| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Dynamically Loading an assembly at Runtime and calling its methods ... This article explains how to load an assembly dynamically and call its method. | Go |
| In-process ASP.NET MVC Web Form View Rendering ... Sometimes it's useful to be able to render a view in-process, for example, from within a unit test if you would like to validate the rendered XHTML. | Go |
| Scan to Scribd (or anything) Tutorial ... Lou has written an article about how to send scanned images to some place on the web. "All of the non-uploading code will work in any Scan to X project, where X can be Amazon S3, Azure SQL Data Services, Google Docs, SharePoint, or any CMIS compliant ECM (you just need to write the uploading part). " | Go |
| Failed to map the path '/App_GlobalResources/' ... Failed to map the path '/App_GlobalResources/' is an obscure exception generated due to some permission settings. FInd out what you need to check and change to get rid of this exception. Save yourself allot of time and solve the issue right away! | Go |
| Bad HTML Can Crash ASP.Net? ... Yes, the title is a question. I think the answer to that is yes, although I am not sure.
I encountered a very strange problem yesterday and it took a while to track down. I found this problem so frustrating that for a moment (only a brief one) I questioned my adoration for ASP.Net. | Go |
| ASP.NET 2.0 Nested GridView Video Tutorial ... This video explains you how to use the Nested GridView Introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. Enjoy :-) | Go |
| Creating JavaScript Components and ASP.NET Controls ... Most people think you need Prototype, jQuery, or ASP.NET AJAX framework in order to create reusable JavaScript components. This isn't true. You already have everything you need to create extensible JavaScript components in ASP.NET controls without any framework dependency. | Go |
| GridView with fixed row height - FIXED! ... How can something that should be so easy, be so damned difficult ???
If you have tried to use a Gridview, where some of the columns contains a lot of text. You maybe know what I am talking about ...
You get some very high rows who are destroying the entire design of your page. | Go |
| Templated User Controls in ASP.NET ... Good design repeats itself, good code does not.
With interface development, you face the conflict above over and over again. You get a design that (rightly) reuses the same concepts over and over, and you need to implement them in code that makes you write the same logic only once. Templated User Controls fills works great in solving this issue. | Go |
| Authorization in ASP.Net MVC using XML Configuration ... A simple application to demonstrate how you can xml based configuration to apply authorization in MVC application | Go |
| Implementing Windows Desktop Search with ASP.NET ... Windows Search provides an easy and comprehensive desktop solution for finding content, whether it's on your PC, in an e-mail message or attachment, on a remote file share, or on the Web. In this article, we will see how to access the indexed data using ASP.NET as the programming language. | Go |
| C#:- Usage of As Keyword in C# ... This article show a little hidden keyword in C# called "As" its usage when it is benificial to use it and when its not. | Go |
| The 3 Musketeers-Model, View and Controller using ASP.NET MVC - Part 1 ... This is my second article in MVC. In my previous article we had discussed how we can develop MVC application in ASP.NET using HttpHandler. In case you have missed the first part I have given the link below. I am sure Httphandler is a tough way to implement MVC, but if you have understood the concept then you have understood the basics of implementing MVC. Ok, now good news in VS 2008 we have a something readymade given by Microsoft ASP.NET community the ASP.NET MVC. In this section we will discuss step by step how we can use the ASP.NET MVC to build the three Musketeer's Model, View and Controller. It's a clean approach and easy to build upon as it encapsulates the HttpHandler implementation for MVC, thus bringing in simplicity. | Go |
| Tips & Tricks when working with jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX ... Tips & Tricks when working with jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX: I posted about how to build and extender control using ASP.NET AJAX with jQuery. During my work I fall into few issues that I resolved and wished to share them with you | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Build a Shopping Cart in ASP.NET - NETTUTS | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 ... We shipped Silverlight 2 last month. Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed. Silverlight 2 was a major release, and delivered an impressive set of cross-browser, cross-platform functionality for Media and Rich Internet Application experiences. It has been great watching new sites launch using it. Media Experiences Silverlight 2 enables the highest quality video on the web, and delivers it with the lowest TCO of any media platform. One of the capabilities built-into Silverlight 2 is its support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables video to be delivered at multiple bitrates (for example: 400Kbits, 800Kbits, 1.5Mbits, 2Mbits) with Silverlight dynamically choosing the optimal bitrate to use depending on the network bandwidth and CPU capability of the client (it can also automatically switch bitrates seamlessly if conditions change later). Silverlight's adaptive streaming support is extensible. Move Networks (who helped pioneer the concept of adaptive streaming) have already integrated their adaptive streaming solution with Silverlight. Silverlight 2 and Move were used to stream the Democratic National Convention live on the web this summer. Last month we announced that Microsoft will be adding adaptive streaming support as a free feature of our IIS7 web-server. IIS Smooth Streaming will provide an integrated way to deliver HD quality adaptive video over the web. Visit Akamai's