| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| ASP.NET Session State ... Session state is nothing more than memory in the shape of a dictionary or hash table, e.g. key-value pairs, which can be set and read for the duration of a user's session. | Go |
| 4 steps to use readymade DAL component (Data application blocks) ... One of the most important components in a project is the DAL component. Many developers end up creating their own DAL component which is pretty time consuming. A Microsoft enterprise application block has a very decent and time tested DAL component i.e. the Enterprise data application blocks. This tutorial will run through the necessary steps of how you can use Enterprise data application blocks in your DAL component. | Go |
| ASP.NET webdomain recycle on subfolder changes ... Faced a classic problem and still the desired solution is pending. But I am sure this will help all!
While working on a web application, one of my team presented some weird behaviour on ASP.NET
FIrst observation: Session times out randomly while working on the application.
So we started observing the application closely to see what might be causing this. We came out with some more observations:
Detailed observation: Session times out when any of the user participates in certain scenario. Also, not only the specific session expires, but all the use sessions are expired. Further study shown that actually the app domain itself recycles.
We studied the activities in these specific scenario. We found that a certain implementation use to create folder, put some temporrary files inside it and once done, the folder and the files were deleted. The application recycles whenever the folder is deleted.
Do know more about it. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta released - Coolness ... ASP.NET MVC is now officially in Beta. Go get it! ScottGu has all the juicy details in his usually Epic style. In a nutshell, this is called Beta (and not Preview 1138) because the quality and the amount of testing gone into it was higher than the Previews and source drops you may have gotten off of CodePlex. It's API surface is pretty stable now. | Go |
| ScottGu: ASP.NET MVC Beta ... One of ScottGu´s monster blogposts | Go |
| Local or Remote JavaScripts? ... Using Google's jQuery source or your own local copy? | Go |
| ASP.Net MVC - Upgrading From Preview 5 to Beta ... For those who, like me, have been following along with each preview push at the CodePlex project, I found a list of changes made between Preview 5 and Beta buried at the bottom of the Release Notes document as well as Microsoft's recommended upgrade path from Preview 5 to Beta. | Go |
| Effective calling of Google Analytics JavaScript ... Two ways to call the Google Analytics script... Is one better than the other? | Go |
| Asp.net Web application Deployment : Simpler Approach ... If you are copying files manually from Development to Testing and from Testing to Production Server(s) its a nightmare. I tried the setup project and it was time consuming to configure and make sure you have added all the related references for testing and production. Finally went to good old DOS command.. | Go |
| hide email and other sensitive information from spam harvesters ... Often we have to display email addresses and other contact information on our pages. For example providing a mailto link etc. However, along with the intended
users, some other persons/bots are also interested in getting those email IDs for sending spams. For this, spammers use special bots for harvesting email/contact
info from the web. In this post, I will show a method using javascript and any server side language by which we can easily protect such important information. | Go |
| Integrating Peter Blum's validation controls into the ASP.NET Wizard ... I brief summary of how to integrate Peter Blums validation controls into the ASP.Wizard control without the use of messy templates. | Go |
| Form Validation Simplified w/ Asp.Net MVC ... A short screencast on how to simplify form validation w/ Asp.Net MVC | Go |
| Building a Simple Iframe Custom Control ... The post explains how to build a simple Iframe custom control in ASP.NET. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC and Json.NET ... Bringing Json.NET to ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.0 - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 | Go |
| An Introduction to jQuery - Part 1: The Client Side | Go |
| CodeProject: Exploring Caching in ASP.NET. Free source code and programming help | 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 |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 Rewrite Module | Go |
| Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication | Encosia | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| Tip/Trick: Implement "Donut Caching" with the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution Feature - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| 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 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Web Voting System using AJAX, XML and LINQ in VB.NET ... This tutorial will teach you how to develop a poll system that will allow any user to cast their vote for the poll, and also view the results. | Go |
| ASP.NET Client Side State Management - Control State ... The article explains what is the control state and how to use it as a part of the ASP.NET client side state management. | Go |
| Building on demand Master/Detail grouping Grid with GridView and ASP.NET AJAX toolkit CollapsiblePanelExtender ... Building on demand Master\Details data with GridView, CollapsiblePanelExtender and ASP.NET AJAX PageMethods | Go |
| Building Custom Paging with LINQ, ListView, DataPager and ObjectDataSource ... Custom paging applied using LINQ and Extension Methods. The used with ObjectDataSource, ListView and DataPager. | Go |
| Building DAC with Execution Time in ASP.NET 3.5 and C# ... This tutorial will show you how to build your own Data Access Component and how to retrieve the time taken to execute. C# version. | Go |
| DataTable - Adding, Modifying, Deleting, Filtering, Sorting rows & Reading/Writing from/to Xml ... In this article, I am going to explain how to Add, Modify, Delete, Sort, Filter rows of the DataTable also writing data to xml as well as loading data from xml. Apart from this, I will also talk about writing/reading Schema of the DataTable. | Go |
| ASP.NET Client Side State Management - Query Strings ... The article discuss the query strings state management technique and how to use it. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Yahoo Market data - another take. ... A User Control that encaspulates the ability to view (delayed) market data from Yahoo. | Go |
| 4 steps to use readymade DAL component (Data application blocks) ... 4 steps to use readymade DAL component (Data application blocks) | Go |
| Agile Development Part 2 ... Agile Development Part 2 | Go |
| Ajax quick start FAQ ... Ajax quick start FAQ | Go |
| Software Architecture Interview Question Part 1 ( Design Pattern ) ... Design Pattern Interview Questions ( Quick Reference) | 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 |
| Switching Between HTTP and HTTPS Automatically: Version 2 ... An article on automatically switching between HTTP and HTTPS protocols without hard-coding absolute URLs | Go |
| AxiomaticTokenizer ... Financial security with one-time tokens | Go |
| NHibernate and MySql - a simple example on how to use it ... A short article with an example on how you can use NHibernate and Mysql together | Go |
| Silverlight 2.0 - Rotating 3D Image Cube / Box ... An implementation of a 3D image cube as a custom user control in Silverlight 2.0 | Go |
| Fully JavaScript Enabled Editor ... Fully JavaScript enabled editor which also contains some server coding | Go |
| Writing Your Own RTF Converter ... An article on how to write a custom RTF parser and converter | Go |
| Selectable GridView with WaitBox ... This article describes how to implement a selectable GridView control in ASP.NET. | Go |
| Windows Communication Foundation FAQ quick starter Part 1 ... Windows Communication Foundation FAQ quick starter Part 1 | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Microsoft Unleashes Tool For Web Developers ... Web App Installer centralized management of ASP.NET and PHP-based open source Web apps.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta ... Nothing is better than hearing the news of Beta release of ASP.NET MVC immediately after arriving at home. Yes, while there is no official announcement about the release by MSFT and there isn’t any new build or download package available on ASP.NET workspace, ASP.NET MVC Beta download package is available to bring the noise to the community.
While there are several big announcements about Microsoft products on a regular basis (such as the recent Silverlight 2.0 release) but I’ve been... 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 |
| NEW Web Application and Platform Installers from Microsoft.com/web. ... Do you know about Microsoft.com/web ?
Wanna get up and running quickly ?
Wanna auto install free ASP.NET or PHP Applications on your Windows Stack.
Then this is some real coolness for YOU !
Previews are below.
