| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Best practice DDD/TDD ASP.NET MVC example applications ... It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. One of the reasons I like it is because it's opinionated - instead of leaving developers free to fumble things as they choose, it recognises that most projects will be more-or-less exactly the same, and imposes some conventions to keep everyone on the same path. | Go |
| ASP.NET Data Input Validation ... I'm no security expert, and as such, I think I'm a member of a ever-growing group of Web developers who fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to the security of their Web forms. | Go |
| Eliminating Postbacks: Setting Up jQuery On ASP.NET Web Forms and Mana ... This is a follow-up to a prior post, Keys to Web 3.0 Design and Development When Using ASP.NET. Now I want to focus solely on getting jQuery and client-side data managmeent working with ASP.NET 2.0 without ASP.NET AJAX or ASP.NET MVC. | Go |
| How to run ASP.NET MVC on Windows Azure ... A quick how-to on getting ASP.NET MVC up and running on Windows Azure. | Go |
| Good Development Resource ... Found a good development resource that aggregates some of the top Microsoft bloggers feeds and tweets. | Go |
| Authorization in ASP.Net MVC using XML Configuration. ... Doing authorization in a clean way is always tricky, You want delicate balance between extreme abstraction and embedding roles in-side your compiled code, I have always preferred simple abstraction either using roles and their corresponding mappings in the database or using simple xml file to store action to role mappings.
Asp.net MVC comes with built in Authorization filter attribute that you can use on your Controller and Action to define the role that can access corresponding Controller or Action. This approach will work fine for small application where you have predefined action to role mappings, but when you have bigger application where developers are not going to define role mappings and mappings might change frequently then maintenance of hard quoted roles might become nightmare. | Go |
| Financial Calculation using .NET:- Depreciation (Part-2) ... In this article we will look how we can use "Microsoft.VisualBasic" namespace to do single line and double line depreciation calculation. | Go |
| Creating A Comma Delimited String ... Creating a Comma Delimited String using the .NET frameworks CommaDelimitedStringCollection class. | Go |
| Outputting Custom Made Charts To An ASP.NET Page ... Guide to inserting a custom chart or System.Drawing image to a web page where other HTML content is displayed. | Go |
| Common Problems with rendering Bitmaps into ASP.NET OutputStream ... helped me solve a problem of dynamic website thumbnail rendering | Go |
| Creating a generic Linq to SQL ModelBinder for the ASP.NET MVC framewo ... How about this action method, using a Person class which is a Linq to SQL entity type. It accepts a Person object as a parameter. The Person class is a Linq to SQL entity type. It's cleaner not to use the Linq to SQL data context here!
Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder infrastructure, I am actually able to bind action method parameters to real objects, based on simple query string parameters like, in this case, id. A custom ModelBinder maps this string id to a real Person instance from my Linq to SQL DataContext. Let me show you how I've created this ModelBinder. | Go |
| Gotcha: ASP.NET and exceptions in asynchronous threads ... If an unhandled exception occurs in a secondary thread which has been launched by your ASP.NET application, IIS will force your application to restart. | Go |
| FormView not retaining values when server-side validation fails ... Takes care of the problem in the Title | Go |
| ASP.Net Request.Querystring with null keys and values - a fix. ... Some observations on the way ASP.Net interprets a non-standard querystring, and how to improve on it. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| CodeProject: Architecting .NET Web Applications for Scale & Performance (A Practical Guide). Free source code and programming help | Go |
| A Guide to Learning ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| 7 of my favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET | Encosia | Go |
| ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know - developerFusion - the global developer community | Go |
| jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX Demo Code - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| Brad Abrams : AjaxWorld Talk: Building a Great Ajax application from ... | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| Azure Services Platform | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - The Weekly Source Code 35 - Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session and Cache State | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you t | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here . The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release. UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup. Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size). Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download. This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications. This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility. I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it. To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application. To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item. We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template wit | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Support with Visual Web Developer 2008 Express ... Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release . One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition. The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it). This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express. If you install the Visual Web Developer Express SP1 Beta you can start using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 with it immediately. Important: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 does not require SP1 to be installed if you are using Visual Studio 2008. ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 will work with both VS 2008 and VS 2008 SP1 just fine. You can learn more about the new VWD Express support for ASP.NET MVC from the VS Web Tools team blog here . This post also includes a free web download that provides ASP.NET MVC Test project support for NUnit-based unit tests. You can use these NUnit project templates with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release ... This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here . You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here . Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release , along with some additional tweaks and adjustments. You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method. For example: which would render the below HTML when run: Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it. This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything). It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow. For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them. The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object): One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required). Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above: We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action: When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red): Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning "JsonResult" (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), "ContentResult" (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results. The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you'll see us add several more built-in result types. Improved HTML Helper Methods The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements. Automatic Value Lookup With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers. For example: to include a value within a <input type="text" value="some value"/> element you would write: The above code continues to work - although now you can also just write: The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use. SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc). One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render. For example, below I'm creating a SelectList view-model class over the | Go |
| May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF ... Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control : Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls : Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario. Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET : A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images. Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on. ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners : Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns). The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated. Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control : Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control. Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch : Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads. Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier. Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class : Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class. Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta : Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls. .NET 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ : Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it. Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL : Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries. Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries. DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers. Ukadc.Diagnostics : Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc). Visual Studio 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know : A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio. Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series. I confess I didn't know this one. Silverlight 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time". Wow. AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes : Nikhil Kothari has a | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| 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 |
| How to Rotate Ads without Refreshing the Page using AdRotator and ASP.NET AJAX ... The AdRotator control in ASP.NET is extremely handy when it comes to randomly displaying advertisements on your site. However the ads are rotated only when the user refreshes the page. In this article, we will explore how you can easily rotate ads at regular intervals, without the user refreshing the page. | Go |
| Using UpdateProgress Control Effectively ... UpdateProgress control provides a mechanism where we can inform user that the server side processing is still progressing. For example, we can provide a “Loading…” message or an image showing the progressing of the request. This article will give you more inputs on how to use the UpdateProgress control very effectively in our projects. | Go |
| Creating a Poll with AJAX, SQL and LINQ in C# ... This tutorial will show you how to create an online voting system which will take advantage of AJAX and LINQ to allow users to quickly and easily vote for their favorite Political candidate, and be shown who is currently the front-runner. C# | Go |
| Data Access Component - Update Data in C# and AJAX ... This tutorial will show you how to use C# and AJAX to create a Data Access Component that will display data from a SQL database and also allow edits of the data. | Go |
| Display Request Processing Time in ASP.Net pages ... There are some sites in internet who are displaying the time taken to process the request given to the server at the end of every page. This article will help us to implement this feature in our asp.net sites. | Go |
| Using JavaScript and UpdatePanels in ASP.NET 3.5 ... We all know that AJAX utilizes JavaScript, but what if we want to use our own JavaScript calls in conjunction with AJAX? This tutorial will show you how we can call JavaScript ourselves whilst using AJAX. We will be making use of the Alert method in JavaScript when the user adds a new entry to an XML file. | Go |
| Developing a Shopping Cart in ASP.NET ... Explains how to develop simple shopping cart web application by using recommended three tier architecture. | Go |
| Animated Popup Master/Detail using GridView, DetailsView and JQuery with jqModal & UpdatePanel ... Demonstrate how to build master/details data presentation using GridView, DetailsView as animated pop-up using jQuery jqModal and ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel.
