| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| C# opensocial container: Pesta code is now available ... Pesta is a C# opensocial container. It is based on revision 698050 of the Java implementation of Shindig. Pesta is based on .NET Framework 3.5 and is implemented using C#. | Go |
| Useful HtmlHelpers for ASP.NET MVC ... HtmlHelpers are super tiny weapons in ASP.NET MVC and they are growing day by day. In this post you will find a list of most useful HtmlHelpers for ASP.NET MVC and this list will be completed and completed! So you can join me to enlarge this list ;-) | Go |
| The 3 Musketeers: - Model, View and Controller using HTTPHandler - Par ... In this section we will learn about the basics of MVC and then see how we can implement the same in ASP.NET using HttpHandlers. | Go |
| Detecting Internet Explorer 6 ... We all wish that IE6 would be abandoned by the masses, but many users have yet to upgrade to IE7. IE6 'hacks' have sprung up to deal with many of the issues plaguing developers. But how do we know that we are dealing with IE6 in the first place? | Go |
| Creating a RESTful Web Service Using ASP.Net MVC ... Building an ASP.net MVC based REST web service | Go |
| State management in ASP.NET ... Web pages rarely be stand alone. Web applications almost always need to track users who visits multiple pages, whether to provide personalization, store information about a user or to track usage for reporting purposes. | Go |
| How to Call Controllers in External Assemblies in ASP.NET MVC ... In this post Simone shows you how to call ASP.NET MVC controllers that are embedded in external assemblies. | Go |
| PathInfo Woes - The whole story. ... ASP.NET introduces a new URI component to the equation: PathInfo. It's not very well known, possibly due to poor implementation and consequent lack of usefulness. However, it is important that you understand how it can affect you. | Go |
| How to Use the Facebook Developer Toolkit 2.0 ... The Facebook Developer Toolkit project has just released version 2.0 of their ASP.NET API into the wild, so let's go over the basics. In this article, we focus on creating an absolutely bare bones FBML application that leverages the API. Enjoy! | Go |
| MVC HtmlHelper for Gravatar ... Ryan plugs his Gravatar library into MVC in order to create a HTML view helper for building gravatar images. | Go |
| Preventing Double Form Posts ... Most posts on this topic focus on disabling the submit button that causes the post. This works fine when you only have one submit control. But, if you have multiple buttons and/or link buttons that can cause a post and want to avoid potential conflicts if a user clicks a second submit control before the first one has been processed then this is really simply approach. | Go |
| MVC: TextBoxFor(u => u.Name) - Unleash the power ... I figured I'd share my implementation of something Chad and Jeremy talked about: the TextBoxFor control. Now I don't know exactly how they implemented their version, and mine just provides the necessary basis to get started, but hopefully it'll help people bake some of this goodness within their own code. | Go |
| MySite - Part 2 - Theming Support ... I've modified an ASP.Net MVC project to allow for a better support for theming. This allows for a fallback to using views from a default theme, while still using other resources from the set theme. | Go |
| The two interceptors: - HttpModule and HttpHandlers ... Many times we want to implement pre-processing logic before a request hits the IIS resources. For instance you would like to apply security mechanism, URL rewriting, filter something in the request etc. ASP.NET has provided two types of interception HttpModule and HttpHandler. This article walks through it. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know - developerFusion - the ... | Go |
| The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET and jQuery | Go |
| Visual Web Developer Team Blog : Rich IntelliSense for jQuery | Go |
| Phil Haack - ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications | pdc2008 ... | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 ... Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications. One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt and create optimal user experience designs. The WPF UI framework shipped in Silverlight further enables a great designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts like layout management, controls, styles, templates, and resources - which help avoid scenarios where designers and developers end up tripping over each other when integrating functionality, behavior and expressive design. Silverlight 2 Twitter Sample Last month I posted an in-depth blog tutorial on how to build a Silverlight 2 Digg application which you can read here . This tutorial was aimed primarily at developers, and focused on introducing the fundamental programming concepts involved when building a Silverlight 2 application. Today Celso Gomes and Peter Blois posted a cool 10 minute video tutorial that shows off using Expression Blend to stylize a Silverlight 2 Twitter Messenger application. You can watch the video here . You can download the source code for the completed Silverlight Twitter application here . The video does a nice job demonstrating how designers can re-style a Silverlight application without having to mess