| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Keys To Web 3.0 Design and Development When Using ASP.NET ... Ten rules to consider for hard-core agile and beautiful ASP.NET development. | Go |
| Setting Up IIS7 In Vista For ASP.NET / WCF Development Purposes ... I recently needed to setup IIS in Vista (again) to support my ASP.NET & WCF development purposes. Since there are a few different things to remember when setting up IIS in Vista to support development purposes (ASP.NET, WCF, Windows Authentication, etc.) I figured others might benefit from a quick How To. | Go |
| Nested Master Page Events not being called ... Its the silly features that soak up the time on any development project..... here's one that caught me out before. Nested MasterPage Events not being fired. | Go |
| last.fm ASP.NET User Control ... If you are using last.fm and ASP.NET then this User Control is for you! | Go |
| Using the New DateTime Support in .NET 3.5 via MVC & jQuery ... Learn to utilize the new expanded support for date times with proper time zone support in .NET 3.5. Create some HtmlHelper extension methods for writing out dates and use the jQuery Time Ago plugin to show them relative to the user's time zone. There is also a bonus method for formatting dates anyway you like through a lambda expression. | Go |
| ASP.NET - Efficiently Importing DataTable ... ASP.NET developers often use DataTable to store data received from SQL stored procedure, web-service, data access layer (DAL) etc. | Go |
| Using HoverMenuExtender with ListView to Update, Delete & Insert ... Explore how to associate a HoverMenuExtender with a ListView control to update and delete records. The Listview control in this sample will also contain the functionality to add new records. | Go |
| Redirect a Login By Role in C# ASP .NET ... Learn how to automatically redirect users upon login, based upon their role membership with a handy method and the web.config file. | Go |
| SPTechnique: Custom Field control implemented as a User Control ... When creating custom controls it is often must easier to create a control using the "User Control" development model instead of the "Server Control" model. Server controls generally have a more "low level" feel and dictate that the developer build the control's rendering from scratch. Either by building a control tree or by constructing the rendered output in code.
Alternatively user controls have nice separation of code and presentation by virtue of having a markup file (.ascx) and a code behind file; much like a standard aspx page. User controls can be created and developed using the same standard approaches and processes that we all know and love from the aspx page model. | Go |
| Creating a reusable grid tree view with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery ... My attempt to create a reusable GridView+TreeView control for ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. | Go |
| Building better web forms: Validation best practices ... Validation is a very important aspect in web forms development and should be planned carefully. Well designed validation can favorably affect the user experience and can speed up the filling of forms. Poor validation can make considerable damage to the system and user experience. Not having any kind of validation is out of the question. | Go |
| ASP.NET Performance: Dynamically Loaded Assemblies Cause Application R ... Walkthrough to identify the root cause of application recycles in ASP.NET | Go |
| Pluggable ASP.NET CacheManager ... A CacheManager class that you can easily write your own providers (memcached, Velocity, etc.) for. Includes providers for request-length caching and ASP.NET's built-in Cache object. | Go |
| OpenFlash Chart - Fixing Open Source ... OpenFlashChartLib fixed to work with the newest version of Open Flash Chart using the original authors code and other open source examples. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Plug-In Hybrids: ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Side By Side | Go |
| Adding OpenID to your web site in conjunction with ASP.NET Membership - Digging My Blog - Dan Hounshell | Go |
| Best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.0 - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 | Go |
| Exploring Caching in ASP.NET (CodeProject) | Go |
| Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication | Encosia | Go |
| ASP.NET website Continuous Integration+Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| Matt Berseth: ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Simple 5 Table Northwind Example | Go |
| Microsoft Web Platform | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - jQuery to ship with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| 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 MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you t | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here . The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release. UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup. Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size). Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download. This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications. This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility. I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it. To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application. To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item. We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template wit | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Support with Visual Web Developer 2008 Express ... Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release . One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition. The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it). This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express. If you install the Visual Web Developer Express SP1 Beta you can start using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 with it immediately. Important: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 does not require SP1 to be installed if you are using Visual Studio 2008. ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 will work with both VS 2008 and VS 2008 SP1 just fine. You can learn more about the new VWD Express support for ASP.NET MVC from the VS Web Tools team blog here . This post also includes a free web download that provides ASP.NET MVC Test project support for NUnit-based unit tests. You can use these NUnit project templates with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release ... This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here . You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here . Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release , along with some additional tweaks and adjustments. You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method. For example: which would render the below HTML when run: Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it. This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything). It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow. For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them. The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object): One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required). Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above: We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action: When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red): Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning "JsonResult" (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), "ContentResult" (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results. The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you'll see us add several more built-in result types. Improved HTML Helper Methods The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements. Automatic Value Lookup With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers. For example: to include a value within a <input type="text" value="some value"/> element you would write: The above code continues to work - although now you can also just write: The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use. SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc). One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render. For example, below I'm creating a SelectList view-model class over the | Go |
| May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF ... Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. 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 Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control : Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls : Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario. Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET : A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images. Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on. ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners : Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns). The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated. Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control : Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control. Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch : Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads. Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier. Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class : Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class. Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta : Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls. .NET 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ : Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it. Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL : Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries. Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries. DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers. Ukadc.Diagnostics : Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc). Visual Studio 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know : A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio. Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series. I confess I didn't know this one. Silverlight 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time". Wow. AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes : Nikhil Kothari has a | Go |
| Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta ... Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them).
