| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| PDC Video: ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap ... Take a walk through the 4.0 landscape from ASP.NET and learn how you can get involved in shaping ASP.NET future. This talk focuses on the next release of ASP.NET including web forms and MVC | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Has Changed My Life ... The utility of this book will be a nuts and bolts how-to guide on creating a website using MVC. It will solve some of the most common problems that programmers run into when creating their first application or when trying to upgrade a current application to this new technology.
The book, much like the first one, will break each section down into 3 parts: the Problem, the Design, and the Solution. For the most part, the chapter outline will be mostly the same, because the majority of the chapters are still just as important now to web developers as they were when the book was originally written. However, this edition includes MVC updates within these chapters. | Go |
| Debugging MOSS 2007 Web Parts ... Helpful little tip for debugging sharepoing web parts. Great time saver. | Go |
| ASP.NET/LINQ to SQL - Building UI Layer ... LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query which was introduced with .NET 3.5. LINQ provides the ability to write query as a first-class language construct using modern programming languages like C# and Visual Basic.
This article will demonstrate working of LINQ to SQL enabled UI by creating an ASP.NET web-form with GridView control bound to the newly introduced LinqDataSource control. | Go |
| How web servers identify your session? ... How a web server identify a session, when many different users are concurrently connected | Go |
| Silver Pride CMS available soon. ASP.Net, JQuery, Silverlight driven ... I'm now in the final development phase of the new content management system. The system makes heavy use of silverlight, jquery and ajax to give a user experience usually associated with client side applications. | Go |
| Leveraging the power of ActionName and AcceptVerbs in Asp.Net MVC ... A short screencast on how to leverage the power of ActionName and AcceptVerbs in Asp.Net MVC | Go |
| C# Adding MetaData to Master page from Child page dynamically ... As for adding metadata description and keywords to your master page from your child page can be done through many ways. Here from my redirect to HTTPS connection, also gave me the idea that the same concept can be adept for adding meta to page which is inherence from a master page. | Go |
| SubSonic MVC Addin ... good work! | Go |
| Helper Class : QueryString Builder (chainable) ... If you are a web developer you would definately have worked with the querystring. Most of the time you are just getting values from the querystring or adding querystring values to url's, but in some cases the querystring can really become a hassle to work with. | Go |
| Solving common problems with Compiled Queries in Linq to Sql for high ... If you are using Linq to SQL, instead of writing regular Linq Queries, you should be using Compiled Queries. if you are building an ASP.NET web application that's going to get thousands of hits per hour, the execution overhead of Linq queries is going to consume too much CPU and make your site slow. There's a runtime cost associated with each and every Linq Query you write. | Go |
| ASP.NET Dynamic Controls ... Nice article about constructing Dynamic Controls, Dynamic Control page. Nice explanations about maintaning state between postbacks. Gets close look at ViewState etc. Worth reading | Go |
| IIS7 URL Rewrite Module - Video Walkthrough ... This video demonstrates how Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 can be used to accomplish common URL manipulation tasks:
.Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URLs for dynamic web pages
.Enforcing canonical host names for web sites
.Using rewrite maps
.Blocking unwanted requests
Also the video shows how to troubleshoot and debug rewrite rules. | Go |
| Proof of Concept: a simple DI solution for ASP.NET WebForms ... Building a simple, reusable Http Module that gives folks DI scoped to the Application, Session, and Request. List of requirements (scaled to just the application level) that looked sort of like this:
Create a DI container for the application
Create a way to get to the container ( we choose an extension method on the Application class)
Allow a way to configure the container
Allow DI to work for pages
Allow DI to work for user controls
Allow DI to work for master pages
Allow DI to work for ASMX web services
Allow the above functionality in a simple and self contained way | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| 7 of my favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET | Encosia | Go |
| Brad Abrams : AjaxWorld Talk: Building a Great Ajax application from Scratch | Go |
| A Guide to Learning ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| CodeProject: Architecting .NET Web Applications for Scale & Performance (A Practical Guide). Free source code and programming help | Go |
| Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - The Weekly Source Code 35 - Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session and Cache State | Go |
| ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know - developerFusion - the ... | Go |
| Our "Opinions" on the ASP.NET MVC (Introducing the Thunderdome Principle) - Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer | Go |
| Maarten Balliauw {blog} - CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application | Go |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Data Access Component - Update 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 edits of the data. | Go |
| Display Request Processing Time in ASP.Net pages ... There are some sites in internet who are displaying the time taken to process the request given to the server at the end of every page. This article will help us to implement this feature in our asp.net sites. | Go |
| Using JavaScript and UpdatePanels in ASP.NET 3.5 ... 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 adds a new entry to an XML file. | Go |
| Developing a Shopping Cart in ASP.NET ... Explains how to develop simple shopping cart web application by using recommended three tier architecture. | Go |
| Animated Popup Master/Detail using GridView, DetailsView and JQuery with jqModal & UpdatePanel ... Demonstrate how to build master/details data presentation using GridView, DetailsView as animated pop-up using jQuery jqModal and ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel.
