| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Pluggable ASP.NET CacheManager ... A CacheManager class that you can easily write your own providers (memcached, Velocity, etc.) for. Includes providers for request-length caching and ASP.NET's built-in Cache object. | Go |
| OpenFlash Chart - Fixing Open Source ... OpenFlashChartLib fixed to work with the newest version of Open Flash Chart using the original authors code and other open source examples. | Go |
| Microsoft Failures & Successes ... I will give no explanation, because I think they speak for themselves, but here are some failures & Successes from Microsoft.
Failures
(not wasting my time on these, they just don't let me opening code good ORM, Patterns, etc. period)
* Typed DataSets
* SharePoint 2003 & 2007
* New Entity Framework
* MS CRM
Successes
* C# 3.0
* .NET 3.5
* VS 2008
* ASP.NET MVC Preview
* LINQ | Go |
| SubSonic MVC Scaffold Addin ... Scaffold your tables using SubSonic in asp.net mvc | Go |
| ALT.NET Podcast 11: jQuery in ASP.NET ... In this episode Chris Brandsma, Rick Strahl, Dave Ward, Bertrand Le Roy, Scott Koon, and Steven Harman discuss Microsoft's jQuery in ASP.NET announcement. | Go |
| Artinsoft Aggiorno fixes your web pages ... On this post Joe Stagner introduces his experiences with Aggiorno, Artinsoft's latest project which automates a lot of time consuming tasks for web developers in the form of web refactorings.
From the post "[aggiorno] takes your web page and fixes errors, removes the use of deprecated constructs, restructures your syntax for XHTLM compliance and more." | Go |
| Count Image Requests from a Web Server using ASP.NET (VB.Net) ... This article explains you how we can count Image request from a Web server using VB.Net and ASP.NET. | Go |
| How to format DateTime in GridView BoundColumn and TemplateColumn? ... Most often, we will get requirements to display date in GridView column. To format the date displayed in the GridView column, we can use "DataFormatString" to set the DateTime format in a Bound Column. This article will helps us formatting the date string in GridView column when we use Bound column and Template column. | Go |
| Windows Communication Foundation FAQ quick starter Part 2 ... In this section we will run through a quick FAQ for WCF. I am sure after reading this you will get a good understanding of the fundamentals of WCF. | Go |
| Windows Communication Foundation FAQ quick starter Part 1 ... In this section we will run through a quick FAQ for WCF. I am sure after reading this you will get a good understanding of the fundamentals of WCF.
In case you like the article or your think I need improvements please send me a message at http://www.questpond.com . I am sure every one needs improvements.
Enjoy. | Go |
| Ajax quick start FAQ ... This FAQ is like a starter kit. It will help you understand the main aspects of Ajax in a rapid fashion.... So get set go... | Go |
| Six Sigma Interview Questions ... I know many will not like my interview questions article. Some may think its bad for various reasons and some may think its good for quick revision. Again I repeat you do not get jobs by reading interview question and answers , but yes it definitely serves as a quick reference. So looking at the good part I continue my Interview questions and answers series. This time I will be writing from process point of view. Six sigma is a getting good recognition in the market and I am sure many professionals are asked questions on the same. So below is a quick revision which will give you a decent understanding of Six sigma from interview point of view. | Go |
| Asp.Net Interview Question Part 1 ... In this section we will touch base on one of important concepts in ASP. Net. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC with NHaml - F# Edition ... As part of some of my adventures with F#, I've seen a lot of interesting things coming from others with regards to SharePoint, ASP.NET and other technologies. This had me thinking of any possibilities and ramifications of using F# with ASP.NET MVC. Was it possible, and better question, what might make someone use this over their existing toolsets. Those are some of the questions to explore. But, in the mean time, let's take the journey of F# and ASP.NET MVC. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Plug-In Hybrids: ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Side By Side | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - jQuery to ship with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio | Go |
| Adding OpenID to your web site in conjunction with ASP.NET Membership - Digging My Blog - Dan Hounshell | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| CodeProject: Exploring Caching in ASP.NET. Free source code and programming help | Go |
| Best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.0 - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 | Go |
| Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication | Encosia | Go |
| URL Rewriting in ASP.NET using URLRewriter.Net | Go |
| CodeThinked | ASP.NET MVC Request Flow | Go |
| My MVC Starter Template : Rob Conery | Go |
| Matt Berseth: ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Simple 5 Table Northwind Example | Go |
| An Introduction to jQuery - Part 1: The Client Side | Go |
| Microsoft Web Platform | 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 |
| Creating a Dynamic Data Web site using Scaffolding ... This post explains how to create a basic Web Site that uses ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET Dynamic Data provides the Web application scaffolding that enables you to build rich data-driven Web applications.