Hop over to http://www.microsoft.com/web to
download and be sure to check out the other cool news and resources !!!\
Microsoft Web Platform Installer
The Web Platform Installer Beta (Web PI) provides a single, free package for installing
and configuring Microsoft's entire Web Platform,... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Microsoft Posts ASP.NET MVC Beta for Download ... Today Microsoft released the official beta for ASP.NET MVC, its model view controller architecture for Web applications based on the .NET 3.5 Framework.... 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 |
| DynamicData many to many FieldTemplate ... Edit control for 'n to n' or 'many to many' table relations for DynamicData... 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 |
| Building Web Sites with ASP.NET - Part 1 ... In this first part of the series, Brian delves into setting up an ASP.NET web application that makes use of object-oriented design patterns while making use of the latest and greatest technologies as they make sense. He begins with an overview of the project creation using Visual Studio 2008 including the coverage of the modal popups feature. Brian also examines the usage of themes and the implementation of searching with the help of screenshots and related source code. 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 |
| Using GeoTwitter to track the fires in LA ... Every year before Halloween, the fires begin here in Southern California. Tonight I was using GeoTwitter GeoRSS Editor to track the fire to share it with my family and friends. The steps to create your georss feed is pretty simple, add as many lines, points and polygons into the map and press Save, after giving your feed a name, the system will provide you with a feed to share with your favorite viewer. You can see other users georss feeds bellowed saved by the system. What's... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Web Platform Installer ... Ive used the term drinking from the fire hose when describing my first days at Microsoft. However, I believe that a lot of our customers feel this way when approaching the plethora of options for web application development on the Microsoft stack. This is feedback weve received from many sources and as Scott Hanselman pointed out, theres a concerted effort to make things easier to find and understand here. Much of these efforts will take time to see fruition, but some of them are happening now.... 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 |
| MVC: From Start to Blog ... I gave a talk this past weekend at the Philly.NET Code Camp 2008.3 . Ive uploaded my slide deck , project , and a few additional files (used in the demo) in case anyone would like to review again. I was also able to find another way to fake HttpContext. Check out Stephen Walthers blog post about faking the controller context . He also has a blog post about unit testing the views without a web server . I hope all that attended enjoyed my talk and I look forward to seeing you all again! 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 |
| Major input control Gotcha ... Short Story:
This will not work:
<ComponentArt:NumberInput runat="server" ID="NumberInput1" /><input type="button" value="+" onclick="NumberInput1.incrementValue();" /><input type="button" value="-" onclick="NumberInput1.decrementValue();" />
This is how to correct it:
<ComponentArt:NumberInput runat="server" ID="NumberInput1" /><input type="button" value="+"... 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 |
| Sitefinity Case Study on Telerik TV ... Carl Franklin and Telerik's own Gabe Sumner host another case study on Telerik TV . This month, they'll interview Mark Davidson from Netfinity as he shows off Fusion Car Audio , the official site for New Zealand's leading exporter of consumer electronics. If you use Sitefinity yourself or are just curious about Telerik's award-winning CMS, you won't want to miss this show. Fusion Car Audio was built with Sitefinity, making use of built-in multi-language and regional capabilities and then extended with some custom modules. The site is SEO friendly and uses extensive URL re-writing techniques to maximize content across multiple regions and languages. So be sure to drop by Telerik TV and watch as Mark shows how easy it was to built a feature-rich site with Sitefinity CMS.
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 |
| Flickr Xplorer - A Cool ASP.NET MVC Example ! ... Mehfuz Hossain has created a cool open source application based on ASP.NET MVC
The
CodePlex project can be found HERE !You can use the application LIVE
- HERE !... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Data Binding Data Conversion ... One of the more interesting topics that arise in Data-binding is that of Data Conversion. So much can be accomplished without explicit conversion that it is easy to overlook until you hit the real world. To see this, I'll make a small modification to the code I wrote for the Silverlight Tutorial on Data Binding. The premise of this simplified example is that you are interacting with a bookstore or a library, displaying information about one book at a time. We assume that you get the book... 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 |
| Sitefinity reviewed for 2009 Web CMS Report ... Sitefinity was selected as 1 of only 42 Web Content Management Products to be reviewed for the 2009 Web CMS Report . This annual report provides a comprehensive overview of CMS products & best practices across 7 vendor categories and multiple platforms.
