| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Combining JQuery Form Validation and Ajax Submission with ASP.NET ... Using JQuery Form Validation and Ajax Submission with ASP.NET | Go |
| Login Status Control in ASP.NET 3.5 ... This article shows how to use LoginStatus control in ASP.NET 3.5. | Go |
| Baking requirements - Developing with raw ingredients is waste ... have learned an important lesson from my combined experiences at all the places I've worked. That is: raw requirements cause waste. A term I've used (and have heard others use) is that requirements are either "baked" or "not baked". For a development team to plan an iteration, or a scope of delivery, the requirements need to be baked. If we pull the development team into a planning session, we ensure the requirements are fully baked before the meeting. Developers will be asking specific questions about the details of the requirements, and answers need to be readily available. | Go |
| Developer Poetry Series: SharePoint How Sad Are We ... SharePoint SharePoint how sad are we
Your marketing promise me everything under the sun & as far as my eyes can see
A hidden cost, a nasty toss, a huge 5 year loss
Go hire a whole team, 3rd party pugs-ins, SharePoint consultants with nothing BUT cost | Go |
| Developer Poetry Series: SharePoint How Sad Are We
... SharePoint SharePoint how sad are we
Your marketing promise me everything under the sun as far as my eyes can see
A hidden cost, a nasty toss, a huge 5 year loss
Go hire a whole team, 3rd party pugs-ings, which ends up to very high cost | Go |
| twilio: Web Service API for making and receiving phone calls ... Turn your Web App into an IVR in minutes. | Go |
| All application UI have common logics like navigating to the next UI, ... All application UI have common logics like navigating to the next UI, state management and work flow. By coding all the above three logic in the code itself you tie up all the three aspects with a specific UI type like windows and web. This article will discuss how we can use UIP to achieve the UI portability. | Go |
| Deploy ASP.NET MVC App on Windows XP (IIS 5.1) ... Deploying ASP.NET MVC application on Windows XP is definitely not easy; there are a lot of settings that need to be tuned. Not only that the application must be changed as well. | Go |
| Toggle Items in CheckBoxList using jQuery ... nice small client side script for toggling the state of your checkboxList control. | Go |
| Css Caching and Compression with HttpModule for ASP.NET ... Yoann. B is talking about Css Caching and Compression with HttpModule for ASP.NET.
Check it out. | Go |
| Programming Asp.Net MVC by O'Reilly ... Well, it is about time we (Tim, Chris and myself) actually made this announcement. We will be doing a MVC book with O'Reilly titled 'Programming MVC'. We are super excited and super pumped to get this out the door. All three of us are huge fans of the MVC framework and know that this is framework going to be smashing success. | Go |
| 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 |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| Build a Shopping Cart in ASP.NET - NETTUTS | Go |
| David Ebbo's blog : ProcessGeneratedCode: A hidden gem for Control Builder writers | Go |
| Creating Charts with the Google Chart API (using ASP.NET) | Go |
| ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know - developerFusion - the global developer community | Go |
| Tracking User Activity | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 ... Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery . Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use. Steps to Enable jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 To enable intellisense completion for jQuery within VS you'll want to follow three steps: Step 1: Install VS 2008 SP1 VS 2008 SP1 adds richer JavaScript intellisense support to Visual Studio, and adds code completion support for a broad range of JavaScript libraries. You can download VS 2008 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 here . Step 2: Install VS 2008 Patch KB958502 to Support "-vsdoc.js" Intellisense Files Two weeks ago we shipped a patch that you can apply to VS 2008 SP1 and VWD 2008 Express SP1 that causes Visual Studio to check for the presence of an optional "-vsdoc.js" file when a JavaScript library is referenced, and if present to use this to drive the JavaScript intellisense engine. These annotated "-vsdoc.js" files can include XML comments that provide help documentation for JavaScript methods, as well as additional code intellisense hints for dynamic JavaScript signatures that cannot automatically be inferred. You can learn more about this patch here . You can download it for free here . Step 3: Download the jQuery-vsdoc.js file We've worked with the jQuery team to put together a jQuery-vsdoc.js file that provides help comments and support for JavaScript intellisense on chained jQuery selector methods. You can download both jQuery and the jQuery-vsdoc file from the official download page on the jQuery.com site: Save the jquery-vsdoc.js file next to your jquery.js file in your project (and make sure its naming prefix matches the jquery file name): You can then reference