| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Introduction to the MagicAjax.NET - The Magic Ajax Engine for .NET ... MagicAjax.NET is a free open-source framework, designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to integrate AJAX technology into their web pages, without replacing the ASP.NET controls and/or writing tons of JavaScript code. | Go |
| VistaDB Provider for MPS ... VistaDB providers for my personal site | Go |
| BlogService MVC Release 0.6 ... This release marks the change over to ASP.NET MVC framework. BlogSvc aims to be THE blog engine for new technology. MVC has greatly reduced complexity and increased testability of BlogSvc. With this release the BlogSvc.net website was separated out of the WebMvc project. The MVC switch also allowed for improvements with jQuery. | Go |
| Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute - Second part ... Just after the ASP.NET MVC preview 5 was released, I made a quick attempt to using the ModelBinder attribute. In short, a ModelBinder allows you to use complex objects as action method parameters, instead of just basic types like strings and integers. While my aproach was correct, it did not really cover the whole picture. So here it is: the full picture. | Go |
| JQuery and ASP.NET MVC ... Where have I been? ;) You probably heard the news already from the GU already, but just in case, we will be shipping JQuery with Visual Studio. ASP.NET MVC will have the privilege of being one of the first products to include JQuery. I am glad we finally announced this because I got tired of stifling my mouth everytime someone suggested we just | 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. | Go |
| ASP.NET - Response time is very slow for the first request to applicat ... ASP.NET - Response time is very slow for the first request to application (45+ seconds) | Go |
| ASP.NET E-Mail Validation Using The Right Validation Expression ... ASP.NET E-Mail Validation With Regular Expression Validator Using The Right Validation Expression | Go |
| Removing unused CSS Classes from your web application ... 2 ways to clean up your Css by removing unused classes. | Go |
| Social Timeline - Twitter Provider ... I've updated the timeline so that you can view your - or anyone else's - tweets on the timeline.
I also added an additional band to provide easier navigation on a day-by-day continuum in addition to the previous (and somewhat confusing at times) hour-only snapshot.
Despite the growing number of FriendFeed users there are a lot of people prefer to use Twitter as their only method of microblogging. I know I never update FriendFeed via its own GUI but rather just allow it to aggregate the contents of my social subscriptions. Anyway, the updated, Twitter-enabled Social Timeline is live, so check it out. | Go |
| When an Interviewer Does Not Give You Enough Time/Opportunities to Ask ... Interviews tend to develop into their own animal. It's not the fault of the company or manager setting up the interview, but just the mere fact that interviews by nature are typically a very discoverable experience for both sides. Therefore an interview anticipated to be x number of people and x hours could completely changed for both sides and neither really has much control over it because both sides really need to get the information that they need to make that decision. | Go |
| Access JavaScript variables on PostBack using ASP.NET Code ... In this article, we will see how to pass javascript values on postback and then access these values in your server side code. This article will primarily showcase two techniques of doing so. One using Hidden variables and the other using the __doPostBack() javascript method. | Go |
| JSON Formatter ... Nice online tool that lets you drop in some JSON text and see a nicely-formatted output. Helps visualize the data you'll be getting back from a JSON API. | Go |
| bblog: How to Parse DateTimes from the Twitter API ... This excellent post saved my day, when I was developing a tool to read Tweets. Excellent! | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - jQuery to ship with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio | Go |
| How do we write test automation for ASP.NET? - Asp.Net QA Team | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| An Introduction to jQuery - Part 1: The Client Side | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Request Flow - Justin Etheredge | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Plug-In Hybrids: ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Side By Side | Go |
| URL Rewriting in ASP.NET using URLRewriter.Net | Go |
| Site AuctionOffer.com | Go |
| My MVC Starter Template : Rob Conery | Go |
| Adding OpenID to your web site in conjunction with ASP.NET Membership ... | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you t | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here . The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release. UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup. Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size). Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download. This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications. This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility. I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it. To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application. To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item. We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template wit | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Support with Visual Web Developer 2008 Express ... Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release . One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition. The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it). This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express. If you install the Visual Web Developer Express SP1 Beta you can start using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 with it immediately. Important: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 does not require SP1 to be installed if you are using Visual Studio 2008. ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 will work with both VS 2008 and VS 2008 SP1 just fine. You can learn more about the new VWD Express support for ASP.NET MVC from the VS Web Tools team blog here . This post also includes a free web download that provides ASP.NET MVC Test project support for NUnit-based unit tests. You can use these NUnit project templates with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release ... This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here . You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here . Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release , along with some additional tweaks and adjustments. You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method. For example: which would render the below HTML when run: Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it. This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything). It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow. For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them. The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object): One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required). Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above: We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action: When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red): Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning "JsonResult" (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), "ContentResult" (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results. The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you'll see us add several more built-in result types. Improved HTML Helper Methods The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements. Automatic Value Lookup With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers. For example: to include a value within a <input type="text" value="some value"/> element you would write: The above code continues to work - although now you can also just write: The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use. SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc). One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render. For example, below I'm creating a SelectList view-model class over the | Go |
| May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF ... Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control : Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls : Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario. Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET : A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images. Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on. ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners : Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns). The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated. Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control : Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control. Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch : Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads. Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier. Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class : Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class. Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta : Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls. .NET 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ : Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it. Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL : Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries. Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries. DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers. Ukadc.Diagnostics : Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc). Visual Studio 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know : A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio. Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series. I confess I didn't know this one. Silverlight 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time". Wow. AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes : Nikhil Kothari has a | Go |
| Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta ... Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them).
We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates. You can download and install the beta here .
Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes
The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form - so you should be careful about installing it on critical machines. There are a few important SP1 Beta installation notes to be aware of:
1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta. There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release. These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta.
2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure). You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things). It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package. We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta.
3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend. This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running. Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue.
Important Update : If you previously installed a VS 2008 Hotfix, you must run the HotFix Cleanup Utility before installing the VS 2008 SP1 Beta. Click here to download and run this.
Improvements for Web Development
.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain a bunch of feature improvements targeted at web application development.
The VS Web Dev Tools team has more details (including specific bug fix details) on some of the VS specific work here . Below are more details on some of the work in the web-space:
ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
.NET 3.5 SP1 adds support for a rich ASP.NET data "scaffolding" framework that enables you to quickly build functional data-driven web application. With the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature you can automatically build web UI (with full CRUD - create, read, update, delete - support) against a variety of data object models (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, REST Services, and any other ORM or object model with a dynamic data provider).
SP1 adds this new functionality to the existing GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView controls in ASP.NET, and enables smart validation and flexible data templating options. It also delivers new smart filtering server controls, as well as adds support for automatically traversing primary-key/foreign-key relationships and displaying friendly foreign key names - all of which saves you from having to write a ton of code.
You can learn more more about this feature from Scott Hanselman's videos and tutorials here .
ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
.NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible new URL routing engine that allows you to map incoming URLs to route handlers. It includes support for both parsing parameters from clean URLs (for example: /Products/Browse/Beverages), as well as supp | Go |
| Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Book (only $16 on Amazon for a short time) ... One of the things I like to track are book sales on Amazon.com, which provides a useful data point to monitor what developers are interested in on any given day. I use the www.TitleZ.com site (which is built using ASP.NET) to track specific titles I want to watch - it then generates a report showing real-time Amazon sales ranking data, as well as 7 day, 30 day and 90 day sales ranking averages. This morning I pulled up my report and saw the usual books near the top of my list, and was about to navigate away when I noticed the eye-popping amazon ranking of the top book -"Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB " by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader. Its Amazon sales rank was a stunning #95 (of all books on Amazon), which meant it was outselling even Harry Potter (which is pretty much unheard of for any technology book). It turns out that Amazon is holding a special price promotion for a short time on a few books - and this was one that was selected. Instead of the usual $54 price, you can buy it for a short time for a ridiculous $16.49. I'm not sure how long this promotion will last - but if you are looking for a great ASP.NET 3.5 book this might be something you might want to take advantage of: The book is a great ASP.NET 3.5 book and an excellent end to end resource. It has been on the best seller list for programming books since it came out in March (usually in the top 5 of all programming titles), and has received glowing reviews (I posted a review of it on Amazon a few weeks ago and gave it 5 stars). If you are in the market for a good ASP.NET book, you might want to consider taking Amazon up on this offer before it closes (and apologies in advance if the price changes before you read this). Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you are looking for other good .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 books - I also recommend: C# 3.0 In a Nutshell , LINQ in Action , and Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 (all of which average a 5 star rating on Amazon). | Go |
| April 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET's membership, roles, and profile support. In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET's Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update : The ASP.NET team last week released an update of the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature. This update adds several new features including cleaner URL support using the same URL routing feature that ASP.NET MVC uses, as well as better confirmation, foreign-key, and template support. ASP.NET Testing with Ivonna : Travis Illig blogs about a new testing framework named Ivonna that enables unit testing of ASP.NET web forms. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX UI Templates : Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team has a cool post that shows off a prototype he has been working on that enables clean client-side AJAX templating of UI. ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit TabContainer Theme Gallery : Matt Berseth has another of his excellent posts - this one shows off a bunch of cool themes you can use to style the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Reducing Page Load Times with UpdatePanels and Timers : Paul Glavich posts of a cool trick you can use with tab controls to asynchronously load their content in the background in order to improve perceived page load time. Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? Dave Ward has a useful article that talks about the page methods feature in ASP.NET AJAX, and explains why they are static methods. JQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 : Brad Vincent posts about using the VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix we released in February to get a nice JavaScript intellisense experience in Visual Studio 2008 when using the JQuery AJAX library. ASP.NET MVC Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing : Fredrik Kalseth has a cool article that talks about the concepts behind inversion of control (IOC) and how you can use this with ASP.NET MVC to better isolate dependencies and enable better unit testing of your code. Stephen Walther's ASP.NET MVC Talk: Stephen Walther delivered a many-hour ASP.NET MVC post conference talk at ASP.NET Connections last week. You can download his slides + demos for free. Also check out his previous posts on Unit Tests with Visual Studio 2008 and TDD with Rhino Mocks . MVC Contrib Project Update : Eric Hexter blogs about some of the latest updates to the open source MvcContrib project to work with the latest ASP.NET MVC interim source release . Testing Action Results with ASP.NET MVC : Jeremy Skinner blogs about some cool extension method helpers he has added to MvcContrib to enable pretty sweet testing of Controller actions. MVC Membership Starter Kit - 1.2 Release : Troy Goode has posted an update to his excellent MVC Membership Starter Kit. This version works with the interim ASP.NET MVC source release. Silverlight Defining Silverlight DataGrid Columns at Runtime : Scott Morrison from the Silverlight team has a cool blog post that talks about how to define Silverlight DataGrid Columns via code at runtime. Visit my Silverlight links page for more DataGrid posts. Silverlight HTTP Networking Stack (Part 1 ), (Part 2 ), (Part 3 ): Karen Corby from the Silverlight team has a great three part blog series that talks about the new Silverlight 2 networking stack and how cross domain security works with it. Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with Sockets (Part 1) and (Part 2) : Dan Wahlin demonstrates how to implement a "GameStream" socket server and connect to it from a Silverlight client using Silverlight 2's built-in network sockets support. Silverlight - the Song : Spike Xavier and Dan Wa | Go |
| Slides from my ASP.NET Connections Orlando Talks ... Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day. You can download my slides+samples below: General Session The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here . In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code. You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here . I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support - which you can learn more about here . I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework - which you can learn more about here . I also showed off the new Hard Rock Memorabilia site built with Silverlight 2. You can try out the Hard Rock application yourself here . You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here . Building .NET Applications with Silverlight The slides + demos for Silverlight breakout talk can be downloaded here . You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here . In particular, I recommend reading my tutorial posts here and here . ASP.NET MVC The slides + demos for my ASP.NET MVC talk can be downloaded here . You can learn more about the latest ASP.NET MVC source refresh here . Stephen Walther also just posted a really good set of slides + demos from his post conference tutorial on ASP.NET MVC here . Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| URL Rewriting in ASP.NET using URLRewriter.Net ... Learn to use search engine friendly URLs for your ASP.NET pages | Go |
| Using ASP.NET 3.5 History Control in ASP.NET 2.0 ... As ASP.NET 2.0 does not provide built in support for Back button functionality in AJAX Update Panel,
This post will show you how to use ASP.NET 3.5 Ajax ControlToolKit History control with ASP.NET 2.0, to achieve the back button functionality in ASP.NET 2.0 | Go |
| Using AJAX, LINQ and XML in C# ... AJAX and LINQ are two of the main focuses of Microsoft right now; and no wonder - both have huge potential and power behind them.