www.smoothhd.com site to see some awesome examples of Silverlight 2 and IIS Smooth Streaming in action (with adaptive streaming up to 2.5Mbits). The NBC Olympics site used Silverlight 2 to serve more than 3,500 hours of live and on-demand Olympic coverage to over 60 million unique visitors this summer. Visitors to the site watched an average of 27 minutes of video - which is stunningly high for online video. The site used the new Silverlight adaptive streaming capability to support 1.5Mbit bitrates - which helped deliver an awesome video experience: In addition to powering the Olympics experience in the US, Silverlight was also used in France (by FranceTV ), the Netherlands (by NOS ), Russia (by Sportbox.ru ) and Italy (by RAI ). In addition to video quality, a big reason behind these broadcasters decision to use Silverlight was the TCO and streaming cost difference Silverlight provided. In the August 2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine (a Dutch publication) a NOS representative reported that they were able to serve 100,000 concurrent users using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media Servers, whereas it would have required 270 servers if they had used Flash Media Servers. Over the last month we've seen several major new deployments of Silverlight for media scenarios. For example: CBS College Sports is now using Silverlight to stream NCAA events from its 170 partner colleges and university. Blockbuster is replacing Flash with Silverlight for its MovieLink application. And Netflix two weeks ago rolled out its new Instant Watch service using Silverlight. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Experiences Silverlight 2 delivers a cross-browser, cross-platform subset of the .NET Framework, and enables developers to build Rich Internet Applications. Developers can use either VS 2008 or the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects, and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment. Designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the same projects and use a creative tool to sculpt and create rich user experiences. I recently blogged about the nice dev | Go |
| 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.com Community Links |
| ASP .net Template Server Control ... The article shows a great use of Template server controls. In the example you will see how you can create a template server control and have access to all the other asp .net controls enclosed within. Here in the example we are trying to retrieve the values of the controls and restore them at later point. With .net if we design our base controls in right way it can save us thousands of lines of code. | Go |
| Ajax rounded corners control ... There is a very good control in AJAX to make rounded type shape. We can create rounded shape in many design by using Corners property of this control. | Go |
| Authorization in ASP.Net MVC using XML Configuration. ... Doing authorization in a clean way is always tricky, You want a delicate balance between an extreme abstraction and something like 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. | Go |
| Using HoverMenuExtender with ASP.NET ListView to Update, Delete and Insert Records ... In this article, we will explore how to associate a HoverMenuExtender with a ListView control to update and delete records. The Listview control in this sample will also contain the functionality to add new records. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| jQuery Based Ajax.Net library ... jQuery Based Ajax.Net library | Go |
| Tom's Halls - A JavaScript Platform Game Engine ... A 2D platform game engine using JavaScript DOM manipulation and CSS | Go |
| Web User Forms ... User driven runtime dynamic ASP.NET Web Forms | Go |
| Enable Gzip compression in IIS 6.0 for ASP.NET 2.0 websites ... How to enable Gzip compression in IIS6.0 for ASP.NET 2.0 websites. | 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 |
| RFC Architecture for Finance Projects (The Invoicing Part) ... RFC Architecture for Finance Projects (The Invoicing Part) | Go |
| JavaScript Mathematical Expression Evaluator ... A mathematical expression evaluator in pure JavaScript, with support for user defined variables. | 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 |
| 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks ... 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks | Go |
| Beginner's Walk - Web Development ... This Table of Contents is editable by all Silver members and above. What we want you to do is replace the entries in the Table of Contents below with links to articles that represent the entries. | Go |
| UI Object Connector Implementation of Mediator Pattern ... UI Object Connector Implementation of Mediator Pattern | Go |
| FCKEditor SharePoint Integration ... How to integrate FCKEditor with SharePoint. | Go |
| 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 |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| One thing you didnt know about ASP.NET unless youre David Ebbo ... David has an excellent post about a pretty cool ASP.NET feature that you almost certainly dont know about. I had no idea for sure. Check it out. http://blogs.msdn.com/davidebb/archive/2008/11/19/a-hidden-gem-for-control-builder-writers.aspx... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Web User Forms ... Design and Publish custom ASP.NET Web 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 |
| Creating Charts with the Google Chart API ... I've always wondered how the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words" came about. I like to think that it was coined by some mid-level manager
viewing a sales figures report that consisted of metrics from the past 1,000 days. After scanning this long list of numbers, he found, at the
bottom of the page, a line chart that summarized the numbers, and uttered that now well-known adage. Charts and graphs provide a succinct synopsis of
large amounts of data. With charts a person can quickly spot trends, compare different resultsets, or recognize patterns.