We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates. You can download and install the beta here .
Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes
The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form - so you should be careful about installing it on critical machines. There are a few important SP1 Beta installation notes to be aware of:
1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta. There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release. These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta.
2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure). You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things). It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package. We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta.
3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend. This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running. Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue.
Important Update : If you previously installed a VS 2008 Hotfix, you must run the HotFix Cleanup Utility before installing the VS 2008 SP1 Beta. Click here to download and run this.
Improvements for Web Development
.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain a bunch of feature improvements targeted at web application development.
The VS Web Dev Tools team has more details (including specific bug fix details) on some of the VS specific work here . Below are more details on some of the work in the web-space:
ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
.NET 3.5 SP1 adds support for a rich ASP.NET data "scaffolding" framework that enables you to quickly build functional data-driven web application. With the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature you can automatically build web UI (with full CRUD - create, read, update, delete - support) against a variety of data object models (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, REST Services, and any other ORM or object model with a dynamic data provider).
SP1 adds this new functionality to the existing GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView controls in ASP.NET, and enables smart validation and flexible data templating options. It also delivers new smart filtering server controls, as well as adds support for automatically traversing primary-key/foreign-key relationships and displaying friendly foreign key names - all of which saves you from having to write a ton of code.
You can learn more more about this feature from Scott Hanselman's videos and tutorials here .
ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
.NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible new URL routing engine that allows you to map incoming URLs to route handlers. It includes support for both parsing parameters from clean URLs (for example: /Products/Browse/Beverages), as well as supp | Go |
| Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Book (only $16 on Amazon for a short time) ... One of the things I like to track are book sales on Amazon.com, which provides a useful data point to monitor what developers are interested in on any given day. I use the www.TitleZ.com site (which is built using ASP.NET) to track specific titles I want to watch - it then generates a report showing real-time Amazon sales ranking data, as well as 7 day, 30 day and 90 day sales ranking averages. This morning I pulled up my report and saw the usual books near the top of my list, and was about to navigate away when I noticed the eye-popping amazon ranking of the top book -"Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB " by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader. Its Amazon sales rank was a stunning #95 (of all books on Amazon), which meant it was outselling even Harry Potter (which is pretty much unheard of for any technology book). It turns out that Amazon is holding a special price promotion for a short time on a few books - and this was one that was selected. Instead of the usual $54 price, you can buy it for a short time for a ridiculous $16.49. I'm not sure how long this promotion will last - but if you are looking for a great ASP.NET 3.5 book this might be something you might want to take advantage of: The book is a great ASP.NET 3.5 book and an excellent end to end resource. It has been on the best seller list for programming books since it came out in March (usually in the top 5 of all programming titles), and has received glowing reviews (I posted a review of it on Amazon a few weeks ago and gave it 5 stars). If you are in the market for a good ASP.NET book, you might want to consider taking Amazon up on this offer before it closes (and apologies in advance if the price changes before you read this). Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you are looking for other good .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 books - I also recommend: C# 3.0 In a Nutshell , LINQ in Action , and Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 (all of which average a 5 star rating on Amazon). | Go |
