... Introduce a methodology of authenticating user cross domain/platform and transferring user data from one site to another during the authentication process.... 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 |
| Xmas present from DZone: my first article resyndicated to DZone .NET Zone ... Last month Alvin Ashcraft sent me a email notifying that I was selected as MVB (Most Valuable Bloggers) by DZone. Actually I forgot to thank him when it happened so: Thank you Alvin!. And on the day of Christmas one of my posts about ASP.NET MVC has been resyndicated on the .NET Zone: How to Call Controllers in External Assemblies in an ASP.NET MVC Application. Actually its not exactly the same article I posted: all the code is displayed using SyntaxHighlighter, a javascript syntax highlighter.... 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 |
| Fight 404 errors with ASP.NET Routing ... Use ASP.NET Routing to avoid 404 Not Found errors... 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 |
| My Interview on High on Coding About ASP.NET MVC ... Mohammad Azam is one the ASP.NET community members who has been actively contributing to some sites including ASP Alliance and his own sites. He had a few sites about ASP.NET where he was publishing his articles but a short while ago he started a new site called High on Coding and redirected all his other domains and URLs to this new one. Mohammad is trying to publish valuable stuff about the .NET on the site as articles, videos and podcasts. As a part of the site, Mohammad records regular podcasts... 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 |
| ViewData mechanics and segmentation (excerpt from ASP.NET MVC in Action) ... (excerpt from ASP.NET MVC in Action) Viewdata is the bag of state that is passed to a view. A view should get all the information it needs from the viewdata. This concept is implemented as a dictionary. It contains key/value pairs as well as some special properties, such as Model. Viewdata is accessible on the controller as well. The controller is responsible for filling the viewdata dictionary with objects, but action filters can add to the dictionary as well. When a view is executing, it will... 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 |
| Extract an msi before installing it. (like the ASP.NET MVC RC msi) ... If you are like me, then you probably have quite a few project going that are using the ASP.NET MVC Framework. The team has been very good about giving us frequent releases over the past year. Because of this, my company has been able to plan for this release in ongoing projects. Because of this also, I, and my employees have projects that depend on the beta release of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. When the RC is release in January, we will plan the migration, but since the 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 |
| Some interesting things I am finding about Windows Azure ... Queue messages have a max size of 8kb.
Queued messages in azure are typed.
If you are interested in #Azure, I would suggest following @smarx on twitter.com.
Transaction support will come in future #Azure CTPs.
ACID Transactions are only supported on single entity updates at this time in azure.
Azure table writes are synchronous.
In the commercial release, MS will offer some control over geodistribution and georeplication. Info is scarce at this time.
In the CTP, Azure runs in "a single datacenter... 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 |
| SQL Server Management Studio 2008 IntelliSense Doesn't Recognize Special Characters ... I just filed a new bug with Microsoft Connect . I certainly hope this one doesn’t get shrugged off like many of my other bugs did. Want to reproduce it yourselves? Just create a table with a character that can only be valid inside the context of brackets (like a comma or braces) and then try to select from it. Don’t keep the CREATE clauses in the same query window or it might just work. See the screenshot below. This is very frustrating because this means that not only is there no IntelliSense for these objects, but IntelliSense now gets in the way of actual querying as it will autocomplete incorrect names. | Go |
| Validate username using custom validation (AJAX) ... In this post, I will explain you how to have an ajax call on custom validator control and check for the username in the database. This task will include two pages one is the form page (default.aspx in our case) in which we have the custom validator and the other one is the page which we call through AJAX to give us the result (validateUser.aspx). You can also have a web service instead of that page but in my scenario , I am using ASPX page. So, the form will look like as following. 1: <...(read more ) | Go |
