Alliagator Tags Archive for Monday, October 20 2008



DotNetKicks.com Links
HTML Mangling with Literal Controls in the Head tag ... Ran into an odd problem with Literal controls in the head tag of the document causing HTML to get corrupted today. It appears that literal controls - and only literal controls - are causing some odd designer manglage that can result in broken HTML.Go
7 of my favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET ... Seven of my favorite jQuery plugins to use with ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, based on my own successes and failures using them over the past year and a half.Go
7 of my favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET ... Seven of my favorite jQuery plugins to use with ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, based on my own successes and failures using them over the past year and a half.Go
WebParts Communication: How WebParts on a page communicate ... In this tutorial we will describe how to make WebParts on a WebParts Page communicate with each other. So will see how to use ConnectionsZone and how to enable WebParts to talk to each other by connecting them.Go
Prevent ASP.NET ImageButtons from submitting twice! ... Hi there, I'm currently rewriting some ASP.NET code, especially code that has to do with ASP.NET Buttons (and in my case: ASP.NET ImageButtons). The current situation allows users to click a lot of times on submit imagebuttons, which results in multiple submits and multiple calls to a webserver. WE DON'T WANT THAT!!! Yell In this article I don't want to go into the discussion that this should always be prevented by a developer (I agree with that!), but I still think there's a lot of code out there that still doesn't have this piece of functionality implemented. At least at my project it doesn't! Undecided. So we'll have to add an OnClientClick event to our ImageButton, preventing our users from submitting twice. After seeing Dave Ward's post, I thought that this was a simple solution: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="BtnSubmit" OnClientClick="this.disabled = true; this.value = 'Submitting...';" UseSubmitBehavior="false" OnClick="BtnSubmit_Click" Text="Submit Me!" /> But then I immediately walked into problems. Since ASP.NET Imagebuttons don't have the UseSubmitBehaviour property like normal ASP.NET buttons do, we'll have to do the postback ourselves. So thinking writing the following logic would make some sense: <asp:ImageButton runat="server" ID="bevestigImageButton" ImageUrl="/images/discussie-bevestig.png" OnClick="bevestigImageButton_Click" OnClientClick="javascript: this.disabled = true;__doPostBack('bevestigImageButton','')" /> Since my page (actually it is an UserControl) has ASP.NET Validation Controls on it (RequiredFieldValidators), the ASP.NET Required Field Validators will fire, but still the ASP.NET ImageButton get's submitted. AAAARGGG Frown. So by first checking if the Page was valid by making use of the Page_ClientValidate method, we can prevent the page from submitting. Once the page is valid, we disable the ImageButton that was clicked on and do a full PostBack to the server. This results in the following code, which works for me! <asp:ImageButton runat="server" ID="bevestigImageButton" ImageUrl="/images/discussie-bevestig.png" OnClick="bevestigImageButton_Click" OnClientClick="javascript: Submit(this);" /> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> function Submit(source){ Page_ClientValidate(); if (Page_IsValid){ source.disabled = true __doPostBack(source.name, ''); } return Page_IsValid; } </scriptGo
A Simple Multi-File Upload Form ... A nifty form you can use to upload multiple files from an ASPX page to your web server.Go
Microsoft Web Application Installer(Beta) ... The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) allows you to install Web applications for IIS from other sources. Web AI identifies available applications and the originating Web sites, and asks you to select the application that you want to install.Go
Creating Thumbnail Image in ASP.Net ... This code snippet helps us to generate thumbnail image from the image streams stored in database and in file system.Go
Project Life Cycle beyond SDLC ... Many people think project life cycle circulates around SDLC. In this article we will discuss about other phases which occur before SDLC starts. I know that companies have tailor made phases we have just tried to put phases followed by majority IT companies. We have visualized two companies Shreya ltd who is the customer and Hanu software who is the vendor. Any resemblance to live and dead is purely coincidentalGo
Speeding up ASP.NET with the Runtime Page Optimizer ... An great new tool to automatically optimize your ASP.NET website.Go
ASP.NET Pivot Tables Made Easy with DevExpress PivotGrid ... Simple ASP.NET example of using the PivotGrid component from DevExpress to better visualize your data.Go
ASP.NET MVC Model Binding Example ... ScottGu does an excellent job in his introduction blog post to the new features in the ASP.NET MVC beta release. The Model Binder support is an excellent feature for which I wanted to put forth a simple example demonstrating its use. This example will demonstrate in straight-forward terms how to use Model Binding in your MVC applications.Go