the standard jquery file with an html <script/> element like so: Or alternatively reference it using the <asp:scriptmanager/> control, or by adding a /// <reference/> comment at the top of a standalone .js file. When you do this VS will now look for a -vsdoc.js file in the same directory as the script file you are referencing, and if found will use it for help and intellisense. The annotated For example, we could use jQuery to make a JSON based get request, and get intellisense for the method (hanging off of $.): As well as help/intellisense for the $.getJSON() method's parameters: The intellisense will continue to work if you nest a callback function within the method call. For example, we might want to iterate over each JSON object returned from the server: And for each of the items we could execute another nested callback function: We could use the each callback function to dynamically append a new image to a list (the image src attribute will point to the URL of the returned JSON media image): And on each dynamically created image we could wire-up a click event handler so that when it is pressed it will disappear via an animation: Notice how the jQuery intellisense works cleanly at each level of our code. JavaScript Intellisense Tips and Tricks Jeff King from the Web Tools team wrote up a great post earlier this week that answers a number of common questions about how JavaScript intellisense works with VS 2008. I highly recommend reading it. One trick he talks about which I'll show here is a technique you can use when you want to have JavaScript intellisense work within user-controls/partials (.ascx files). Often you don't want to include a JavaScript library <script src=""/> reference within these files, and instead have this live on the master page or content page the user control is used within. The problem of course when you do this is that by default VS has no way of knowing that this script is available within the user control - and so won't provide intellisense of it for you | Go |
| 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| XML DataSource control in ASP.NET 3.5 ... In this article I am going to discuss how to use XmlDataSource control in ASP.NET 3.5 | Go |
| Tracking User Activity ... Scott Mitchell talks about tracking user activity in web applications. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Format Currency using Javascript ... Format numbers to currency using Javascript | Go |
| Access Parent Control's Method from a Child Control ... Simple technique to access parent page and controls method from a child control | Go |
| 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 dynamically load images in Crystal Reports using Visual Studio 2005 ... How to dynamically load images in Crystal Reports in ASP.NET, using the TypedDataSet. | 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 |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Combining JQuery Form Validation and Ajax Submission with ASP.NET ... As I mentioned before, Im really excited that were shipping jQuery with ASP.NET MVC and with Visual Studio moving forward. Just recently, we issued a patch that enables jQuery Intellisense to work in Visual Studio 2008. But if youre new to jQuery, you might sit down at your desk ready to take on the web with your knew found JavaScript light saber, only to stare blankly at an empty screen asking yourself, Is this it? See, as exciting and cool as jQuery is, its really the vast array of plugins that... 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 |
| Virtual TechDays November 2008 ... Virtual TechDays is our online technology forum for delivering sessions around ASP.NET, Silverlight and other technologies. The previous 2 virtual tech days have been hugely successful owing to the ease of delivery and attending it.
There are sessions around ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, Silverlight Toolkit, ASP.NET for Mobile etc., For a detailed agenda and registration, please visit http://www.virtualtechdays.com/
Cheers!!!... 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 |
| New Version of Error Logging Modules and Handlers (ELMAH) Available ... ELMAH is a free, open-source library created by Atif Aziz for logging errors that occur in an ASP.NET application. I've written about ELMAH many times before ; its one of the first things I setup when creating a new ASP.NET application. A new version - ELMAH 1.0 BETA 3 - was recently released.
With just a few minutes of setup and configuration you can have ELMAH automatically log unhandled exceptions to a number of different data stores - SQL Server, Oracle, a Microsoft Access database, an XML file, to an e-mail address, and so on. You can also write code to proactively record an error via the ELMAH library. Granted, ASP.NET provides some built-in support for logging errors via its health monitoring system , butELMAH is a simpler version of the health monitoring system that focuses specifically on error logging and is easier to configure. It also works in ASP.NET 1.x applications, whereas health monitoring is only available in ASP.NET 2.0 and up. What's more, ELMAH provides a built-in web page and RSS support for viewing error information.