with the code behind it. In the process it shows some of the power and capability that Expression Blend 2 provides to build really rich user experiences. Celso starts with a developer version of the application, and then customizes and sculpts the UI to have a fun twitter character theme: The Application Model The Silverlight Twitter client is hosted within an ASP.NET server application that exposes a web service that enables the Silverlight Twitter application to communicate to the Twitter service (since Twitter does not allow direct access from client applications). Communication between the Silverlight client and the ASP.NET web server is done using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The client application uses a Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern (also known as the Model-View-ViewModel pattern) which is commonly used in large WPF applications. Even though this is a fairly simple application they wanted to take advantage of the flexibility that MVP allows and allow room for future growth. Maintaining the separation between the visuals and the application logic also enables designers to make fairly complex visual changes without impacting the basic application flow. The video goes through some examples of the styling flexibility this architecture facilitates. The Styling Process In the video, Celso highlights how Resources can help designers quickly change colors. A common Brush Resource, for example, can be used to change the color of all the text elements in the application: Celso shows how easy is to create new User Controls from graphics using Expression Blend 2 SP1 (just select multiple elements in the designer, right-click, and choose the "Make Control" menu option): And also how to create new states inside this new User Control (using the Visual State Manager feature - which is also now supported with WPF), to animate the bird (fly, blink, etc...) Celso also shows how to create animations for each state, changing advanced properties like Key Spline curves, and Repeat Behavior: He also shows how to create custom buttons from drawings (which can come from XAML or any other design tool like Photoshop or Illustrator). All the states of a Button Control are available out of the box. Expression Blend also enables you to easily change complex controls like List Boxes. Designers have acce | Go |
| 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 cove | Go |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you t | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here . The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release. UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup. Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size). Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download. This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications. This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility. I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it. To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application. To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item. We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template wit | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Support with Visual Web Developer 2008 Express ... Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release . One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition. The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it). This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express. If you install the Visual Web Developer Express SP1 Beta you can start using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 with it immediately. Important: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 does not require SP1 to be installed if you are using Visual Studio 2008. ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 will work with both VS 2008 and VS 2008 SP1 just fine. You can learn more about the new VWD Express support for ASP.NET MVC from the VS Web Tools team blog here . This post also includes a free web download that provides ASP.NET MVC Test project support for NUnit-based unit tests. You can use these NUnit project templates with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| DropDownList asp.net Control problems and challanges faced using appenddatabound items and autopostbacks ... This tutorial will help you in appending data items to a dropdownlist control which already have some listitems from the markup.Sometimes in this there is a problem of duplicate items being appended every time the page refreshes.So here we will see how to workaround this situation. | Go |
| Implementing Cascading DropDownList in ASP.NET GridView ... In this article, we will explore how to implement Cascading DropDownList in a GridView without writing a single line of code. We will be using the Categories and Products table of the Northwind database to show the cascading effect | Go |
| ASP.NET 3.5 URL Routing ... Introduction
This post speaks about basics of URL Routing and how URL Routing related to building a ASP.NET MVC Application. You can also use the URL Routing with the ASP.NET Web application if install the Visual Studio 2008 service pack1. This post specifically speaks about how URL Routing is used in ASP.NET MVC Application.
URL Routing is critical element in the ASP.NET MVC Application.