| April 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, 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 Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET's membership, roles, and profile support. In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET's Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update : The ASP.NET team last week released an update of the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature. This update adds several new features including cleaner URL support using the same URL routing feature that ASP.NET MVC uses, as well as better confirmation, foreign-key, and template support. ASP.NET Testing with Ivonna : Travis Illig blogs about a new testing framework named Ivonna that enables unit testing of ASP.NET web forms. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX UI Templates : Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team has a cool post that shows off a prototype he has been working on that enables clean client-side AJAX templating of UI. ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit TabContainer Theme Gallery : Matt Berseth has another of his excellent posts - this one shows off a bunch of cool themes you can use to style the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Reducing Page Load Times with UpdatePanels and Timers : Paul Glavich posts of a cool trick you can use with tab controls to asynchronously load their content in the background in order to improve perceived page load time. Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? Dave Ward has a useful article that talks about the page methods feature in ASP.NET AJAX, and explains why they are static methods. JQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 : Brad Vincent posts about using the VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix we released in February to get a nice JavaScript intellisense experience in Visual Studio 2008 when using the JQuery AJAX library. ASP.NET MVC Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing : Fredrik Kalseth has a cool article that talks about the concepts behind inversion of control (IOC) and how you can use this with ASP.NET MVC to better isolate dependencies and enable better unit testing of your code. Stephen Walther's ASP.NET MVC Talk: Stephen Walther delivered a many-hour ASP.NET MVC post conference talk at ASP.NET Connections last week. You can download his slides + demos for free. Also check out his previous posts on Unit Tests with Visual Studio 2008 and TDD with Rhino Mocks . MVC Contrib Project Update : Eric Hexter blogs about some of the latest updates to the open source MvcContrib project to work with the latest ASP.NET MVC interim source release . Testing Action Results with ASP.NET MVC : Jeremy Skinner blogs about some cool extension method helpers he has added to MvcContrib to enable pretty sweet testing of Controller actions. MVC Membership Starter Kit - 1.2 Release : Troy Goode has posted an update to his excellent MVC Membership Starter Kit. This version works with the interim ASP.NET MVC source release. Silverlight Defining Silverlight DataGrid Columns at Runtime : Scott Morrison from the Silverlight team has a cool blog post that talks about how to define Silverlight DataGrid Columns via code at runtime. Visit my Silverlight links page for more DataGrid posts. Silverlight HTTP Networking Stack (Part 1 ), (Part 2 ), (Part 3 ): Karen Corby from the Silverlight team has a great three part blog series that talks about the new Silverlight 2 networking stack and how cross domain security works with it. Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with Sockets (Part 1) and (Part 2) : Dan Wahlin demonstrates how to implement a "GameStream" socket server and connect to it from a Silverlight client using Silverlight 2's built-in network sockets support. Silverlight - the Song : Spike Xavier and Dan Wa | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Using UpdatePanel Triggers in C# ... In this example, we will look at how we can specify different controls to refresh the whole page, and parts of the page. We will create two UpdatePanels and see how we can refresh each of them as well as refresh the whole page with the triggers. C# version. | Go |
| Creating a Dynamic Data Web site using Scaffolding ... This post explains how to create a basic Web Site that uses ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET Dynamic Data provides the Web application scaffolding that enables you to build rich data-driven Web applications.
scaffolding is mechanism that enhance the functionality of the existing ASP.NET Framework by adding the ability to dynamically display pages based on the data model of the database. | Go |
| ListView Control with DropDownExtender and Menu ... This article describes how to display the Context Menu on each row of the ListView Control using DropDownExtender and Menu control. | Go |
| Using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC ... The Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework has been getting talked about more and more lately. The power and flexibility of ASP.NET MVC allows for developers to use libraries other than those include in the box. The popular JavaScript framework, jQuery, is no exception. | Go |
| URL Rewriting in ASP.NET using URLRewriter.Net ... Learn to use search engine friendly URLs for your ASP.NET pages | Go |
| Using ASP.NET 3.5 History Control in ASP.NET 2.0 ... As ASP.NET 2.0 does not provide built in support for Back button functionality in AJAX Update Panel,
This post will show you how to use ASP.NET 3.5 Ajax ControlToolKit History control with ASP.NET 2.0, to achieve the back button functionality in ASP.NET 2.0 | Go |
| Using AJAX, LINQ and XML in C# ... AJAX and LINQ are two of the main focuses of Microsoft right now; and no wonder - both have huge potential and power behind them.