Also who how to color animate updated row on GridView after confirming update on DetailsView using jQuery. Live Demo Provided. | Go |
| Unraveling the Mysterious of the ValidationGroup Control ... ASP.NET validation works in mysterious ways especially when you want to validate a group of controls on the page. In this article we are going to dig deep into the ValidationGroup property and see how to validate a group of controls. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| All you want to know about a mobile website ... The article explains all the aspects of a mobile website | Go |
| MVC, MVP, ASP.NET ... MVC Design pattern in comparison with MVP in the ASP.NET world | Go |
| Swapping Blogger Title Hack ... Modifying the default settings in Blogger to make a more SEO friendly Page Title | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Flexigrid sample ... How to create an ASP.NET MVC sample using LINQ to SQL, Flexigrid for JQuery and Json | Go |
| Javascript Dataset, Data Repeater and Grid ... An object that can repeat data in any template | Go |
| Using ZIP content for delivery over HTTP ... This article shows how to use already compressed content for transmission over HTTP. | Go |
| Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1 ... Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1 | Go |
| Add-in to attach ASP.NET debugger ... This visual studio add-in puts a nice-cool shortcut button on your debug toolbar to attach your code to ASP.NET debugger (aspnet_wp.exe). | Go |
| AxiomaticTokenizer ... Financial security with one-time tokens | Go |
| UI Object Connector Implementation of Mediator Pattern ... UI Object Connector Implementation of Mediator Pattern | Go |
| Create One Application for both Desktop and Web ... With Habanero's support for Visual WebGui, you can write one application to release on either the desktop or web. | Go |
| Dynamic validation according to logged in user ... Dynamic validation according to logged in user | Go |
| Creating print preview page dynamically in ASP.NET ... An article on creating a print preview page dynamically by using JavaScript code. You do not need to make any ASPX page to view print preview, and you can also print any portion of the print page. | Go |
| Custom membership provider for the ADO.NET Entity Framework ... Custom membership provider implementation for the ADO.NET Entity Framework. | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Going to vote No on Prop 8. Evolution will eventually take over. ... This is my first post about anything that is not related to technology; I have never done that in the last three years of blogging. I was urged to do so now by my disappointment in seeing a community in California so no accepting of progress and evolution. It has been a long time - 88 years, since females were given the right to vote, and a long time, also since black people were given equal rights. As a people, we have come a long way. We invented technology and we have been able to improve... 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 |
| MVC, MVP, ASP.NET ... MVC Design pattern in comparison with MVP in the ASP.NET world... 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 |
| Chameleon skinning coming up to WinForms in Q3 2008 ... I know many of you like our WinForms "Desert" theme:
I like it very much too. But I've been using it for quite some time and it started to kind of bore me. I just wish it wasn't so orange-ish. Then I got impressed by the UI of Windows Live 's set of desktop applications , which have the cool option to change the skin color - on the fly:
Its very neat and I just can't get bored using this kind of UI.
Our Windows Form components on the other hand have a very extensible way of skinning , but still, you are limited to selecting one of the predefined themes or take the not-so-short way to fully customizing an existing theme. If you are keeping an eye from time to time at our roadmap , you probably know that we are on our way to extend the list of built-in themes, but still, this does not help the UI be as easily customizable as the above mentioned MS products.
Well, not any more!
For the upcoming Q3 2008 release we have been working closely with our UX guys to implement a color blending feature within our products that works similar to the way the professional graphics design tools do.
The result is an new elegant approach to customizing the appearance of your applications. And it works very straightforward. Lets take a look again at the Desert theme. We have smooth dark orange color all over. But if we take away all the orange and replace it with other color(s) we get these new cool-looking themes:
Here is what's happening underneath in short. To apply the color blend, TPF will search through the theme's color RGB settings, convert them to HSL color space and calculate the new RGB color values, based on the newly selected color Hue. The code used to achieve all this looks similar to the following:
Theme currentTheme = Telerik.WinControls.ThemeResolutionService.GetTheme("Desert");
currentTheme.AddColorBlend("BaseColor", HslColor.FromColor(Color.Orange));
currentTheme.ThemeProperties["BaseColor"] = HslColor.FromColor(Color.PaleGreen);
That's all! And since the theme modification is taking place at runtime you will be able to see all controls on the form changing their appearance corresponding to the new color blend base-color selection.
What about themes, like the MS Office-resembling Blue that has a totally different set of colors based on the visual state of each piece of UI? Well, you can add several color blends, at once:
And finally if the resulting skin still needs some touches, you can export the modified theme data to xml files, and tweak them using the Visual Style Builder app, as much as you wish.
I believe that by using this powerful approach you will be able to design your application with an UI that can be personalized by the end user, but still looks very professional.
I will be really exited to hear what you think about about Theme Color Blending.
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 |
| Telerik Reporting - Tips and Tricks ... What better source for tips and tricks for your beloved Reporting product, than a blog spot right from the kitchen where the product is 'mixed'. As of this post, we would like to start a small series of tips and tricks that make a developers' life sweeter. We're not going to discuss general topics, so if you're looking for answers for one of those questions - please review our documentation and our forums .
As you can guess, the sub-report item, which lets you display one report within another report is widely used in Telerik Reporting. It lets you compose complex reports from disparate report sources and the data for each sub-report can be completely different. With its help you can create the very much exploited master-detail report scenarios with ease. Wiring up report parameters and accessing the sub-report's report is straightforward, but a question arises - what should we do if there is no data to be shown in the sub-report under some conditions. Well, we can check if it has data and if it does not contain any - hide it, so it does not take up any unnecessary space and mess up the master report layout . We're going to use the subreport_ItemDataBound eventhandler for this purpose:
private void subReport1_ItemDataBound( object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Processing.SubReport subReport = (Processing.SubReport)sender;
Processing.Report report = (Processing.Report)subReport.InnerReport;
subReport.Visible = report.Items.Find("detail" , true ).Length > 0;
}
The "detail" parameter is the name of the detail section of the report set as Report Source for the sub-report item.