The reason for this is URL Routing determines incoming request to get mapped to the MVC Controller. | Go |
| Display Master-Detail Data with the ModalPopup Extender and GridView ... In the past we have often used the combination of the GridView and DetailsView to display Master-Detail data. Developers have also used pop-ups to depict similar scenarios where a user clicks on a ‘master’ row and the details are displayed in a pop-up window. I was recently exploring the ModalPopup extender control which allows a page to display content to the user in a "modal" manner. I thought of trying out the Master-Details scenario using the ModalPopup Extender. This article discusses how to do so. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| AxiomaticTokenizer ... Financial security with one-time tokens | Go |
| The 3 Musketeers: Model, View and Controller using HTTPHandler – Part 1 ... The 3 Musketeers: Model, View and Controller using HTTPHandler – Part 1 | Go |
| Design pattern – Inversion of control and Dependency injection ... Design pattern – Inversion of control and Dependency injection | Go |
| Load and Display Page Contents Asynchronously with Full Postback Support ... An AJAX UpdatePanel with less communication overhead and better performance | Go |
| Crystal and Reporting Services FAQ Part 1 ... Crystal and Reporting Services FAQ Part 1 | Go |
| Ajax quick start FAQ ... Ajax quick start FAQ | Go |
| jQuery Based Ajax.Net library ... jQuery Based Ajax.Net library | Go |
| The two interceptors: - HttpModule and HttpHandlers ... The two interceptors: - HttpModule and HttpHandlers | 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 | Go |
| Security Features Analysis for ASP.NET ... To analyse the various security featutes for ASP.NET | Go |
| 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 2 | Go |
| Unit Testing ASP.NET Data Caching ... A class for unit testing ASP.NET data caching when using SQL Server. | Go |
| 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 |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| How to call controllers in external assemblies in an ASP.NET MVC application ... If your ASP.NET MVC is growing large, its likely that you are partitioning your controllers in different namespaces, or maybe even in different assemblies, and it might happen that you have controllers with the same in different namespaces.
Phil Haack and Steve Sanderson wrote some great write-ups on how to partition an ASP.NET application down into Areas, a concept that exists in MonoRail but not in the core ASP.NET MVC framework. The two posts above allow grouping both the controllers and the views,... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC In The Clouds ... Quick question? Whats higher than a kite? No, its not me nor Cheech and Chong. Its a cloud! Bad jokes (but funny video link) aside, Windows Azure, Microsofts foray into cloud computing, is getting a lot of attention right now. The basic idea behind cloud computing is you can host your application in the cloud and pay a monthly fee much like a utility such as paying for water and power. The benefit is you dont have to deal with the infrastructure work and maintenance and you get elastic scalability,... 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 |
| Client Perspective of Windows Azure Services Platform ... Windows Azure was announced on PDC 2008 (Oct 27) and will hopefully be released mid next year. You probably already know about Azure by this time. If no, I would like to quote some from www.azure.com as intro: The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. [...]... 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 |
| SEO starting guide for ASP.NET ... Today I just found two great sources of information on Search Engine Optimization.
Googles search engine starter guide
The first has been released directly by Google: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
It covers the most common areas that might need a bit of optimization: urls, titles, metatags, images alt attributes, robots.txt file and other topics. A must read for everybody that is interested in the topic.