ASP.NET Routing revisited (again) ... I've updated my ASP.NET 3.5 + System.Web.Routing sample based on some great feedback and questions. It's much simpler and gives a better example of how routes can be configured. It now uses Phil Haack's excellent WebFormRouteHandler class, which is much more versatile than my unnecessarily generic one...Go
ASP.NET Caching: SQL Cache Dependency With SQL Server 2000 ... SQL cache dependencies are one of the most wonderful new features in ASP.NET 2.0, the ability to automatically invalidate a cached data object (such as a DataSet or Custom Data Type) when the related data is modified in the database. This feature is supported in both SQL Server 2005 and in SQL Server 2000, although the underlying plumbing is quite different.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 3.5Go
ASP.NET MVC Beta Released - ScottGu's BlogGo
An Introduction to jQuery - Part 1: The Client SideGo
CodeProject: Exploring Caching in ASP.NET. Free source code and programming helpGo
ASP.NET MVC : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET SiteGo
ASP.NET website Continuous Integration+Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5Go
Steve Sanderson's blog " Blog Archive " Partial Requests in ASP.NET MVCGo
Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication | EncosiaGo
New ASP.NET MVC Tutorials - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVCGo
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 Rewrite ModuleGo
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 prGo
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 - makinGo
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, ScottGo
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, ScottGo
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 wGo
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, youGo
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 ouGo
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 tGo
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 witGo
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, ScottGo
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 theGo
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 suppGo
ASP.net.com Community Links
Data Access Component - Deleting Data in C# and AJAX ... This tutorial will show you how to use C# and AJAX to create a Data Access Component that will display data from a SQL database and also allow you to delete records from the database.Go
Using JavaScript and UpdatePanels in VB.NET ... We all know that AJAX utilizes JavaScript, but what if we want to use our own JavaScript calls in conjunction with AJAX? This tutorial will show you how we can call JavaScript ourselves whilst using AJAX. We will be making use of the Alert method in JavaScript when the user clicks a button.Go
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 PageMethodsGo
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
CodeProject.com ASP Links
Plug & play architecture using policy application blocks ... Plug & play architecture using policy application blocksGo
Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1 ... Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1Go
Introducing SilverlightDesktop.net ... SilverlightDesktop.net is a Open-Source ASP.NET framework that allows you to dynamically load Silverlight modules into resizable draggable windows.Go
Deploying Web Sites Using Visual Studio 2005 ... This Article Describe Various Way To Deploy Your ASP.Net Sites On IIS using Visual Studio 2005 IDEGo
A better way to implement exclusive login, the account can only be used by one person at the same time. ... This article brings a better approach to implement the exclusive login in ASP.NetGo
MenuApart.Net based on a ListApart ... A XML listbased browser independent ASP.NET MenuGo
Maintain GridView Scroll Position and Header Inside Update Panel ... This article describes how to maintain the scroll position and Freezing header at the time of postback inside Update panel.Go
Customise VisualSVN Server browser view ... How to... Customise VisualSVN Server browser viewGo
Combining, Compressing, Minifying ASP.Net ScriptResource and HTML Markups ... This article is about combining, compressing, minifying the ASP.Net ScriptResource and HTML markups.Go
Yahoo Market data - another take. ... A User Control that encaspulates the ability to view (delayed) market data from Yahoo.Go
Optimize Page Loading - 20 General Tips and Tricks ... a list of general tips to speed up the loading time of your pagesGo
Agile Development Part 2 ... Agile Development Part 2Go
Ajax quick start FAQ ... Ajax quick start FAQGo
Software Architecture Interview Question Part 1 ( Design Pattern ) ... Design Pattern Interview Questions ( Quick Reference)Go
DotNetSlackers.com Links
Asp.Net Interview Question Part 3 ... Asp.Net Interview Question Part 3... 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
MenuApart.Net based on a ListApart ... A XML listbased browser independent ASP.NET Menu... 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
Maintain GridView Scroll Position and Header Inside Update Panel ... This Article Described that how to maintain the scroll position and Freezing header at the time of postback inside Update panel.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here .Go