Hope this helps!
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 |
| Novermber`s Toolbox Column Now Online ... MyToolbox column in theNovember 2008issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. TheNovember issue examines: DayPilot - DayPilot is an AJAX-enabled calendar and scheduling ASP.NET Web control that offers functionality not unlike what you find in Outlook and other desktop-based calendar applications. Plus there's a free, open-source Lite version .
Blogs of Note -JeffSmith - Jeff's blog contains great posts on T-SQL syntax, queries, and tips and tricks for getting the most out of Microsoft SQL Server.
RegexBuddy - with its terse syntax and mix of special characters, regular expressions are usually hard to read, understand, and enhance when using the naked eye. However, with a tool like RegexBuddy, regular expressions are much easier to grok. RegexBuddy is a desktop application with features that assist in building, testing, and editing regular expressions. RegexBuddy includes a regular expression debugger and wizards for turning your regular expressions into C# or VB code. ForThe Bookshelf sectionI reviewed The Productive Programmer , by Neal Ford. An excerpt from the review follows: In the Productive Programmer (O'Reilly, 2008), Neal Ford shares proven techniques that will help any developer improve his or her productivity. The first part of the book explores behaviors and tools for boosting developer productivity; the second part looks at software development practices that help contribute to a more streamlined development process. He espouses the Don't Repeat Yourself tenet for improving productivity and provides examples of how to avoid needless repetition in areas from version control to technical documentation. Poor software development practices can quickly swallow up those productivity gains, Neal notes. Adding unnecessary features, insufficiently testing your code, and failing to correctly encapsulate your objects are all practices that lead to bugs and unmaintainable code. The willingness to question the status quo is another important aspect in developer productivity. Too often developers get into a rut and use a particular design pattern or coding technique because that's the way it's always been done, overlooking or turning down alternatives that may be more efficient. Enjoy! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd148647.aspx As always, if you have any suggestions for products,blogs, or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them to toolsmm@microsoft.com . 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 |
| Script# Programming in the Large ... Yesterday's PDC keynote featured a number of interesting products and technologies, such as Office 14 and Live Services, that today involve fairly large-scale (code size, team size and project length) Ajax development. The demos were just amazing - Kudos to the product teams!Behind the scenes, on the engineering front, Script# provided the toolset and script authoring model. I've been working with both teams for quite a while now, and am really excited to be able to finally share these particular... 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 |
| Creating print preview page dynamically in ASP.NET ... An article on creating print preview page dynamically by javascript code. You do not need to make any aspx page to view print preview and you can also print any portion of the print page... 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 Play SWF File In Asp.Net ... This article demostrates how to play an swf (flash) file in asp.net.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap talk available online ... Scott Hunters talk on the ASP.NET 4.0 roadmap (in which Im doing a 10 minute demo) is available from Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC20/... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Hot New Presentation Tip ... Before giving a presentation, I review Scott Hanselmans top 11 presentation tips. Well I have a twelfth tip that Scott needs to add to his list, and hell vouch for this. A couple of hours before Jeff and I gave the ASP.NET MVC presentation, we played some RockBand in the Big Room (exhibition area). Playing Eye of the Tiger before a big talk has a great way of both pumping you up and loosening you up at the same time. When I ran into Scott and told him this tip, he said he did the very same thing,... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Smart Code Generator: Use ASP.NET, NAnt and Cassini for Code Generation ... This article describes how NAnt and Cassini can be integrated with the Smart Code Generator development cycle. This article can also used as a reference for ASP.NET developers who want to build, run and deploy ASP.NET projects seamlessly using NAnt and Cassini.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session without changing your code using a Session provider. ... Scott Hanselman had a post last week to zip your Session state. a great idea I thought to be able to save memory on the computer. Yet I didnt want to change all my source code to use another class to do so, a nightmare to track all the Sessions in every application, or worse when you dont have access to that source code. So last weekend I work on a Session State Provider that allows me to intercept every call to the Session State and compressed when set or unzip when retrieve. The Session State... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Introducing grid client-side editing support with Q3 2008 ... With our upcoming version of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX (early November) you will be able to bind our grid even if the grid is in edit mode. RadGrid will locate automatically all built-in column editors (GridNumericColumn, GridDropDownColumn, GridDateTimeColumn, etc.) and you can get old/new values directly from the grid client-side API.
