| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| 7 Steps to write your own custom rule using FXCOP ... Code review is one of the important activities in any project. Manual code reviews are definitely good and I will say better than automation. But when the project is large manual code reviews have their own limitations. FXCOP is one of the legendary tools which help us automate code reviews. This article will discuss some basics of FXCOP and then concentrate mainly on how we can add custom rules in FXCOP. | Go |
| Chad & I get Opinionated about the ASP.NET MVC ... The videos for Chad & I's talk on our MVC usage from KaizenConf this past week is available on Viddler. This workshop covered the content from the Our "Opinions" on the ASP.NET MVC post from a couple weeks back with the real code. | Go |
| ASP.NET podcast has a new co-host: David Penton ... Episode 126 of ASP.NET Podcast: discusses about how to increase application performances and introduces a new co-host: David Penton | Go |
| ASP.NET Performance By Design: Takeaways From PDC ... The digest for PDC "Performance By Design" sessions | Go |
| ASP.NET AJAX 4.0: Microsoft did it! They married DOM and Javascript!! ... ASP.NET AJAX templates are a new feature of the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Library that make it easy to create dynamic data-driven user interface (UI) in the browser. ASP.NET AJAX templates consist of HTML markup to which you add attributes and annotations that specify run-time behavior. | Go |
| Automating Compilation for VS Web Developer 2008 Express edition ... Express edition are downsized free IDE provided by Microsoft, so that developers and experiment to feel how the enterprise edition will look like. One of the products provided in the express edition suite is the web developer 2008 express edition. VS web developer edition helps us to make web application in .NET. One of the big drawbacks of VS web developer express edition is that it helps to debug but does not compile the ASPX pages. In other words no DLL is generated for the ASPX pages. This tutorial will discuss how we can use the aspnet_compiler.exe to generate DLL for web projects developed in VS 2008 web developer express edition. | Go |
| Best practice DDD/TDD ASP.NET MVC example applications ... It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. One of the reasons I like it is because it's opinionated - instead of leaving developers free to fumble things as they choose, it recognises that most projects will be more-or-less exactly the same, and imposes some conventions to keep everyone on the same path. | Go |
| ASP.NET Data Input Validation ... I'm no security expert, and as such, I think I'm a member of a ever-growing group of Web developers who fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to the security of their Web forms. | Go |
| Eliminating Postbacks: Setting Up jQuery On ASP.NET Web Forms and Mana ... This is a follow-up to a prior post, Keys to Web 3.0 Design and Development When Using ASP.NET. Now I want to focus solely on getting jQuery and client-side data managmeent working with ASP.NET 2.0 without ASP.NET AJAX or ASP.NET MVC. | Go |
| How to run ASP.NET MVC on Windows Azure ... A quick how-to on getting ASP.NET MVC up and running on Windows Azure. | Go |
| Good Development Resource ... Found a good development resource that aggregates some of the top Microsoft bloggers feeds and tweets. | Go |
| Authorization in ASP.Net MVC using XML Configuration. ... Doing authorization in a clean way is always tricky, You want delicate balance between extreme abstraction and embedding roles in-side your compiled code, I have always preferred simple abstraction either using roles and their corresponding mappings in the database or using simple xml file to store action to role mappings.