In this example, we will show how we can use AJAX coupled with LINQ and XML to create a Web Application that we can use to view stored data instantaneously, as well as add to it in the same way | Go |
| Forms Authentication in ASP.NET with C#: Advance ... This article describe how to create Roles based sccurity using Forms Authentication in easy to follow steps. | Go |
| MVC Preview 5 - Create Dynamic Action Links ... Explains how to add new views to sample project and create dynamic action links on the data coming from database ? Also explains how to use these dynamic actions links to perform database actions.
Sample Videos To Explains All these in action | Go |
| Handling Files and Directories from your web applications. ... Using C#, VB.NET, and ASP.NET to get all files of directory and subdirectory. Simply illustration of working with files and directories in ASP.NET. | Go |
| Programmatically Encrypt and Decrypt Configuration Sections in web.config using ASP.NET ... The ASP.NET Configuration API provides support for encrypting and decrypting configuration sections in web.config. This feature comes extremely handy when you need to hide sensitive information like passwords. In this article, we will explore how to encrypt and decrypt sections of the web.config. | Go |
| Role Based Content Rendering ... Designing a web based Information Management System poses a lot of challenges to developers. One of these challenges is how to provide desired level of security security to different users with different access to an application. You often encouter situations where certain users will be allowed to update specific fields while others can only view them. It is essential to design for adequate security features in the presentation layer of your application. | Go |
| Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC ... Hot off the presses, and new to ASP.NET MVC (Preview 5) is an awesome capability that (in my opinion) revolutionizes the way we design web applications. This feature is being touted (by me) as "the ViewState for MVC". | Go |
| Building On-Demand Master/Detail Grouping Grid with GridView and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit CollapsiblePanelExtender ... Shows how to build on demand master/detail data using GridView, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit CollapsiblePanelExtender control and ASP.NET AJAX PageMethods. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Agile Development FAQ Part 1 ... Agile Development FAQ Part 1 | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part VI - Framework Architecture ... Catharsis web-app framework - Framework Architecture | Go |
| Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data Part - I ... An article on ASP.NET Dynamic Data | Go |
| Blend PDF with Silverlight ... Details & demo project of plumbing works that blend PDF and Silverlight visually with bi-directional data exchange. | Go |
| Color Picker ASP.NET AJAX Extender Control ... Web UI coclor picker control implemented as an ASP.NET AJAX Extender. | Go |
| Scheduling Future Dates ... Implement repetitive tasks at consistent intervals | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part V. - adding new Entity ... Catharsis web-app framework - adding new Entity (enter into Catharsis) | Go |
| Nest Gridviews using LinqDataSource ... Here I will explain how to pur Gridview in other one , such as categories and products | Go |
| Silverlight on Fly loading (RC0) ... This article is about how to manage xap packages at runtime | Go |
| Windows workflow foundation FAQ ... Windows workflow foundation FAQ | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part IV - Localization ... Catharsis web-app framework - localization | Go |
| 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks ... 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks | Go |
| TB.TreeGrid ... An ASP.NET Webcontrol used to show hierarchy data in grid view | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part III - Roles ... Catharsis web-app framework - role management | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data Part - I ... An article on ASP.NET Dynamic Data... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Review: Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls For .NET 3.5 ... This is a fine resource for ASP.NET developers who want to build high performance, data-driven Web applications with a richer user interface. The introduction of ASP.NET AJAX 2.0 extensions caught many of us off-guard. We were suddenly thrown into intensive...(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 |
| ASP.NET Ajax simple image browser ... An article on showing an image browser in a web page using ASP.NET Ajax... 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 |