The CMS landscape contains hundreds of products; it is very exciting for Sitefinity to be selected as one of only a few to be reviewed
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 |
| ASP.NET MVC Framework Status: BETA ... Although I haven`t noticed any announced from the big names yet (see update 2 below), ASP.NET MVC BETA release is already online and available for download . ASP.NET official MVC page and CodePlex site are not yet updated. Will keep you updated when the announcements come. Udpate 1: You can find screenshots for the new release with some info in this blog post . Update 2: Announcements have arrived :) [MUST READ] Scott Guthrie has posted his announcement , with so many interesting details and how-to guides as you would expect him to. From the ASP.NET MVC Framework team: Phil Haack has written his own announcement , with many references to very useful ASP.NET resources . Scott Hanselman wrote an announcement with references to the new features in the BETA release as described in Scott Guthrie’s post. Technorati Tags: asp.net ,asp.net mvc ,aspnetmvc ,asp.net mvc framework ,mvc ,microsoft news | 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 |
| SQL Injection ... A must read article on how to write Injection proof SQL . | Go |
| Functional .NET - Fighting Friction in the BCL with Directory.GetFiles ... Very recently on a project, I was having significant issues with System.IO.Directory.GetFiles, in which I was getting an access denied message which prevented further crawling of certain directories. The performance issue was another issue that was detrimental. I wasn't happy either with the design of this API. Instead, I set out to fix some of these issues and come up with a design that I felt better addressed some of my concerns with some techniques from functional programming.
The Issues
There are several issues that lead me to come up with an alternative for this situation of getting all files in a directory.
Arrays shouldn't be returned from method calls
Processor intensive for iterating over large directory trees instead of calculating only what I need, when I need it
Filtering is weak, and only uses file format patterns
Access denied internal messages occur for no apparent reason which halts the method
Let's talk about each just a little bit more.
The first issue with GetFiles is that it returns an array. Eric Lippert , of the C# team recently posted on "Arrays considered somewhat harmful" , in which he describes that for most cases, arrays should not be used in one form or another. In this post, he states:
You probably should not return an array as the value of a public method or property , particularly when the information content of the array is logically immutable. Let me give you an example of where we got that horridly wrong in a very visible way in the framework. If you take a look at the documentation for System.Type, you'll find that just looking at the method descriptions gives one a sense of existential dread. One sees a whole lot of sentences like "Returns an array of Type objects that represent the constraints on the current generic type parameter." Almost every method on System.Type returns an array it seems.
Given that the GetFiles method returns an array, we could feel free to mutate the contents of this array and we'd be none the wiser for it. There is no need, once calculated, to change this value. This file path is what it is. If you need to modify the contents, a Map (Select) would do wonders if you are using an IEnumerable<string> instead. The problem with arrays is that they are a big bucket of mutability. Coming from the functional programmer standpoint in me, I don't like that as an option, and would rather have an immutable List<T>.
Secondly, there are performance implications of recursing through large directories all at once. It's very much a blocking call in the application. Another key point in the functional programming world is to only calculate what you need, aka just-in-time computing. If I'm not going to immediately use all items in this array, I just calculated all files for no apparent reason. So, there is a big plus when returning an IEnumerable<T> and using the yield return to calculate the value.
Thirdly, the search options for handling whether or not to include a given file or directory is a string used for file or directory masks. There are more important ways of filtering than just using that one simple mechanism. Instead, what if I want to return only hidden files, compressed and so on? The level of effort got a little bit higher for doing that. Instead, what you could do is provide a Predicate<string> function in order to be able to include certain files as you calculate your items.
Finally, there has been a big blocking issue which brought this up in the first place. There are instances in which the implementation was throwing very odd internal windows errors while it was searching in some hidden directories. So, the implementation of this just simply wouldn't work for my needs.
Given these issues that I faced here, what could I do about it?