In this example, we will show how we can use AJAX coupled with LINQ and XML to create a Web Application that we can use to view stored data instantaneously, as well as add to it in the same way | Go |
| Forms Authentication in ASP.NET with C#: Advance ... This article describe how to create Roles based sccurity using Forms Authentication in easy to follow steps. | Go |
| MVC Preview 5 - Create Dynamic Action Links ... Explains how to add new views to sample project and create dynamic action links on the data coming from database ? Also explains how to use these dynamic actions links to perform database actions.
Sample Videos To Explains All these in action | Go |
| Handling Files and Directories from your web applications. ... Using C#, VB.NET, and ASP.NET to get all files of directory and subdirectory. Simply illustration of working with files and directories in ASP.NET. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Dynamic validation according to logged in user ... Dynamic validation according to logged in user | Go |
| An ASP.NET Data Layer base class for LINQ disconnected mode ... Quickly and easily implement your LINQ Data Layer with this abstract class. | Go |
| How to generate a WPF image and render it in a Webpage ... WPF Image generation | Go |
| Sortable GridView using jQuery's TableSorter ... A client side sortable grid view using jQuery's plugin Tablesorter | Go |
| 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 |
| Image manipulation and reading and writing to a database ... This code allows you to read/write from a database and change image dimensions, size, and quality. | Go |
| Create and display funnel charts on a web page ... How to create and display funnel charts on a web page with C# and ASP.NET. | Go |
| Send emails in ASP.NET using Gmail credentials ... This article contains code to send email using Gmail accounts. | Go |
| ServerComponents HTTP Handlers ... By using only configuration, create and customize HTTP handlers that do a lot of tasks. | Go |
| Agile Development Part 2 ... Agile Development Part 2 | Go |
| How to use Microsoft Silverlight in Oracle Weblogic Portal 10gR3 ... Step-by-step instructions on how to use the Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Software Development Kit in Oracle Weblogic Portal10gR3. | Go |
| Fixing infinite redirect loops in DotNetNuke ... Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete. | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part IX - Business layer ... Catharsis web-app framework - Business layer | Go |
| Win-Form/Web-Form Generic Components using the same Controller ... A framework to develop Win-Form and Web-Form applications using generic components | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| New Visualizations at Work: Moving to Silverlight Clients ... Microsoft's tools for building rich Internet applications (RIAs)-ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight 2-promise to help take the "developer ugly" out of line-of-business software.... 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 |
| Intersoft Updates WebUI Studio.NET Components ... Indonesian component maker Intersoft Solutions Corp. last month released a new version of its controls and components suite for ASP.NET -- and Silverlight-based Web development.... 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 |
| PARTNER DEVELOPER DINNER: Introduction to ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) ... Microsoft Developer Dinner Series for Partners Presenting Introduction to ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) The "Same Event" on different days in DC and Virginia, pick one! Where Date/Time Registration Link Address DC Wed. October 15th (6:30-8:30PM) Register... 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 |
| Gaining an Advantage with Application Roles ... Youve seen them, but have you really ever used them?... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Practical ASP.NET: Looking (Suspiciously) at SP1 ... What's in SP1 for ASP.NET developers? At least one bug fix, a couple of enhancements and -- perhaps -- something that will change your life. But Peter is suspicious.... 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 MVP Award and MVC ... I still don't have a chance to blog about my personal achievement recently - I got my MVP status renewed on Oct 1! Yes, it's a great news for myself and I enjoyed it so much since 2001.