Asp.net MVC comes with built in Authorization filter attribute that you can use on your Controller and Action to define the role that can access corresponding Controller or Action. This approach will work fine for small application where you have predefined action to role mappings, but when you have bigger application where developers are not going to define role mappings and mappings might change frequently then maintenance of hard quoted roles might become nightmare. | Go |
| Financial Calculation using .NET:- Depreciation (Part-2) ... In this article we will look how we can use "Microsoft.VisualBasic" namespace to do single line and double line depreciation calculation. | Go |
| Creating A Comma Delimited String ... Creating a Comma Delimited String using the .NET frameworks CommaDelimitedStringCollection class. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| CodeProject: Architecting .NET Web Applications for Scale & Performance (A Practical Guide). Free source code and programming help | Go |
| jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX Demo Code - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| 7 of my favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET | Encosia | Go |
| A Guide to Learning ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| Brad Abrams : AjaxWorld Talk: Building a Great Ajax application from Scratch | Go |
| Azure Services Platform | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you t | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here . The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release. UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup. Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size). Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download. This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications. This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility. I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it. To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application. To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item. We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template wit | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Support with Visual Web Developer 2008 Express ... Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release . One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition. The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it). This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express. If you install the Visual Web Developer Express SP1 Beta you can start using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 with it immediately. Important: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 does not require SP1 to be installed if you are using Visual Studio 2008. ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 will work with both VS 2008 and VS 2008 SP1 just fine. You can learn more about the new VWD Express support for ASP.NET MVC from the VS Web Tools team blog here . This post also includes a free web download that provides ASP.NET MVC Test project support for NUnit-based unit tests. You can use these NUnit project templates with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release ... This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here . You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here . Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release , along with some additional tweaks and adjustments. You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method. For example: which would render the below HTML when run: Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it. This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything). It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow. For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them. The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object): One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required). Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above: We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action: When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red): Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning "JsonResult" (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), "ContentResult" (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results. The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you'll see us add several more built-in result types. Improved HTML Helper Methods The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements. Automatic Value Lookup With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers. For example: to include a value within a <input type="text" value="some value"/> element you would write: The above code continues to work - although now you can also just write: The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use. SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc). One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render. For example, below I'm creating a SelectList view-model class over the | Go |
| May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF ... Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control : Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls : Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario. Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET : A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images. Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on. ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners : Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns). The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated. Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control : Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control. Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch : Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads. Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier. Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class : Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class. Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta : Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls. .NET 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ : Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it. Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL : Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries. Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries. DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers. Ukadc.Diagnostics : Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc). Visual Studio 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know : A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio. Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series. I confess I didn't know this one. Silverlight 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time". Wow. AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes : Nikhil Kothari has a | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| ASP.NET Client Side State Management ... The article discuss the client side state management techniques and when to choose client side state management over server side state management. | Go |
| Improving Performance By Using ASP.NET Caching - Output Cache ... What is ASP.NET caching mechanism? When to use caching? and how can I use it in order to improve my site performance? are the questions this post series is going to answer. In today’s post I’ll introduce the output cache. | Go |
| Test Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC ... One of the biggest benefits of MVC is it's direct link to Test Driven Development. Because of some of the new features of ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 (ModelBinders in particular), testing your Action methods is even easier. This article will demonstrate how easy it is to ensure the quality of your MVC app with unit tests. | Go |
| How to Rotate Ads without Refreshing the Page using AdRotator and ASP.NET AJAX ... The AdRotator control in ASP.NET is extremely handy when it comes to randomly displaying advertisements on your site. However the ads are rotated only when the user refreshes the page. In this article, we will explore how you can easily rotate ads at regular intervals, without the user refreshing the page. | Go |