You can use client-side editing completely codeless with templates as well. The requirement here is to set ID for the control to be equal to desired data field.
Example :
<telerik:GridTemplateColumn HeaderText="CompanyName">
<EditItemTemplate>
<telerik:RadTextBox ID="CompanyName" runat="server" />
</EditItemTemplate>
</telerik:GridTemplateColumn>
We have introduced also three new client-side methods for GridTableView to get new values, old values and keys for particular GridDataItem.
Example :
var newValues = $find("RadGrid2").get_masterTableView().extractValuesFromItem(0) ; // get first item new values
var newValues = $find("RadGrid2").get_masterTableView().extractOldValuesFromItem(0) ; // get first item old values
var newValues = $find("RadGrid2").get_masterTableView().extractKeysFromItem(0) ; // get first item keys
I've made small example using two grids (master/detail) both bound completely client-side to illustrate this new functionality:
Enjoy!
[Download ]
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| SESSION NOTES: ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap ... This session is by Scott Hunter, Program Manager at MSFT In July 2007 - ASP.NET Futures was released That was followined by an Extensions Preview of ASP.NET 3.5 in Dec 07 Then in March 08 - we started doing some new stuff - ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - MVC and more The ASP.NET will continue to release out-of-bound items. CodePlex is the main driver for that. www.codeplex.com/aspnet - This is where you will find the interim drops. Currently there are ~1,000 downloads today If you want to see all... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Zune feedback ... As you may have heard Zune v3 is out, I spent a long time playing with it to provide my feedback one ¦more time. First thought: Zune software is still a piece of sh*t! But I have to say this is no more the worst software ever written by Microsoft, it is a bit better now, but still full of crappy features and the UI s*x badly. First, I always wonder myself: “why the hell did they create a NEW media player ???”. Windows Media Player v11 - Zune v3 - Hello? Marketplace?? Why not simply add a new “Social” tab on WMP ?? So that is the point, I start this feedback exactly like my previous one : “both Zune software and firmware can do a lot better”. Having said that I will start with what I like on this new version : The “Add to now playing list” feature on device. Best.Thing.Ever ! they finally get rid of the “Quick list” stupid feature (it was soooo useless!) Games are officially supported ! Time displayed on device main screen Zune is now able to go back to current song after viewing some pictures. Find Zune buddy by Live ID: Now, on your "my social" page you can see if any of your Windows Live contacts have a Zune Card and add them as friend. Picks are great and allow you to get personalized recommendations. I can’t talk about Channels as I don’t have a Zune Pass but this seems very nice. Now here is my list of suggestions : * Device: Add some auto playlists please Last sync (a bit like the “date added” view in software). When I have a lot of music in my Zune it become hard to find the last synced music. Favorites songs, the one tagged as “heart”. Snooze mode. Not a big deal but this would be a nice addition. Screensaver: why not? my Zune at home is always docked and can’t stop itself, so it would be nice to have a screensaver coming – or to be able to enter sleep mode while docked. * Software: Add a Folders view (like Windows Media Player) tags are nice but a great part of my collection is not tagged so I have difficulties to browse my music. This is also a big problem with compilations which generate me thousands of artists entries with only one album/song. I would love to have a setting “Do not display artists with less than X songs in artists view”. See also next bullet. Add a live search box (like in WMP library). I would like to get some stats of my library (number of albums, songs, artists, most played song, album, artist, ….) Now playing screen is interesting (and really beautiful with artists shots and stats) but… I would need a party mode, where I can see the current playlist, sort, move and add new music. It would be like a “Now playing” + collection view. Also it seems to me there is a bug: while playing just one song (not an album), then browse to another song and "add to now playing list": it turns out that the song is queue after the whole album of the current playing song. I would need to add songs one by one to the current playing list, what do you think ? Don’t get me wrong my goal is not to flame Zune but to bring ideas and feedback to make it better. I like my Zune, but to me the Zune Software is a total mistake. If a Microsoft guy or better someone from the Zune Team read this, I would love to be a beta tester and bring my feedback, do you have a beta program ? As an MVP + Windows Live Butterfly let me say I am strong on feedback. Technorati Tags: Zune | Go |