SEO for ASP.NET podcast
The second resource is the great (as always) podcast by Polymorphic... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Building Web Sites with ASP.NET - Part 2 ... In this second part of the series, Brian demonstrates how to add AJAX features for an application that already has been built using the server-based approach of posting back and processing data on the server. This article shifts the application to doing more work on the client. After providing a detailed overview of the topic, he examines the steps required to implement AJAX features with the help of a sample application which renders news content using the ListView control with the help of relevant source code. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Cloudship: Membership Provider for the Cloud ... Planning to move to the Azure Cloud, but already tied to the Membership API? I have recently written an article on Windows Azure which guides you to build a complete Membership provider library which can be leveraged by existing application to link to Microsoft’s cloud platform Windows Azure with no friction. Goals of this project [...]... 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 |
| Section 508: Enable Support In ALL DevExpress ASP.NET Controls ... Support for Section 508 and even the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 is now available in all DevExpress ASP.NET controls. Starting with the 2008 Volume 3 release of the DXperience Subscription, your DevExpress ASP.NET projects will be Section 508 compliant. What is Section 508? Section 508 and the web accessibility guidelines make Web content accessible to people with disabilities or those that are technically limited. In the US and several other countries, these guidelines are a software... 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 |
| Url without Querystring ... Modified URL RegExp that requires (http, https, ftp,gopher,telnet,file|notes,ms-help)://, A nice domain, and a decent file/folder string. 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 Future of WebForms And ASP.NET MVC ... Ive heard a lot of concerns from people worried that the ASP.NET team will stop sparing resources and support for Web Forms in favor of ASP.NET MVC in the future. I thought I would try to address that concern in this post based on my own observations. At the PDC, a few people explicitly told me, not without a slight tinge of anger, that they dont get ASP.NET MVC and they like Web Forms just fine thank you very much. Hey man, thats totally cool with me! Please dont make me the poster boy for killing... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Microsoft Exec Describes Azure Services Vision ... Microsoft executive David Treadwell today provided a few more details about the company's Azure Services Platform in a Webinar aimed at the investment community.... 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 General Overview ... How web forms (page design) compare to basic HTML forms... 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 Events ... What they are, how/when they are fired, how to use them, Event Procedure.... 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 Page Life Cycle ... This article will cover: GET vs. POST for beginners, Web.Config (how to set it up, etc.)... 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 User State ... This article discusses: Viewstate (what, why, when to use, when not to use), Caching, Session, Application Object, Cookies, Other methods (static variables, application variables, file storage, database storage)... 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 |
| Web-based Form Builder For VWG ... We would like to share a post made by Mitch Stephens, a Visual WebGui community member about a Web-based Form Builder developed at his company for VWG: "Over the past few months, there have been several threads talking about run-time form designer. From what I can tell, most of these leverage the Visual Studio designer. While this may work for some applications, it won't work in our HR application. We needed a web-based designer that is targeted at power users, but not programmers. So we went ahead...(read more ) | Go |
| Functional .NET 4.0 - Tuples and Zip ... Previously, when covering some of the additions to the .NET 4.0 Framework such as optional and named parameters , some of the other additions have caught my eye from the perspective of functional programming. Unlike .NET 3.5, this release is not as targeted towards functional programming as it is more towards dynamic programming and COM interoperability. But, there are a few items to note that we can soon take advantage of, including the Tuple type and the Zip operator function among other items.
Looking at Tuples
To define a tuple, it comes from the mathematics field, and is simply an ordered list of values, which are components of that tuple. These components can be of any type, whether it be string, integer, or otherwise. In order to refer to these components, we retrieve references to them by absolute position in that sequence.
In F#, the tuple is a fully supported data type and perhaps one of the most useful. To define a tuple is to define a number of expressions grouped together with comma separation to form a new expression such as the following:
#light
// val blogger : string * string
let blogger1 = "Matthew" , "Podwysocki"
let blogger2 = "Jeremy" , "Miller"
let blogger3 = "David" , "Laribee"
// val bloggers :
// (string * string) * (string * string) * (string * string)
let bloggers = blogger1, blogger2, blogger3
From there, tuples can be decomposed into their components in either of two ways. For pair tuples, a tuple with exactly two components, can be deconstructed using the fst and snd functions such as the following:
#light
let pageHitCount = "http://www.codebetter.com/" , 25500
let page = fst pageHitCount
let hitCount = snd pageHitCount
However, it is more common to use a pattern expression to retrieve values from a tuple, such as the following code:
#light
let request = "http://codebetter" , new DateTime( 2008 , 11 , 15 ) ,
"Firefox/3.0.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
let host, date, userAgent = request
What we're able to do is break down the given request into three pieces, the host, date and user-agent. This makes pattern matching against tuples really powerful such as the following:
#light
// val permit_request : string * string * int -> bool
let permit_request = function
| "http" , "google.com" , 80 -> true
| _, "microsoft.com" , _ -> true
| "ftp" , _, 21 -> true
| _ -> false
Just as well, we could even use them in active patterns so that we could pattern match against parts of a FileVersionInfo in order to determine which action to take such as the following.