scaffolding is mechanism that enhance the functionality of the existing ASP.NET Framework by adding the ability to dynamically display pages based on the data model of the database. | Go |
| ListView Control with DropDownExtender and Menu ... This article describes how to display the Context Menu on each row of the ListView Control using DropDownExtender and Menu control. | Go |
| Using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC ... The Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework has been getting talked about more and more lately. The power and flexibility of ASP.NET MVC allows for developers to use libraries other than those include in the box. The popular JavaScript framework, jQuery, is no exception. | Go |
| URL Rewriting in ASP.NET using URLRewriter.Net ... Learn to use search engine friendly URLs for your ASP.NET pages | Go |
| Using ASP.NET 3.5 History Control in ASP.NET 2.0 ... As ASP.NET 2.0 does not provide built in support for Back button functionality in AJAX Update Panel,
This post will show you how to use ASP.NET 3.5 Ajax ControlToolKit History control with ASP.NET 2.0, to achieve the back button functionality in ASP.NET 2.0 | Go |
| Using AJAX, LINQ and XML in C# ... AJAX and LINQ are two of the main focuses of Microsoft right now; and no wonder - both have huge potential and power behind them.
In this example, we will show how we can use AJAX coupled with LINQ and XML to create a Web Application that we can use to view stored data instantaneously, as well as add to it in the same way | Go |
| Forms Authentication in ASP.NET with C#: Advance ... This article describe how to create Roles based sccurity using Forms Authentication in easy to follow steps. | Go |
| MVC Preview 5 - Create Dynamic Action Links ... Explains how to add new views to sample project and create dynamic action links on the data coming from database ? Also explains how to use these dynamic actions links to perform database actions.
Sample Videos To Explains All these in action | Go |
| Handling Files and Directories from your web applications. ... Using C#, VB.NET, and ASP.NET to get all files of directory and subdirectory. Simply illustration of working with files and directories in ASP.NET. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| 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 |
| Create and display funnel charts on a web page ... How to create and display funnel charts on a web page with C# and ASP.NET. | Go |
| An ASP.NET Data Layer base class for LINQ disconnected mode ... Quickly and easily implement your LINQ Data Layer with this abstract class. | Go |
| Send emails in ASP.NET using Gmail credentials ... This article contains code to send email using Gmail accounts. | Go |
| ServerComponents HTTP Handlers ... By using only configuration, create and customize HTTP handlers that do a lot of tasks. | Go |
| Agile Development Part 2 ... Agile Development Part 2 | Go |
| How to use Microsoft Silverlight in Oracle Weblogic Portal 10gR3 ... Step-by-step instructions on how to use the Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Software Development Kit in Oracle Weblogic Portal10gR3. | Go |
| Fixing infinite redirect loops in DotNetNuke ... Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete. | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part IX - Business layer ... Catharsis web-app framework - Business layer | Go |
| Win-Form/Web-Form Generic Components using the same Controller ... A framework to develop Win-Form and Web-Form applications using generic components | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - Part VIII - Data layer ... Catharsis web-app framework - Data layer | Go |
| ASP.net 2.0 website as a sub application of a 1.1 website ... How to configure an asp.net 2.0 as a sub app of an asp.net 1.1 application | Go |
| Design pattern – Inversion of control and Dependency injection ... Design pattern – Inversion of control and Dependency injection | Go |
| Exploring Caching in ASP.NET ... This article describes details of caching in ASP.NET | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Scott Guthrie will be on the PDC keynotes would he be at the PDC Underground? ... Gu will be at the PCD talking about Silverlight 2 and jQuery. Im guessing that a few news will come out on that presentation. Mr Guthrie likes to release the news. I would be missing the PDC this year. $2000 is an expense that I cant find a justification to give the wife. Im still trying to get a BluRay DVD player for the house. Yet for people like me that cannot make it to the PDC, there is a free event called The Underground PDC, I wonder if Scott Guthrie would be attending. You need to... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Search Trends October 2008 ... PDC is fast approaching and Cloud Computing is the theme - and all the rage for everyone else in the Industry media. Amazon recently announced they'll be extending their compute cloud to support Windows and real databases. Here's a look at some recent trends in the tech industry, using Google Trends . Daylight Savings Time The topic of DST is likely of at least marginal interest to most software developers, as working with DateTime constructs is a frequent requirement for us (and often a source of frustration). I wanted to confirm when it was this year and that led to the rest of these trend searches (I once missed a flight due to a change in the date of DST that my alarm clock's auto adjustment failed to pick up). FYI: Daylight Savings Time in 2008 will Fall Back the first Sunday in November. Interesting (and expected) that twice a year folks become interested in this topic. Note that the main regions who care are US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Most of the world doesn't observe DST. And contrary to what I thought I knew, Ben Franklin didn't invent DST and it only started in the early 1900s (according to the Source Of All Knowledge: Wikipedia ). Cloud Computing If I were a betting man, I'd bet on cloud computing to be a big upcoming trend in the next several years. It first hit the search term scene a little over a year ago, and it's gone up rather drastically since then. I'd look for it to peak in November this year after PDC and then to plateau or rise gently after that. Amazon's S3 and EC2 services have been around for a while - let's see how Microsoft compares thus far. Amazon Cloud vs. Microsoft Cloud I'd say Microsoft is going to catch and surpass Amazon by PDC time. Looking at another Microsoft event and announcement, let's see how Silverlight is doing in terms of interest. Silverlight Silverlight is still going strong. I predict it will go up steadily once Silverlight 2 is released, slated for later this year and most likely at PDC, I would say. So what about hosting? Is anyone looking for cloud hosting solutions? Compared to what? Let's look at two comparably small sets of terms. Cloud vs. Ruby Hosting Cloud hosting didn't exist as a trend before 2008 Q3 and now it's nearly as popular a search term as ruby hosting. Clearly Ruby Hosting isn't all that popular, but just how does it compare to say ASP.NET and PHP? Ruby vs. ASP.NET vs. PHP Hosting Clearly the trends for all three of these are heading downward, as I think the hosting marketplace has largely shaken out and become somewhat commoditized. With sites like GoDaddy offering cheap hosting along with about a million easy to use web publishing and blogging platforms, the need for hosting is obviously in decline. So what else is new? What about ASP.NET? Remember when it was Atlas? And what about this new jQuery thing that's not really new but is now going to ship with Visual Studio? Atlas vs. ASP.NET AJAX ... and jQuery How about data access technologies? Would it surprise you to learn that NHibernate has been a search trend since late 2004, with greater popularity than either LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework's high water mark since 2006 (that is, NH's 2006 and later popularity exceeds the best the others have ever achieved). I doubt this reflects adoption, but it's interesting nonetheless. Perhaps it reflects people searching for documentation... NHibernate vs. LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework How is interest in ASP.NET MVC coming along, with its hopeful release some time in 2008 as well? ASP.NET MVC Lastly, in the self-fulfilling prophecy department, how many people have been looking for a recession, since about a year ago? It certainly appears the popularity of a recession has gone up dramatically in the last 12 months. Recession Look up bailout as well, though the graph isn't terribly interesting since it's almost asymptotic... Fun times in the financial industry. Now back to more regularly scheduled geekdom. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .ne | Go |
| A possible cause of Sys is undefined explained ... Clay Compton explains on the ASP.NET QA blog how bad web.config overrides can lead to the Microsoft Ajax Library not loading and the Sys is undefined error being thrown when the page loads. Its a great read and hopefully will unblock some of you. http://weblogs.asp.net/asptest/archive/2008/10/06/asp-net-ajax-and-http-handlers-a-cautionary-tale.aspx... 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 |
| Create and display funnel chart on a web page ... How to create and display funnel chart on a web page with c# and asp.net... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| MvcContrib latest release now with SubController support ... One of the items that many people I know have requested are subcontrollers. Most non-trivial web applications require many things happening on a single screen. Even if it's only the current shopping cart displayed on multiple screens, the MVC Framework needs a mechanism of screen decomposition so that web applications can scale with complexity. WebForms has the Control model where markup and logic live together and can be composed easily. With the MVC Framework CTP 5, a single... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| MvcContrib latest release now with SubController support ... One of the items that many people I know have requested are subcontrollers. Most non-trivial web applications require many things happening on a single screen. Even if it's only the current shopping cart displayed on multiple screens, the MVC Framework needs a mechanism of screen decomposition so that web applications can scale with complexity. WebForms has the Control model where markup and logic live together and can be composed easily. With the MVC Framework CTP 5, a single... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| In Love With Complexity ... I have just finished reading Simplexity
by Jeffrey Kluger, a senior editor and writer for Time magazine. The full title of the book is Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple). This is precisely the kind of question that’s been on my mind for a long time.