| Richmond Code Camp, Entity Framework and the Beer House ... I will be presenting an introduction to the Entity Framework and the Beer House this Saturday at the Richmond Code Camp . I have been very busy with the Beer House application, Entity Framework, ASP.NET AJAX, CSS Layouts and much more the past 2 months...(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 |
| Color Picker ASP.NET AJAX Extender Control ... Web UI coclor picker control implemented as ASP.NET AJAX Extender... 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 |
| JQuery and ASP.NET MVC ... Where have I been? ;) You probably heard the news already form the GU already, but just in case, we will be shipping JQuerywith Visual Studio. ASP.NET MVC will have the privilege of being one of the first products to include JQuery. I am glad we finally announced this because I got tired of stifling my mouth everytime someone suggested we just include JQuery. :)
As you can see from demos I've done in the past, JQuery will fit nicely with the ASP.NET MVC style of development.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| How To: Telerik RadGrid for ASP.NET AJAX with ASP.NET MVC ... I've made small example how to use RadGrid for ASP.NET AJAX in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC:
The key here is to inherit from RadGrid and call explicitly desired grid commands. Let's say you want to edit particular record:
1) Create a template column and add this to the ItemTemplate:
<%# Html.ActionLink("Edit", "RadGridCommand", new { ControlID = MyGrid1.ID, CommandName = "Edit", CommandArgument = Container.ItemIndexHierarchical }) %>
2) Now handle this in your controller:
public ActionResult RadGridCommand(string ControlID, string CommandName, string CommandArgument)
{
ViewData["ControlID"] = ControlID;
ViewData["CommandName"]= CommandName;
ViewData["CommandArgument"] = CommandArgument;
return View("Index");
}
3) Override OnPreRender in inherited class and call explicitly the grid RaisePostBackEvent() method:
protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnPreRender(e);
if (ViewData["ControlID"] != null && ViewData["ControlID"].ToString() == ID &&
ViewData["CommandName"] != null)
{
RaisePostBackEvent(String.Format("FireCommand:{0};{1};{2}", MasterTableView.UniqueID, (string)ViewData["CommandName"], (string)ViewData["CommandArgument"]));
}
}
For other useful techniques please refer to the attached source code.
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 |
| Visual Studio To Include jQuery Library ... In a tip of its hand toward open source software development, Microsoft announced on Sunday that it will incorporate the jQuery JavaScript library into Microsoft Visual Studio and ASP.NET.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| MS + jQuery: This Is Huge! ... Yesterday, the ASP.NET team announced that they were going to ship jQuery, a small, populate open source web client library. And not only is Microsoft going to ship this library, as is, but we're going to build support into Visual Studio for it, build future versions of our web components assuming it and support it via PSS like any other Microsoft product.
This is huge.
Of course, is it useful for developers using Microsoft tools, because they get another supported library out of the box for them... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Microsoft announces jQuery support in ASP.NET Ajax ... I just noticed a very interesting announcement by Scott Guthrie. Microsoft will officially start co-operating with jQuery development community, adding support for jquery in ASP.NET Ajax, and which also includes Microsoft PSS e.g they take support cases. Read more here . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! 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 |
| TB.TreeGrid ... a asp.net webcontrol used to show hiberarchy data in grid view... 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 |
| Define Maximum length to a TextBox ... This expression can be use to define the maximum length to a textBox.
U can change the maximum character by replacing the last numeric value that is 10 in my example.
Just change this number to your desired number like
^(.|\r|\n){1,10}$ : for max 10 character
^(.|\r|\n){1,20}$ : for max 20 character
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part III - Roles ... Catharsis web-app framework - role management... 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 |
| jQuery now officially part of the .NET developers toolbox ... You may have read that from John Resig or Scott Guthrie. Im very excited to announce that Microsoft has decided to ship, adopt and support using jQuery on top of ASP.NET. This may come as a surprise to some of you but I hope youll agree with me that it makes total sense. jQuery is a fantastic JavaScript library that focuses on DOM querying and manipulation, whereas the Microsoft Ajax Library focuses on building reusable components and interacting with ASP.NET web services.
