| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Model View Presenter ... In this article we will understand MVP, execute a sample project with MVP, implement the same using windows UI and then finally we will discuss about the differences between MVP and MVC. | Go |
| Useful Cache and Session Method Extensions for ASP.NET ... In the line of Method Extensions here is some Extensions for Cache and Session for ASP.NET | Go |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control ... From ScottGu's blog. Brand new, Free, ASP.NET 3.5 chart control. It looks very nice! | Go |
| Microsoft Web Platform Installer RC and Windows XP Support ... Mictosoft Web Platform Installer, a great tool that Microsoft provides is now in Release Candidate and supports Windows XP | Go |
| ASP.NET 3.5 MVC Application ... This post gives you the basic overview on ASP.NET Models, Views and Controllers. It explains how all parts in MVC Application work together and discuss how the architecture of an ASP.NET MVC application differs from an ASP.NET Web Forms application. | Go |
| Learn how to chose between renderpartial and renderaction ... Derik explains the difference between RenderPartial and RenderAction and how to weigh the choice when designing an MVC application | Go |
| CSS Friendly Control Adapters -- Dead? : LeeDumond.com ... It's now coming up on two years since the release of Microsoft's ASP.NET CSS Friendly Control Adapters. Remember them?
Well, 1.0 is still the "official" production release, but at some point Microsoft handed over the keys and the whole shebang was moved to CodePlex, where it seems a lot of good ideas go to die. | Go |
| Padding is Invalid and Cannot Be Removed : LeeDumond.com ... On some of the ASP.NET sites I maintain, every once in a while I get the following error showing up in my logs. Here is the likely cause... | Go |
| ASP.NET supported on Server Core - Windows Server 2008 R2 ... In case you haven't already heard the news, ASP.NET will now be enabled on Windows Server Core starting with Windows Server 2008 R2. | Go |
| jQuery Ajax uploader plugin (with progress bar!) ... Do you want your HTML file upload controls to show a progress bar during the upload? That's always been tricky. Here's a cool jQuery plugin that gets the job done, along with a demo app written in ASP.NET MVC. | Go |
| Creating ASPX Page Dynamically in ASP.Net and C# ... There are situations where we need to create ASPX pages dynamically in our asp.net websites. For example, if we want to build a tutorial hosting site or a content management system that has huge static data we can publish it in a static page instead of putting it into database. | Go |
| Automatic Properties and StackOverflowException ... I've written a couple of times before about Automatic Properties, a tiny little feature that I have really come to enjoy. Remember that an Automatic Property looks something like this: | Go |
| Detecting Session Timeouts using a ASP.Net MVC Action Filter ... This article shows one way on how to detect a session timeout in an ASP.Net MVC application. The implementation uses a MVC action filter to detect when a session has timed out redirects the user to a Login page. | Go |
| Creating an RSS Feed in ASP.NET ... This article explains how to create an RSS feed in ASP.NET. The author first explains the structure of RSS feed and then provides working code example from Stardeveloper.com to explain how an RSS feed can be generated dynamically. After reading this article you will be able to create an RSS feed for your website. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| David Ebbo's blog : ProcessGeneratedCode: A hidden gem for Control Builder writers | Go |
| Tracking User Activity | Go |
| ASP.NET.4GuysFromRolla.com: Creating Charts with the Google Chart API | Go |
| Build a shopping cart in ASP.NET | Go |
| Combining JQuery Form Validation and Ajax Submission with ASP.NET | 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 |
| Storing and Retrieving Connection Strings in ASP.NET 2.0/3.5 ... This article demonstrates how to store database connection strings in Web.config in ASP.NET 2.0/3.5 and retrieve it for creating connection objects. | Go |
| Loading Images Asynchronously Inside an ASP.NET GridView ... Retrieving and displaying images in a GridView is a time consuming task. If done synchronously, this task can at times test the user’s patience. One way to provide a good user experience is to load the images asynchronously. So when the GridView loads, we initially display a default image for the user to view, while the actual images are being loaded from the database. In this article, we will see how to do so. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Dynamic control in Web.Extension ... Efficient development on web projects | 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 |
| Create a guestbook by using XML serialization ... This article shows an easy way to create a guestbook using ASP.NET and XML serialization. | Go |
| Ajax Tutorial for Beginners: Part 1 ... Ajax Tutorial for Beginners: Part 1 | Go |
| Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1 ... Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1 | Go |
| Format Currency using Javascript ... Format numbers to currency using Javascript | Go |
| First Step into the ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Life make easy to create data driven websites. | 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 |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Section 508 Compliant Renamed Accessibility Compliant ... The Section508Compliant property was added to all of our ASP.NET controls to support accessibility. Since this announcement, we thought about the Section508Compatibility property name. While Section508Compatibility certainly describes the feature the term, Section 508, however is used only in the US. And because we are an international company and have respect for all customers, we decided to rename this property. [Well, since Section 508 is not used by the rest of the world, also has something... 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 a Guestbook by using XML serialization ... This article shows an easy way to create a guestbook using ASP.NET and XML serialization.... 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 using GridView control as lookup ... ASP.NET using GridView control as lookup... 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 |
| Sing it brother Frans! ... http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2008/11/21/baby-sitter-framework-2-0-change-tracking-in-the-ef-v2-it-s-still-your-problem.aspx
So, I'm tooling around the web this morning and I came upon Frans Brouma's post about change tracking in EF. Let me say that I don't like EF so far, but that's a different discussion. I like and agree with Frans' point that it's one thing to be technically correct and to really miss the mark regarding what the customer needs.... 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 |
| 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 |
| A Better Multi-Page Solution ... I've posted on multi-page Silverlight applications, and in fact have two videos (here and here) that show an approach that works quite well and that I was happy to steal at the time.