One of the arguments I’ve heard against offering simple solutions is that simple is not “professional.” The UI has to look sophisticated, rugged. With lots of buttons to click.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part IX - Business layer ... Catharsis web-app framework - Business layer... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Communaut .NET Montral Next Meeting: ASP.NET Dynamic Data and ADO.NET Data Services ... www.dotnetmontreal.comDate: Lundi 6 octobre, 18h15Sujets: ASP.NET Dynamic Data et ADO.NET Data ServicesConfrenciers: ric Moreau et Guy BarretteLe SP1 du Framework .NET 3.5 nous apporte un lot de nouvelles technologies. Parmi celles-ci, on retrouve ASP.NET Dynamic Data qui permet aux dveloppeurs de livrer des applications Web centres sur les donnes de faon trs rapide et ce, sans crire de code. Parfait pour les pages de style gestion de donnes pour alimenter un site. ADO.NET Data... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Win-Form/Web-Form Generic Components using the same Controller ... A framework to develop Win-Form and Web-Form applications using generic components... 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 + jQuery: What about PrototypeJS? ... Well done jQuery
As everyone already knows, Microsoft has announced that jQuery will ship in the future with Visual Studio. I think this really is a step forward and will definitely complement all the exciting new developments going on with ASP.NET including the enhancements with ASP.NET Ajax and ASP.NET 3.5 + SP1.
But...
Heres what I would like to know: Why did Microsoft choose jQuery? The only explanation I can come up with is: Well..why not?
I have ported JavaScript from jQuery to PrototypeJS and visa-versa, even emulated functionality Ive seen in one with the other. Aftera while, I ended up settling into PrototypeJS , why? Well, honestly its probably not because of PrototypeJS itself, but because of script.aculo.us . Going back 12 months or so, the animations and effects in script.aculo.us to me appeared a little smoother and seemed to have more browser compatibility then the jQuery of the time.
I have recently been writing a client-side control extender using the ASP.NET Ajax libraries then using PrototypeJS+script.aculo.us to basically fill the gaps. And thus far these libraries are an exceptionally powerful and productive combination.
Battle tested
Lets also not forget that PrototypeJS + script.aculo.us are included as part of Ruby-on-rails, which basically means you can be assured that these JavaScript libraries have been deployed in a huge variety of websites in the Ruby community.
Taking a look at the warm-fuzzy real world client list on Prototype s site and jQuery s site, its obvious that both libraries are popular, there are a lot of big companies in each list, some are even listed in both. Funnily enough though Microsoft itself is listed only on the Prototype site.. :)
Conclusion?
Not really knowing where to get answers or reasons, I took a long shot and fired a tweet at Scott Hanselman no pulse, but I didnt expect anything. Im just wanting to know what makes jQuery so special? It definitely has a better website then PrototypeJS. Ive read forum comments that in some casesjQuery is only being used for its plugins, which are conveniently accessible from a link on the homepage. How many people even know that Scripteka has a collection of downloadable plug-ins for prototype!? I agree that the guys over at Prototype should look at a website refresh and start pulling the community together a bit.