| Microsoft Chart Controls ... Wow! Essa eu não estava esperando, o time de visualização de dados do Reporting Services liberou um conjunto de controles para gráficos, para serem utilizados aplicações ASP.NET e Windows Forms. Da mesma forma que já temos os gráficos integrados na versão 2008 do Reporting Services, agora podemos ter os mesmos gráficos nas nossas aplicações asp.net e windows forms, totalmente de graça! Links para download: Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Esse instalador irá instalar os controles no GAC e na pasta "%Program File%\Microsoft Chart Controls\Assemblies". Language Pack for Microsoft Chart Controls Pacotes para traduzir os gráficos para 23 idiomas. Microsoft Chart Controls Add-on for Visual Studio 2008 Plugin para instalar o intellisense e os controles na Toolbox Documentation for Microsoft Chart Controls http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart Exemplo para ajudar a começar a utilizar os novos componentes see ya =) | Go |
| Deepzoom with Silverlight 2.0 First Hands Example ... I was looking for an interesting starting point to getting my hands dirty with Silverlight. Deepzoom caught my attention. It is basically a Silverlight component that let's you zoom in and out into an image. While there are some examples out there that utilize and showcase it, most of them are pretty basic and not that practical. While back I wrote a small app that composes a target image mosaic out of smaller images, but back than , I had to use Zoomify to provide a zoom in and zoom out interface. Now with Deepzoom, I wanted to check it out. So here is the final result, it is basically an image broken down to pixel size images that are matched to images that serve as the tiles of the original image. Now that we have the matching tiles, we can simply compose the original image. The only challenging is point here is to break the new image into Deepzoom format. For that I used this good codeproject published project . Because the end result is almost 200MB , I've decided to share a video showcasing a silverlight ASP.Net embedded page. What is shown here is the Deepzoom running in an IE7 window with the composed mosaic image. It would be cool to have this online application that let's you upload images and build the last uploaded image from all of the previously loaded images. I'll share more technical information on this on later posts , so stay tuned. BTW, here is a cool Michael Phelps mosaic, hand made. It would be nice to have a computer software to do this. | Go |
| LINQ Cheat Sheet ... A while ago when I was learning LINQ I searched the web for a 'cheat sheet'. I needed a single document that covered most of the common scenarios w.r.t LINQ so that I would not need to google every time I was writing LINQ queries. I found one very good one : http://aspnetresources.com/blog/linq_sqo__cheat_sheet.aspx . But I wanted more (as usual) so I created my own. I was also new to lambda expressions and I wanted to learn the differences between syntax in a LINQ query written in 'query syntax' and 'lambda syntax' so I also included that as part of my cheat sheet. Every query is given in both syntaxes. Here is a screenshot: Download the LINQ CHEAT SHEET Please let me know what you think. Did it help you? Where could it be improved? What would you add? You can also download the code that I used when creating the document. It also includes basic testing to make sure the queries of both syntaxes returned the same results. Beware as it may contain some bugs ;) | Go |
| Run ASP.NET MVC on Windows Azure ... If you’ve purposefully been ignoring the announcements out of PDC, I don’t blame you one bit. Everybody knew it would be the unveiling of Microsoft’s “cloud computing” initiative, and just about the only thing we didn’t know was the official name of it: Windows Azure. And of course I pronounce it wrong every time (I say “ah-jour ”, as in “soup-de-jour”). It’s hard to call it “initiative” when they’re the 3rd one to bring a product to the table. ;) One thing I was looking forward to was hearing about the ASP.NET MVC story on Azure. So color me surprised when I found out there wasn’t one. Since ASP.NET MVC is bin-deployable it shouldn’t be impossible, and doing some quick searches didn’t retrieve any results showing anybody else having tried this. Of course later I discovered that Phil and Eilon had whipped up a sample app that ran ASP.NET MVC on Azure, but was pleased to find out that the downloadable sample app didn’t work. In fact, it seemed to just be MVC stuff slapped into a WebRole project. (I’m guessing something got “lost in translation” since it wasn’t Phil or Eilon that posted the code.) Anyway, here’s how you can get ASP.NET MVC up and running on Azure. I’ve created a Visual Studio template for this to make it easy to set up - download it here . To avoid distributing code that isn’t my own (i.e. Windows Azure SDK Samples) there are a few steps you’ll have to take. I’m presuming that you’ve already installed the Windows Azure SDK and the Azure Visual Studio tools . One thing that running a web application “in the cloud” means