There are many ways to create charts in an ASP.NET web page. You can use the classes
in the System.Drawing namespace to programmatically generate charts ; you can use
the Microsoft Office Web Components (OWC) . There are also open-source charting tools and a plethora of third-party components, as well. Microsoft has even entered
the game and introduced Microsoft
Chart Controls for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 .
This article looks at how to use the Google Chart API to create charts. The Google Chart API is a
free service from Google that enables web developers to generate chart images on the fly by creating an <img> element with a
src attribute that points to a URL that includes the chart data, labels, and other information in the querystring. For instance, the
chart on the right is available at the URL http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p&chs=225x150&chd=t:100,30,70,25&chl=Q1|Q2|Q3|Q4&chtt=2008%20Sales%20By%20Quarter .
Read on to learn how to use the Google Chart API in your ASP.NET website!
Read More > Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Creating Charts with the Google Chart API ... I've always wondered how the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words" came about. I like to think that it was coined by some mid-level manager
viewing a sales figures report that consisted of metrics from the past 1,000 days. After scanning this long list of numbers, he found, at the
bottom of the page, a line chart that summarized the numbers, and uttered that now well-known adage. Charts and graphs provide a succinct synopsis of
large amounts of data. With charts a person can quickly spot... 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 |
| Murach`s ASP.NET 3.5 Web Programming with VB 2008 ... Developers, especially beginners, require quality resources to master the essentials of any programming technology. In this review, Anand deeply examines the contents of Anne Boehm's latest book from the house of Murach Publishing and also points out a few suggestions for improvement. Is this a book worth purchasing? Read on and find out. 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 |
| AppCmd Migrate Config and Remove HttpModules ... In some of my Web projects Im using the <remove name=/> tag in web.config section system.web/httpModules . When youre using the appcmd migrate config command not all removed httpModule configurations are copied to the new section below system.webServer . Before: < system.web >
< httpModules >
< remove name ="PassportAuthentication" />
< remove name ="Profile" />
< remove name ="AnonymousIdentification" />
< remove name ="BlockModule" />
</ httpModules >
</ system.web >
.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; }
After:
< system.webServer >
< modules >
< remove name ="Profile" />
< remove name ="AnonymousIdentification" />
</ modules >
</ system.webServer >
.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; }
Why is PassportAuthentication and BlockModule not added to be removed? Well, it is simple to modify your web.config manual, but I would like to know what the difference is.
If youre reading my blog you may have noticed another bug using appcmd . Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Create COOL implementations of Search API 2.0 Beta + Ads ... In case you haven't seen this -
During the keynote at PubCon in Las Vegas we announced Project Silk Road which is a collection of services, including a new version of the Live Search APIs for developer community basically Search API 2.0 Beta + Search Ads pilot.
We are looking for some really cool implementations from the developer community which will be displayed on our website at: http://search.live.com/developers Were looking for as many implementations as possible! Come on team, put your developer skills to use and share your passion about Microsoft technology!
Win a Prize:
All submissions entered by (12am) midnight PST US on Dec 5th 2008 will be eligible for our prize drawing of a $120 gift certificate to the Microsoft Company store.
Please note: All submissions must be on live websites (so we have to be able to navigate to the website or be able to download the application to see it) and must follow our Terms of Use present on Search API and Ads web sites respectively. Drawing will take place on Dec 8th 2008 and the winner will be notified via email by Dec 9th 2008.
Send all links/information about implementations to: AniB@Microsoft.com .
