Alliagator Tags Archive for Wednesday, November 12 2008



DotNetKicks.com Links
ASP.NET C# DataBind RadioButtonList from DataTable with Multiple Field ... I have been trying to DataBind multiple fields into the RadioButtonList DataTextField from my DataTable, by default this property only accept 1 column using its column name as the primary key. But if I want to concate multiple column, then what do I do? Well after be playing around with this logic, I found that you manually add ListItem to the RadioButtonList, is where you can manual add your DataTextField end results directly into the ListItem.Text property field.Go
ModalPopupExtender in a GridView sample ... Although the ModalPopulExtender isn't new at all there are still countless poeple who search the web for a comprehensive sample on how a ModalPopupExtender is used in a GridView. It can be pretty tricky to handle so I decided to come up with a good example of most things that you need tot know about it. Hence this blog post is a sample on how you can use the ModalPopupExtender in a GridView coupled with an UpdatePanel. Working with the ModalPopup from a GridView can be a pain, but with a good reference nice results can be yielded.Go
11 Quick and Useful ASP.net Tips and Tricks ... Here are eleven tips and tricks I've collected while developing ASP.net applications that are useful and just might even make your day a little brighter.Go
MySite - Part 1 ... My goal is to create a personal website application that implements the features needed, and wanted for someone who wants to create a personal site that extends beyond just a blogging engine. I've been wanting to work with ASP.Net MVC and some other technologies, so I'll be focusing on using them in MySite.Go
WCF MembershipProvider and RoleProvider - Schweeeet ... Custom provider over WCF for EnterpriseLibrary Membership provider.Go
Working with QueryStrings, a critique and different solution. ... A critique of a DNK article submitted and my personal solution for dealing with type safe query string operations.Go
Parsing query string in ASP.NET safely ... safely parse ASP.NET query stringGo
The power of interface polymorphism ... A simple way of avoiding developing for a single database system (i.e. MySql, SqlServer, Xml, etc) when developing with ASP.NET MVC.Go
Estimation and Quotation using Use case Points ... In this article we will see how we can do estimation using use case pointsGo
Pouplating Multiple DetailsView based on single GridView using DataKey ... This is a example of populating three different DetailsView based on selection of of record in a GridView using DataKeyNames in C sharp and ASP .NETGo
Creating a custom ASP.NET RadioButtonList with images. ... ASP.NET RadioButtonPictureList custom control.Go
BlogCumulus.NET - A flash based tag cloud. ... A BlogEngine.NET extension called BlogCumulus.NET that adds a flash based tag cloud to your blog.Go
sharepoint SPListItem strange behavior ... This time I was facing a very strange problem that I am even not sure if it is SharePoint problems or it is just our environment, I was not able to find any similar problem on the net so thought I could document it here. SharePoint API provides a great API to access list items , search them, add, delete, and update them that save you...Go
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) ... This article gives a neat explaination of configuring WCF sercices,Dependency Injection using WCF extensibility points and lot more. I find this article very useful.Go
Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links
ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know - developerFusion - the global developer communityGo
Visual Web Developer Team Blog : Rich IntelliSense for jQuery (Viewstate: 0k)Go
Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVCGo
Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVCGo
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET and jQueryGo
Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVCGo
Using Active Directory to authenticate users to your ASP.NET Web Site.Go
Microsoft ASP.NETGo
Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF - ScottGu's BlogGo
ASP.NET.4GuysFromRolla.com: Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles, and Profile - Part 13Go
ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications | pdc2008 | Channel 9Go
Scott Gu Blog Links
Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF ... Last week was our big PDC conference, and I've been busy catching up back at work this week.  I'm hoping to publish a bunch of new posts soon (including some on the PDC announcements we made).  Until then, 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 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos : Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1. Download Hotfix: False C# Compilation Errors for ASP.NET Code Behind Files with VS 2008 SP1 : The C# team added support for live semantic errors with background compilation in VS 2008 SP1.  There were a few cases where this caused false errors to be shown with ASP.NET Web site projects.  You can fix these either by disabling live semantic errors (tools->options allows you to disable this), or by downloading a recent hotfix patch which is now public.  Omar Khan has a useful blog post with more details on it. Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13 : Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles.  This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database.  For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos . ASP.NET Patterns Developers Should Know : Alex Homer from the Patterns and Practices (PAG) team at Microsoft has a nice article that introduces a number of common design patterns (MVC and MVP, Repository, Singleton, etc) and how you can apply them within ASP.NET applications.  If you are interested in learning more about pattern based development I also highly recommend reading the Head First Design Patterns book (which has more than 250 positive reviews on Amazon). ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008 : Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery.  Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today. ASP.NET and jQuery : Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free.  Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation. jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2 : Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery.  Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial. ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples. Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX : Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution. ASP.NET MVC Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC.  This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work). Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC : Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC.  I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms.  Phil coveGo