A lot has been written... 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 |
| Windows 7 Features ... There is some new features which will come with windows 7 makes me feel that Vista was like Windows Millennium (ME). Any way i beleive that Windows 7 will open and new age in operating systems. here is some links for Windows 7 Features ; http://www.pcauthority.com.au/ http://blogs.msdn.com/ http://www.winsupersite.com/ | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Family Video Website #5 – Multiple File Upload with Progress ... In this series of tutorials, I build an entire ASP.NET MVC application from start to finish. In this entry, I add a Silverlight file upload control to make it easier to upload multiple media files. This blog entry is part of a series of entries on using ASP.NET MVC to build an entire Family Video Website from scratch. Before reading this entry, you might want to read the previous four entries: Family Video Website #1 – Upload the Videos – In this entry, I create an MVC controller that accepts large file uploads. Family Video Website #2 –Add the Database – In this entry, I added a database so that I could associate additional information, such as a title and description, with each video. Family Video Website #3 – Play Videos with Silverlight – In this entry, I added the ASP.NET MediaPlayer Silverlight player to the application. Family Video Website #4 – Paging, Silverlight, and Flip – In this entry, I add paging to the application and demonstrate how you can encode and upload videos recorded with a Flip video camera. Accepting File Uploads The standard HTML <input type=”file” /> element does not work well when you need to upload large files (see Figure 1). It doesn’t display a progress bar. When you initiate the upload, your browser freezes. You have no idea whether something is happening or not. The standard HTML <input type=”file” /> element also does not provide you with a method of uploading multiple files at once. Typically, I dump a large number of pictures from my camera onto my hard drive and I want to upload several of these pictures to the Family website. The standard HTML file upload element forces you to upload the files, laboriously, one at a time. Figure 1 – The standard HTML file upload element For these reasons, I decided to investigate alternatives to the standard HTML file upload element. I investigated both Ajax and Silverlight solutions. Using Ajax for File Uploads My first inclination was to implement an Ajax solution for accepting file uploads. Using Ajax, you can continuously poll the server from the browser to check on the progress of uploading a file. In that way, you can display a progress bar. I found good reviews of different Ajax file upload solutions for ASP.NET in Matt Berseth’s blog and Jon Galloway’s blog at the following addresses: http://mattberseth.com/blog/2008/07/aspnet_file_upload_with_realti_1.html http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2008/01/08/large-file-uploads-in-asp-net.aspx After reading Matt Berseth’s positive review of two open source Ajax file upload components, named NeatUpload and the ASP.Net File Upload/Download Module, I experimented with using these components in an ASP.NET MVC application. You can download these components from the following URLs: http://www.brettle.com/neatupload http://darrenjohnstone.net/2008/07/15/aspnet-file-upload-module-version-2-beta-1/ I made some progress in adapting these components to work in the context of an ASP.NET MVC application. However, after reading Jon Galloway’s blog, I decided to investigate a Silverlight solution to the problem of accepting file uploads. Using Silverlight for File Uploads When I need an answer to a Silverlight question, I turn to either Tim Heuer or Jesse Liberty who are the Silverlight gurus on my team. Tim recommended that I look into the following two Silverlight controls: http://sandbox.inetsolution.com/fileuploadwebsite/FileUploaderTestPage.aspx http://www.michielpost.nl/Silverlight/MultiFileUploader/ Both of these Silverlight controls enable you to upload multiple files. However, the first control is commercial and the second control is open source (the author says that the control will be released as open source with the Silverlight 2.0 release). Therefore, I decided to use the second control, the Multi File Uploader control, for the Family Videos Website application. The Multi File Uploa | Go |
| Playing around with ASP.NET MVC ... As I'm a big fan of Castle Project's MonoRail , I often get asked my opinion of the ASP.NET MVC stuff Microsoft is working on. And I always have the same answer -- I've seen some demos but haven't actually played around with it. So I took some time tonight and installed it. Installation You can download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 release here . Double-click on the MSI and you get the usual welcome screen. As always, there's a EULA to accept. After that, you're ready to install. And then you're done! Painless and easy. My First Project After installation completed, I started up Visual Studio 2008. At this point, the GhostDoc configuration screen appeared. I had to repeat my GhostDoc set up. That was weird! Don't know if that had anything to do with the ASP.NET MVC install, but I hadn't done anything else with my VS2008 installation recently. You'll now have a new Web project type called "ASP.NET MVC Web Application". After selecting this I was