#light
open System. Diagnostics
let ( | FileVersionSections| ) ( f: FileVersionInfo) = ( f. FileName,f. ProductName,f. ProductVersion)
let parse_files = function
| FileVersionSections( fn, "Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework" , _) -> printfn "Parallel Extensions file %s" fn
| FileVersionSections( fn, "Microsoft Office Communicator 2007" , _) -> printfn "Communicator file %s" fn
| _ -> printfn "Unknown file"
You're saying, great, but what has this to do with .NET 4.0?
Tuples in .NET 4.0
Earlier this month, Justin Van Patten, on the BCL Team Blog announced some the base class library changes coming to .NET 4.0. Among them was Tuples in which was stated:
We are providing common tuple types in the BCL to facilitate language interoperability and to reduce duplication in the framework. A tuple is a simple generic data structure that holds an ordered set of items of heterogeneous types. Tuples are supported natively in languages such as F# and IronPython, but are also easy to use from any .NET language such as C# and VB.
What does that mean exactly? Does this mean we'll get some form of syntactic sugar around them as well? If we could decompose them in such a fashion as we do in F#, and to initialize them in an easy fashion without a | Go |
| Silverlight Futures: Line of Business app made easy! ... Interested in building Line of Business app with Silverlight ? Check out this presentation from Jamie Cool at PDC2008: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC11/ You may want to go straight to 30min on the talk to get the good stuff… Jamie shows what’s coming in a next version of Silverlight: a new framework to help you build business focused applications: Data access with client side ObjectDataSource! Silverlight Business Logic Class (used inside Silverlight without adding a service reference!!) Validator controls, validation rules enforced by server–side business class Navigation workflow, browser history integration Login control, roles This is coming… and this is huge! This reminds me of what was ASP.NET 2.0 compared to ASP.NET 1.1! | Go |
| TechEd 2008 Developers - How to start testing ... I visited Roy Osherove session at TechEd 2008 Developers (EMEA) where he spoke about how and why to test software. There was nothing new to me besides couple of things but I want to give you a little overview about the most painful topic for companies and developers - how to start testing. It was the best part of session I think and that's why I decided to blog about it. So it is a short review of notes I made in this session. As af first thing, it is important to avoid making testing something large as hill. To become a good tester you have to practice testing all the time and you are making many mistakes when you are starting. There is no point to study testing for a long time without practicing it. You can start your studies also on some system you are already developing. During your studies you can make the code of some existing system testable. Of course, there are systems where unit tests are not possible (let's take SharePoint by example). One thing you have to understand is: Test Driver Design means that software is built up so that it can be tested . I suggest you to also read the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code . By the way, soon will be available testing book by Roy titled as The Art of Unit Testing . Just follow the last link I gave to get more information about the book. | Go |
| dotNETwork 9th Gathering: Domain Driven Design, ASP.NET MVC, you know, tada tada… ... Yeah, somehow dotNETwork decided to allow me to show all my psychopath about design and implementation in a session with a very weird long title, “Applying Domain Driven Design on ASP.NET MVC”. Yeah, two unrelated topics. In 2 hours frame, I should be introducing day to day development styles from a different perspective. I had a small talk about the process side of the world . This time we move towards the other areas related to architecture and design. About the event dotNETwork is an independent .NET user group in Egypt. They organize a semi-monthly FREE event about various .NET related topics. This is going to be the 9th gathering/event. I have delivered a couple of sessions there before, about Scrum for developers and Design Patterns in C# 3.0 . This time the event will be: At: Saturday, November 29th, 2008. 12 PM to 4:30 PM In: CIC Canadian International College Busses Availability: @ Nady El Sekka, Nasr City (11:00 AM to 11:30 AM) This is the event agenda, note that session videos will be recorded : 12:00 – 14:00 Applying Domain Driven Design on ASP.NET MVC Mohamed Meligy Senior Software Developer, Raya-Software Information Architecture Mostafa Mourad Team Leader, ITWorx 14:30 – 16:30 IIS 7 Hossam Kamel Senior Software Enginee, ITWorx BizTalk-SharePoint Integration Hossam El-Deen M. Barakat Senior Software Developer, Raya-Software The sessions are all really great. Again, the parallelism hits me once more. I know almost all the speakers, Maybe I don’t know Hossam Kamel that well, but I heard very great things about him from friends. While on the other hand Hossam El-Deen M. Barakat will be giving a session that I attended the smaller version of it in Raya. IT was more than great explaining things I thought