October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more.  A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC.  7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets.  Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download.  This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development.  Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface.  This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, ScottGo
ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework.  Click here to download it.  You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments.  The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion).  Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements).  The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release:  New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier.  You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type:   Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want).  For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox.  You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it.  For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of prGo
Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2.  You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it.  It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).  Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier.  In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning.  The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications.  The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc).  All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support.  It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services.  It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web).  It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).  It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code.  It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support.  The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support).  Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection.  The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2.  In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makinGo
October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0.  Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1.  You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET.  If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages.  A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today.  Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation.  This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, ScottGo
October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service.  This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data.  You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control.  4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series).  This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5.  It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, ScottGo
jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code.  jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them.  One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another.  jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands.  The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago.  As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already.  The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it?  We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward.  We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time.  For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1).  The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC.  New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well.  We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project.  These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner wGo
Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship.  We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight.  This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it.  There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out.  As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here .  Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1.  You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support.  If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework.  Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them.  You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release.  We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use.  When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks).  If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon).  Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics.  In addition to statically defining items like above, youGo
ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  You can download the new release here .  This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1.  It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ).  You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here .  In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios.  You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database:   The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application.  The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML.  We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element.  We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form.  When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server.  The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form.  The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server.  The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names.  The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database.  If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message.  If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML.  Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5".  The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better.  These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ouGo
Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer).  Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-)  I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers).  I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work.  I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out.  I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog.  Yep - I actually really do write every single post.  Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-)Go
ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week.  The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC.  Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all.  This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings.  My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release.  These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute.  This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request.  Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied.  I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters.  ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this).  To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method.  We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds.  This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic).  For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you tGo
Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today.  You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine.  It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines.  These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out.  But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads.  You can download both of them here .  The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release.  UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup.  Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size).  Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download.  This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications.  This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls.  This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility.  I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it.  To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application.  To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item.  We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template witGo
ASP.NET MVC Support with Visual Web Developer 2008 Express ... Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release .  One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition.  The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it).  This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express.  If you install the Visual Web Developer Express SP1 Beta you can start using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 with it immediately. Important: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 does not require SP1 to be installed if you are using Visual Studio 2008.  ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 will work with both VS 2008 and VS 2008 SP1 just fine.  You can learn more about the new VWD Express support for ASP.NET MVC from the VS Web Tools team blog here .  This post also includes a free web download that provides ASP.NET MVC Test project support for NUnit-based unit tests.  You can use these NUnit project templates with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Hope this helps, ScottGo
ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release ... This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release.  Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here .  You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here . Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release , along with some additional tweaks and adjustments.  You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method.  For example: which would render the below HTML when run: Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it.  This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything).  It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow. For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them.  The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object): One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required).  Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above:   We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action: When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red): Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning "JsonResult" (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), "ContentResult" (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results.   The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you'll see us add several more built-in result types. Improved HTML Helper Methods The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3.  In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements. Automatic Value Lookup With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers.  For example: to include a value within a <input type="text" value="some value"/> element you would write: The above code continues to work - although now you can also just write: The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use. SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc).  One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render.  For example, below I'm creating a SelectList view-model class over theGo
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ASP.NET 3.5 MVC Application ... Introduction This post gives you the basic overview on ASP.NET Models, Views and Controllers. It explains how all parts in MVC Application work together and discuss how the Architecture of an ASP.NET MVC application differs from an ASP.NET Web Forms application.Go
ASP.NET MVC Tip: Ajax and Validations using jQuery ... This post demonstrate how to integrate jQuery with ASP.NET MVC and explaining how to send Ajax requests to Controller and also provides partial rendering with the help of a user control. This post also discussing client-side validation using jQuery.Go
AJAX-Enabled Comment Form in ASP.NET and C# ... In this article, we will be looking at how we can use Visual Studio to create a comment form, or guestbook to allow visitors of our web site to leave messages, in ASP.NET with the added functionality of AJAX. This means that the comments will almost immediately by added to a SQL database and displayed on the page without postback - the whole page will not be reloaded.Go
Spice Up Your Ad Reports - Using the ASP.NET Repeater Control to Group Data and Add Totals ... The Repeater control is truly amazing. Being template driven, it gives you a lot of flexibility to manipulate and render the final output. In this article, we will exploit this flexibility of the ASP.NET Repeater and build a sample to demonstrate how to use the templates to group and display data. We will also use a little code to ‘total’/sum up our data and display it on the fly.Go