Also who how to color animate updated row on GridView after confirming update on DetailsView using jQuery. Live Demo Provided. | Go |
| Unraveling the Mysterious of the ValidationGroup Control ... ASP.NET validation works in mysterious ways especially when you want to validate a group of controls on the page. In this article we are going to dig deep into the ValidationGroup property and see how to validate a group of controls. | Go |
| New AJAX Support For Data-Driven Web Apps ... This article shows three iterations of a page written with classic postback, then with UpdatePanel, and then with pure AJAX to illustrate how techniques employed on the server can sometimes perform better on the client. | Go |
| Creating a Custom Validation Control in ASP.NET ... The BaseValidator class defines the basic implementation needed for all Validation controls. There are 6 very useful Validation Controls included in the ASP.NET framework, however they come with a few shortcomings. In this article, we will explore how to create a custom validation control in ASP.NET and provide both Server and Client Side Validation for the same. | Go |
| Building Sharepoint List Style GridView with Ajax Control Toolkit ... In this article, we will implement a sharepoint list style GridView with the help of DropDownExtender control in Ajax Control Toolkit. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| SharePoint Delegate Controls Unclouded ... Demistifying the SharePoint delegate controls, allowing fast and painless SharePoint branding. | Go |
| Avoid session loss when using Cookieless sessions with XML Sitemap Provider ... This will explain how to avoid session loss when you use Cookiless sessions with XML Sitemap Provider | Go |
| JavaScript Advanced List ... An advanced list that works with all objects | Go |
| Smart Code Generator: Use ASP.NET, NAnt and Cassini for Code Generation ... This article describes how NAnt and Cassini can be integrated with the Smart Code Generator development cycle. This article can also used as a reference for ASP.NET developers who want to build, run and deploy ASP.NET projects seamlessly using NAnt and Cassini. | Go |
| RFC Architecture for Finance Projects (The Invoicing Part) ... RFC Architecture for Finance Projects (The Invoicing Part) | Go |
| Resize/Shrink Photos for Web Development ... Resize/Shrink Photos for Web Development to reduce download time | Go |
| Create an ATL COM DLL and Invoke It through PHP ... Demonstrates creating a simple ATL COM DLL and invoking it through PHP. | Go |
| Legion: Build your own virtual super computer with Silverlight ... Legion is a grid computing framework that uses the Silverlight CLR to execute user definable tasks. It provides grid-wide thread-safe operations for web clients. Client performance metrics, such as bandwidth and processor speed, may be used to tailor jobs. Also includes a WPF Manager application. | Go |
| Design pattern – Inversion of control and Dependency injection ... Design pattern – Inversion of control and Dependency injection | Go |
| Image Shadow UserControl for ASP.NET 2.0 ... This ASP.Net 2.0 UserControl will add a shadow to an image on your webpage. | Go |
| Generation of web feeds and podcasts ... This article describes the generation of web feeds (RSS, Atom, podcasts) using wrapper classes. | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - Part I - New Solution ... Catharsis web-app framework | Go |
| Visual Studio 2005 Project And Item Templates ... All about Project and Item Templates. You can use templates to make your development Faster than you ever think. | Go |
| Datagrid Operations ... this is to illustrate grid update operation | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap talk available online ... Scott Hunters talk on the ASP.NET 4.0 roadmap (in which Im doing a 10 minute demo) is available from Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC20/... 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 |
| Hot New Presentation Tip ... Before giving a presentation, I review Scott Hanselmans top 11 presentation tips. Well I have a twelfth tip that Scott needs to add to his list, and hell vouch for this. A couple of hours before Jeff and I gave the ASP.NET MVC presentation, we played some RockBand in the Big Room (exhibition area). Playing Eye of the Tiger before a big talk has a great way of both pumping you up and loosening you up at the same time. When I ran into Scott and told him this tip, he said he did the very same thing,... 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 |
| Smart Code Generator: Use ASP.NET, NAnt and Cassini for Code Generation ... This article describes how NAnt and Cassini can be integrated with the Smart Code Generator development cycle. This article can also used as a reference for ASP.NET developers who want to build, run and deploy ASP.NET projects seamlessly using NAnt and Cassini.... 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 |
| Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session without changing your code using a Session provider. ... Scott Hanselman had a post last week to zip your Session state. a great idea I thought to be able to save memory on the computer. Yet I didnt want to change all my source code to use another class to do so, a nightmare to track all the Sessions in every application, or worse when you dont have access to that source code. So last weekend I work on a Session State Provider that allows me to intercept every call to the Session State and compressed when set or unzip when retrieve. The Session State... 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 |
| Introducing grid client-side editing support with Q3 2008 ... With our upcoming version of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX (early November) you will be able to bind our grid even if the grid is in edit mode. RadGrid will locate automatically all built-in column editors (GridNumericColumn, GridDropDownColumn, GridDateTimeColumn, etc.) and you can get old/new values directly from the grid client-side API.
You can use client-side editing completely codeless with templates as well. The requirement here is to set ID for the control to be equal to desired data field.
Example :
<telerik:GridTemplateColumn HeaderText="CompanyName">
<EditItemTemplate>
<telerik:RadTextBox ID="CompanyName" runat="server" />
</EditItemTemplate>
</telerik:GridTemplateColumn>
We have introduced also three new client-side methods for GridTableView to get new values, old values and keys for particular GridDataItem.
Example :
var newValues = $find("RadGrid2").get_masterTableView().extractValuesFromItem(0) ; // get first item new values
var newValues = $find("RadGrid2").get_masterTableView().extractOldValuesFromItem(0) ; // get first item old values
var newValues = $find("RadGrid2").get_masterTableView().extractKeysFromItem(0) ; // get first item keys
I've made small example using two grids (master/detail) both bound completely client-side to illustrate this new functionality:
Enjoy!