| Using UpdateProgress Control Effectively ... UpdateProgress control provides a mechanism where we can inform user that the server side processing is still progressing. For example, we can provide a “Loading…” message or an image showing the progressing of the request. This article will give you more inputs on how to use the UpdateProgress control very effectively in our projects. | Go |
| Creating a Poll with AJAX, SQL and LINQ in C# ... This tutorial will show you how to create an online voting system which will take advantage of AJAX and LINQ to allow users to quickly and easily vote for their favorite Political candidate, and be shown who is currently the front-runner. C# | Go |
| Data Access Component - Update Data in C# and AJAX ... This tutorial will show you how to use C# and AJAX to create a Data Access Component that will display data from a SQL database and also allow edits of the data. | Go |
| Display Request Processing Time in ASP.Net pages ... There are some sites in internet who are displaying the time taken to process the request given to the server at the end of every page. This article will help us to implement this feature in our asp.net sites. | Go |
| Using JavaScript and UpdatePanels in ASP.NET 3.5 ... We all know that AJAX utilizes JavaScript, but what if we want to use our own JavaScript calls in conjunction with AJAX? This tutorial will show you how we can call JavaScript ourselves whilst using AJAX. We will be making use of the Alert method in JavaScript when the user adds a new entry to an XML file. | Go |
| Developing a Shopping Cart in ASP.NET ... Explains how to develop simple shopping cart web application by using recommended three tier architecture. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| 7 Steps to write your own custom rule using FXCOP ... 7 Steps to write your own custom rule using FXCOP | Go |
| Multi-Threading: Deadlock Tracer Utility ... Tracing dead-locks in multi-threaded application | Go |
| SQLite Membership, Role, and Profile Providers ... Complete, production-ready Membership, Role, and Profile providers for SQLite. Includes instructions for migrating data between SQL Server and SQLite. | Go |
| Extending Hyperlink control to use JavaScript to create a Popup ... Make your Hyperlink control use JavaScript to create a Popup window | Go |
| All you want to know about a mobile website ... The article explains all the aspects of a mobile website | Go |
| MVC, MVP, ASP.NET ... MVC Design pattern in comparison with MVP in the ASP.NET world | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Flexigrid sample ... How to create an ASP.NET MVC sample using LINQ to SQL, Flexigrid for JQuery, and JSON. | Go |
| Javascript Dataset, Data Repeater and Grid ... An object that can repeat data in any template | Go |
| Using ZIP content for delivery over HTTP ... This article shows how to use already compressed content for transmission over HTTP. | Go |
| Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1 ... Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization Part 1 | Go |
| Add-in to attach ASP.NET debugger ... This visual studio add-in puts a nice-cool shortcut button on your debug toolbar to attach your code to ASP.NET debugger (aspnet_wp.exe). | Go |
| AxiomaticTokenizer ... Financial security with one-time tokens | Go |
| UI Object Connector Implementation of Mediator Pattern ... UI Object Connector Implementation of Mediator Pattern | Go |
| Create One Application for both Desktop and Web ... With Habanero's support for Visual WebGui, you can write one application to release on either the desktop or web. | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| DevReach 2008 Speaker Feedback ... I've been posting feedback from my talks on my blog as a means of transparency as well as a way to get more feedback and hopefully improve my talks and topics. You can see some past posts here for instance. At any rate, a month or so ago I was in beautiful Bulgaria speaking at DevReach , and here's how things turned out. Note that in this case I don't have any plain text comments, which are usually the most useful, but I did get a bunch of comments to my last post about DevReach . Honestly in this case I feel a bit embarrassed to post this because I don't have any critical remarks and the numbers came out pretty nice. It's not my intention for this to be a "look what a great presenter I am" post, and I fully realize that there are a great many speakers who far surpass my abilities. In any event, I have three talks, two of which were originally scheduled and one of which was a last-minute filler due to a speaker cancellation. Here's how the numbers broke down (out of 5): Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools (Part 1) Attendees : 61 Session : 4.13 Session Helpful : 4.05 Speaker : 4.25 Total : 4.14 Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools (Part 2) Attendees : 109 Session : 4.36 Session Helpful : 4.34 Speaker : 4.40 Total : 4.37 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Attendees : 52 Session : 4.53 Session Helpful : 4.47 Speaker : 4.80 Total : 4.60 Overall My Speaker Average : 4.37 Overall Speaker Average : 4.08 I think my main takeaway from this is that the developers at DevReach are far nicer with their feedback and comments than those at typical Microsoft events. My TechEd talk had its share of harsh critics, but looking at these numbers (and the speaker average) I don't think too many 1's were given to anybody. At any rate, it was a very fun week and a conference I'm looking forward to presenting at next year. Thanks again to those who attended and especially to Telerik and Martin Kulov for putting on a great show. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| The Thunderdome Principle and a very opinionated MVC stack ... Last week Jeremy Miller introduced their own opinionated MVC stack built on top of the MS ASP.NET MVC framework. They talked about this at the KaizenConf that was held last weekend in Austin and as it happened for all the PDC sessions, here are the videos of their Using and Abusing ASP.NET MVC for Fun and Profit session. Its available in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,KaizenConf
... 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 |
| Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC ... With the release of ASP.NET MVC Beta, the assemblies distributed with ASP.NET MVC are automatically installed into the GAC. System.Web.Mvc System.Web.Routing System.Web.Abstractions While developing an application locally, this isnt a problem. But when you are ready to deploy your application to a hosting provider, this might well be a problem if the hoster does not have the ASP.NET MVC assemblies installed in the GAC. Fortunately, ASP.NET MVC is still bin-deployable. If your hosting... 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 |
| Going to vote No on Prop 8. Evolution will eventually take over. ... This is my first post about anything that is not related to technology; I have never done that in the last three years of blogging. I was urged to do so now by my disappointment in seeing a community in California so no accepting of progress and evolution. It has been a long time - 88 years, since females were given the right to vote, and a long time, also since black people were given equal rights. As a people, we have come a long way. We invented technology and we have been able to improve... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| MVC, MVP, ASP.NET ... MVC Design pattern in comparison with MVP in the ASP.NET world... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Chameleon skinning coming up to WinForms in Q3 2008 ... I know many of you like our WinForms "Desert" theme:
I like it very much too. But I've been using it for quite some time and it started to kind of bore me. I just wish it wasn't so orange-ish. Then I got impressed by the UI of Windows Live 's set of desktop applications , which have the cool option to change the skin color - on the fly:
Its very neat and I just can't get bored using this kind of UI.