Handling the Native Code
In order for us to fix the overall issue with the Directory.GetFiles method, we | Go |
| Performance Profiling And Commerce Server 2007 ... Not too long ago we had to do some performance profiling for a Commerce Server site that went into production a couple of months before. We knew we had some performance issues, but because of some inventory issues at the client, we had to rush the site into production. The first couple of days the performance was acceptable, but as more and more customers started hitting the site, some of the nasty issues we addressed started showing up. The site was stable though, just not the fastest one out there. The site is a pretty standard e-commerce site, not much fancy stuff on this one. The only exception is some very large categories rendering 500+ products on a single page. First Things First: HTML Ad Libitum Generating HTML for a category containing 500+ can be pretty tough on both the server and the client side. On the server side, the basic category layout was built using a couple of ASP.NET user controls and each product view consisted of a couple of user controls too. This provided a very flexible and configurable layout, but the performance for generating all those server controls and related markup was pretty tough for the server. The HTML output (without images) was about ~1.6 MB, which the browser wasn't too happy about either. So removing a lot of user controls and only one user control per product resulted in an HTML output around ~400 kb tops. No need to say that this had a major impact on performance. With the HTML all nice and cleaned up, we can start digging in to the inner workings of the site. Next up: Tracing For Bottlenecks To get a basic idea of where bottlenecks could be found, we turned to the ASP.NET Output Trace. It's pretty simple stuff, and I wrote some stuff the trace we I knew we had some issues. When displaying categories we had to do a lot of heavy filtering on product variants. Each product having about 10+ variants, a product list with 500 products would generate ~5.000 products to filter! However, the trace showed that this wasn't nearly as time consuming as I had imagined. A bigger problem was in a user controlle called CatalogTopMenu.ascx. At the top of the site the user can navigate through the catalogs available in the catalog set, implemented in CatalogTopMenu.ascx. Bring In The Profiler Of course, you could add stuff to the trace, compile, deploy, test, check trace, write down result, remove trace code, add more trace code, compile, deploy and so on. Instead we used ANTS Profiler from Red Gate . I really love this tool, it fairly easy to use, but it provides some real useful result. If you find yourself in need of a performance profiler I can highly recommend trying this one - there's a 14-day free trial available on their web site. Setting Up ANTS Profiler For Commerce Server When profiling an ASP.NET site, ANTS Profiler starts a new instance of the worker process (w3wp.exe), which runs the site you're profiling. Because Commerce Server requires a seperate application pool, running the site outside IIS proved a bit difficult. The profiling worker process is being executed by a service called "ANTS Profiler 3 Server", so setting the log on identity for this one to the same identity as the application pool used to host the site resolved this issue. You can find the service under Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services. Here's my setup: Next up, start the profiler from the site, and browse around. When you're done browsing, hit the "Take Snapshop" button in the profiler. The Profiler Results The main window displays slowest lines of code (top) and slowest method (bottom): Looking at the slowest method you can see it's a lot slower than the second slowest! Taking a look at the source method we find the following line, which is the sinner: It kind of surprised me that the cause of our slowest methods is a call to the Commerce Server API. We did a lot of additional tests to prove this right, and they all confirmed this issue, even though catalogs are being cached. I would imagi | Go |
| Nice Silverlight 2 Business App Design with Source Code ... My sense is that Silverlight 2 is going to have a major impact in business applications because of its security, programmability, and ease of deployment. I'm currently working on a prototype for a client who would use the application mainly within the office but who sees a big bonus in allowing employees to log in after hours from any computer to handle emergency/on call tasks. The best business design example I've seen so far is the Microsoft Health Common User Interface Patient Journey Demonstrator...(read more ) | Go |
| ASP .NET - A ValidationSummary with some style ... Using the built-in ASP .NET validation controls makes validation a breeze. The controls are an easy and powerful way to validate form data client-side and server-side. If you need to display a summarized list of all the validation errors on a page you can use the ValidationSummary control. Unfortunately, as with most out of the box controls, you'll have to sacrifice the ability to style it exactly how you want.
Figure 1 - Boring ol' ValidationSummary
Figure 1 shows the ValidationSummary consists of two parts: the header text, and the error messages. The control does not allow you to specify a custom css class for either of these text elements, nor does it allow you to specify an image. So, how do you create a ValidationSummary with some style?