I recently received email from Lucas Stark (Senior Web Developer at Delta College) who suggested (quite correctly) that the pages should not have to find the PageSwitcher each time they want to navigate to another page, but rather they ought to be able to call a static method.
I've tinkered with the code he... 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 |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Cool Navigation in SharePoint 2007 using jQuery – Teaser! ... So you think GUI coolness nowadays is only related to fancy RIA stuff like Silverlight? Think again! The video above is a little project I’m working on, using jQuery plugins to show a cool way to navigate to the Lists and Document Libraries of a SharePoint site. So there are no requirements on the client, everything is done using Javascript! Nifty isn’t it? I need to polish the code a little bit and I hope to be able to release it later on this week. But i’m still thinking about a cool name .. any suggestions? Technorati Tags: sharepoint ,jquery ,moss ,wss ,navigation | Go |
| Integrating SharePoint 2007 and jQuery [Part Two] ... The first part of this article showed you how you can enable jQuery in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages, so in this article let's assume jQuery is up and running in your SharePoint environment. The second part of this article will show you a couple of things that you can accomplish by making use of jQuery in SharePoint 2007. It's not my goal to write about how jQuery is working, the syntax etc, for those things I kindly refer to the tutorials that are already available .
Time to get started with a first sample! Let’s assume you've got a nice SharePoint List or Document Library with a bunch of columns and some data in it. SharePoint can display that data in a nice table of course, but let's try to make that table even nicer by highlighting the entire row when the user hovers over the table. The JavaScript code, using jQuery to accomplish this goes as follows:
$(document).ready(function() { $("table[class='ms-listviewtable'] tr").hover ( function() { $(this).addClass("myRowHighlight"); }, function() { $(this).removeClass("myRowHighlight"); } ); } );
The first line creates a function that will be called when the document is completely loaded, this function is defined inline. In this function first all tr elements of all the tables that are having the class attribute set to ms-listviewtable , are selected (this class attribute value is used by SharePoint for every table that contains list data). For every tr element, the hover jQuery function is called. This hover function takes two parameters, once again two functions: one will be executed when the mouse pointer enters the hover area (in this case the tr element), the second one will be executed when the mouse leaves the hover area. When the hover area is entered, the addClass method will add the myRowHighlight CSS class to the tr element and that CSS class is removed when the hover area is left. Of course the myRowHighlight CSS needs to be declared as well:
<style type="text/css"> .myRowHighlight {color:red; background-color:#FFCC66} </style>
The next thing that we need to think about is how we can tell a SharePoint page (which is showing a table containing List data), to execute that script and declare the CSS class. Probably the easiest thing to do is to make use of the Content Editor Web Part . Navigate to for example a Task list (e.g. http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/AllItems.aspx). Next click Site Actions , Edit Page to switch the page into edit mode. Then click on the Add a Web Part button of the web part zone of that page and add an instance of the Content Editor Web Part . Click on the link open the tool pane and click on the button Source Editor .
Finally copy and paste the script and CSS class discussed above (note that script tags have been added around the JavaScript code!):
<style type="text/css"> .myRowHighlight {color:red; background-color:#FFCC66} </style> <script> $(document).ready(function() { $("table[class='ms-listviewtable'] tr").hover ( function() { $(this).addClass("myRowHighlight"); }, function() { $(this).removeClass("myRowHighlight"); } ); } ); </script>
Now you can click Exit Edit Mode in the top right of the screen to switch back to the normal view. When you hover over one of the rows of the table, the entire row will be highlighted.