The future
In any respect I feel this is a step forward for Microsoft actually accepting and using Open Source products for .net instead of replicating them . And you never know, shipping NHibernate with Sql Server would be to me, a whole new level of respekt.
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 |
| Blogging with ease using Sitefinity & Windows Live Writer ... A few weeks ago Ivan made a small post to the Sitefinity forums and announced:
Yes the Live Writer support is fully functional. As a matter of fact all the guys and girls on blogs.telerik.com are using Live Writer for their everyday blogging.
This forum post probably went unnoticed by most people, but it's an incredible announcement. Windows Live Writer is a free desktop application that can be used to compose your blog offline. When you're finished composing, you can publish with a 'click' of a button. I've now written a handful of blog posts using Live Writer, it's a nice little editor that makes publishing online extremely easy.
If you are blogging on the Sitefinity platform, you need to give Windows Live Writer a look.
MetaWeblog API
In fairness, the Sitefinity team hasn't specifically created support for Windows Live Writer. Rather, they've created support for the MetaWeblog API . The MetaWeblog API is an XML-RPC web service that exposes methods for managing blog posts. Windows Live Writer (as well as other blog editors) use this API to publish compositions online.
Configuring Windows Live Writer to Publish to your Sitefinity Blog
There is a full KB article that contains a lot of information about the MetaWeblog API & Sitefinity . Below I'm going to walk-through, very specifically, setting up Windows Live Writer to publish to your Sitefinity blog. If you need additional information, please refer to the KB article or the Sitefinity forums .
Step 1: Download Windows Live Writer and run the installer.
Step 2: Click "Writer " from the list of products to be installed.
Step 3: Click the "Add to installation " button.
Step 4: When the installation is finished, click the "Close " button.
You will be prompted to create a new Windows Live Spaces account. Because you will be publishing to Sitefinity, this is not necessary.
Step 5: From your Start menu, load the "Windows Live Writer " program.
You will be prompted to setup a new Weblog service. If you are not prompted click "Tools " and then "Accounts " from the menu above. Then click the "Add " button to create a new Weblog service.
Step 6: Choose "Another weblog service " for your Weblog Type and click the "Next " button.
Step 7: For the "Weblog Homepage URL " type the URL you've configured for your blog in Sitefinity.
Step 8: Type the Sitefinity username & password you use to modify your blog. Click the "Next " button.
Step 9: Type "http://<your url>/blogs/metablog.ashx " for the "Remote posting URL ".
Step 10: Click "Next ". Live Writer will contact the Sitefinity MetaWeblog API. Click the the "Finish " button to complete the setup.
Write your Blog Post and Publish
You are now done and ready to publish new blog posts to your Sitefinity blog. Use Windows Live Writer to write your article. When you're ready to publish your post, just click "Publish ".
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 |
| Debugging ASP.NET MVC Routing ... One of the most critical pieces to MVC is routing users to the proper controller. During the development process, you must keep in mind that routes will take users to the first pattern that matches. Its not that difficult to create patterns that are too similar that users are routed to the incorrect place. Phil Haack, from the ASP.NET team, has created a cool library to help routes. You can download his library at http://haacked.com/archive/2008/03/13/url-routing-debugger.aspx . When you download the library, be sure to place it in your bin directory and add a reference to it within your project. Hes updated it for MVC Preview 5. 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 |
| Loading Web User Controls Dynamically in ASP.NET Pages ... Shows the correct way of loading and rendering web user controls dynamically in ASP.NET pages... 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 |
| Scott Guthrie will be on the PDC keynotes would he be at the PDC Underground? ... Gu will be at the PCD talking about Silverlight 2 and jQuery . I’m guessing that a few news will come out on that presentation. Mr Guthrie likes to release the news. I would be missing the PDC this year. $2000 is an expense that I can’t find a justification to give the wife. I’m still trying to get a BluRay DVD player for the house. Yet for people like me that cannot make it to the PDC, there is a free event called The Underground PDC , I wonder if Scott Guthrie would be attending. You need to register to attend the event. The line up of speakers at the underground is secret right now. I’m guessing that if Gu was presenting at the Underground PDC the list wouldn’t be a secret. The Underground event is on Wednesday, October 29th from 6pm to 2 am. The Edison 108 W 2nd St, #101, Los Angeles, CA 90012 Who will stay that late on a week day? Register quick, the event is almost full. Cheers Al | Go |
| Alt.NET podcast on jQuery ... We had an interesting conversation with the good people from the Alt.NET podcast on jQuery and what it means for .NET developers. Check it out: http://altnetpodcast.com/episodes/11-jquery-in-asp.net | Go |
| ASP .NET - Validators in a MultiView ... A few weeks ago I needed to create a step-by-step wizard that required more functionality than the built-in Wizard control provided out of the box. I created my custom wizard by taking advantage of the MultiView control which is essentially what the Wizard control is based on. After creating my custom wizard I tackled a requirement that specified all validation had to occur on the final step of the wizard when the user clicked "Finish". I designed the wizard so each view would have validators with a ValidationGroup unique to that view. My original plan was to call the following code:
Unfortunately, this code will not return the correct result. Why? Well after some investigating it turns out validation controls in a hidden View will not be validated and checking IsValid on those controls will always return true. It would be interesting to find out why this design decision was made.