Figure 2 - Stylin' and profilin'
A few weeks ago I was asked to create something similar to figure 2. I wanted to avoid creating a custom control because I wasn't adding any functionality. Moreover, creating a custom control from scratch or extending the existing ValidationSummary meant I'd have to code both the client-side and server-side functionality -- I really didn't want to touch WebUIValidation.js .
To start, I played with the header text to see if I could inject some HTML, and I could.
Figure 3 - Injecting HTML into the HeaderText
Injecting HTML allowed me to wrap the header text and error messages in span tags and assign a css class as shown above. Next, I needed to add an image to the ValidationSummary.
My first attempt at adding an image to the ValidationSummary was to set the CssClass for the control and use the image as the background-image of the div. I used the following css:
Figure 4 - Setting the image as the background
It worked! But, when I tested different display modes and edge cases I found, in certain situations, the error messages would not align correctly. I couldn't fix this because I had no way of wrapping all the error messages in a div. I also tried adding the image using HTML in the header text but ran into a similar problem.
Figure 5 - Alignment problem
To fix the alignment problem I created a two column layout. I placed the image in the left column and the ValidationSummary in the right column. Next I whipped up some Javascript to tie the image and ValidationSummary together so they would show/hide in unison.
Figure 6 - Two column layout
Figure 7 - Javascript to show/hide image
I used the client-side method Page_ClientValidate which let me test if my controls met the validation criteria. In this case I also passed a validation group so it didn't interfere with any other validation on the page. I hooked up my button's OnClientClick to call the Javascript and there it was...a ValidationSummary with some style.
One word of caution, since the image is only tied to the ValidationSummary using Javascript you'll need to write some server-side code to show/hide the image in case the user has disabled Javascript. | Go |
| What the heck is the "Microsoft Web Platform Installer?" ... In my TechNet Flash this morning I see this section: Download the New Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer lets you create a Web platform on your server. The Microsoft Web Platform is a reliable, high-performance Web stack that is capable of hosting both ASP.NET and PHP applications on a single server, and can scale to run the largest sites on the Web. Question #1: "What is the Microsoft Web Platform?" Question #2: "Why does it need an installer?" Question #3: "How is it different that what I currently use to host my websites?" So I did some reading... Answer #1: The "Microsoft Web Platform" is nothing more than the collection of Microsoft products that might typically be installed on a web server (i.e., IIS, .NET Framework, SQL Server, VisualStudio, etc.). It would be the equivalent of calling MS Office the "Microsoft Office Productivity Platform"--which I think is possibly how they (MS) will be referring to Office "12". Answer #2: The "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" is also kind of like the installer that comes with MS Office. It allows you to selected the components you want to install, configure some settings, and carefully read through all the EULAs for the individual components before sitting back and enjoying a nice long progress bar. Answer #3: Since you can "roll y'er own" Microsoft Web Platform by simply installing and configuring all the individual components manually, nothing is particularly special about the installer other than it is supposed to make it easier to setup a new web server. In conclusion... Dear Microsoft, Thank you for providing us with fancy-smancy batch file. The fewer progress bars I have to look at the better. However, "Boo...hiss", on the cheesy marketing description. <rollingEyes> The Microsoft Web Platform is a reliable, high-performance Web stack that is capable of hosting both ASP.NET and PHP applications on a single server, and can scale to run the largest sites on the Web. </rollingEyes> Sincerely, Long-time "Microsoft Web Platform" Assembler SEE ALSO: Microsoft Web Application Installer Microsoft Application Platform | Go |
| Updated Samples for Silverlight 2 ... Now that Silverlight 2 has been released, I have updated all the samples. Conversion was mostly straight forward, with very few changes to code. Building Business Applications with Silverlight 2 Introduces the basic building blocks of a data centric application (primarily using DataGrid control), which can be used to develop full fledge business applications. Part 1: Adding new item Part 2: Deleting item Part 3: Validation (sync) Part 4: Validation (async, across the wire) Part 5: Validation (refactored) Part 6: IEditableObject and Add new item (Take 3!) Part 7: Beyond Validation, Prevention All code ported properly except for EndEdit method on DataGrid. DataGrid no longer provides EndEdit method. Instead of calling DataGrid.EndEdit(), we just call EndEdit on the underlying data item that implements IEditableObject interface. Old Code (Beta 2) void peopleDataGrid_KeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) {
if (Key.Down == e.Key || Key.Enter == e.Key) {
peopleDataGrid.EndEdit(true , true );
}
}
New Code (RTW)
void peopleDataGrid_KeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) {
if (Key.Down == e.Key || Key.Enter == e.Key) {
((Person)peopleDataGrid.SelectedItem).EndEdit();
}
}
Another change was from DisplayMemberBinding to Binding for data binding.