is that you can instantly scale higher by adding more “instances”. This means the leaky-as-a-sieve abstraction of “session state” isn’t immediately available (finally!) since any given HTTP request could be going to a different server. The default session state provider for ASP.NET is an in-memory provider. This assumes that every request comes to the same physical machine. Session state providers have varied in their reliability and handling of scalability, but the other built-in providers include an out-of-proc provider (still same machine, but more resilient to IIS going up and down) and a SQL Server provider. None of these are enabled on the Azure platform, for good reason. The limitation of zero session state wouldn’t matter except that ASP.NET MVC includes the concept of “Temp Data”, which is data persisted in one request and made available to the next request only . By default, MVC uses the session to store this data. Aside: like it does everywhere else, ASP.NET MVC allows you to swap out default implementations for TempData persistence. A better solution than what I have below is to specifically implement a TempDataProvider that uses the Azure data storage capabilities. Look for that soon. ;) Fortunately for us the Windows Azure SDK includes some “samples”, including full implementations of membership, profile, and session providers built on the Azure data storage platform. So let’s hack those in to fulfill the default requirements of ASP.NET MVC. The only thing that I’ll say about this is that much of this stuff had better be baked into the SDK/platform by the time it goes GA. This is just a CTP, and Microsoft has been doing better at earlier community releases, so I’ll cut them some slack. ;) But this is way to much work to be a reasonable shipped solution. Unzip the “samples.zip” file in the Azure SDK and build the “AspProviders” application. They’ve conveniently included “buildme.cmd” batch files, but I built the application using Visual Studio since I like to see more of “what’s going on” (even though I really don’t see more, per se). Create the required tables in the Azure Development Storage. Open the Azure SDK command prompt under your start menu, and navigate to the directory containing the AspProviders output. Run the command “devtablegen” passing in the assembly name “AspProviders.dll”. This command creates the appropriate database structures to persist objects that meet certain | Go |
| “Yama-Hama! It's fright night!” #1 ... Since today is Halloween I thought I’d share a scary ghost bug story that I ran into this week. What better way to get everyone into the Halloween spirit?
Background:
· Running a load test, using one webtest, to gauge how the application handles heavy loads for a very specific scenario
Problem:
· Application is throwing an average of 4 exceptions/sec per user spiking CPU usage
Story:
· Ran load test and confirmed baseline of ~ 4 exceptions/sec per user on average
· Reviewed code and saw that Response.Redirect(url) was being used
· Replaced Response.Redirect(url) with Response.Redirect(url, false) and ran load test
· Saw improvement to ~3 exceptions/sec per user
· Added break point in custom error handler, to see the exceptions being caught, and ran load test
· Caught a FileNotFound exception with no valuable information
· Checked the stack trace and saw “ System.Web.StaticFileHandler”
· Guessed that there must have been a problem loading a .css or image file which are static
· Used ieHttpHeaders and saw a funky GET: GET /~/foo/bar.css
· Fixed the style sheet reference and ran load test
· Saw improvement to ~2 exceptions/sec per user
· Ran load test again
· Caught an EventValidation exception
· Observed custom error handler throwing a NullReferenceException because Server.GetLastError() was null but there was no check before calling Server.GetLastError.GetBaseException()
· Added null check
· Ran load test and saw improvement to ~1 exception/sec per user
· Disabled EventValidation on pages and ran load test and saw improvement to ~0 exceptions/sec per users
· Enabled EventValidation on pages because I didn’t like the solution and began investigating
· 30mins later –I was baffled
· Manually ran the webtest and did not get any EventValidation exceptions
· Eureka! moment – checked webtest and saw that the ThinkTime between requests was set to 0 causing the next page request to be called before the first page request had finished loading
· Changed ThinkTime between request to 5sec
· App now had ~0 exceptions/sec per user
Ok, so it wasn’t that scary but it was painful! Happy Halloween! | Go |
| Summing Columns in a GridView ... Level: Beginner.
After getting information from a database, you may also want summary information about the data (totals, averages, counts, etc.). This can be done using SQL group by clauses or, it can be done while binding to a GridView. I've seen other examples of this but they seem more complicated than they need to be.
Note: If the GridView has more than one page, only the data on the current page can be summarized using this technique.