Microsoft Releases ASP.NET MVC 1 Beta ... Last evening, Scott Guthrie announced that ASP.NET MVC beta has been pushed out. Theres a ton of really cool, new features that have been added. Be sure to check out Scotts book, err I mean post to read up on what new has been added. As Scott has mentioned in his post, click here to download it.  You can also visit asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quick starts , and videos to learn more. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here .Go
Fiddler for Firefox ... In my tools talk at DevReach earlier this week I mentioned that I use Fiddler with IE and FireBug with Firefox to see HTTP traffic involved in loading and working with a given web page/site. I said in the talk that Fiddler only works with IE, but that's not entirely true as Ivo Evtimov was kind enough to point out to me. You can configure Firefox to work with Fiddler, but you have to do so manually each time you want to do it (whereas Fiddler just works with IE, and Firebug just works with FF). In order to configure FF to work with Fiddler, you have to set it up as a proxy server. You'll find this under FireFox's options, which in FF3 is under Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network. Next go to Settings. And configure it to use 127.0.0.1 and port 8888 by default. You can check which port Fiddler is listening on by going to Fiddler's Tools -> Fiddler Options menu and looking at its Listen Port. I have mine set to 8889 because I have other web sites using 8888. Just be sure they match. Once you have these set up, you can make requests in FireFox or IE and have all of the traffic captured within Fiddler. However, when you shut down Fiddler you'll need to manually reset your proxy to No Proxy in FireFox. Also note that if you're trying to test something on localhost, remove that from the No Proxy For list in FireFox's settings. Thanks again to Ivo Evtimov for following up on this! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here .Go
Microsoft Releases ASP.NET MVC 1 Beta ... Last evening, Scott Guthrie announced that ASP.NET MVC beta has been pushed out. Theres a ton of really cool, new features that have been added. Be sure to check out Scotts book, err I mean post to read up on what new has been added. As Scott has mentioned in his post, click here to download it.  You can also visit asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quick starts , and videos to learn more. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here .Go
Telerik.Charting in RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q3 2008 ... There is no Telerik.Charting.dll anymore. It is now merged into Telerik.Web.UI. You will no more have to worry about its version and its registration in Web.config or replacing it in GAC when new version is out. Here are the steps you need to take when upgrading your applications from RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX version prior to Q3 2008 to RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q3 2008 and later: If you have Telerik.Charting installed in GAC (this used to be the default RadControls installer action) replace the following Register directive < % Register Assembly ="Telerik.Charting, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=d14f3dcc8e3e8763" Namespace ="Telerik.Charting" TagPrefix ="telerik" % > with this one: < %@ Register Assembly ="Telerik.Web.UI" Namespace ="Telerik.Charting" TagPrefix ="telerik" % > You will also need to remove the Telerik.Charting registration from your web.config file. In the <system.web> <compilation> <assemblies> section you will find this line: < add assembly ="Telerik.Charting, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=D14F3DCC8E3E8763"/> Simply remove it. If you do not have Telerik.Charting installed in GAC (you use it from the local Bin folder) replace this Register directive < %@ Register Assembly ="Telerik.Charting" Namespace ="Telerik.Charting" TagPrefix ="telerik" % > with this one: < %@ Register Assembly ="Telerik.Web.UI" Namespace ="Telerik.Charting" TagPrefix ="telerik" % > That is, simply change the Assembly from Telerik.Charting to Telerik.Web.UI . You will also need to remove Telerik.Charting.dll from Bin folder. In case you have a web application, you will need to remove the reference to Telerik.Charting. This one-time effort will allow you to upgrade to future versions of Telerik.Web.UI by simply replacing the Telerik.Web.UI.dll without worrying about the fully qualified name of Telerik.Charting and whether the correct version is available in GAC or in the local Bin folder. 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 Released! ... Today we finally officially released the beta of ASP.NET MVC (go download it already!). True, the release has actually been available online since yesterday as it was announced in a Keynote at VSLive by Scott Hanselman, but that was intended to be a special treat for attendees in what ended up being the worst kept secret in .NET-dom. As usual, to get all the details, check out the latest epic installment on ScottGus blog. Scott Hanselman also has a great blog post with good coverage as well. As... 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 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