Our Windows Form components on the other hand have a very extensible way of skinning , but still, you are limited to selecting one of the predefined themes or take the not-so-short way to fully customizing an existing theme. If you are keeping an eye from time to time at our roadmap , you probably know that we are on our way to extend the list of built-in themes, but still, this does not help the UI be as easily customizable as the above mentioned MS products.
Well, not any more!
For the upcoming Q3 2008 release we have been working closely with our UX guys to implement a color blending feature within our products that works similar to the way the professional graphics design tools do.
The result is an new elegant approach to customizing the appearance of your applications. And it works very straightforward. Lets take a look again at the Desert theme. We have smooth dark orange color all over. But if we take away all the orange and replace it with other color(s) we get these new cool-looking themes:
Here is what's happening underneath in short. To apply the color blend, TPF will search through the theme's color RGB settings, convert them to HSL color space and calculate the new RGB color values, based on the newly selected color Hue. The code used to achieve all this looks similar to the following:
Theme currentTheme = Telerik.WinControls.ThemeResolutionService.GetTheme("Desert");
currentTheme.AddColorBlend("BaseColor", HslColor.FromColor(Color.Orange));
currentTheme.ThemeProperties["BaseColor"] = HslColor.FromColor(Color.PaleGreen);
That's all! And since the theme modification is taking place at runtime you will be able to see all controls on the form changing their appearance corresponding to the new color blend base-color selection.
What about themes, like the MS Office-resembling Blue that has a totally different set of colors based on the visual state of each piece of UI? Well, you can add several color blends, at once:
And finally if the resulting skin still needs some touches, you can export the modified theme data to xml files, and tweak them using the Visual Style Builder app, as much as you wish.
I believe that by using this powerful approach you will be able to design your application with an UI that can be personalized by the end user, but still looks very professional.
I will be really exited to hear what you think about about Theme Color Blending.
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Telerik Reporting - Tips and Tricks ... What better source for tips and tricks for your beloved Reporting product, than a blog spot right from the kitchen where the product is 'mixed'. As of this post, we would like to start a small series of tips and tricks that make a developers' life sweeter. We're not going to discuss general topics, so if you're looking for answers for one of those questions - please review our documentation and our forums .
As you can guess, the sub-report item, which lets you display one report within another report is widely used in Telerik Reporting. It lets you compose complex reports from disparate report sources and the data for each sub-report can be completely different. With its help you can create the very much exploited master-detail report scenarios with ease. Wiring up report parameters and accessing the sub-report's report is straightforward, but a question arises - what should we do if there is no data to be shown in the sub-report under some conditions. Well, we can check if it has data and if it does not contain any - hide it, so it does not take up any unnecessary space and mess up the master report layout . We're going to use the subreport_ItemDataBound eventhandler for this purpose:
private void subReport1_ItemDataBound( object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Processing.SubReport subReport = (Processing.SubReport)sender;
Processing.Report report = (Processing.Report)subReport.InnerReport;
subReport.Visible = report.Items.Find("detail" , true ).Length > 0;
}
The "detail" parameter is the name of the detail section of the report set as Report Source for the sub-report item.
Hope this helps!
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Novermber`s Toolbox Column Now Online ... MyToolbox column in theNovember 2008issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. TheNovember issue examines: DayPilot - DayPilot is an AJAX-enabled calendar and scheduling ASP.NET Web control that offers functionality not unlike what you find in Outlook and other desktop-based calendar applications. Plus there's a free, open-source Lite version .
Blogs of Note -JeffSmith - Jeff's blog contains great posts on T-SQL syntax, queries, and tips and tricks for getting the most out of Microsoft SQL Server.