So, what's new in ELMAH 1.0 BETA 3? The project page and issue tracker has the full set of details, but in a nutshell here are the enhancements that most interest me:
Three new error logging sources: Oracle, Microsoft Access, and VistaDB.
Log errors in AJAX applications.
Addition of an ErrorLogDataSourceAdapter, which you can use with the ObjectDataSource to declaratively work with the error log details from an ASP.NET page.
It is imperative that every web application in production log errors and report those errors to the development team. ELMAH offers this important functionality and can be setup, configured, and customized within a few minutes. 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 Tale of Two Page Hits ... I keep falling into this trap. If you see the phenomenon of a page being hit twice on a single request, read the following:
Page Events Raised Twice
Conversion to Web Application Project Resets AutoEventWireup
In the same vein: Session_Start or Session_OnStart?.... 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 |
| 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 |
| How to get ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 to run with .NET SP1 ... As you probably know by now (i.e. from Phill's blog), however both Routing and Abstractions are. MVC Preview 4, however, has its own version of both assemblies. In order to get MVC to use the new RTM bits of both assemblies (and avoid weird side-by-side errors), you just need to add the following binding redirect to the web.config file: <runtime>
<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity... 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 |
| Prof. PowerShell: Reading Assignment ... My secret for learning Powershell? Check out these blogs.... 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 |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| LINQ to XML and LINQ to Objects Basic Sample ... In this post I will show how to use LINQ to XML and LINQ to Objects, very basic example with sample code . First I have created a XML file which contains the Customer Details, as given below <? xml version = "1.0 " encoding = "utf-8 " ?> < customers > < customer > < customerid > ALFKI</ customerid > < city > Berlin</ city > < age > 20</ age > </ customer > < customer > < customerid > BONAP</ customerid > < city > Marseille</ city > < age > 21</ age > </ customer > < customer > < customerid > CONSH</ customerid > < city > London</ city > < age > 30</ age > </ customer > < customer > < customerid > EASTC</ customerid > < city > London</ city > < age > 34</ age > </ customer > < customer > < customerid > FRANS</ customerid > < city > Torino</ city > < age > 35</ age > </ customer > < customer > < customerid > LONEP</ customerid > < city > Portland</ city > < age > 40</ age > </ customer > < customer > < customerid > NORTS</ customerid > < city > London</ city > < age > 25</ age > </ customer > < customer > < customerid > THEBI</ customerid > < city > Portland</ city > < age > 36</ age > </ customer > </ customers > I have also created a class with the same properties which I have given in the XML document above, and populating the same data, public class Customer
{
public string CustomerID { get ; set ; }
public string City { get ; set ; }
public int Age { get ; set ; }
public static IEnumerable <Customer > CreateCustomers()
{
return new List <Customer >
{
new Customer { CustomerID = "ALFKI" , City = "Berlin" , Age=20 },
new Customer { CustomerID = "BONAP" , City = "Marseille" , Age=21},
new Customer { CustomerID = "CONSH" , City = "London" , Age=30 },
new Customer { CustomerID = "EASTC" , City = "London" , Age=34 },
new Customer { CustomerID = "FRANS" , City = "Torino" , Age=35 },
new Customer { CustomerID = "LONEP" , City = "Portland" , Age=40 },
new Customer { CustomerID = "NORTS" , City = "London" , Age=25 },
new Customer { CustomerID = "THEBI" , City = "Portland" , Age=26 }
};
}
}
Now I have got the Object ready to query using LINQ with the Same data which I have in my XML Document.