[Download ]
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 |
| SESSION NOTES: ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap ... This session is by Scott Hunter, Program Manager at MSFT In July 2007 - ASP.NET Futures was released That was followined by an Extensions Preview of ASP.NET 3.5 in Dec 07 Then in March 08 - we started doing some new stuff - ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - MVC and more The ASP.NET will continue to release out-of-bound items. CodePlex is the main driver for that. www.codeplex.com/aspnet - This is where you will find the interim drops. Currently there are ~1,000 downloads today If you want to see all... 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 Loading Panel Introduction: New DevExpress Control ... Check out this 6 minute video on the ASPxLoadingPanel Introduction: There is a new ASP.NET UI control coming out in the next major release of DXperience and ASPxGridView & Editors Library. The ASPxLoadingPanel can be used during callbacks to display a custom Loading text and image. Callbacks can be quick, or take a long time to complete, depending on your scenario. Regardless of the length of time, its good practice to notify the end users of partial page updates. And whether you show the notification... 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 |
| Whats New in v8.3: SharePoint, Gauges, Section 508/WAI, & New ASP.NET Controls ... [Post Updated: Sunday, October 26th, 2008] The next major release of DXperience and the ASPxGridView & Editors Library includes new controls, features and support for SharePoint! Here's the full list of juicy newness for ASP.NET: SharePoint Support New controls, WebParts, and sample solutions to help SharePoint developers integrate the ASPxGridView and ASPxHtmlEditor into SharePoint projects. Section 508 / WAI support The ASPxperience Controls include support for Section 508... 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 |
| Dealing with Complex Client Interfaces: Html or RIA? ... Ive been working with a client whom Ive been working for almost 10 years now in an advisory capacity. The customer has built and Ive helped with systems that for the most part are highly meta data driven with application service based interfaces that have light weight front ends talk to server heavy applications over the wire. These arent service based application in the SOA sense but lightweight, custom service implementations that serve data over HTTP. Whats different with this customer (for me... 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 |
| Workshop “ASP.NET 3.5 and beyond Web Development”: slides and samples ... Yesterday I talked about whats new with the SP1 of .NET 3.5 and about ASP.NET MVC in front of around 50 people in the sunny city of Bari: I really enjoyed doing these two talks, and the public was fantastic. Furthermore it was a pleasure to meet in person people I only met virtually on the forum or through blogs. Today, after recovering from the trip from Milan to Bari, I organized the material and I put everything on the server for everyone to download. Slides are in Italian, but samples are language-agnostic... 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 |
| Escaping ASP.NET Tags in Code Smith Templates ... I love to generate code, I have code templates for Code Smith that are the equivalent of a mold for a machine shop. I use them to create thousands upon thousands of lines of code each week, so I guard them with my life and update them almost as often...(read more)... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| FIX: The return type or the out argument of an ASMX service method that includes a property that has an internal setter may not be serialized on a computer that has the .NET Framework installed ... 952883 ... FIX: The return type or the out argument of an ASMX service method that includes a property that has an internal setter may not be serialized on a computer that has the .NET Framework installedThis RSS feed provided by kbAlerz.com.Visit kbAlertz.com to
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from the Microsoft Knowledge Base.... 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 |