Note: The sample uses the OrderDetails table from the NorthWind database.
ASP code:
< asp : GridView ID ="GridView1" runat ="server" AutoGenerateColumns ="False" DataKeyNames ="OrderID,ProductID" DataSourceID ="SqlDataSource1" ondatabinding ="GridView1_DataBinding" ondatabound ="GridView1_DataBound" onrowdatabound ="GridView1_RowDataBound"> < Columns > < asp : BoundField DataField ="OrderID" HeaderText ="OrderID" ReadOnly ="True" SortExpression ="OrderID" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="ProductID" HeaderText ="ProductID" ReadOnly ="True" SortExpression ="ProductID" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="UnitPrice" HeaderText ="UnitPrice" SortExpression ="UnitPrice" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="Quantity" HeaderText ="Quantity" SortExpression ="Quantity" /> < asp : BoundField DataField ="Discount" HeaderText ="Discount" SortExpression ="Discount" /> </ Columns > </ asp : GridView >
C# Code:
private Decimal OrderTotal; // holds total price of order // ---- the grid is about to start getting data...initialize protected void GridView1_DataBinding(object sender, EventArgs e) { OrderTotal = 0.0M; } // ---- Each row is data bound ------------------------------ protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType .DataRow) { DataRowView DRV = e.Row.DataItem as DataRowView ; // price is in column 2 // quantity is in column 3 Decimal Price = (Decimal )DRV.Row.ItemArray[2]; short Quantity = (short )DRV.Row.ItemArray[3]; Decimal RowTotal = Price * Quantity; OrderTotal += RowTotal; } } // ---- The grid is done getting data, show the Order Total -------- protected void GridView1_DataBound(object sender, EventArgs e) { LabelOrderTotal.Text = OrderTotal.ToString("C" ); }
I hope you find this useful.
Steve Wellens | Go |
| Expression Encoder 2 SP1 available! ... The main info is in the title… Download the SP1 of Expression Encoder 2 here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A29BE9F9-29E1-4E70-BF67-02D87D3E556E&displaylang=en Why is it so nice? Because you can now export your encoded videos to a Silverlight 2 player with a new set of templates! Then easily open the output in Visual Studio 2008 and add your C# or VB code! How cool is that? The blue “I” gives you information about the template applied to your video/settings like: “The gallery bar in this template supports thumbnails, but not all your media files have them.” nice! 2 days ago we (RunAtServer Consulting ) were invited by Microsoft Montreal to demo Silverlight during a presentation to their major media customers, we needed that SL2 templates to show VS2008 integration after export from Encoder 2, and had the chance to get a pre-version of the SP1 thanks to Joel ! Technorati Tags: Expression | Go |
| PowerShell: Install-Gac (GACUTIL for PowerShell) ... So, I don't know about anyone else, but it is a pain to use GACUTIL on systems without the .NET SDK. So, I found out there is a .NET API for GACUTIL, so now I just wrapped it in PowerShell to make it easier to use. :)
BEGIN {
$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"
if ( $null -eq ([AppDomain]::CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies() |? { $_.FullName -eq "System.EnterpriseServices, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" }) ) {
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("System.EnterpriseServices, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a") | Out-Null
}
$publish = New-Object System.EnterpriseServices.Internal.Publish
}
PROCESS {
$assembly = $null
if ( $_ -is [string] ) {
$assembly = $_
} elseif ( $_ -is [System.IO.FileInfo] ) {
$assembly = $_.FullName
} else {
throw ("The object type '{0}' is not supported." -f $_.GetType().FullName)
}
if ( -not (Test-Path $assembly -type Leaf) ) {
throw "The assembly '$assembly' does not exist."
}
if ( [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile( $assembly ).GetName().GetPublicKey().Length -eq 0 ) {
throw "The assembly '$assembly' must be strongly signed."
}
Write-Output "Installing: $assembly"
$publish.GacInstall( $assembly )
} | Go |
| Follow-Up to TechDays 2008 in Toronto ... Thanks to all the folks who attended my presentation on using the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. As promised, here are the resources that I used at TechDays 2008 in Toronto. A Deep Dive into the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions PowerPoint slide deck AJAX-ized Burton Site AJAX Demonstration Site The Canadian telephone number Do Not Call List is online here . Note that most of the content from this talk is the original work of Jeff Prosise of Wintellect....(read more ) | Go |