LINQ to SQL Paging using GridView in C# and ASP.NET 3.5 ... This tutorial will show you how we can extend the LINQ to SQL Class and create methods that will allow us to page data from a SQL database. C# version.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 using ASP.NET. This article will primarily showcase two techniques of doing so. One using Hidden variables and the other using the __doPostBack() javascript method.Go
Using AutoComplete in the AJAX Toolkit in C# ... In this tutorial, you will learn how to implement something similar using the AutoComplete AJAX Control and a Web Method. We will be using a SQL database to match the typed text against and retrieve matches to the user.Go
ASP.NET Client Side State Management ... The article discuss the client side state management techniques and when to choose client side state management over server side state management.Go
Improving Performance By Using ASP.NET Caching - Output Cache ... What is ASP.NET caching mechanism? When to use caching? and how can I use it in order to improve my site performance? are the questions this post series is going to answer. In today’s post I’ll introduce the output cache.Go
Test Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC ... One of the biggest benefits of MVC is it's direct link to Test Driven Development. Because of some of the new features of ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 (ModelBinders in particular), testing your Action methods is even easier. This article will demonstrate how easy it is to ensure the quality of your MVC app with unit tests.Go
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How to Load images in Crystal Reports dynamically Using Visual Studio 2005 ... How to Load images in Crystal Reports dynamically in Asp.net, working with Typed DataSetGo
Send Emails in ASP.NET using Gmail Credentials ... This article contains code to send email using Gmail accounts.Go
Agile Development Part 2 ... Agile Development Part 2Go
Unit Testing ASP.NET Data Caching ... A class for unit testing ASP.NET data caching when using SQL ServerGo
A. R. Live Support: XML based Customer Support Chat Solution ... Customer Support chat solution build using ASP.net(2.0) with c# and XML as a database.Go
AxiomaticTokenizer ... Financial security with one-time tokensGo
Web User Forms ... Design and Publish custom ASP.NET Web FormsGo
Automatically Create Data Access Layers and Business Layers From Microsoft Access or SQL Server Databases ... How to automatically create data access layers and business layers from a Microsoft Access or a SQL Server databaseGo
C# Code reviews using StyleCop – Detailed Article ... C# Code reviews using StyleCop – Detailed ArticleGo
Gallery Server Pro - An ASP.NET Gallery for Sharing Photos, Video, Audio and Other Media ... Gallery Server Pro is a complete, stable ASP.NET gallery for sharing photos, video, audio and other media. This article presents the overall architecture and major features.Go
Avoid Multiple Space Elimination in ASP.NET GridView Control ... This article describes how to avoid multiple space elimination in ASP.NET Gridview Control.Go
Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - Part I - New Solution ... Catharsis web-app frameworkGo
Handle session variable problems between classic ASP and ASP.NET web applications ... A solution to handle session variable problems between classic ASP and ASP.NET web applications.Go
How to save data from a DataSet into a T-SQL table ... This article tells you how to save data from a DataSet into T-SQL tables.Go
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C# 4.0, ASP.NET4.0, Silverlight Toolkit, Rest Toolkit Oh My! ... On December 10th, 2008 (11-5) I'm speaking at an MSDN event in Phoenix. I'm excited to have an hour to talk about ASP.NET 4.0 and the new Silverlight Toolkit. Registration is required, because there is a fixed number of seats. Registration link. http://is.gd/6HJW   And Here is an overview of the day ... What to expect with C# 4.0 (Joe Guadagno) Overview of REST in WCF and The WCF REST Starter Kit  (Rob Bagby presenting his session at PDC ASP.NET 4.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit... 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 Load images in Crystal Reports dynamically Using Visual Studio 2005 ... How to Load images in Crystal Reports dynamically in Asp.net, working with Typed DataSet... 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
Preview documentation for ASP.NET Ajax 4.0 available ... We published some documentation for ASP.NET Ajax 4.0 Preview 3: http://quickstarts.asp.net/previews/ajax/templates/default.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
Tracking User Activity ... Many websites that support user accounts, such as the ASP.NET Forums , include information as to how what users are currently online and what they are doing. For example, the Who Is Online page on the ASP.NET Forums shows the users currently online, what forum they're viewing, and how many minutes it's been since they were last active. Unfotunately the Membership system does not offer much in the way of tracking user activity. All it has out-of-the-box is the ability to log the date and time the user was last 'active' and to report the total number of users online - that is, the count of users whose last active date and time falls within a certain time window (15 minutes, by default). With a little bit of elbow grease it's possible to track user activity. I use the word activity here loosely. An activity might mean visiting a particular URL, much like how the ASP.NET Forums Who Is Online page shows what forum the user is visiting. It could also be more broad. For example, if a user just updated their account information the activity could be logged as, Updating account information. The activity information of interest can be logged in a database table and, once there, can be used in reports, be it a Who Is Online page or a report detailing the activity of a particular user. To learn how to log user activity and display the results in the aforementioned reports, check out my latest article onDotNetSlackers.com :Tracking User Activity . 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
Azure Adds Risk to Microsoft`s Business Model ... Azure amounts to Microsoft's "most significant coordinated shift in strategy" since it got come-to-the-Internet religion in 1995.... 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