Although adding the script and style in a Content Editor Web Part is very easy, you probably don’t want to do this in every list view for ever single List or Document Library if you want to activate the row highlighting everywhere. A better approach is to wrap the adding of the script and style in a Feature. And once again this can be accomplished by making use of the Delegate control (for more information about this approach, check out the previous part of this series ).
The feature.xml simply points to a manifest which will define the delegate. The only special thing in the feature.xml is the ActivationDepenencies element: there’s an activation dependency define | Go |
| Looking back at MicrosoftPDC.com (from the inside) ... I had the privilege of working on the MicrosoftPDC.com website as lead developer for the past several months. The process hasn’t been kind to my blogging schedule lately, but the experience definitely taught me quite a bit: working with the top-notch Microsoft developer evangelism team, setting up a site for maximum flexibility, setting up the Silverlight experience, and troubleshooting some interesting issues during the conference. I’m going to run through several of these at a high level and may dig into some of these in more detail later (so comment if you want to hear more about something). As I’m describing some of these, remember that while I was the lead developer, these sites were built by a team. The project and UI experience were managed by the Microsoft Developer Evangelism team, the visual design was based on the overall conference visual design concept. I lead the development team which included some of our super-awesome developers and designers here at Vertigo 1 . So I’ll take some of the credit for what went well and most of the blame for what went wrong. Also, while the experiences were kept in sync, we didn’t do any of the work for the the registration and live conference session information (including video links, evals, etc.). register.microsoftpdc.com and sessions.microsoftpdc.com didn’t even live on the same server as the rest of the micorosoftpdc.com site. This site used ASP.NET Webforms rather than ASP.NET MVC. We built the first release of the PDC2008 site in April - May 2008, and ASP.NET MVC was at a Preview 2 release stage back then. I love new and shiny, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend that we launch the PDC site on MVC so early on. As I worked on it, though, I continually asked myself, “Will this be the last ASP.NET Webforms site I’ll deploy?” Reuse Through Simplicity We originally built a single site – microsoftpdc.com – but it’s turned into quite a bit more than that. The original microsoftpdc.com site was a pretty simple “brochure” site, designed to give people the information they needed to get to the PDC conference. The week before the conference, we shifted to a “live experience” mode that included a re-skin and changes to the sitemap to present information that was relevant to people attending the conference or keeping up with it online. That same week, we launched two other sites: m.microsoftpdc.com (a mobile site for PDC attendees) and 2009.visitmix.com, an information site for the MIX09 conference. While all these these sites looked pretty different, they all ran on the same code base. As I look back at things that went well, I think this is one thing we got right - we struck a good balance on the design so that we were able to heavily reuse the site code without having to tell the client that simple changes would take days because our system was too complicated. Here are some of the things that helped keep us flexible: CSS based design Resisting the urge to premature generalization A great client – we were able to be involved in the user experience planning at a level which allowed us to define some consistency across the site Feed-based content as an ultra-lightweight CMS Master pages used on all pages in the site except the home page – for a while, the same site would display in “PDC Classic”, “PDC Live”, and “MIX” modes with a querystring switch (disabled in production) The master-page / CSS switching worked surprisingly well – for instance, here’s the same agenda page shown before and after the theme switch: We didn’t use the built-in theme system for ASP.NET, as it unfortunately doesn’t play that well with CSS based design and conditional stylesheets . Look, Ma! No database! One interesting thing about these sites is that they pulled their dynamic content from a variety of feeds. I built out a control which basically piped an RSS feed through an HTML cleaner to a ListView control. The ListView control just output the content in unstyled HTML, so | Go |
| Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint with a free full license for bloggers ... Time for a freebie! We’re announcing today about a new product: Isolator for sharepoint – which allows unit testing sharepoint code without needing sharepoint installed. “Huh?” It is almost the same as Typemock Isolator, but will only work on APIs that are directly connected with sharepoint’s API . All the other features are the same. That means that if you only need to test sharepoint stuff, you can get a powerful product, for a much cheaper price than the full Isolator (you can always upgrade later if you need to isolate more APIs). How cheap? Isolator for sharepoint is only 99$ during this offer . With this release, we want to gather the power of crowds, by offering you an incentive for blogging about this news: Get A free Typemock Isolator license (the full one) just because you have a blog. Here are the full rules on how to get a free License for Typemock Isolator (full). Basically, you just write the following text on your blog (with the links) and tell us about : <Begin> Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here . The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free . for rules and info click here . <End> Here are the full rules on how to get a free License | Go |
| Microsoft Web Platform Installer Release Candidate – Now works with XP and Windows 2003! ... I’m excited to announce the availability of the Release Candidate version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI). Web PI is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server, along with a lot of cool IIS extensions like URL rewrite and ASP.NET MVC . Web PI offers a simple experience for downloading and installing the entire stack through a single installer...(read more ) | Go |
| ASP.NET supported on Server Core - Windows Server 2008 R2 ... In case you haven’t already heard the news, ASP.NET will now be enabled on Windows Server Core starting with Windows Server 2008 R2. If you're not familiar with Server Core, it is a low footprint Server installation option that lays down just the minimal footprint to boot up the server, it doesn't even install the Shell! This has several key benefits. First, it means server core uses less disk and memory footprint. In our testing, we see a little over 1GB disk...(read more ) | Go |
| Announcing the Web Platform Installer Release Candidate! ... The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft's entire Web Platform, including IIS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more ) | Go |
| St. Louis Day of .NET December 13th ... Are you in the St. Louis area, or near by? You might be interested in checking out the St. Louis Day of .NET that is scheduled for 12/13/2008. My good buddy Scott Spradlin has been getting this organized and lined up a great list of speakers covering a wide range of topics ! I’m happy to be included in the list of speakers and will be presenting on “ Live Services: Building Applications with the Live Framework ” If you’re interested in attending get signed up soon, registrations will most likely...(read more ) | Go |
| Kör asynkrona anrop med ett visst tidsintervall ... Jag sitter för tillfället på ett flyg som är hyfsat försenat på grund av det härliga ovädret, så jag passade på att skriva en liten post om hur man använder jQuery för att hämta data asynkront med ett visst tidsintervall. Jag åkte 16:15 från Umeå, sen var vi över Stockholm i en halvtimme och är sedan runt 18 i Nyköping på grund av att det snöade för mycket på Arlanda (klockan är för tillfället 20:00)... Härligt, härligt! :-) För att hämta data asynkront med jQuery så finns det en inställning som sätter cachen i webbläsaren. Den skall vi använda för att förhindra att datan cachas av webbläsaren, vilket skulle ge felaktiga resultat. Sedan använder vi en standardmetod i javascript för att anropa vår metod var 1000:e millisekund (dvs varje sekund). Det som skall hämtas är aktuell tid från servern, och det presenteras via en web handler. Först och främst så behöver vi en enkel HTML-sida: 1: <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
2: < html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
3: < head runat ="server" >
4: < title > Ajax</ title >
5: < script src ="scripts/jquery-1.2.6.js" type ="text/javascript" ></ script >
6: <script src="scripts/ajax.js" type="text/javascript" ></ script >
7: </ head >
8: < body >
9: < div id ="currentTime" ></ div >
10: </ body >
11: </ html >
.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; }
Tiden skall visas i klartext i div-elementet med ID satt till "currentTime". För att förhindra att HTML skickas in (vilket skulle kunna bero på någon sårbarhet i metoden som returnerar tiden) så använder vi text-metoden i jQuery.
1: $().ready(function () {
2: ShowCurrentTime();
3: window.setInterval('ShowCurrentTime()' , 1000);
4: });
5:
6: function ShowCurrentTime() {
7: $.ajax({
8: url: "currenttime.ashx" ,
9: cache: false ,
10: success: function (result) {
11: $("#currentTime" ).text(result);
12: }
13: });
14: }
.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; }
Det som sker här är att vi först anropar metoden "ShowCurrentTime()" vid sidans laddning och då visar aktuell tid, sedan anropar vi den igen var 1000:e millisekund. Metoden window.setInterval() är en standardmetod i javascript som stöds av alla moderna webbläsare.
För att hämta datan så använder vi ajax-metoden i jQuery som låter oss skicka med en mängd inställningar, vilka som finns kan ni hitta i dokumentationen. Vi anropar currenttime.ashx med cachning inaktiverad och visar sedan (vid lyckad hämtning) resultatet i klar | Go |
| My TechEd 2008 EMEA Session's demo files: OFC03-IS ... Here you can find the demos of my last TechEd 2008 EMEA Session about "Deploying and Updating SharePont Solutions using features and templates". I hope you enjoy them. | Go |