BTW, I'm very happy to meet few friends this week, including Greg Low and Phil Hacck. Greg is a SQL expert and I knew him for years in the space of INETA and online community personally. Phil is obviously a star and I really enjoy his presentation about introducing MVC at local TechEd today (even the session... 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 |
| Scott Guthrie will be on the PDC keynotes would he be at the PDC Underground? ... Gu will be at the PCD talking about Silverlight 2 and jQuery. Im guessing that a few news will come out on that presentation. Mr Guthrie likes to release the news. I would be missing the PDC this year. $2000 is an expense that I cant find a justification to give the wife. Im still trying to get a BluRay DVD player for the house. Yet for people like me that cannot make it to the PDC, there is a free event called The Underground PDC, I wonder if Scott Guthrie would be attending. You need to... 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 |
| Search Trends October 2008 ... PDC is fast approaching and Cloud Computing is the theme - and all the rage for everyone else in the Industry media. Amazon recently announced they'll be extending their compute cloud to support Windows and real databases. Here's a look at some recent trends in the tech industry, using Google Trends . Daylight Savings Time The topic of DST is likely of at least marginal interest to most software developers, as working with DateTime constructs is a frequent requirement for us (and often a source of frustration). I wanted to confirm when it was this year and that led to the rest of these trend searches (I once missed a flight due to a change in the date of DST that my alarm clock's auto adjustment failed to pick up). FYI: Daylight Savings Time in 2008 will Fall Back the first Sunday in November. Interesting (and expected) that twice a year folks become interested in this topic. Note that the main regions who care are US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Most of the world doesn't observe DST. And contrary to what I thought I knew, Ben Franklin didn't invent DST and it only started in the early 1900s (according to the Source Of All Knowledge: Wikipedia ). Cloud Computing If I were a betting man, I'd bet on cloud computing to be a big upcoming trend in the next several years. It first hit the search term scene a little over a year ago, and it's gone up rather drastically since then. I'd look for it to peak in November this year after PDC and then to plateau or rise gently after that. Amazon's S3 and EC2 services have been around for a while - let's see how Microsoft compares thus far. Amazon Cloud vs. Microsoft Cloud I'd say Microsoft is going to catch and surpass Amazon by PDC time. Looking at another Microsoft event and announcement, let's see how Silverlight is doing in terms of interest. Silverlight Silverlight is still going strong. I predict it will go up steadily once Silverlight 2 is released, slated for later this year and most likely at PDC, I would say. So what about hosting? Is anyone looking for cloud hosting solutions? Compared to what? Let's look at two comparably small sets of terms. Cloud vs. Ruby Hosting Cloud hosting didn't exist as a trend before 2008 Q3 and now it's nearly as popular a search term as ruby hosting. Clearly Ruby Hosting isn't all that popular, but just how does it compare to say ASP.NET and PHP? Ruby vs. ASP.NET vs. PHP Hosting Clearly the trends for all three of these are heading downward, as I think the hosting marketplace has largely shaken out and become somewhat commoditized. With sites like GoDaddy offering cheap hosting along with about a million easy to use web publishing and blogging platforms, the need for hosting is obviously in decline. So what else is new? What about ASP.NET? Remember when it was Atlas? And what about this new jQuery thing that's not really new but is now going to ship with Visual Studio? Atlas vs. ASP.NET AJAX ... and jQuery How about data access technologies? Would it surprise you to learn that NHibernate has been a search trend since late 2004, with greater popularity than either LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework's high water mark since 2006 (that is, NH's 2006 and later popularity exceeds the best the others have ever achieved). I doubt this reflects adoption, but it's interesting nonetheless. Perhaps it reflects people searching for documentation... NHibernate vs. LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework How is interest in ASP.NET MVC coming along, with its hopeful release some time in 2008 as well? ASP.NET MVC Lastly, in the self-fulfilling prophecy department, how many people have been looking for a recession, since about a year ago? It certainly appears the popularity of a recession has gone up dramatically in the last 12 months. Recession Look up bailout as well, though the graph isn't terribly interesting since it's almost asymptotic... Fun times in the financial industry. Now back to more regularly scheduled geekdom. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .ne | Go |
| Create and display funnel chart on a web page ... How to create and display funnel chart on a web page with c# and 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 |
| MvcContrib latest release now with SubController support ... One of the items that many people I know have requested are subcontrollers. Most non-trivial web applications require many things happening on a single screen. Even if it's only the current shopping cart displayed on multiple screens, the MVC Framework needs a mechanism of screen decomposition so that web applications can scale with complexity. WebForms has the Control model where markup and logic live together and can be composed easily. With the MVC Framework CTP 5, a single... 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 |
| MvcContrib latest release now with SubController support ... One of the items that many people I know have requested are subcontrollers. Most non-trivial web applications require many things happening on a single screen. Even if it's only the current shopping cart displayed on multiple screens, the MVC Framework needs a mechanism of screen decomposition so that web applications can scale with complexity. WebForms has the Control model where markup and logic live together and can be composed easily. With the MVC Framework CTP 5, a single... 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 |
| In Love With Complexity ... I have just finished reading Simplexity
by Jeffrey Kluger, a senior editor and writer for Time magazine. The full title of the book is Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple). This is precisely the kind of question that’s been on my mind for a long time.