Slides for my ASP.NET Connections Sessions ... As promised the slides for me two ASP.NET Connections talks for 11/12/08: MDA01: Deep Dive: ADO.NET Data Services FrameworkApplication Patterns MDA04: LINQ to XML, SQL, Entities, DataSets and Co.: Data Access Technologies Explained - AKA Linq to Anything Will get the demos up in a day or so.... 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
Obtaining and Caching a Lot of Words ... It is surprising how often I wish I had a lot of words handy.  This week it has been because I've wanted to play with the AutoCompleteBox (you just set the list of words as the ItemSource for the control and voila! In previous posts I demonstrated how I obtained these from a book through Project Gutenberg and how I used a background worker thread to keep the UI up to date. Today I'll show how to use Isolated Storage to stash the words locally to dramatically improve performance, and then... 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
Practical ASP.NET: Using the Entity Model to Create an ASP.NET Page ... What's one test of a new technology? Seeing whether you can use it with the old technology.... 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
Framework Design Guidelines: Testable Frameworks ... I thought I do a weekly blog post series that highlights a few of the new additions to the Framework Design Guidelines 2nd edition.. The first is around writing testable frameworks it is found in Chapter 1: Introduction. Phil brings his real world experience building ASP.NET MVC to the table with this annotation. PHIL HAACK I would add one more point to this list, which is that Well-Designed Frameworks Are Testable. And by testable I dont just mean that the framework itself can be unit tested, though... 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
CodeSnip: How to Add an Interval to a Time Stamp Field Being Selected Through a Local Variable ... The Teradata syntax does not allow any time interval (i.e. Hr/Min/Sec) to be selected through a local variable to be added to a Timestamp value. It only permits the exact interval literal being put through a pair of quotation marks. This creates some serious limitations where the interval to be added is used through a local variable for manipulation. The aim of this Code Snippet is to provide a workaround for the use of local variables. Deepankar provides a short description of the problem followed by the suggested solution with the help of the source code. He also provides a snapshot of the final output with relevant analysis. 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
The magic behind live bindings explained ... Dave has a fantastic and very detailed post about our implementation of the Observer pattern in ASP.NET Ajax 4.0. This feature is what enables the live bindings to work. Check it out! http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/archive/2008/11/09/asp-net-ajax-4-0-observing-updates-to-pojos-plain-ole-javascript-objects.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
jQuery Intellisense Updates from Microsoft ... In case you missed it: Microsoft released the second part of their support tools for jQuery in Visual Studio this week. The second part comes in the form of a hotfix for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 that provides built-in support for vsdoc.js files to when present automatically provide Intellisense support in Javascript documents. In combination with the recently released jQuery Intellisense file that Microsoft released you can now very easily get jQuery Intellisense in Visual Studio. Here are all the... 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
My first article on ASP.NET Pro thanks to INETA. ... On the December issue of the ASP.NET Pro magazine youll find my article about maps I wrote for them, a great tutorial to report your data in a geographic matter. I really hope that will help many people start using that kind of analysis and reporting for making better decisions. ASP.NET Pro always being the leader in ASP.NET articles, to receive the magazine you can subscribe at http://www.aspnetpro.com/Members/subscribe/ComponentOne.asp Tuesday, November 11th Ill be at the Inland... 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
A Quick and Dirty Bar Code Image httpHandler ... Yesterday I was trolling the ASP.NET forums killing some time and answering questions when I came across a thread where someone was seeking some help on a FREE .NET Bar Code library . Last summer I needed the same thing and was working on manipulating...(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
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Fixed: "Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) is stopping because it encountered an error." ... I'm not yet clear what I did, but I'm blogging it so it can be found if someone else has this issue. For whatever reason, last week both of my Vista 64-bit machines suddenly stopped being able to start IIS (Internet Information Server). The service just Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more )Go
#1 Technical Blog ... A friend whom I haven't heard from in a few years googled for technical blog this evening, and my technical blog somehow came up as the very first hit! I have no idea how I achieved such high page rank, nor how I eclipsed Mark Russinovich .Go
Windows Mobile 6.1.4 – Download Emulator Images ... Yesterday Microsoft has published the new emulator images for Windows Mobile 6.1.4. One of the most important new features is the Internet Explorer Mobile 6 version. Windows Mobile 6.1.4 includes the new Internet Explorer Mobile 6,  a full-featured browser for Windows Mobile devices that brings the same high-quality browsing experience to the user as desktop browsers. Internet Explorer Mobile 6 supports desktop-quality rendering and has the best compliance support of all versions of Internet Explorer on a Windows Mobile device to date. Several new features and improved support allows users to complete tasks quickly and easily. This package includes localized Windows Mobile 6.1.4 emulator images that can be used with Visual Studio to test applications or as standalone emulators without Visual Studio. Download new emulator images for Windows Mobile 6.1.4 . The download link for the Internet Explorer Mobile 6.pdf is currently not working.Go