Source Code for the Business Application:BusinessApp1.zip
Restricting User Input using Attached Property
Highlights use of Attached property to implement text filtering to restrict user input to selected type, such as numeric, decimal and others. Also introduces basics of Attached property and showcases various ways of using them.
Only code change was rename of Source property on KeyEventArgs. Source was renamed to OriginalSource
Old Code (Beta 2)
private static void textBox_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) {
// bypass other keys!
if (IsValidOtherKey(e.Key)) {
return ;
}
//
TextBoxFilterType filterType = GetFilter((DependencyObject)sender);
TextBox textBox = sender as TextBox;
if (null == textBox) {
textBox = e.Source as TextBox;
}
New Code (RTW)
private static void textBox_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) {
// bypass other keys!
if (IsValidOtherKey(e.Key)) {
return ;
}
//
TextBoxFilterType filterType = GetFilter((DependencyObject)sender);
TextBox textBox = sender as TextBox;
if (null == textBox) {
textBox = e.OriginalSource as TextBox;
}
Source Code: FilterService.zip
ComoboBox In DataGrid
Examines the usage of ComboBox in DataGrid. In particular, it shows how to implement foreign key scenarios in lieu of SelectedValue/SelectedValuePath property. It also highlights workaround for a bug in that causes ComboBox dropdown to close immediately in DataGrid.
No code change was required to the original RC0 code, just a recompile. But that also means ComboBox in DataGrid still has display bug where it immediately closes. You can use following attached property to force it to open. Please see the original post for full explanation.
public class ComboBoxService {
public static readonly DependencyProperty ForceOpenProperty =
DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("ForceOpen" , typeof (bool ), typeof (ComboBoxService),
new PropertyMetadata(OnForceOpenChanged));
public static bool GetForceOpen(DependencyObject d) {
return (bool )d.GetValue(ForceOpenProperty);
}
public static void SetForceOpen(DependencyObject d, bool value ) {
d.SetValue(ForceOpenProperty, value );
}
private static void OnForceOpenChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) {
ComboBox comboBox = d as ComboBox;
if ((bool )e.OldValue) {
comboBox.Loaded -= new RoutedEventHandler(comboBox_Loaded);
}
if ((bool )e.NewValue) {
comboBox.Loaded +=new RoutedEventHandler(comboBox_Loaded);
}
}
static void comboBox_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {
ComboBox comboBox = sender as ComboBox;
if (null == comboBox) {
com | Go |
| Log Off OWA from Code Behind ... After many tries and havey googling to find out the best way to log off OWA from asp.net page code behind while logging out from my main application, i found out that this can be achieved in one way ( in my position). Rise a small popup window and call OWA log out page! All done with a small javascript. the script is below ; private void LogoffOwa() { string popupScript = "<script language='javascript'>" + "var mywindow=window.open('https://OWA_SERVER_Adress/owa/auth/logoff.aspx?Cmd=logoff', 'CustomPopUp', " + "'width=1, height=1, menubar=no, resizable=no');" + "setTimeout(\"mywindow.close();\",3000);" + "</script>"; Response.Write(popupScript); } in the script you have to set the time out of the window. Do not close the window directly or you will not log off. Just give it some time to open the log off page. Hope this helps | Go |