Note above how I'm using the new "Automatic Proper | Go |
| Putting more than one behavior on one element ... Microsoft Ajax has the interesting ability to combine more than one component onto a single element. In the previous talk, I alluded to this possibility and one of the commenters (Tiamat) asked me to show how this is done. Here is an example that combines the new EditInPlace behavior I showed yesterday with an AutoComplete and a Watermark from the Ajax Control Toolkit: <% @ Page Language ="C#" %>
<% @ Register Assembly ="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace ="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix ="act" %>
<! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
< html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head runat ="server">
< title > Many behaviors on a textbox</ title >
< link href ="template.css" rel ="stylesheet" type ="text/css" />
</ head >
< body >
< form id ="form1" runat ="server">
< act : ToolkitScriptManager runat ="server" ID ="sm1" EnablePartialRendering ="false">
< Scripts >
< asp : ScriptReference Path ="~/Script/EditInPlace.js" />
</ Scripts >
</ act : ToolkitScriptManager >
< script type ="text/javascript">
Sys.Application.add_init(function () {
$create(Bleroy.Sample.EditInPlace, { cssClass: "editInPlace" },
{}, {}, $get('<%= tb1.ClientID %>' ));
});
</ script >
< div >
< h1 > Many behaviors on a textbox</ h1 >
< asp : TextBox runat ="server" ID ="tb1" />
< act : TextBoxWatermarkExtender runat ="server"
TargetControlID ="tb1" WatermarkText ="Click me..."/>
< act : AutoCompleteExtender runat ="server"
TargetControlID ="tb1"
ServicePath ="Words.asmx" ServiceMethod ="GetWords"
BehaviorID ="AutoCompleteEx"
ID ="autoComplete1"
MinimumPrefixLength ="3"
CompletionInterval ="500"
EnableCaching ="true"
CompletionSetCount ="20"
CompletionListCssClass = "autocomplete_completionListElement"
CompletionListItemCssClass ="autocomplete_listItem"
CompletionListHighlightedItemCssClass = "autocomplete_highlightedListItem"
DelimiterCharacters =";, :"
ShowOnlyCurrentWordInCompletionListItem ="true" >
< Animations >
< OnShow >
< Sequence >
< OpacityAction Opacity ="0" />
< HideAction Visible ="true" />
< FadeIn />
</ Sequence >
</ OnShow >
< OnHide >
< FadeOut />
</ OnHide >
</ Animations >
</ act : AutoCompleteExtender >
</ div >
</ form >
</ body >
</ html >
The sample page here is using the extenders that the toolkit provides to instantiate the AutoComplete and Watermark behaviors but you really could include the script references and $create yourself. The edit in place behavior doesn’t have an associated server-side extender (but it would be quite easy to build one) so I’m just including the script and calling $create from client script. If you run this sample, you’ll see something like this:
If you view source in the browser, you’ll see that the code that the extender generates for the browser to run isn’t magical in any way, it’s just script tags and $create like we’d do manually.
One thing to note is that I hit a bug in the Toolkit while building that sample: AutoComplete assumes the element it attaches to is visible when it calls focus on it, which is usually OK but fails here when used with the edit in place behavior. I fixed this bug by surrounding the focus call with a try/catch block. A build of the toolkit with this fix is included in the zip file for this sample.
Bottom line is that more than one behavior on a single tag works great and makes for a formidable composition model.
Download the code for this sample:
http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/ManyBehaviors.zip | Go |
| Seadragon & Deep Zoom ... I stumbled upon this today and definitely want to play with this further when I have time.... SeaDragon Ajax http://livelabs.com/seadragon/ "The aim of Seadragon is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays all the way down to cell phones, so that graphics and photos are smoothly browsed, regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network." Deep Zoom Composer http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=457b17b7-52bf-4bda-87a3-fa8a4673f8bf&displaylang=en "...a tool to allow the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature currently being previewed in Silverlight 2. The new Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight allows users to see images on the Web like they never have before. The smooth in-place zooming and panning that Deep Zoom allows is a true advancement and raises the bar on what image viewing should be. High resolution images need to be prepared for use with Deep Zoom and this tool allows the user to create Deep Zoom composition files that control the zooming experience and then export all the necessary files for deployment with Silverlight 2." | Go |
| Book Review: ASP.NET Application Architecture ... Amazon.com: ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design: Vivek Thakur: Books ISBN : 1847195504 ISBN-13 : 9781847195500
Although this books title states the book is for ASP.NET 3.5 application architecture and design, you will be able to take these concepts well beyond ASP.NET. The concepts and technics that this author conveys can be used for all Windows .NET development. The author starts out explaining basic 1 tier architecture and eventually graduates you to a five tier architecture. The book covers ER diagrams, domain modeling, common design patterns, SOA, WCF and even database design. This book is a good starter book for those of you that want to move out of the developer role and start learning about basic principals in applications design. There is only one downside the book and that is the formatting of the code samples. There seems to be an issue with the spacing and tabs (at least in the book). Other than that it is a good read. | Go |
| Using jQuery with ASP .NET AJAX to create a cascading CheckBoxList ... Unless you've been living under a rock you know that Microsoft has recently partnered with jQuery and will be shipping jQuery with future versions of Visual Studio. When the announcement was made I didn't know much about jQuery, how it would work with ASP .NET AJAX, or how it would interface with Visual Studio. I decided to do some research to fill in those gaps and then apply what I learnt by creating a very basic cascading CheckBoxList.After I learnt jQuery (I read jQuery in Action -- and highly recommend it) and set up VS2008; building the app was very natural and required very few lines of code. Sufficed to say I’ve become a fan of jQuery and will be using it going forward for all my JavaScripting.