| Generic sorting of customer objects for ObjectDataSource (ASP.NET) ... Generic sorting of customer objects for ObjectDataSource (ASP.NET)... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Model Binding To A List ... Using the DefaultModelBinder in ASP.NET MVC Beta, you can bind submitted form values to arguments of an action method. But what if that argument is a list? Can you bind a posted form to an IList<T>? Sure thing! Its really easy if youre posting a bunch of simple types. For example, suppose you have the following action method. public ActionResult UpdateInts(IList<int> ints) {
return View(ints);
}
You can bind to that by simply submitting a bunch of form fields which each... 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 |
| Oslo ... I was going to write a large post on Oslo, until I found this one . I still did not play enough with it yet to add value to what Fowler said. As I guess everyone in the world is waiting to listen what I have to say about it, I'd just say that I liked it, and that it's probably the most exciting piece of technology I've seen during the PDC. I still have a lot of questions that I'll try to answer by reading the book, playing with the bits, and trying to grab some Oslo guy during the breaks. | Go |
| PDC Day 2 - A much better Keynote ... The first genuine, spontaneous, unanimous round of applause after a Keynote demo happened today when they shown the Live Mesh stuff. Two 'friends' were looking at the same picture, one edited it, and it was immediately changed in the other one's machine. Today's keynote was good. The highlights were Windows 7, Mesh, and Office 14. Office 14 has a web counterpart written in Silverlight, that edits with full fidelity Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote documents. Google Apps and the rest of the online 'Office' tools will have a hard time competing with this. Office 14 also has cool collaboration (two people can edit the same document and they get notified of the changes made by the other one), and web-publishing features (you can publish a chart in a webpage that has a live link to a Excel 'online' spreadsheet), but those things can be done with Google Apps too. The 'Lap Around Azure' demo by Don Box and Chris Anderson was fun but they only feature that was not shown before was the Service Bus. The rest of the stuff ships with .NET 3.5SP1 or it was demoed in the previous day. I was expecting more Oslo content in the Keynote, but it looks that it's still to fuzzy for a Keynote. | Go |
| Windows Azure, A letter from Steve Ballmer ... Another email to share with you, “A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution” : During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It's a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others. It's a transformation in which the barriers between technologies will fall away so we can connect to people and information no matter where we are. It's a transformation where new innovations will shorten the path from inspiration to accomplishment. Many of the components of this transformation are already in place. Some have received a great deal of attention. "Cloud computing" that connects people to vast amounts of storage and computing power in massive datacenters is one example. Social networking sites that have changed the way people connect with family and friends is another. Other components are so much a part of the inevitable march of progress that we take them for granted as soon as we start to use them: cell phones that double as digital cameras, large flat-screen PC monitors and HD TV screens, and hands-free digital car entertainment and navigation systems, to name just a few. What's missing is the ability to connect these components in a seamless continuum of information, communication, and computing that isn't bounded by device or location. Today, some things that our intuition says should be simple still remain difficult, if not impossible. Why can't we easily access the documents we create at work on our home PCs? Why isn't all of the information that customers share with us available instantly in a single application? Why can't we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home? This week at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, we shared news with software developers about a new set of platform technologies that will help transcend these limits. Because you are a subscriber to Executive Emails from Microsoft, I wanted to share my thoughts about