GeekswithBlogs.net
Check out one of the first implementations of the Search API 2.0 Beta at http://geekswithblogs.net
Learn more about: Search API 2.0 (Beta) + Ads pilot
The Live Search API 2.0 Beta enables you to embed as a custom component a flexible and powerful search engine on your sites and applications. With the addition of XML (POX) and JSON formats, as well as the previously supported SOAP API, the Live Search API 2.0 Beta allows you to integrate the power of search using the code and formatting you choose. In addition, some source formats types are also accessible through an OpenSearch-compliant RSS interface.
Step 1: Get an App ID
Go to http://search.live.com/developers to create your AppID which you will use to gain access to all the great search results from Search API 2.0.
Step 2: Select your URI type
When you want to query the HTTP endpoint you first start with an HTTP GET request to the appropriate URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). There are two URIs, one for XML results and one for JSON results: http://api.search.live.net/xml.aspx and http://api.search.live.net/json.aspx respectively.
Both URIs expect at least three required query string parameters: AppID , query , and sources . The AppID query string parameter is a value you get when you sign up as a developer with the Developer Center program ( http://search.live.com/developers ). The query value will be the query you want the API to execute for you, and the sources value indicates which Live Search Engine indexes you want the query to be run against.
Step 3: Select your source type
The following are the source types supported by the current release of the Search API 2.0 Beta.
Source
Description
web
Searches for web content
image
Searches for images on the web
news
Searches news stories
instantanswer
Searches Encarta online
spell
Searches Encarta dictionary for spelling suggestions
phonebook
Searches phonebook entries
relatedsearch
Returns the query strings most similar to yours
Step 4: Select your front end
RIA - Silverlight
Silverlight is a framework from Microsoft that enables developers to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), using the same .NET framework and programming languages they are familiar with using in their typical .NET applications. Because of its strong integration with browsers, as well as with images and other media, it is a robust and very interesting client for building applications using the Live Search API 2.0 Beta.
Like JSON applications that live in the browser, Silverlight applications cant normally invoke services (raw HTTP or SOAP) on domains other than the domain where the Silverlight application is downloaded from. But because Live Search API 2.0 beta publishes a crossdomain.xml policy file at the root | Go |
| Filter as you type and custom pager for the grid with client binding ... I've made small demo on how to filter as you type client bound grid with custom pager:
You can use the grid client-side DataBinding event to build your own filter expression:
and the grid client-side DataBound event to customize your already defined pager template:
[Live | 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 |
| eBook on ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 First Draft ... After much pain, agony, cussing, and fussing, I have shipped off the
first draft of an eBook on ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 to Wiley/Wrox.
In a moment of weakness foolishness back in September, I told Jim Minatel
at Wiley that I would write an eBook on the new features in ASP.NET 3.5
Service Pack 1. I wasn't able to start until October. I kinda
mistakenly glossed over the fact that I was speaking at VSLive in Last
Vegas, spent a week going through Ohio to do 7 talks, got sick for... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| A. 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.... 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 |
| RADactive I-Load 2008.R2 Image Upload Web Control ... RADactive I-Load is an ASP.NET web control (1.1, 2.0 and 3.5 compatible) which basically:Allows the final user to upload, crop, resize and rotate/flip images which must respect all the constraints of width, height, aspect ratio, file size and format that you need.Can automatically generate thumbnails (sometimes many) from the original uploaded image to serve various needs (preview, zoom, icons, etc).I-Load is cross-browser and does not require any client side software download !http://www.radactive.com/en/Products/ILoad/Image_Resize_Crop_Upload.aspx... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Configurable indentation for NHaml ... NHaml, an alternative view engine for ASP.NET MVC written by Andrew Peters, uses indentation instead of opening and closing tags to identify code blocks. If you never saw something written in NHaml here is taste of it. If you want to loop over a list and put it inside a unordered list with webform you would write: <div class="list">
<ul>
<%foreach (var route in ViewData.Model) { %>
<li><%= route.Name %></li>
<% } %>
</ul>
</div>
... 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 |
| Training courseware for ASP.NET AJAX ... Among all the big announcements we had over the past couple of weeks you might have missed that we now have a brand new 800-page training courseware for ASP.NET AJAX . This is a step-by-step tutorial that covers all RadControls from the very basics to the more advanced topics. The learning guide includes tons of how-to's, tips and tricks, code samples and a real-life online exam application (called ActiveSkill) that you can build as you cover the chapters.
The courseware is available to everyone for free download from our website:
PDF (51MB)
PDF with all code samples and Visual Studio projects (97MB)
Special thanks go to the whole team at Falafel Software for spending a lot of efforts on making this book the best RadControls self-paced training resource.