ASP.NET.com Links
Gizmox Announces release of Visual WebGui 6.2 ... Upgraded Edition Features a Consolidated Installer and a Higher Level of Integration into Visual Studio for a Dramatic Improvement in Developer Experience and also development environment compatibility Tel Aviv, Israel —October 13, 2008 — Gizmox , the developer of Visual WebGui open source platform, today announced the release of Visual WebGui 6.2. The upgrade will introduce a complete integration into the Visual Studio designer, allowing Visual WebGui Projects to be configured without any need for...(read more )Go
ASP.NET MVC for Live Applications ... ASP.NET MVC has got big attention in the community and lot of people looking to start production ready applications with ASP.NET MVC. When can we start production ready applications with ASP.NET MVC? Since ASP.NET MVC Beta version is available, I think this is time to start live application with ASP.NET MVC. There is already lot of live applications build with ASP.NET MVC. Stackoverflow is really a killer web application build with ASP.NET MVC. If you are an Architect, this is the right time to develop infrastructure frameworks for ASP.NET MVC. The RTM version will be in Q4 2008 or Q1 2009. I hope that the RTM version will be release on this December. The changes from Beta to RTM version will be very minimum and the Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. Scott Guthrie wrote in his bog post ASP.NET MVC Beta Released “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”. I believe that breaking changes and new features will be available after the release of V1. When I asked about the SubController infrastructure, Scott Guthrie replied that “The team currently has that penciled in for the release immediately following V1. The reason for not having it in V1 are: 1) there are a couple of approaches that could be used for it, and we want to spend a little more time investigating and exploring them (and not bake something prematurely into V1), and 2) there is a subcontroller implementation currently in the MVCContrib project that be used with the V1 release. I'd recommend looking at using that one if you need a subcontroller pattern, and then we'll bake one into the core binary once we feel confident on a final design”. Our Development Attitude ASP.NET MVC is a great technology and you can build powerful and highly maintainable web applications with ASP.NET MVC. But please keep in mind that you can build good and bad applications with same technology. So our attitude and development approaches are very important for building great software and the most important things is that we should have a good architecture for good software. I strongly believe that the .Net developer community should be more focus on object oriented principles and practices. I believe that the ALT.NET movement is a good sign and the ALT.NET Criterion is good for building better software. The ASP.NET MVC technology is based on a loosely coupled architecture and the framework is highly testable so that it enables to build great software. When we build applications with ASP.NET MVC, we should focus on object-oriented principles and practices and take this time to change our attitude towards object-oriented way. In the past, applications have been data-centric and this has been gradually changing to object-oriented way. I would like to suggest using an ORM for data persistence, Persistence Ignorance (PI) objects for domain layer, a Repository pattern, Inversion of Control (IoC) container for applying dependency injection (DI) pattern along with your ASP.NET MVC application. And I believe that Test Driven Development (TDD) gives you lot of values to yGo
Blocked by the Silverlight ManagedRuntimeError 4004 ... For my Silverlight 2 prototype business app, I wanted to try capturing JSON data from a WCF service and caching it in isolated storage. I found a nice example by Tim Heuer that I updated to the RTW version. After setting up the WCF service on a VPC running Windows Server 2008, I was able to fill the Silverlight datagrid with remote JSON data. Great!, I thought. The hassles started when I moved the WCF code to a server out on the real Internet. The same Silverlight app on my workstation now throws...(read more )Go
Got Source Control? ... If you're a small team or a single person and find the need for some source control and backup, I can highly recommend ProjectLocker . It includes Trac for management, and BuildLocker can be added for CI. The uptime is amazing too! I use the VisualSVN client for Visual Studio along with TortoiseSVN , but it supports most tools. I use the lowest service level which includes unlimited repositories, 1 GB space and 2 users - the price is $2.50 pr month. And no, I don't get any royalties :)Go
Farewell and Welcome! ... There were some changes this week in the MSDN Canada DPE group. Jean-Luc David is moving to Redmond to work at corp.http://blogs.msdn.com/cdndevs/archive/2008/10/14/farewell.aspx That's JL on the left with me at the MVP Summit.He's replaced by Joey deVilla, the accordion guy! http://blogs.msdn.com/cdndevs/archive/2008/10/17/an-accordion-a-new-addition-a-great-team-and-big-challenges.aspx Best of luck to both of you!Go