the impact that these technologies will have as developers begin to use them to create a new generation of experiences that extend uninterrupted from the desktop to the mobile phone, media player, car, and beyond-to places where we never thought information and communications would be available to us. A New Platform for Cloud Computing At PDC, we announced the availability of an early preview release of a new technology called Windows Azure. Windows Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone. For the first time, we shared pre-beta code for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows 7, which is the next version of the Windows desktop operating system, will take advantage of software and hardware advances to help eliminate the boundaries between information, people, and devices. We also previewed Office Web applications, which are light-weight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are designed to be accessed through a browser. Office Web applications will be part of the next version of Office and will enable people to view, edit, and share information and collaborate on documents on the desktop, the phone, and in a Web browser in a way that is consistent and familiar. Windows Azure is part of the Azure Services Platform, a comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services that reside in Microsoft's network of datacenters. Using the Azure Services Platform, developers will be able to build applications that run in the cloud and extend existing applications to take advantage of cloud-based capabilities. The Azure Services Platform provides the foundation for business and consumer applications that deliver a consistent way for people to store and share information easily and securely in the cloud, and access it on any device from any location. Windows Azure is not s | Go |
| WWCD? Would Chuck Zune? ... So I don't know if any of you watch Chuck , I've been watching it since the first episode last season, it's a great geek comedy if I do say so myself. During last night's episode (which we watched tonight) there was a moment where Chuck ask's Morgan if the store, Buy More, had any Rush albums, to which Morgan replied something to the effect of "Are you kidding, I have every album on my Zune". I yelped with glee, he just said he had a Zune, score one for the Microsoft Machine! My glee was quickly...(read more ) | Go |
| The New Visual Studio 2010 Code Editor ... As you may have already heard Visual Studio 2010 will include a *new* code editor completely *rewritten* in fully managed code and based on *WPF*. Yaay!. Very, very promising stuff. I just fired up the bits I received at the PDC08 and went Help->About Box, and looks like they haven't put much cycles into it yet -which is expected for a CTP release- and it's funny how are the calling it right now... "Text" (very humble!) with a somehow confusing description of "WPF Editor" and an ugly stock icon stolen from someplace. I'll be playing with the new editor and extending Visual Studio 2010 for the next couple of days so stay tuned if you are into extensibility or just want to know about the latest news of Visual Studio 2010! | Go |
| Looking for DotNetNuke Modules? (minor rant, hopefully an informative post) ... I’m going to start this blog post off with a minor rant about purchasing DNN modules, and had intended to follow that up with a discussion on the evolution of the DotNetNuke ecosystem customer, but both topics have grown larger than initially planned so I will break them up into two separate posts. So here goes the ranting, followed by what I hope will be an informative blog post. This post is directed to potential purchasers of third party DNN modules with the goal of making the lives of module...(read more ) | Go |
| PDC 2008 Experience: Day 2: Entity Framework Futures ... The Data Platform Layers of the data platform The Data Access Layer -> Integration aggregation sync --> Reporting and Analytics -> Management deployment policy and security --> Models and Workflow Joining the layers together Core storage Data access API's and frameworks Mid-tier frameworks and technologies Client technologies Consumer Segmentation This missing from the first version of the Entity Framework Tradition data developer (basic ADO.NET developer) Scripting / rebel frameworks (Struts, nHibernate, ActiveRecord, Domain Driver Design) LOB scripting / macro writers (SharePoint, Excel developers) Information Worker (The typically office user) The Entity Framework v1 was geared towards Model centric data developer (Enterprise Architects) A Lap Around Framework v2 Entity Creation from Code The Entity framework tries to map your database table to your C# class automatically. NO MAPPING FILES REQUIRED. If the table names and or fields are different you can map it with attributes 1: [TableMapping(Schema="sys" , TableName="tables" )]