One of the arguments I’ve heard against offering simple solutions is that simple is not “professional.” The UI has to look sophisticated, rugged. With lots of buttons to click.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part IX - Business layer ... Catharsis web-app framework - Business layer... 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 |
| Communaut .NET Montral Next Meeting: ASP.NET Dynamic Data and ADO.NET Data Services ... www.dotnetmontreal.comDate: Lundi 6 octobre, 18h15Sujets: ASP.NET Dynamic Data et ADO.NET Data ServicesConfrenciers: ric Moreau et Guy BarretteLe SP1 du Framework .NET 3.5 nous apporte un lot de nouvelles technologies. Parmi celles-ci, on retrouve ASP.NET Dynamic Data qui permet aux dveloppeurs de livrer des applications Web centres sur les donnes de faon trs rapide et ce, sans crire de code. Parfait pour les pages de style gestion de donnes pour alimenter un site. ADO.NET Data... 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 |
| Some tools for Highlighting Code in web pages ... In October's version of MSDN Magazine (Toolbox Section) , Scott Mitchell has a nice post about tools for highlighting code. Some times bloggers needs to copy source code from visual studio IDE to web page. for readability purpose, Highlighting code is important in web page. You should convert the code snipped to formatted HTML. Highlighting code in web page is tedious work and in fact I hate that! Scott introduced some of existing and free tools for this purpose. One of best those is " CopySourceAsHtml...(read more ) | Go |
| C# Coding Standards by Lance's ... Following the right Coding standars comes with Practice and proper Guidance if you are a starter, and also lots of companies define or customize their own coding standards.
When I came across this challange to define the coding standard for my team, I thought instead of reinventing the wheel and recollecting everything from my experience, better if I get something which is already defined and documented. So I started googling and came across a very good document which covers almost all the aspects of C# Coding standards which I was looking for. This Document covers the following topics*
Cover all major C# Language features.
Provide guidelines on coding style & language usage (but not syntax)
Demonstrate all rules in code where applicable.
Describe rules in structure that is easy to read & use.
Define clear & concise rules.
Use consistent terminology & rule patterns.
Only provide rules where there is a clear cut best practice.
Lead developers to a "pit of success" and avoid common "pits of failure"
You can download the PDF from here http://weblogs.asp.net/lhunt/attachment/591275.ashx
Original Post you can find here : http://weblogs.asp.net/lhunt/pages/CSharp-Coding-Standards-document.aspx
Thanks
~Brij
* All the Copyrights in this Post are the property of the Respective Owner. | 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 |
| Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to Application Pages in SharePoint Central Administration ... Normal
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mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}
It is great to find out people like the articles you write on your blog, and it's even more fun when people actually contribute to your blog as well. That's how I received an update to a blog post I wrote some time ago, about adding breadcrumb navigation to Application Pages. Bart Snyckers explained that the mechanism described in my post worked a little bit different if you want to add Application Pages to the Central Administration site. Bart doesn't have a development blog yet (but he told me he's working on one, and he's running a photo blog already), so I'm posting Bart's findings below. Thanks Bart! Recently we also wanted to add breadcrumb navigation
to some Application Pages for SharePoint, which we were using in our Central
Administration, like the out-of-the-box Application Pages have. But it didn't
worked out the way I wanted to. Google showed me the way to Jan Tielens’ blogpost
about Adding breadcrumb navigation to SharePoint Application Pages, The easy
way .
But after some research I found out that Application
Pages that you want to show in the SharePoint Central Administration Site should be placed in different folders than
normal Application Pages (in collaboration or publishing sites for example).
When you are building up your 12-hive structure you should use
12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN for the Application Pages (*.aspx) and sitemap
(admin.sitemap.*.xml) files, instead of the 12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS . If you mix up
the .aspx and .sitemap files between the ADMIN and LAYOUTS folder, the
breadcrumbs just don't appear at all and if you place everything in the LAYOUTS
folder, the breadcrumbs don't work like you expect them to do. Further you have
to reference the correct MasterPageFile from the ADMIN folder as well.