were too complex that just happened to be so easy, and … Man, I know I must attend the complete one. But this is special to me because I have hit so many IIS 7 issues before and played with its various interesting features, so, maybe my choice is not the best for you. The one I really regret to miss is the one Mostafa Murad will be delivering. Once more I’ll have to do much effort to prevent myself from leaving my own session and go attend the session in the other room!! I expect it to be a super great day. The session topics and speakers are of a very high quality, yeah yeah, except that white guy in the beginning called Meligy or Something and his weird session :). About the session topic(s) Domain Driven Design Domain Driven Design (DDD) is a thought paradigm. This means it is a set of thoughts to have in your mind when designing software. This usually has its effect on how you organize your layers (and question yourself whether the 3-tire typical model is truly the right answer), and affects also how you write different pieces of functionality in your code (which happens to meet some OOP principles that are not emphasized usually in day to day work). It also introduces some other concepts like Dependency Injection (DI) / Inversion of Control (IoC). ASP.NET MVC One of the patterns that fit pretty much within DDD style is Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. The idea of having some way to represent business entities in a way independent from technical operations calling them Models is the shared part, having a core business flow and control in the Controllers, and a dumb View that only gets the model from a controller and knows nothing except how to display it properly. There have been some famous MVC frameworks in the world that were built to make it easy to develop applications applying the MVC style. The one that was highly noticed was one called Ruby on Rails. Microsoft has recently developed its own MVC framework calling it just as it may sound: ASP.NET MVC Framework. Wrapping Up So, during this session, I’m going to try to touch the surface of both the concepts and tools and how they all play together. Of course I will not be able to go deeply in any of them because each requires a separate sessio | Go |
| get ID inside a Silverlight Datagrid when Button clicked ... This blog pots describes a datagrid and a encapsulated custom button for each row. I want to show two methods how to get information about the underlaying data of the row. I use a ado.net data service and a entity datamodel, which is not part of the article, to get the data. Database is good old northwind and table is customer. When use clicks on button messagebox comes up with some information about the row. First the xaml code < Grid x:Name ="LayoutRoot" Background ="White" >
< data:DataGrid x:Name ="DataGrid1" >
< data:DataGrid.Columns >
< data:DataGridTemplateColumn Width ="100" >
< data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate >
< DataTemplate >
< Button Content ="{Binding CustomerID}" Click ="Button_Click" Tag ="{Binding CustomerID}" ></ Button >
</ DataTemplate >
</ data:DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate >
</ data:DataGridTemplateColumn >
</ data:DataGrid.Columns >
</ data:DataGrid >
.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 databinding to the tag attribute is necessary for my first trick
Private Sub Button_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object , ByVal e As System.Windows.RoutedEventArgs)
MessageBox.Show(CType (e.OriginalSource, Button).Tag)
End Sub
.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; }
Easy or? Do you like it more complex, than following code gives you the select row as number
Private Sub Button_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object , ByVal e As System.Windows.RoutedEventArgs)
Dim datenliste As List(Of ServiceReference1.Customers)
datenliste = DataGrid1.ItemsSource 'automatischer cast
Dim datenButton As Object = CType (e.OriginalSource, Button).DataContext()
MessageBox.Show(datenliste.IndexOf(datenButton))
End Sub
.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; } | Go |
| Calling Web Services from Silverlight using IIS 7.0 and ARR ... During this PDC I attended Ian's presentation about WPF and Silverlight where he demonstrated the high degree of compatibility that can be achieved between a WPF desktop application and a Silverlight application. One of the differences that he demonstrated was when your application consumed Web Services since Silverlight applications execute in a sandboxed environment they are not allowed to call random Web Services or issue HTTP requests to servers that are not the originating server, or a server...(read more ) | Go |
| .NET Code Contracts and TDD Are Complementary ... After my recent post on the introduction of Code Contracts in .NET 4.0 , I got some strong reaction that they would rather rely on TDD, or the better term, Example Driven Development specifications to ensure correctness. Instead, it's my intent to talk about how they can complement each other in some rather powerful ways, such as having contracts bound to interfaces instead of class instances to ensure uniform interaction. When we combine these two things together, the edge cases of our behaviors quickly melt away.