asked if I wanted to add a unit test project as well. Very nice! Obviously, I selected "Yes". :) My solution was now all set up and ready to go: Notice the project is pre-populated with folders for my controllers, models and views. The web.config is also fully configured. At this point, I clicked "Run" to see what would happen. By default, the web.config is not set up for debugging. I took the default and let VS.NET set up my config for debugging. And now my first ASP.NET MVC project was up and running! Comparison to MonoRail Now I started poking around the directory structure. I noticed that instead of a "layouts" folder they place their master pages ("layouts" in MonoRail) inside a "shared" folder. Sounds similar to MonoRail's shared views. I noticed that the view pages are still ASPX pages and contain a code-behind file. This seems kind of odd to me as I'm accustomed to MonoRail's view files (mostly NVelocity) -- a single file that contains everything needed to render the view; no more, no less. I could see that without discipline, the code-behind files could be bloated with business logic when it should only contain view logic. Be careful! Poking around the pre-built pages I noticed most of the "ViewData" (PropertyBag for you MonoRail people) output was wrapped in Html.Encode. It would seem to me that you'd want to, by default, always HTML encode your output (like MonoRail does). I think raw output of view data is the exception rather than the rule. Others think it should be this way too. Again, be careful! Adding a New View So it's time to start adding a little bit of my own code to this sample app. I started with adding a new view. When you do this, make sure you add a new "MVC View Page" and not the usual "Web Form": The page popped up and I noticed something right away: There's no way to pick your master page when creating a new MVC View Page. I'm sure this is just one of those things that don't exist yet. I know that this selection step is available for web forms so it's probably just a matter of time before the ASP.NET MVC stuff supports this. But, since it doesn't, you'll need to add the MasterPageFile attribute yourself as well as any ContentPlaceholder tags. I grabbed them from one of the sample pages. So now I just dumped some code real quick into the view. As I typed, I noticed the Visual Studio was complaining about what I was typing: It didn't like my "Html.Encode" nor my "ViewData" references. I copied these right from another page?! What was I missing? An import perhaps? Nope, the imports on the sample pages are the same as mine. Then it hit me -- these view pages (like web forms pages) inherit from a base class. That base class probably exposes the Html and ViewData objects. Since I just created this page (and haven't compiled), the intellisense wasn't picking up the proper settings. So even though I had the red squiggle's, I hit the build button. Everything built fine and my page errors went away. I put a line of code in one of the controllers to stick my name in the V | Go |
| Review: Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls For .NET 3.5 ... Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls For .NET 3.5 is a fine resource for ASP.NET developers who want to build high performance, data-driven Web applications with a richer user interface. The introduction of ASP.NET AJAX 2.0 extensions caught many of us off-guard. We were suddenly thrown into intensive JavaScript programming on a Microsoft platform. Faced with a major learning curve, many of us fled to the convenience of the UpdatePanel control as a stepping stone. There's no getting around it, it...(read more ) | Go |
| Display a Nice Error Popup Window ... I always hated web sites that show Javascript alert message to tell the user about an error. Doing so make me feel that I'm in front of desktop application and not a web app. May be the alternative is to have an error page where you redirect the user in case of any error. This definitely works fine, but sometimes it bugs me when I get redirected to that error page just because my credit card number is wrong. Of course we can use the validation controls as a standard or with AJAX support to handle that. Anyhow, I needed to display an error message to the user as popup window, or at least this is the requirement of the project that I'm working on. To display the above error message you just need to add <nw:ErrorPopUp ID="ErrorWindow" runat="server" Title="Error Message" Message="Put Error Message here" Show="true" ></nw:ErrorPopUp> This control leverages the Modal Popup control which is part of the AJAX Controls Toolkit . The ErrorPopup control is highly configurable in which you can change the look and feel, behavior and a lot's of things. For example when you want to show the error message all you need to do is to set the property Show to 'true' or invoke the ShowControl() method to display the error window. In the attachment you will find the control source-code, and demo web app. The control is written in separate DLL, all related JS, CSS styles and images are embedded in that dll so you can easily add it to your web project. Hope this helps | Go |
| Deep Zoom... so close! ... I've been trying to put together a couple of articles on rolling your own Deep Zoom viewer, fed by a database with images all cut up for you. The image cutting I've got, the data I've got... but the MultiScaleImage control is not working as expected.