To deploy your feature and let SharePoint add the
sitemap entries, you can use the methods described in Jan's article . Below you can find a small example to provision an
Application Page in the Operations tab in your Central Administration:
Application Page (.aspx), deployed to 12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN
<% @ Assembly
Name ="Microsoft.SharePoint,
Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<% @ Assembly
Name ="Example.SharePoint.CentralAdminApplicationPage,
Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=2de06805bd3065de" %>
<% @ Page
Language ="VB"
MasterPageFile ="~/_admin/admin.master"
Inherits ="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsPageBase"
%>
< asp : Content ID ="content1"
ContentPlaceHolderID ="PlaceHolderMain"
runat ="server">
Central
Administration Application Page
</ asp : Content >
< asp : Content ID ="content2"
ContentPlaceHolderID ="PlaceHolderPageTitle"
runat ="server">
Central Administration Application Page
</ asp : Content >
< asp : Content ID ="content3"
ContentPlaceHolderID ="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea"
runat ="server">
Central Administration Application Page
</ asp : Content >
Sitemap
(admin.sitemap.*.xml) , deployed to 12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN
<? xml version = "1.0 " encoding = "utf-8 " ?>
< siteMap >
< siteMapNode title = "Central Administration Application Page " url = "/_admin/CentralAdminApplicationPage.aspx " parentUrl = "/_admin/operations.aspx "/> | Go |
| Meet Me in Los Angeles, PDC2008 ... According to the countdown timer at the PDC2008 site , the opening keynote is only 17 days away (at the time of writing). The previous PDC in 2005 was all about Office 2007 (including SharePoint) and Vista, but this time there didn't seem to be a lot of Office/SharePoint content scheduled. Not that this is a bad thing; after 3 years of SharePoint teaching, coding and evangelizing, getting to know new technologies can be great. :-) I'm really looking forward to learn more about Live, Live Mesh, Cloud Services etc. But if you check the PDC sessions now, you can find five SharePoint related sessions. For a nice summary check Paul's blog post here . Hey there will even be a SharePoint booth! So I hope to meet you in LA! | Go |
| ASP.NET Podcast Show #125 - Routing with Webforms ... Subscribe to All!
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Show Notes:
Not just for MVC. Available with .NET 3.5 SP1. System.Web.Routing. Web.config. Global.asax. Routing class. Security . Output page.
Source Code:
Web.config entry:
<httpModules> ....... <add name="Routing"
type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule, System.Web.Routing,
Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> </httpModules>
Global.asax:
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Routing; using System.Web.Security; using System.Web.SessionState;
.................
void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Code that runs on application startup string strUrlPat = String.Empty; Route rteRoute, rte2;
strUrlPat = "{controller}/{action}/{nameid}";
rteRoute = new System.Web.Routing.Route(strUrlPat, new DisplayHandler()); System.Web.Routing.RouteTable.Routes.Add(rteRoute);
strUrlPat = "Book/{ISBNid}"; rte2 = new Route(strUrlPat, new BookHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(rte2);
}
Handler class:
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Security; using System.Web; using System.Web.Compilation; using System.Web.Routing; using System.Web.Security; using System.Web.UI;
namespace WAP { public class DisplayHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext rc) { var routingPage = __LongTerm__ typeof(Page)); routingPage.ControllerValue = rc.RouteData.Values["controller"] as string; routingPage.ActionValue = rc.RouteData.Values["action"] as string; routingPage.ProductValue = rc.RouteData.Values["nameid"] as string; return (routingPage); } }
public class BookHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext rc) { string VirtualPath = "~/Routing/Books.aspx"; if (!UrlAuthorizationModule.CheckUrlAccessForPrincipal(VirtualPath, rc.HttpContext.User, rc.HttpContext.Request.HttpMethod)) throw (new SecurityException()); var routingPage = (WAP.Routing.Books)BuildManager.CreateInstanceFromVirtualPath(VirtualPath, typeof(Page)); routingPage.ISBNNumber = rc.RouteData.Values["ISBNid"] as string; return (routingPage); } } }
Codebehind page:
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
namespace WAP.Routing { public partial class RoutingExample : System.Web.UI.Page { public string ControllerValue { get; set; } public string ActionValue { get; set; } public string ProductValue { get; set; } protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!Page.IsPostBack) { lblController.Text = ControllerValue; lblAction.Text = ActionValue; lblProduct.Text = ProductValue; } } } } | Go |