We continue to improve all support resources for all Telerik products and your feedback will be very welcome. Let us know what materials (demos, tutorials, samples, documentations, KBs, etc) you need and we will do our best to provide them.
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Dynamic Data Templates in ASP.NET 3.5 ... Gayani gives an introduction to Dynamic Data Templates in ASP.NET 3.5 and explains how one can save a great deal of time and effort when building data-driven web sites by using them... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| ASP.NET MVC project and TFS Team build issue ... I was trying to include my ASP.NET MVC project in a TFS team build today but the build failed so I've investigated this issue and thought it will be helpful to share it with the community. To get the MVC project build successfully with the team build make sure of the following: - Your build server has the WebApplication targets file located in <Program Files> \MSBuild\Microsoft\Visual Studio\v9.0\WebApplications , if not . copy this file from your development machine to the same path in the build server. - You have installed ASP.NET MVC framework in the Build server , this is the most important step otherwise you application will not build successfully in the team build you may faces some errors like : error CS0234: The type or namespace name 'Mvc' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Web' (are you missing an assembly reference?) or Controllers\RuleController.cs(31,10): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'AcceptVerbs' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) ** Update This will work with Beta version of ASP.NET MVC since the installation register the MVC assembly in GAC. For preview versions , you can reference the DLL from your build project <AdditionalReferencePath Include="C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4\Assemblies" /> Thanks ! | Go |
| One thing you didn’t know about ASP.NET unless you’re David Ebbo ... David has an excellent post about a pretty cool ASP.NET feature that you almost certainly don’t know about. I had no idea for sure. Check it out. http://blogs.msdn.com/davidebb/archive/2008/11/19/a-hidden-gem-for-control-builder-writers.aspx | Go |
| Tip#25: Did you know... You can have canonical URLs and Redirects with IIS 7.0 ... Canonical URLs help you to make your links Search Engine Optimized (SEO). For human it is easy to understand that http://www.live.com is same as http://live.com . But many search engines will not make this assumption and treat them as two separate entries. This will split the rankings among them and lower the overall relevance of the site. In IIS7.0 you can use URL Rewrite to solve this problem. The following rule when added in the "Web.config" file in the root of your web site will automatically...(read more ) | Go |
| Process and Thread Identity in ASP.NET – A Practical Approach ... The following scenarios establish the way the process identity and the thread identity are defined while building asp.net websites and publishing using the IIS webserver. IIS supports the following authentication types : · Anonymous – In this case the default credentials are of the IUSR_Machinename user . · Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) : This can either use NTLM challenge/Response or can be configured to use Kerberos. However for this discussion we will not delve into those...(read more ) | Go |
| My 4th Amazon.com order has shipped ... my order at Amazon.com finally shipped, this book is fresh from the oven and fresh from the C# "Chef", Anders Hejlsberg, the language’s architect, and his colleagues, Mads Torgersen, Scott Wiltamuth, and Peter Golde. So why i call it fresh from the oven? because it is, the book is published on October 18, 2008, yes, last saturday when most of you still enjoying the week end
More info about the book goes here .
Let's back to basic, learn the fundamental to hardening my foundation. Can't wait to see new C# 4.0. | Go |
| GmailSync on codeplex ... By far the most popular tool that I published is GmailSync which was also features on Lifehacker . But as I get busier in other projects , it is getting difficult to put more effort into it. Its been a while since I put the last update so I've decided to upload the sources hoping that I can find someone to lead on this.
You can download the binaries and check out the sources from the following url. As the source code is not the best I've written so I'm willing to work with anyone who is interested.