TechDays Montreal - Special Offer ... This is a special offer from MSDN Canada to the user group members of the Montreal area for TechDays Montreal. In anticipation of the upcoming Tech•Days 2008 tour date in Montréal on November 6th and 7th, I’m writing to inform you of an EXCLUSIVE OFFER that Microsoft Canada is extending to user group members in the Montréal and surrounding area. The first 500 user group members to send their confirmation e-mail for early bird registration to me (v-anhow@microsoft.com) will personally receive a NEW XBOX 360 title at the event on November 6th, 2008. In order to be eligible, registration must be completed prior to the early bird registration deadline on October 29th, 2008 (NOTE: Early Bird Registration is the largest discount being offered and has been extended. In Montréal, $249 instead of $499). In addition, the confirmation e-mail must reference the user group(s) to which they belong and must be forwarded to Andrew Howell no later than October 31st, 2008 at 5:00pm EST. The XBOX title will be available for pick-up at designated times at the event. Specific details will be communicated directly to each individual recipient in advance of the Montréal event. We sincerely hope that you’ll take advantage of this exclusive offer and look forward to seeing you at the Palais des Congrès on November 6th and 7th, 2008!Go
Visual Studio Talk Show #84 is now online (French) ... www.visualstudiotalkshow.com Arnaud Cleret: Serveur Biztalk Nous discutons avec Arnaud Cleret du serveur Biztalk. Entre autres, nous discutons en quoi le serveur Biztalk est une pièce maitresse pour l'implantation d'un "Enterprise Service bus" (ESB). Suite à cinq années passées aux Aéroports de Paris en tant que Chef de projet et Architecte Logiciel spécialisé sur les problématiques d'architectures distribuées et d'industrialisation des développements, Arnaud Cleret a rejoint Exakis en janvier 2005 en tant qu'Architecte Logiciel et Leader Technique .Net. Depuis juillet 2008, Arnaud est Directeur Technique (CTO) et a en charge l'activité Architecture Logicielle dont le rôle est d'intervenir principalement sur des missions de définition d'architecture, d'expertise et d'audit chez les clients autour des technologies Microsoft mais aussi en interne chez Exakis pour promouvoir et favoriser l'adoption des nouvelles technologies. Arnaud est aussi impliqué dans différentes communautés et à ce titre, depuis 2006, à été nommé MVP sur la technologie C# puis sur BizTalk. Télécharger l'émission Si vous désirez un accès direct au fichier audio en format MP3 ou Windows Media (WMA), nous vous invitons à télécharger le fichier en utilisant un des boutons ci-dessous. Si vous désirez utiliser le feed RSS pour télécharger l'émission, nous vous invitons à vous abonnez en utilisant le bouton ci-dessous. Si vous désirez utiliser le répertoire iTunes Podcast pour télécharger l'émission, nous vous encourageons à vous abonnez en utilisant le bouton ci-dessous.Go
LiteralControl in Markup!!! ... I always had the question if I could add a LiteralControl via Markup code. Let's say something like that : < div class ="header" > < asp :LiteralControl runat ="server" ID ="ltrHeader" > </ asp :LiteralControl > </ div > < div class ="sub-header" > < asp :LiteralControl runat ="server" ID ="ltrSubHeader" Text ="Some Text" > </ asp :LiteralControl > </ div > Well It IS possible and simple to be honest. Just Register the control at the top of the page like that : <%@ Register Assembly="System.Web" Namespace="System.Web.UI" TagPrefix="asp" %> You might have a warning that "Element 'LiteralControl' is not a known element." but it will compile just fine and you can set the Text programmatically! Hope that helps anyone who wants to use a LiteralControl over Literal! Enjoy!Go
Visual WebGui Empty Client Approach ... Abstract Up to now, in order to design new web applications, enhance and modernize existing ones or port desktop applications to web, one would use tools that extend traditional multi-layer, multi-language architecture. This traditional architecture is complex, time consuming to develop, hard to debug and maintain, and the end result is vulnerable and hard to secure. Whether one chooses the "Thin client" approach which requires specific installation on the client, or the "Thick client" which requires...(read more )Go
Interesting Finds: 2008.10.16~2008.10.18 ... Web FancyUpload for Flash 10 to fix your uploader Using Javascript to Fix 12 Common Browser Headaches Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter - 1.2.15 Release 10 Easy Steps to Great Website Optimization Optimize Page Loading - 20 General Tips and Tricks MooTools 1.2.1 Released - Changelog - Download Silverlight.js - a helper file which enables Web sites to create advanced Silverlight installation and instantiation experiences A High Performance Memory Database for Web Application Caches 30+ Animated Tab-Based Interface and Accordion Scripts .NET Functional .NET - Fighting Friction in the BCL with Directory.GetFiles A Guide to Learning ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 YUIAsp.Net - Yahoo! UI Library controls for ASP.NET Ajax New Open Source Application: .NET Task Service Other Using WM Encoder to DRM protect existing content A DirectX Game: QuadrinoGo










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