| Tweaking my color settings ... Like many developers, I spend a lot of time reading and writing code every day. After hearing so many developers praise the "dark background/light text" colors that have become popular, I decided to switch too. I did some research and found a theme I really liked . I tweaked it very slightly and have been using it ever since. It is much easier on the eyes. However, one thing has been bothering me. When Visual Studio stops in an exception or when an exception is thrown and Visual Studio highlights the catch block, the coloring is almost unreadable. Here's a quick sample: I remember doing a quick run through trying to find what this type of code block was called so I could change the color, but had no luck. Today, I couldn't stand it anymore. I methodically searched through every color option and finally found the one that corresponds to this case: Read-Only Region Looking in the Options dialog, the "Sample" shown looks okay: But that's because the "Item Foreground" is set to "Default" and VS assumes black. Since my default text color is White, this combination is horrible. I picked a new color from the background color dropdown (Olvie) and now my eyes are much happier: Technorati tags: Visual Studio , Color Scheme | Go |
| Canucks at PDC ... A Facebook group was created to help Canadians meet, exchange and connect at PDC 2008. www.CanucksAtPDC.com | Go |
| ESB Series: Part 5 ... Been a really crazy month with a lot of projects all going into production at once. Finally had some time to blog about the progress on my WCF based ESB:
http://www.iserviceoriented.com/blog/post/Building+Our+Own+ESB+-+Publish+Subscribe+Part+5.aspx
There's been a ton of interest in the project for something that is still very early on. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback so far. | Go |
| Stealth Paging : DataGrid ... It is quite common to see paging of data in today’s web application. It allows developer to show only a fixed set of rows at a time and pulling next set of rows on demand, improving overall user experience. In a desktop application, user normally does not have to deal with explicit paging. User experience is that of a continuous data stream, user just scrolls to see additional data. It is certainly possible to replicate explicit paging functionality in Silverlight. However Silverlight is supposed to be a RIA platform, combining best features of web and desktop. So let see how we can combine these two concepts, efficient chunked data retrieval of the web, with continuous scroll experience of the desktop. Enter Stealth Paging. Stealth Paging Stealth paging refers to the concept of retrieving data in background just before it is needed. You start by loading DataGrid with only one or two pages worth of data, just enough to cover the screen and some more. Now when user starts scrolling, and nears the end of available rows to show, we fetch additional data and add it to the data collection. User continues scrolling, without ever realizing that data was fetched in the background. We will start with a simple cumulative paging and then enhance it to implement the stealth mode. Simple Cumulative Paging In traditional web paging scenario, user is only shown one page of data at a time. Each new page replaces previous page, forcing user to page back to see the previous data. Instead of replacing one page of data with next page of data, we will just add to the existing data. This way user has access to all the current and previous data, and only needs to page to get next set of data. Create a new Silverlight application project. Also create the corresponding web application to host and test the Silverlight application Step 1 – PeopleService We will use WCF service to provide data to client. First add reference to System.Runtime.Serialization. Next create a data contract, as a Person class that will be sent back to the client as shown: using System.Runtime.Serialization;
namespace Silverlight.Web {
[DataContract]
public class Person {
private string _firstName;
[DataMember]
public string FirstName {
get { return _firstName; }
set { _firstName = value ; }
}
private string _lastName;
[DataMember]
public string LastName {
get { return _lastName; }
set { _lastName = value ; }
}
private int _age;
[DataMember]
public int Age {
get { return _age; }
set { _age = value ; }
}
private string _city;
[DataMember]
public string City {
get { return _city; }
set { _city = value ; }
}
}
}
Note that Person class is marked with DataContract attribute and individual fields with DataMemeber attribute. Next add a simple service to provide data for the client. Add Silverlight enabled WCF service and call it PeopleSevice. Add method GetData to the code behind PeopleService.svc.cs as shown.
[OperationContract]
public List<Person> GetData(int startRow, int endRow) {
List<Person> personList = new List<Person>();
for (int i = startRow; i < endRow; i++) {
personList.Add(new Person() {
FirstName = string .Format("First Name {0}" , i),
LastName = string .Format("Last Name {0}" , i),
Age = i,
City = string .Format("City {0}" , i)
});
}
//
return personList;
}
Here we are just creating test data on demand. In an actual production application, you will be calling database and paging, perhaps using Linq Skip and Take functionality or Top and RowNumber features in SQL.
Step 2 - Client
Now add the service reference to the Silverlight client and call is PeopleServiceReference. (use Discover button to see PeopleService). Next add System.Windows.Control.Data reference to the Silverlight project.
Add following xaml to page.xaml.
< UserControl x:Class ="Silverlight.Page"
xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml | Go |