http://www.codeplex.com/gmailsync | Go |
| Programmers and typists ... The inimitable Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame (or is it Stack Overflow fame now?) recently blogged about the importance of typing skills for developers. In typical smackdown style, he posited that "coding is just typing". Jimmy Bogard disagreed , saying that the number of lines of code typed per day is actually quite small, and the productivity difference for typing that much code is quite negligable. I happen to agree with both of them. What neither discussed is that as a developer, I type a hell of a lot more than just code . I type emails. I type Word documents. I submit questions to Stack Overflow . I type search terms into Google and URLs into the browser. I Twitter . My ability to do all of those things efficiently is affected by how well I type, and all of those things are critically important to doing my job. So while typing fast may not be hugely important for being a coder , it is hugely important for being a developer . I type all damn day, whether or not I'm coding that day. There's another important point that I think needs to be stressed - good typing technique can help avoid repetitive stress injuries . I'm pretty convinced that my lack of RSI problems is at least in part due to good typing technique imparted by my 7th grade typing teacher. Whenever I feel a glimmer of discomfort in my hands, I can almost always attribute it to either a) too much mousing (know thy keyboard shortcuts) or b) falling back into sloppy typing technique (my great failing is one-handed modifier action - e.g. ctrl-w with one hand instead of two). Over the years I've known people that literally could not work at a computer any more due to RSI problems. Now if THAT isn't a terrifying thought that keeps your hands glued to your home keys... | Go |
| Comparing XML Files with Beyond Compare 3...Brilliant ... I bought a new laptop and was loading it with the tools I use every day. When it came to installing one of my favorites, Beyond Compare 2, I thought I'd check the Scooter web site to see if I had the latest version. I was happy to see they now had a version 3 with plenty of new features . I immediately reached for my credit card to buy a license. Folks, this is honestly one of the tools I don't even hesitate paying for...it's that good, and that invaluable. I don't work for them, I'm just a very happy customer. The base tool itself is great, but I was really thrilled when I followed the link on the Download page to Additional file format downloads for version 3 . There I found something I've been looking for years...and in fact a while ago had written a plug-in for BC2 to do...the ability to compare Tidied XML. How many times have you tried to compare two dense XML files to find out their differences only to be faced with a block of differences that looks like this: Beyond Compare notices that there are differences in there somewhere, but can't really show you where with any precision. Further inspection is going to be needed, and forget merging selected changes over from one side to the other. If you install the XML Tidied and XML tidied with attributes sorted file formats, you can now tell Beyond Compare to tidy up your documents, putting each attribute on its own line, so the differences stand out. You can now see exactly which attributes differ. Absolutely brilliant. This is a fantastic feature that's already saved me a bunch of time. I see there is a similar add-in for HTML tidied files that also will come in handy. A couple of other features in Beyond Compare that I've come to rely on over the years: Beyond Compare has great "low-friction" integration with Windows Explorer. For example to compare two files, you just right click on one file and choose "Select Left Side For Compare", then right click on the other file and say "Compare to {file...}". This works for folders too. Beyond Compare has great FTP integration. I use it to deploy changed files to FTP sites very painlessly. I also see it supports doing 3-way merging from most version control systems. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm going to see how hard it is to plug into TFS. If anyone has pointers on how to set this up, let me know. They have a 30 day trial, so if you aren't so sure, you can give it a try for a while. Highly recommended. | Go |
| Open Source alternatives in .NET for building RESTful services ... Usually all my posts about REST are about WCF or mention this technology in some parts. Today, I decided to take a different approach and discuss some of the projects available today for building REST services, Resourceful and Dream framework (Both available for mono as well).It is worth mentioning however that the WCF team has made an excellent work introducing the new Web Model in .NET 3.5, it has definitively helped a lot to adopt this kind of service in the .NET platform. In my opinion, there are still some aspects in WCF that could be improved,
WCF services are hard to unit test. It is possible but requires some extra work. I already mentioned some techniques based on integration tests and mocks in this post "Unit tests for WCF"
Poor support for defining multiple resource representations/formats within a single operation definition.
Any aspect you would like to add here ?
Ok, I will try now to summarize some of available features or implementation details in these two projects.
Resourceful
Service definitions are totally imperative. Whereas a service definition (and operations) in WCF is made declaratively through attributes (annotating classes with WCF attributes), the service definition in Resourceful is totally imperative, it has to be made through several lines of code.
LocalApplicationDescription app = new LocalApplicationDescription ();
// get-user
LocalApplicationMethod getUser = app.NewMethod("getUser" , HttpMethod .Get, _usersController.GetUser);
getUser.NewResponseRepresentation(MediaType .ApplicationXml);
getUser.NewResponseRepresentation(MediaType .ApplicationExWwwFormUrlencoded);
ApplicationResource userResource = app.NewResource("users/{username}" , new TemplateParameter ("username" , "xsd:string" ));
app.Bind(userResource, getUser);
The developer has to perform two things, first define the operation itself specifying a friendly name along with the supported Http methods and resource representations and afterwards, create a resource mapping ("users/{username}" in this case). {username} is a URI template hole, equivalent to the Uri Templates in WCF.