The following code will get around this:
One caveat to this method is that the MultiView's ActiveViewChanged event will fire so you'll need to take that into account if you are using it. | Go |
| ActiveRecord and a Custom NHibernate PrimitiveType ... I was intrigued by Steve Smith 's blog post yesterday about reducing SQL Lookup tables in nHibernate . He gave an example of a WorkOrderStatus class the exposed the actual status as a POCO object that wasn't stored in the database. What really piqued my interest was the following comment: NHibernate can map this status directly if you create a WorkOrderStatusType class that inherits from NHibernate.Type.PrimitiveType and overrides its methods. I never knew nHibernate supported this type of feature (never needed it or thought about it). As I'm an avid ActiveRecord user, I decided to see how I would implement a custom nHibernate PrimitiveType and utilize it via ActiveRecord. Turns out it was pretty easy! The full source is available from my GoogleCode page either through SVN or simply a ZIP download. A quick note before we begin: I didn't find a whole lot of documentation on extending PrimitiveType and implementing your own. I reviewed some nHibernate code and I think I got the general implementation right, but can't be sure it'll work 100% of the time. It was a proof-of-concept project. ActiveRecord Setup I decided I'd use SQLite for this sample since it's perfect for this type of job -- small, compact and no install required. I can poke around the database to check schema and data using the SQLite addon for Firefox . Instead of stealing Steve's WorkOrderStatus, I decided to go with a schema that has a simple Company object, and that Company object has a CompanyType defined. Instead of defining a lookup table just for company types, I'll create a CompanyType class that derives from NHibernate.Type.PrimitiveType and let nHibernate do the loading/saving. First, the CompanyType. For this demo, it's a simple object with a Description (string) and a Value (integer). The Value is what is actually saved to the database (note: this isn't the entire class -- just the basics): public class CompanyType : NHibernate.Type.PrimitiveType { public static readonly CompanyType Software = new CompanyType() { Description = "Software" , Value = 1 }; public static readonly CompanyType Manufacturing = new CompanyType() { Description = "Manufacturing" , Value = 2 }; public static readonly CompanyType Insurance = new CompanyType() { Description = "Insurance" , Value = 3 }; private static readonly CompanyType[] AllTypes = new CompanyType[] { Software, Manufacturing, Insurance }; public string Description { get; set; } public int Value { get; set; } public override string ToString() { return this .Description; } public CompanyType() : base (SqlTypeFactory.Int32) { } }
I've defined an AllTypes[] that I'll use to find the matching CompanyType when nHibernate reads the integer from the database. The ctor calls the base class ctor and tells nHibernate what data type this new PrimitiveType is based on (the schema in the database will be an integer). I also overrode ToString() to return the Description property to make debugging easier.