Environment Setup
Ok, first things first. The environment needs to be setup to use jQuery and the jQuery IntelliSense.
Install the VS2008 patch to enable the jQuery IntelliSense here
Download jQuery here and the jQuery IntelliSense here
Create a scripts folder under the project and add both the jQuery and jQuery IntelliSense files to it
Creating the App
The app consists of two files: a web form that contains the HTML and jQuery code, and an Ajax-enabled WCF web service that returns JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) that will be rendered client side. Figure 1 - Cascading CheckBoxList (Don't judge a book by its cover..I know it looks horrible!)
The Wiring
To start, create a new web form and place a ScriptManager on the page. Adding the ScriptManager will register the ASP .NET AJAX library for the page and allow the app to make web service calls. The app also needs to use jQuery so add a new ScriptReference to the ScriptManager and set the path to the jQuery file. Figure 2 - Hooking up jQuery
The Markup
We’ll need two divs, with unique ids (I used chklstSelectLeauge and chklstSelectTeam), to hold the checkboxes. The first div will have two static checkboxes that can be added at design time. The second div’s checkboxes will be added by passing the div to a jQuery function that will load it with the JSON returned from the web service. Figure 3 - Required HTML
That’s the entire HTML so it’s time for the fun stuff.
The jQuery
The benefit of using jQuery is that we’re able to embrace “Unobtrusive JavaScript” which means the behavior is separated from the structure. In order to achieve this paradigm the JavaScript needs to run after all the DOM elements on the page are loaded. Because we are using ASP .NET AJAX we’ll need to use its pageLoad() event instead of jQuery’s ready() event.
Building the cascading CheckBoxList breaks down into three smaller problems:
Finding the checked league checkboxes
Calling the web service
Creating the team checkboxes
Let’s tackle these problems one at a time.
In order to find the checked league checkboxes we need to find all checkboxes under the div, iterate through them to find which ones are checked, and maintain a list of checked values. Well, that’s the traditional JavaScript way of solving the problem. The beauty of jQuery is that we can use a selector to do most of the work for us. Here is the code: Figure 4 - Selecting checked checkboxes
The above jQuery selector finds all checked checkboxes that are contained in the specified div. It then applies a function that will run for each item in the set of checkboxes. This function appends, using Sys.StringBuilder which doesn’t suffer from the inefficiencies of string concatenation, the checkbox’s value to our list of values.
Now the app knows which leagues have been selected but when should we call this function? It makes sense to call it whenever we check or uncheck a league checkbox. jQuery makes that a breeze: Figure 5 - Adding a click event
The click event needs to be set as soon as the page finishes loading so the code above goes in the pageLoad() function.
The next mini-problem is to call the web service. We’ll see the web service later but for now trust me that the following code is all you need t | Go |
| New utility for dealing with off-screen apps - Front And Center! ... From time to time I find myself faced with a really annoying problem - a Windows application that has positioned itself offscreen. This usually happens for one of two reasons:
A bug in the software. Sometimes things go terribly wrong, and the application, for lack of a better phrase, flips out. I just had this happen last week with Firefox - it would end up above and to the left of my screen (might have been a script or add-in, I'm not sure). Another common cause is an application that writes bogus data when trying to remember its screen position for the next time it's launched. Close it and relaunch, and bang, it's off-screen.