The method signature for the NewMethod is the following,
NewMethod(string id, string name,Action <IRepresentationContext > handler)
As you can see, the last argument is a delegate that points to the operation implementation. IRepresentationContext is equivalent to the WebOperationContext class in WCF, it contains all the runtime context settings that a service can use. This actually better than WCF because IRepresentationContext can be mocked for unit tests.
In the example above, _usersController is a simple class with the service implementation (This separation of concerns definitively helps a lot for unit testing). Some code for the GetUser operation implementation looks as follow,
public void GetUser(IRepresentationContext context)
{
string username = context.TemplateParameters["username" ];
UserAccount user = this .Engine.FindUser(username);
if (user == null )
{
this .RenderStatus(context, HttpStatus .NotFound);
return ;
}
Support for WADL. The framework uses the service definition (the LocalApplicationDescription class in the example above) to publish all the available operations in the service.
Support for multiple resource representations in a single operation. This is possible because the framework does not support the concept of channels (Or aspects) that can be plugged into the service to perform additional work, all the translation must be done in the operation implementation itself. The service operation can only get the resource representation as an stream from the IRepresentationContext (Same thing can be done in WCF if the input parameter for the operation method is an stream or a message),
public void CreateUser(IRepresentationContext context)
{
if (context.Request.MediaType != MediaType .ApplicationXml)
{
this .RenderStatu | Go |
| So what have we been up to lately at Speak With Me? ... I noticed that this week I got five emails from friends asking "So what's been going on?" or something to that effect! I figured this would be the easiest way to tell everyone! Our economy has been a mess... We're still raising and have been able to raise money. We're on track for a really awesome product ready towards the tail end of next year. I hope it doesn't slip! If you know me or attended the United Cerbral Palsy Foundation Charity event in Philadelphia, you might have an inkling of what the first product might be. If you don't know me then know that the first product is something for your car. But Americans aren't buying more cars. That's okay, they still have their current cars, they can put this into them! The current system has been in my car for 3.5 years and 60,000 miles. Tested in the rain in Seattle while going through a tunnel, tested on the highways of California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. I did distraction testing during an aggressive driving course with some friends & some of our investors. Prior to this, the usability tests showed a <1% difference in lap times between using the system while driving and not. We demonstrated for real, that using Speak With Me's system while driving causes next to no distraction. How? Because the car behind me had trouble keeping up with me . Imagine his surprise when discovering I always had the music I wanted playing, and that my car did not have two turbos. (It does have a clutch-type 100% locking LSD which really helped my corner exit speeds, and the suspension is aligned and corner balanced). What about those swanky iPhones, the new Android phones, the new Blackberry Bold & Storm, and the Windows Mobile smartphones? And Google came out with it's voice app this week? Isn't that a competitor? The speech apps that are out there for mobile phones are using speech recognizers with complex language models. They work - kinda sorta - well they think about working. Are they competitors? Kinda, sorta, but not entirely. As you can see from this review of Google's voice search added to their mobile app by John Markoff, the NY Times reporter and author of the fabulous book, What The Dormouse Said, speech recognizers on their own, still aren't up to the task. Speak With Me is different. We help the recognizer understand context. Think of it as a debriefing session from your assistant before you go on stage. That's how we're more accurate. But gosh darn it, why haven't you shipped anything yet so we can try it out? Because half baked cookies are kinda mushy. We could get a phone app out faster, but it would sacrifice the time to market of our other key product which is in the GPS market. The two products share some similarities, but have some differences too. One has the data on the device, one has the data in a cloud. So we made a tough decision this week, to stay on track with the GPS product, and hold off on the smartphone related products till we're a bit further along with the GPS product. Back in 2005 when you first read about us from Robert Scoble's Blog or Techcrunch , there were very few devices capable of running our software in the mobile and embedded space. Today there are tons, and everyone - not just Speak With Me , is scrambling to make the best use of the computing power we have today to give everyone fabulous software for their mobile devices. The phone today is like the PC world in the early eighties, I agree with Steve Ballmer on that point. It is interesting how the internet has really led to much faster demand creation. What if the New York Times had an article about Xerox PARC in the seventies - would we have all had the GUI before the early eighties? I'm curious and I think I'll ask John Markoff and Doug Englebart that question directly in a couple weeks. SRI's doing a 40th anniversary event of the mother of all demos - on December 9th. Doug as you may or may not know, was the inventor of the mouse. Just think, he demoed in 1968 - what we as the public di | Go |