Design by Contract Basics
In order to understand how it can help, it's best to understand more about what Design by Contract can do for us. The basic idea revolves around three questions:
What does it expect? (Pre-conditions)
What does it guarantee? (Post-conditions)
What does it maintain? (Invariants)
Now, to map that to actual software terms, these constraints are enforced at the method level. Listed below are the basic rules for how contracts work:
Pre-conditions may be weakened and not strengthened by subclasses
Post-conditions may be strengthened and not weakened by subclasses
Invariants may be strengthened and not weakened by classes
The intent of DbC and using contracts, your program must never try to verify the contract conditions and instead fail hard, with the contract verification being your safety net. This fail hard technique makes reading and understanding this code easier because the intended behavior is clearly specified. When using the .NET Code Contracts, these hard failures are enforced either through the Debug.Assert or the Environment.FailFast implementations, depending on the build configuration.
TDD and Contracts Strategies
We have a couple of options when we talk about Code Contracts and TDD. Either way, the tests always come first. Then what comes next is up to interpretation.
We have the option of:
Defining the contract implementation after the test, to narrow the behavior of the code under test, then write the code required to pass.
Defining the code to achieve a passing test, then refactor the code to a contract implementation.
It really depends on the application as to which style might work better. For most applications, I would recommend that you go with the second option where you define the code first to pass, and then refactor to an evolving contract design. For those creating frameworks with predefined behaviors, the first option would probably work best.
One thing that Code Contracts gives us is the ability apply intrinsic behavior to interfaces. At that point, I no longer really call them interfaces, but abstract contracts is a better term for them. I favor their use as much as possible to achieve uniform behavior across implementations and really becomes a powerful tool to enforce Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY).
Red - Yellow - Green Refactor
One analogy that can be adapted here is the original idea of Red, Green, Refactor. Let's take this a step further to use a phrase that Greg Young uses, which is Red, Yellow, Green, Refactor. This is to say that we first implement the test, fail with a red light because no code actually exists for it to compile or work. Then we implement the contract and our code to a point where it can at least compile, which would be yellow. After that, we then pass our test with green after implementing the right amount of code to satisfy our contract. We can refactor our contracts and code to clean it up a bit more, and move onto the next test.
BDD for the Business and DbC for the Minutia
Another argument that can be made is that we could make is that we treat BDD for the business and Design by Contract for the minutia. This idea is that we can continue to use the BDD syntax that we normally do, and then use contracts to enforce the edge constraints, to narrow our definitions. This would allow us to focus on | Go |
| You are not going to need it ... When you are writing code it is common to think "I may need XYZ" but I am not really going to need it, Agile advocates using the available time as best as possible and if you do not really need it then why waste time ? Agile also advocates refactoring to improve and tune your code and these two concepts fit together, consider very carefully when refactoring what your code does and if you really need said refactoring. Ron puts it best
The best way to implement code quickly is to implement less of it. The best way to have fewer bugs is to implement less code. | Go |
| Windows Azure Distilled - A programmer's view ... I've written a quick summary on my understanding of the core Azure platform at http://www.indiangeek.net/2008/11/14/windows-azure-distilled/ | Go |