| Add me to the list of MVPs ... I received my MVP email this week along with others. I am happy to receive the award for all of the work that I have with the Southeast Valley .NET User Group . It is nice to know that someone noticed the work and appreciated it. I look forward to making this year as valuable for the Phoenix area. | Go |
| Tip #41: Did you know... establishing a remote connection to a IIS server with self-issued certificate will require a certificate validation delegate? ... Either through WMSvc or through your own script, whenever you try to establish a connection with a remote server, which doesn’t provide a trusted certificate you need to provide a delegate for this certificate validation check to validate untrusted certificates. The signature for this delegate is as follows Namespace: System.Net.Security Assembly: System (in System.dll) public delegate bool RemoteCertificateValidationCallback( Object sender, X509Certificate certificate, X509Chain chain...(read more ) | Go |
| Session_OnEnd, Classic ASP and IIS 7.0 ... I have found that a classic ASP application that worked just fine on IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0 may have some problems in IIS 7.0 if it is making use of the Session_OnEnd function in Global.asa. Here is the set up, I have a very simple global.asa file which increments SessionCount in Session_OnStart and decrements SessionCount in Session_OnEnd : Sub Session_OnStart Application("SessionCount")=Application(" Session Count ")+1 End Sub Sub...(read more ) | Go |
| A Linq2Kdb+ Query provider ... Over the winter break I wanted to learn more about a few technologies: T4 - the built into Visual Studio code generation tool The Kdb+ columnar database Expression trees The result ended up in a Linq to Kdb+ query provider. The following snippet translates to using (IConnection connection = new Connection("localhost", 5001))
{
var tkc = new TestKdbContext(connection,Console.Out);
connection.Run(@"\l sp.q");
IEnumerable<string> names = from row in tkc.sRecord
where row.status == 20 && row.city == GetCity()
select row.name;
}
which ends up being transformed to something like this Q function
{?[s;enlist (&;(=;`status;20);(=;`city;enlist x));();(enlist `name)!enlist `name]}
My thoughts -
T4, combined with the T4 toolbox proved to be a fine alternative to CodeSmith. With it I was able to generate some strongly typed classes which mapped to a Kdb tables, and also create a strongly typed KB query context.
Kdb+/Q is certainly an impressive technology. It combines a columnar database server and complete functional and query language in a 156kb executable. That said, getting proficient in reading Q code seems like it'll take five times as long as it will to learn to write it.
Expression trees are definitely fun to play with, there's tons of opportunity in compiled lambdas for custom filtering and fine-grained entitlement checks. Creating the query provider was made possible (in the time I had) with the IQToolkit and this guide . | Go |
| Creating high performance WCF services ... I had a WCF service where I wanted to be able to support over a hundred concurrent users, and while most of the service methods had small payloads which returned quickly, the startup sequence needed to pull down 200,000 records. The out of the box WCF service had no ability to support this scenario, but with some effort I was able to squeeze orders of magnitude performance increases out of the service and hit the performance goal. Initially performance was abysmal and there was talk of ditching WCF entirely ( and as the one pushing WCF technology on the project this didn't seem like a career enhancing change ) Here's how performance was optimized. These are listed in the order they were implemented. Some are fairly obvious, others took some time to discover. Each item represents, a significant increase in latency or scalability from the prior - and although I have internal measurement numbers, I'm not comfortable publishing them as the size of the data increased, and the testing approach changed. Use NetTCP binding This helps both throughput and the time it takes to open and close connections Use DataContract Serializer instead of XMLSerializer I started out using DataTables - POCO objects via Linq2Sql yielded a 6x increase slow: [OperationContract] MyDataTable GetData(...); fast: [OperationContract] IEnumerable<MyData> GetData(...); Unthrottle your service It's quite understanable that WCF is resistant to Denial of Service attacks out of the box, but it's too bad that it's is such a manual operation to hit the "turbo button". It would be nice if the Visual Studio tooling did this for you, or at least had some guidance (MS - hint, hint) The items to look at here are: <serviceBehaviors><serviceThrottling ...