Remote Desktop'ing into my multi-monitor desktop from my laptop. In that case, everything that was on the second monitor suddenly becomes off screen, and I need to move it back to the primary monitor in order to interact with it.
Now, Windows does provide a way to deal with this problem - by right-clicking on the item in the task bar, selecting Move, and using the keyboard (nicely described here ). It works, but I always find it to be clunky and a bit flaky (sometimes it take a lot of keyboarding in just the right way to get the app to pop on screen). So I took a couple of hours and hacked together my own solution to the problem - a utility called "Front and Center!"
You can see a screen shot of the app here (I tried to embed the image in this post, but for some reason its not working, not sure why). Hopefully it's pretty apparent what's going on. The app enumerates all the top level windows and lists those that are offscreen, along with their coordinates and size. Highlight it and click "Front and Center!" and it will move the app to your primary monitor.
The app requires at least the .NET Framework 2.0 be installed. The app itself requires no installation - just unzip and run.
I hacked this together pretty quick, so I'm sure it has problems. I've only tested with my standard ("center and right") dual monitor setup on Vista - I may very well have done something dumb that causes problems for other configs. Drop me a line if you have problems or ideas for improvement.
You can download it here . | Go |
| The Illusion of Persistence: Saving Test Data ... I recently introduced the BookRepository , which is a set of
a few classes designed generated fake data. The idea is that if you are writing
a test or a demo and just need some data objects and don’t want to have to
worry about the ins and outs of a real persistence layer – then the
BookRepository is just for you.
While displaying read-only fake data is useful, what if you
want to simulate fake persistence as well? In a demo I am working on that
implements the Live Form Ajax pattern, I needed a way to at least create
illusion of persistence.
Adding Persistence
The repository class already includes methods for GetByID,
Insert, Update and Delete. The first iteration just had stubs that called
System.Diagnositcs.Debug.WriteLine so that you had a place to add a breakpoint
during testing. All that I needed to do was add some code that would “do
something” to persist the objects without a database.
The solution that seems to work well is to add a Hashtable
into a Cache entry. Objects IDs are used as the keys in the Hashtable and the
objects themselves are loaded into the value. To handle the grunt work of this
interaction I create a new class: CacheMockPersistence.
CacheMockPersistence
The CacheMockPersistence class is a simple class and also
features methods named Insert, Update, Delete and this time GetByKey. The cache
key is a GUID so if you use it in an existing application it shouldn’t stomp on
anything you are doing.
Here is the code:
public class CacheMockPersistence
{
private Hashtable _data = null ;
private HttpContext _context = null ;
private const string DATA_STORE_KEY = "{2E54BB16-3220-4B49-9932-1455C4014E5B}" ;
private Hashtable Data
{
get
{
if (this ._context.Cache[DATA_STORE_KEY] == null )
{
this ._context.Cache.Insert(DATA_STORE_KEY, new Hashtable());
}
return ((Hashtable)this ._context.Cache[DATA_STORE_KEY]);
}
}
public CacheMockPersistence(HttpContext context)
{
this ._context = context;
}
public void Insert(object key, object value )
{
this .Data.Add(key, value );
}
public void Update(object key, object value )
{
this .Data[key] = value ;
}
public void Delete(object key)
{
this .Data.Remove(key);
}
public object GetByKey(object key)
{
object value = new object ();
if (this .Data[key] != null )
{
value = this .Data[key];
}
return value ;
}
}
Here is the updated BookRepository that is hooked up to
CacheMockPersistence:
using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Web;
[Serializable]
public class Book
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public string Author { get; set; }
public string Url { get; set; }
public double Price { get; set; }
public DateTime PublishDate { get; set; }
public string PriceFormatted
{
get { return string .Format("{0:C}" , Price); }
}
public string PublishDateShort
{
get { return PublishDate.ToShortDateString(); }
}
public Book() { }
public static Book Create(int id)
{
Book bk = new Book();
Random random = new Random();
bk.ID = id;
bk.Title = string .Format("Title of Book {0}" , id);