2: [ColumnMapping(PropertyName="TableKeyKey" , ColumnName="object_id" )]
3: [Key(PropertyName="Id" )]
4: public class MyTableObject
5: {
6: public int Id { get; set;}
7: public string Name { get; set;}
8: }
Entity Creation from Model
You will be able to create entities from a drag and drop designer within Visual Studio.
Creation from a Framework Perspective
Support for deferred loading
Support for table value functions
1: public void TvfDemo(DataContext context)
2: {
3: var cp = from in context.Products
4: where p.ProductID == 799
5: select new {Product=p, Customers = context.GetCustomersForProduct())};
6:
7: foreach (var o in cp)
8: {
9: Console.WriteLine(o.Product.Name)
10: {
11: foreach (customer c in o.Customers)
12: {
13: Console.WriteLine(c.Name);
14: }
15: }
16: }
17: }
Support for model driven functions (the functions a created with the model or XML representation of the model)
1: // c.FirstName + c.LastName;
2: c.FullName()
Other Features
You can create complex types (Types with multiple properties)
Entity Framework, EDM, and Oslo
EDM and Entity Framework could be domains in Oslo | Go |
| Interesting Finds: 2008.10.27~2008.10.29 ... PDC PDC 2008 - PDC Pre-Conference: Concurrent and Parallel Programming - Microsoft PDC 2008: Day 1 Wrap-Up PDC 2008 Experience: Day 2: "Oslo" the language PDC Day 2 – Windows 7, Windows Live, Mesh and Office Online C# 4.0 New Features Part 1 - dynamic keyword - My View of C# 4.0 - C#4: dynamic keyword - Named and Optional Arguments in C# 4.0 ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap Web 50 Beautifully Dark Web Designs How I write JavaScript Widgets GameJS: Canvas Game Library ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 3 .NET Visual Studio 2010 - Ayende Rahien's first impressions Solving common problems with Compiled Queries in Linq to Sql for high demand ASP.NET websites Helper Class : QueryString Builder (chainable) BETA 1 Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Generating the Lambda Expression dynamically Smart Code Generator: Use ASP.NET, NAnt and Cassini for Code Generation Debug Web Site Stops Responding for 15-25 seconds | Go |
| The Future of the Entity Framework ... The data platform These are the different scenarios the Entity Framework addresses or should address. The following layers are the reference architecture used as a starting point for the EF. Customer segmentations V1 of EF didn't really address all personas and the team is now working on supporting the following different personas with tools and frameworks. New stuff You still need meta data, but you don't need no more entity data model XML. For this you have to decorate your classes with attributes. New stuff added respecting the different scenarios and customer segmentations. If you really don't care about the model you can work without it. You still need to describe your meta-data. The demo shows persistence ignorance, code only no XML. Model first approach is supported. You can now generate the DDL from the entity data model. Forward only at the moment. So when you update the database from the model it's blow away your existing database. The demo shows lazy loading. Nice! It also shows model defined functions (think FullName()). User defined functions can also be declared in the entity data model XML. Database expressions using the available meta data from the entity data model. DbExpression expression = context.EntitySet("Categories").Scan(); where c.Property("Name").Equals("Dennis"); select c; DbDataReader reader = context.ExecuteQuery(expression); | Go |
| Named and Optional Arguments in C# 4.0 ... Many interesting news is coming from PDC this week. Part of the announcements was around Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 CTP. Microsoft has made available, a Virtual PC Image preloaded with Visual Studio.