The Company record is pretty simple too. When we get to the CompanyType, we tell ActiveRecord (which works through nHibernate) the column type for the column (our custom PrimitiveType):
[ActiveRecord] public class Company : ActiveRecordBase<Company> { [PrimaryKey(Generator = PrimaryKeyType.Identity)] public int Id { get; set; } [Property] public string Name { get; set; } [Property] public DateTime InceptionDate { get; set; } [Property(ColumnType = "ARPrimitiveType.Model.CompanyType, ARPrimitiveType" )] public CompanyType CompanyType { get; set; } public override string ToString() { return this .Name; } }
Implementing the required methods in CompanyType was pretty easy. I'm not sure when DefaultValue is used, so I just return a CompanyType of Software:
public override object DefaultValue { get { return CompanyType.Software; } }
ObjectToSQLString seems to want to convert your PrimitiveType (CompanyType) to a string value that can be used by the database. So we'll convert our Value property to a string:
| Go |
| Mono 2.0! ... Para quem acompanha o projeto Mono , foi lançada ontem a versão 2.0! E para quem não conhece, o projeto mono é a implementação do .net framework para linux e mac, o projeto é patrocinado pela Novell e foi criado pelo Miguel de Icaza , o criador do gnome também. Para ver as mudanças da versão 2.0 acesse: http://www.mono-project.com/Release_Notes_Mono_2.0 see ya | Go |
| Richmond Code Camp 2008.2 - Functional C# Recap ... Thanks to everyone who attended my session "Functional C# or how I lost the foreach and learned to love LINQ". This is still an ongoing passion of mine that I hope to expand upon in the upcoming posts. Some of these topics include favoring functional composition over inheritance and implementing patterns such as the Specification Pattern using these techniques. I'll be posting all code snippets from the functional posts up to date on the MSDN Code Gallery Functional C# Project .
Here are some resources that will be helpful in covering functional programming aspects as well as other topics covered:
Functional Programming
Why Functional Programming Matters - John Hughes
Why Haskell Matters
F# Home Page
C# Futures
Is C# Becoming a Functional Language? - Mads Torgersen
C# 4.0 : Meet the Design Team
Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele on Concurrency and Language Design
Functional Programming Aspects with C#
Functional C# - Into the Great Void
Functional C# - Unfolding Lists
Functional C# - Learn from F# and LINQ
Functional C# - Pattern Matching
Recursion in C#
Part 1 - Basic Recursion Techniques
Part 2 - Recursing into Linear, Tail and Binary Recursion
Part 3 - Recursion on Lists
Part 4 - Recursing into Recursion - Memoization
Part 5 - Continuation Passing
Monads
The Marvel of Monads - Wes Dyer
Don't Fear the Monads - Brian Beckman
Monads, Monoids and Mort - Brian Beckman
Spec#
Spec# Home Page
Hanselminutes Episode 110 - Spec# with Rustan Leino and Mike Barnett
.NET 3.5, Design by Contract and Spec#
Books
LINQ in Action
Pro LINQ
Expert F#
Podcasts
Software Engineering Radio Episode 108 - Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming and Haskell
Software Engineering Radio Episode 97 - Anders Hejlsberg
Software Engineering Radio Episode 72 - Erik Meijer on LINQ
.NET Rocks Episode 310 - Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming and Haskell
.NET Rocks Episode 270 - Erik Meijer on LINQ
As I said before, I'm making the code available as I put it up on MSDN Code Gallery as the FunctionalCSharp project . This is intended to be a library of functional programming techniques in C# 3.0 and some demonstrations of moving from imperative style programming to a more functional programming style. This is an ongoing project and more will be added in time, and I may end up just putting them up not as samples, but as a library.
Some of the topics covered in these code projects are:
Closures
Currying
Filter High Order Function
Fold High Order Function
Iterators
Lazy Evaluation
LINQ
Lists (Immutable and Recursive)
List Comprehensions
Map High Order Function
Memoization
Monads
Operators (Forward, Reverse, etc)
Recursion
Unfolding and Generators
As always, my code snippets can be found on MSDN Code Gallery at the Functional C# Library .