LINQ Tips #7 Create a LINQ to Anything(3) ... Yesterday, we implemented a simple LINQ to Objects pattern. In our post , we overwrote the  data source , if you can remember, all the return value were added a tail as "LINQ". But this seems useless, in the NFlickr project, we need to send the filter to the Flickr service and get the filtered result.So we need to implement the "Where"  clause. Before we start, can you answer the question first? If we want to implement the new clause like "Where","Orderby", where we should implement? The answer is the method (CreateQuery) for the interface IQueryProvider! Yesterday, we only handled the "Select" clause, I will add a new case switch to implement the "Where" condition. 1: case "Where" : 2: StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); 3:   4: functions = new List<KeyValuePair<string , Func<int >>>(); 5: filterList = new List<string >(); 6: LambdaExpression lambdaExpression = (LambdaExpression)(((UnaryExpression)callExpression.Arguments[1]).Operand); 7: ExpandExpression(lambdaExpression.Body); 8: return (IQueryable<TElement>)this ; .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The key point is to cast the callExpression from the Expression to LambdaExpression. After we got the LambdaExpression, we can go inside the method ExpendExpression. 1: List<string > filterList = null ; 2: public void ExpandExpression(Expression lambdaExpression) 3: { 4: switch (lambdaExpression.NodeType) 5: { 6: case ExpressionType.Equal: 7: Expression right = (BinaryExpression)lambdaExpression; 8: filterList.Add((string )((ConstantExpression)right).Value); 9: break ; 10: } 11: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This function is to preserver the filter list and this list will be used we the code is to return the data source. public IEnumerator<Student> GetEnumerator() { IEnumerator<Student> list = (IEnumerator<Student>)this ; if (functions == null ) return list; List<Student> result = new List<Student>(); foreach (Student student in students) { foreach (string filter in filterList) { if (student.FirstName.Equals(filter, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { result.Add(student); } } } return result.GetEnumerator(); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcodGo
C# 4.0, ASP.NET4.0, Silverlight Toolkit, Rest Toolkit Oh My! ... On December 10th, 2008 (11-5) I'm speaking at an MSDN event in Phoenix. I'm excited to have an hour to talk about ASP.NET 4.0 and the new Silverlight Toolkit. Registration is required, because there is a fixed number of seats. Registration link. http://is.gd/6HJW   And Here is an overview of the day ... What to expect with C# 4.0 (Joe Guadagno ) Overview of REST in WCF and The WCF REST Starter Kit  (Rob Bagby presenting his session at PDC ASP.NET 4.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit (Scott Cate) Overview of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”) and Azure Services  (Rob Bagby )Go
Preview documentation for ASP.NET Ajax 4.0 available ... We published some documentation for ASP.NET Ajax 4.0 Preview 3 : http://quickstarts.asp.net/previews/ajax/templates/default.aspxGo
VS10 at Tech-Ed Europe ... I just watched some of the keynote at Tec-Ed Europe, here's what I liked. WPF editor - I had wondered about this but the zoom out\in can be useful for large code files, however, I'd like to see some what of marking up sections of code to make it more useful so that by zooming out I can see the block of code that is most useful to me. Also some way of marking up code coverage blocks etc would be useful to see at 70,000 feet - maybe one for the NCover gang. The comments view feature was also rather nice but not sure how useful it actually is (got some cheers though). UML in the class file. Test recording and debug profile, this is super useful to debug a testers session. However I do wonder how other factors would be weighed in here, database state and other enviromental factors would be considerations in the enterprise and debug profile alone would not be enough. Team Lab - this was a very short demo and I need to see the other videos to get a better idea of this but I like the sound of it (more on this later maybe). Here's what I wondered about The refactoring features reminded me a great deal of R#, with some of those features now included I can only wonder what R# 5.0 will give us. The code explorer looked a great deal like NBehave (but with none of the drill in\query language goodness of NBehave).Go
Silverlight in Groove ... Fabrice Barbin (Groove MVP ) has developed an extraordinary tool with Groove and Silverlight. It is a 'Nabazgame' that can be played amongst members in a Groove space. This is very promising - it opens up the ability to use Silverlight to develop Groove applications. (Click image below for Fabrice's site that has the details).Go
StyleCop and Resharper ... The StyleCop add-on for Resharper has really gathered steam and Howard has announced a new release . Loads of great features and it really makes the two a killer combination. I do hope that that StyleCop is open-sourced (or open license Microsoft use), the tool is a great tool but it has real pain points (adding new rules and a couple of bugs) that the community could help iron out.Go
MSDN Events Unleashed: The Best of PDC ... Please join us on December 10th, 2008, as we present some of the highlights of PDC.  We will be providing overviews of some technologies first discussed at PDC, such as Windows Azure, C# 4.0 and ASP.NET 4.0.  But we will not only be talking about the future.  We will also discuss some recent releases that you can take advantage of now, including the WCF REST Starter Kit and the Silverlight Toolkit.  The afternoon will be broken down as follows:   11:00 am – 12:00 PM Registration, Box Lunch and Networking 12:00 PM – 12:15 pm Kick-Off 12:15 pm – 1:15 pm     What to expect with C# 4.0 (Joe Guadagno ) 1:15 pm – 1:30 pm   Break ; Raffle 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm  Overview of REST in WCF and The WCF REST Starter Kit  (Rob Bagby presenting his session at PDC ) 2:30 pm – 2:45 pm Break ; Raffle 2:45 pm – 3:45 pm   ASP.NET 4.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit (Scott Cate ) 3:45 pm – 4:00 pm     Break ; Raffle 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm  Overview of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”) and Azure Services  (Rob Bagby ) 5:00 pm – 5: 15 pm    Final Raffle Every attendee will receive a free “.Net REST in WCF” T-Shirt and will be entered in drawings to win great Prizes. The event will be held at the Wells Fargo Conference Center , 100 Washington Street, Phoenix Arizona. Please Note: Conference Center parking is limited to the garage at 303 N. 2nd Avenue (N.E. corner of Van Buren).  All attendees who park in the Plaza Garage located above the Conference Center are subject to towing. Look for the announcement soon about the Social Mixer after party brought to GoDaddy .Go










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