> set the max values high <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483647" /> and under <netTcpBinding> setting the listenBacklog, maxConnections, and maxBuffer* value high Cache your data WCF, unlike ASP.Net has no built in facility to cache service responses, so you need to do it by hand. Any cache class will do. Normalize/compress your data this doesn't necessarily have to be done in the database, the Linq GroupBy operators make this easy to do in code. To clarify, say your data is kept in a denormalized table string Key1 string Key2 string Key3 int val1 int val2 the bulk of the result set ends up being duplicate data LongKeyVal1 LongKeyVal2 LongKeyVal3 10 12 LongKeyVal1 LongKeyVal2 LongKeyVal3 11 122 LongKeyVal1 LongKeyVal2 LongKeyVal3 12 212 so normalize this into LongKeyVal1 LongKeyVal2 LongKeyVal3 10 12 11 122 12 212 In code, given the following classes public class MyDataDenormalized
{
public string Key1 { get; set; }
public string Key2 { get; set; }
public string Key3 { get; set; }
public int Val1 { get; set; }
public int Val2 { get; set; }
}
public class MyDataGroup
{
public string Key1 { get; set; }
public string Key2 { get; set; }
public string Key3 { get; set; }
public MyDataItem[] Values { get; set; }
}
public class MyDataItem
{
public int Val1 { get; set; }
public int Val2 { get; set; }
}
you can transform an IEnumerable<MyDataDenormalized> into a IEnumerable<MyDataGroup> via the following var keyed = from sourceItem in source
group sourceItem by new
{
sourceItem.Key1,
sourceItem.Key2,
sourceItem.Key3,
} into g
select g;
var groupedList = from kItems in keyed
let newValues = (from sourceItem in kItems select new MyDataItem() { Val1 = sourceItem.Val1, Val2= sourceItem.Val2 }).ToArray()
select new MyDataGroup()
{
Key1 = kItems.Key.Key1,
Key2 = kItems.Key.Key2,
Key3 = kItems.Key.Key3,
Values = newValues,
};
Use the BinaryFormatter, and cache your serializations If you're willing to forgo over the wire type safety, the binary formatter is the way to go for scalability. Data caching has only a limited impact if a significant amount of CPU time is spent serializing it - which is exactly what happens | Go |
| Facebook vs. Twitter - ‘A Division of The Spoils’ ... Lately, I have been working quite a bit on Facebook, primarily R & D for a prospective client project (in Marketing Research). Perusing through Facebook-related blogs, one posting stands out – ‘How Facebook Could Kill Twitter Overnight’ . The premise is - if the Facebook API call ‘Users.getInfo’ includes the user’s status update – it would mean the demise of Twitter overnight! Sounds very interesting indeed – developers will be thankful and Facebook would save $500m (part of which would belong to Microsoft ). Unfortunately, the blog post claims that Facebook does not have the developer resources available to build the status updates internally – this is a weak argument. Good post and some very good responses (comments) to the post. I am of the opinion - why not do it? it appears that Facebook would have more to gain (broader demographics) and the market would sort out ‘the division of the spoils’. | Go |
| Powershell 1.0 script to update Active Directory FTP User isolation attributes (msIIS-FTPDir, msIIS-FTPRoot) ... I recently posted an article how to setup FTP User Isolation and Active Directory together. Here is the article . In the post, I mentioned you'll need to engage your AD administrator to update the two attributes. Here is a script using Powershell 1.0. You could expand the script to take parameters (domain controller, distinguishedName and the two attributes). The user account that runs the script needs the proper permissions in Active Directory. $objUser = [ADSI]" LDAP://192.168.1.1/CN=UserNameHere...(read more ) | Go |
| Powershell 1.0 script to update Active Directory FTP User isolation attributes (msIIS-FTPDir, msIIS-FTPRoot) ... I recently posted an article how to setup FTP User Isolation and Active Directory together. Here is the article . In the post, I mentioned you'll need to engage your AD administrator to update the two attributes. Here is a script using Powershell 1.0 Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more ) | Go |