bk.Author = string .Format("Author {0}" , id);
bk.Url = string .Format("http://site.com/book/{0}/" , id);
bk.Price = Convert.ToDouble(string .Format("{0:##.##}" , random.Next(5, 35) + random.NextDouble()));
bk.PublishDate = Convert.ToDateTime(string .Format("{0}/{1}/{2}" , random.Next(1, 12), random.Next(1, 28), random.Next(1990, DateTime.Now.Year)));
return bk;
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Summary description for BookRepository
/// </summary>
public class BookRepository
{
private static BookRepository _instance;
private C | Go |
| How do you test private methods? ... This morning I read a post by Davy Brion who was explaining a technique to test private methods. Although the post was interesting, it was a comment by Rafferty Uy that got me thinking. He suggests that you make your method protected instead of private and have the testing class inherit from this class. There is much debate as to whether you should be testing private methods at all, and as I am fairly new to unit testing, I have only ever tested my public methods. From Microsoft:- protected The type or member can only be accessed by code in the same class or struct, or in a derived class. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173121.aspx ) So that is fine if your tests live in the same project as the code being tested. You just inherit from the class. If however you have all your tests in a separate project, then you simply need to have a reference to the .dll or .exe of your main project with the methods that need testing. Add the namespace to your using list and inherit the class in your test class. 1: using NUnit.Framework;
2: using Spike.PrivateMethodTest;
3:
4: namespace Spike.UnitTests
5: {
6: [TestFixture()]
7: public class Class1 : Spike.PrivateMethodTest.Program
8: {
9: [Test()]
10: public void TestPublicMethod()
11: {
12: string expectedValue = "this is public" ;
13: string actualValue = Program.MyPublicMethod();
14: Assert.AreEqual(expectedValue, actualValue);
15: }
16:
17: [Test()]
18: public void TestPrivateMethod()
19: {
20: string expectedValue = "this is private" ;
21: string actualValue = Program.MyPrivateMethod();
22: Assert.AreEqual(expectedValue, actualValue);
23: }
24: }
25: }
This technique seems by far the simplest I have come across to allow you to test private methods. | Go |
| Infragistics WinGrid Sort ... I was trying to sort an Infragistics WinGrid automatically after each row insert or update by the user so in the AfterRowUpdate event, I added the following code:
grd.DisplayLayout.Bands[0].Columns["MyColumn"].SortIndicator = Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.SortIndicator.Ascending;grd.DisplayLayout.Bands[0].Columns["MyColumn"].Band.SortedColumns.RefreshSort(true);grd.Refresh();
This works fine except that the grid does an alphabetical sort even thought the column type is numeric. Ex:1102223
A quick search lead me to this Infragistics knowledge base article:http://devcenter.infragistics.com/Support/KnowledgeBaseArticle.aspx?ArticleID=7695
Although not exactly what I wanted, I slightly changed to code to sort my numeric column.
public class srtComparer : IComparer{ public srtComparer() {}
public int Compare(object x, object y) { UltraGridCell xCell = (UltraGridCell)x; UltraGridCell yCell = (UltraGridCell)y; return Decimal.Compare((Decimal)xCell.Row.Cells["MyColumn"].Value, (Decimal)yCell.Row.Cells["MyColumn"].Value); }}
grd.DisplayLayout.Bands[0].Columns["MyColumn"].SortComparer = new srtComparer();grd.DisplayLayout.Bands[0].Columns["MyColumn"].SortIndicator = Infragistics.Win.UltraWinGrid.SortIndicator.Ascending;grd.DisplayLayout.Bands[0].Columns["MyColumn"].Band.SortedColumns.RefreshSort(true);grd.Refresh();
Of course, the above class could be made more generic by having a column name or number as an argument.
I would have expected that the grid would sort correctly depending on the column type but I guess this behaviour gives more flexibility. | Go |
| Tip #26: Did you know... How to have C# and VB.NET files inside your App_Code directory? ... If you are taking advantage of the App_Code folder to develop an ASP.NET WebSite some times you need to use code files that are written in different .NET languages. For example, you may want to use C# files and VB.NET files in the same web site: To be able to do this you can use a feature of the compilation section in web.config to configure sub folders inside App_Code to be compiled separately. < compilation debug = " true " > < codeSubDirectories > < add directoryName ...(read more ) | Go |