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var dzone_style = '1'; | Go |
| Do you jQuery? ... There has been a steadily growing buzz over jQuery, and many development teams have already introduced it as a standard library in their Ajax applications. The buzz just got much much louder, when Microsoft announced that jQuery will now be included and officially supported inside of Visual Studio .NET. Even though I haven't yet embraced jQuery, it looks like it has huge promise and potential. It's a well crafted light weight Javascript framework that makes most common tasks trivial. It has great support for css selectors, meaning you can find an element based on a css selector instead of hard coding id's into every element. What's even better, you can get references to multiple elements and treat them as a single entity - setting the css class on hundreds of elements in a single line of Javascript. That's something I KNOW I can quickly get used to.. So my next step is to start playing around with this new (to me) framework, though I think I've already decided that I'm a fan. I'm interested in what you think. Are you already using jQuery? Are you planning on using it? Is the fact that Microsoft is now standing behind this library make it more attractive to you? Leave your feedback in the comments. | Go |
| My Syndication at FeedBurner – Using Your Domain ... Awhile back, one of my friends over at Telligent , Scott Watermasysk , posted a message regarding FeedBurner and hosting your own RSS feeds . FeedBurner is a web application owned by Google that hosts syndicated feeds and provides statistics based on those feeds such as the number of viewers. Scott recommended setting the MyBrand feature of FeedBurner to point to your own site and creating a CName entry with your domain’s DNS. You can read more about that here: http://simpable.com/technology/feedburner-cname/ . I finally got around to getting this setup. You can now access my feed using: http://feeds.jasongaylord.com/JasonNGaylord . | Go |
| C# Compiled DotNetNuke Module Template ... It shouldn't be hard to get started writing a module for DotNetNuke , but it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of help especially when you are wanting to use C#. At Engage , we have created a Visual Studio project template which will get you started developing a C# DotNetNuke module, using a Web Application project (rather than the, in my opinion, much more cumbersome Web Site project). It is available for free on our downloads page after registering on the site. The template will get you started...(read more ) | Go |
| How to find Visual Studio command bars ... When developing a Visual Studio Addin it is a common task to add custom commands to existing menus and toolbars. It is a common problem too, not to find the proper command bar (we have to traverse all command bars to see its names, the names are not unique, etc). In these two posts: Using IVsProfferCommands to retrieve a Visual Studio CommandBar and Using EnableVSIPLogging to identify menus and commands with VS 2005 + SP1 it is very well explained how to solve this problem. The answer relies on the fact that every toolbar and menu is uniquely identified in Visual Studio by a GUID, Id pair. In order to see which is the GUID, Id pair for a given command, you must: Add or change the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\General\EnableVSIPLogging to 1. Click on the toolbar or menu you want identify while keeping CTRL+SHIFT pressed. This will show a dialog with the command bar properties. Take note of the Guid and the CmdID : From the Addin, use the following code to add your command in the desired command bar: private void AddMyCustomCommand() { … object [] contextGuids = new object [0]; myCommand = ((Commands2 )this ._applicationObject.Commands).AddNamedCommand2(this ._addInInstance, partialCommandName, displayName, tooltip, true , null , ref contextGuids, (int )vsCommandStatus .vsCommandStatusSupported + (int )vsCommandStatus .vsCommandStatusEnabled, (int )vsCommandStyle .vsCommandStyleText, vsCommandControlType .vsCommandControlTypeButton); CommandBar ownerBar = FindCommandBar(new Guid ("{9AEB9524-82C6-40B9-9285-8D85D3DBD4C4}" ), 1280); myControl = workflowCommand.AddControl(ownerBar, 1) as CommandBarButton ; } private CommandBar FindCommandBar(Guid guidCmdGroup, uint menuID) { // Retrieve IVsProfferComands via DTE's IOleServiceProvider interface IOleServiceProvider sp = (IOleServiceProvider )_applicationObject; Guid guidSvc = typeof (IVsProfferCommands ).GUID; Object objService; sp.QueryService(ref guidSvc, ref guidSvc, out objService); IVsProfferCommands vsProfferCmds = (IVsProfferCommands )objService; return vsProfferCmds.FindCommandBar(IntPtr .Zero, ref guidCmdGroup, menuID) as CommandBar ; } [ComImport ,Guid ("6D5140C1-7436-11CE-8034-00AA006009FA" ), InterfaceTypeAttribute (ComInterfaceType .InterfaceIsIUnknown)] internal interface IOleServiceProvider { [PreserveSig ] int QueryService([In ]ref Guid guidService, [In ]ref Guid riid, [MarshalAs (UnmanagedType .Interface)] out System.Object obj); } | Go |