There are a couple of articles out there already that describe how to feed custom data to the control about image locations. Here's my version:
public class ViewerSource : MultiScaleTileSource {
public ViewerSource(int imageWidth, int imageHeight, int tileSize, int overlap, int imageID) : base(imageWidth, imageHeight, tileSize, tileSize, overlap) { ImageID = imageID; } public int ImageID { get; private set; } protected override void GetTileLayers(int tileLevel, int tilePositionX, int tilePositionY, System.Collections.Generic.IList<object> tileImageLayerSources) { string source = String.Format("http://localhost:2974/TileHandler.ashx?id={0}&level={1}&x={2}&y={3}", ImageID, tileLevel, tilePositionX, tilePositionY); Uri uri = new Uri(source, UriKind.Absolute); tileImageLayerSources.Add(uri); } }
If I step through the code, I can see that it's getting the URL's for the images right (I can cut and paste and see they work), but the requests are never made for them. In the constructor for the XAML page, I use this:
ViewerSource source = new ViewerSource(4372, 2906, 256, 0, 6); msi.Source = source;
... where msi is the MultiScaleImage. For some reason, no go. Interestingly enough, when I put a break point on the .Add(uri), the IList<object> is empty, which doesn't seem right.
This is frustrating the heck out of me, because I feel like I'm pretty close. Does anyone else have experience with this? If I can't make it work, it might be an interesting exercise to try and do it in Javascript since I have the tile part all figured out. | Go |
| Saved passwords after deploying web applications ... Hi:
The Problem
I ran into a very odd, at the time, issue after I deployed my applications. I opened various directories on different web servers using an admin account. I deployed my apps, but when I browsed to the apps they failed, because they wouldn't authenticate my personal account which I was signed in with on my local desktop.
The Cause
When browsing to the the various applications via IE, windows used the same account you used when deploying your application (admin account). So, your apps are not broken, you just get authentication issue since Windows is saving the accounts your are using to log into your web servers.
The Solution
Open your control panel and delete your saved passwords. | Go |
| Introducing Engage: Events 1.0 ... After three public pre-releases, and weeks of wrestling through user-submitted bugs and those we found (so that you don't have to!), we are now ready to release Engage: Events to the eagerly awaiting public! After we cemented our feature-set in the Beta release, we have hunted down no less than 15 bugs, ranging from grammar to complete show-stoppers. We are very thankful for the support of the community as we worked together to create a DotNetNuke module that fits your needs, from the ground up,...(read more ) | Go |
| Microsoft Unveils Next Version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework ... Recently Microsoft Unvelled some Details about Next Version of Visual Studio & .net Framework 4.0 here is link to press release. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-29VS10PR.mspx...(read more ) | Go |
| New Article: Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC - Part 2 ... I normally don't do a "Part 2", but the first article seemed to cause some concerns to many people. The concerns aren't valid, which is why I felt in necessary to address them. The issues stemmed around RESTful URLs, comparing ModelBinders to the ViewState and accessing the database from a ModelBinder. Here's the article: Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC - Part 2 | Go |