RegexBuddy - with its terse syntax and mix of special characters, regular expressions are usually hard to read, understand, and enhance when using the naked eye. However, with a tool like RegexBuddy, regular expressions are much easier to grok. RegexBuddy is a desktop application with features that assist in building, testing, and editing regular expressions. RegexBuddy includes a regular expression debugger and wizards for turning your regular expressions into C# or VB code. ForThe Bookshelf sectionI reviewed The Productive Programmer , by Neal Ford. An excerpt from the review follows: In the Productive Programmer (O'Reilly, 2008), Neal Ford shares proven techniques that will help any developer improve his or her productivity. The first part of the book explores behaviors and tools for boosting developer productivity; the second part looks at software development practices that help contribute to a more streamlined development process. He espouses the Don't Repeat Yourself tenet for improving productivity and provides examples of how to avoid needless repetition in areas from version control to technical documentation. Poor software development practices can quickly swallow up those productivity gains, Neal notes. Adding unnecessary features, insufficiently testing your code, and failing to correctly encapsulate your objects are all practices that lead to bugs and unmaintainable code. The willingness to question the status quo is another important aspect in developer productivity. Too often developers get into a rut and use a particular design pattern or coding technique because that's the way it's always been done, overlooking or turning down alternatives that may be more efficient. Enjoy! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd148647.aspx As always, if you have any suggestions for products,blogs, or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them to toolsmm@microsoft.com . Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Script# Programming in the Large ... Yesterday's PDC keynote featured a number of interesting products and technologies, such as Office 14 and Live Services, that today involve fairly large-scale (code size, team size and project length) Ajax development. The demos were just amazing - Kudos to the product teams!Behind the scenes, on the engineering front, Script# provided the toolset and script authoring model. I've been working with both teams for quite a while now, and am really excited to be able to finally share these particular... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Creating print preview page dynamically in ASP.NET ... An article on creating print preview page dynamically by javascript code. You do not need to make any aspx page to view print preview and you can also print any portion of the print page... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| How To Play SWF File In Asp.Net ... This article demostrates how to play an swf (flash) file in asp.net.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap talk available online ... Scott Hunters talk on the ASP.NET 4.0 roadmap (in which Im doing a 10 minute demo) is available from Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC20/... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Hot New Presentation Tip ... Before giving a presentation, I review Scott Hanselmans top 11 presentation tips. Well I have a twelfth tip that Scott needs to add to his list, and hell vouch for this. A couple of hours before Jeff and I gave the ASP.NET MVC presentation, we played some RockBand in the Big Room (exhibition area). Playing Eye of the Tiger before a big talk has a great way of both pumping you up and loosening you up at the same time. When I ran into Scott and told him this tip, he said he did the very same thing,... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Smart Code Generator: Use ASP.NET, NAnt and Cassini for Code Generation ... This article describes how NAnt and Cassini can be integrated with the Smart Code Generator development cycle. This article can also used as a reference for ASP.NET developers who want to build, run and deploy ASP.NET projects seamlessly using NAnt and Cassini.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Moving Community Server to the Cloud ... Next pet project is to move my blog on Community Server to the Cloud. I spend too long making sure my database size does not go over 500 MB, the size limit on my hoster. So once every 3 months I have to do some clean up of the database: DELETE FROM cs_statistics_Site DELETE FROM cs_Visits DELETE FROM cs_Exceptions DELETE FROM cs_EventLog To keep the database from going over 500 MB, those above are the tables that keep growing without impacting my blog posts. I have to options, move to Telligent Graffiti or to move my database to the Microsoft Cloud. I don’t think that there is a tool to convert CS2007 to Graffiti. If I decide to move to the Cloud, this is a bookmark to remember to set up a computer with the Azure SDK for VS2008. What do I need. Windows Azure SDK Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio Where to learn. http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud/archive/2008/10/27/getting-started-windows-azure-tools-for-microsoft-visual-studio.aspx I recommend to subscribe to http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud and start using the cloud for all your data instead of keeping using hosters databases. What's next? I need a token to get access to the storage. Anybody? Cheers Al | Go |
| Server-side Office Integration -7 (Conclusion) ... Voow, I am almost done. On this Sunday night, at Panera, I have enjoyed writing while listening to the jazz and drinking coups of tea (3, so far).