You can download the preview information here:
Microsoft Pre-release Software Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP Feedback
C# Future Samples on MSDN Code Gallery
One of the interesting features of C# 4.0 is for both named and optional arguments. They are often very useful together, but are quite actually two different things. Optional arguments gives us the ability to omit arguments to method invocations, whereas named arguments allows us to specify the arguments by name instead of by position. Code using the named parameters are often more readable than code relying on argument position. These features were long overdue, especially in regards to COM interop. Both F#, and now C# have this feature which gives us greater flexibility is designing APIs.
Named and Optional Arguments in F#
As I've stated before, F# has had these features for both named and option parameters. Let's look at the implementation details of each. Named arguments are simply when creating an object, specify the name before the assignment (=) operator such as the example below.
let t = new TextBoxInfo( text = "Hello" , color = Color. Black)
An optional parameter can be specified during the declaration by prefixing the argument name with a question mark (?). This becomes translated to an Option<'a> type which allows for either some value or no value at all. Should the value not be specified, you can set the default argument value through the let syntax. Let's walk through an example of a simple class called TextBoxInfo.
#light
open System. Drawing
type TextBoxInfo( ?text: string , ?color: Color, ?font: Font) = // Initialize
let text = defaultArg text "" let color = match color with | None -> Color. Red | Some c -> c let font = match font with | None -> new Font( FontFamily. GenericSerif, 10 .0f ) | Some f -> f // Properties
member x. Text = text member x. Color = color member x. Font = font
Now that we've looked at the F# implementation, let's look at how the C# team handled this issue.
The Implementation in C#
First, let's look at the named parameters. Much like F#, this process is rather straight forward. Instead of using the assignment operator (=), the colon is used to denote the name and value pair. An example of this using the above code would look like this:
var t1 = new TextBoxInfo(text : "Hello" , color : Color.Blue);
var t2 = new TextBoxInfo(color : Color.Blue, font : new Font(FontFamily.GenericSerif, 10 .0f ));
These optional arguments can be used not only on these constructors, but also methods, and properties with indexers. Moving onto optional arguments, a parameter is simply declared optional by giving a default value to it. Let's take the above example written in F# and express is C# 4.0.
public class TextBoxInfo
{
public TextBoxInto(
string text = "" , Color color = Color.Red, Font font = new Font(FontFamily.GenericSerif, 10 .0f ))
{ ... }
}
Ok, so you're probably asking about overload resolution. Using this technique will affect the resolution of your given methods. There are some rules that apply for resolution which are taken from the New Features in C# 4.0 document:
A method signature if applicable if all its parameters are either optional or have exactly one corresponding argument (by name or position) in the call which is convertible to the parameter type.
Betterness rules on conversions are only applied for arguments that are explicitly given - ommitted optional arguments are ignored for betterness purposes.
If two signatures are equally good, one that does not omit optiona | Go |