Alright, let's summarize briefly what we have done so far in these series: After giving some intro, In this complete but simple web application, we import data from an excel spreadsheet uploaded by the user into a database table by leveraging .NET 3.5 framework and ExcelPackage with C#.
Plus, we expose to some other areas of application development:
Best practices and Enterprise Library (used Data and Logging Blocks). Later on, I will deep into more details hopefully
Object serialization and de-serializaition
File operations using System.IO namespace (FileInfo, Stream/FileStream)
Resource releases/disposal once it is done by using 'using' blocks
XML Document
Use of XPATH for accessing XML content.
Use XML Document as way of importing data (like a Batch process)
T-SQL Script for reading data from an XML Document
Rendering data as an Office document
Use of Data Controls.
I will also publish the solution. Please note that this is just a sample application, I have used very simple development architecture (UI and Business), it is not optimized nor tested well.
I think I am done. Bye for now & All the Best!.
Technorati Tags: Best Practices & Design ,Office Integration ,How to import excel spreadsheet into a database table ,Data Application Block ,Validation Block ,System.IO.Packaging. | Go |
| Tip #20: Did you know… How to change WAP to use an IIS Web server? ... Sometimes while developing WAP you might want to switch to IIS Web server instead of the Visual Studio Development Server provided by VWD. Here is how you do it: 1. Go to the Properties page of WAP by clicking on properties under WAP in Solution Explorer or Right click on WAP and select Properties from the context menu. 2. This will bring up the properties page as shown below. 3. In the Properties page, select the Web tab on the left hand side as marked in the picture above. 4. Under Servers , select...(read more ) | Go |
| See you at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona next week ... I'll be at TechEd in Barcelona next week. I'll be at the Ask The Experts booths a few hours during the week. Feel free to come and say hello. I'll be available if you want to discuss about LINQ, the LINQ in Action book, WPF and Silverlight, my projects, or .NET in general :-) Please ping me if you'll be there too and would like to meet.
Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net | Go |
| Signs your DNN Module Development skills could use some sharpening ... Your latest DNN module utilizes in-line CSS like it was going out of style.
You frequently need to release new versions due to changes that consist solely of updates to hard coded strings in your code-behind.
Every time you implement your modules as part of a new solution, you spend the first few days just getting them to display correctly in the new skin
You FTP into the production DNN site to upgrade your module.
You spend more than 30 seconds packaging a new version of your module
When you get a SQL script from source control you open up your favorite file comparison utility to see what’s changed so that you can run only those changes.
You’ve been curious, for the last two years, about how to use the DNN UrlControl, but you never have the source readily available, so you still don’t know.
The last time you upgraded your production environment you were up until 4AM trying to piece together outdated versions of your database.
When creating your latest DNN module, you opened up the first DNN module you ever created to grab that same piece of code that you always grab when creating a new module. | Go |
| The PDC Crushed my Old Record ... Blogging at the PDC08 crushed my good old refactoring is not free series . In other words, thanks for reading my blog. I hope you enjoyed my somewhat limited live coverage. | Go |
| What Sets the PDC Apart from Other Conferences ... Big thanks goes out to Marjan for sharing these photo's. ps: I'm the guy with his arm under his chin. While discussing the Entity Framework future with Tim Mallalieu another guru jumped on the couch. Don Box shared his definite experience, without going into much detail, wearing a Microsoft speakers shirt and the bathtub scene at Tech Ed Amsterdam (where Alex Thissen in red assisted). We talked about the future of Olso and language workbenches in specific domain's. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of Chris Anderson who also joined in for a couple of minutes. It was great fun being able to spend time on the couch with passionate Microsofties. | Go |
| A Custom DropDownList using an Enum Type as a DataSource ... First off, I have to again express my admiration at the job Microsoft have done at building the core ASP.NET Web Form Controls. I think they are sometimes taken for granted. This post is about making a control which derives from the DropDownList and uses a Enum as a Data Source. A little more though, you can transform the text with the use of Regular Expressions. I had a scenario where by I need a static set of Enum Values in the database to correspond with foreign keys in another table. So for example, say you have a table called Cars and it has a TransmissionID field which is linked to another table called TransmissionType. TransmissionType TransmissionTypeID TransmissionTypeName The values for exmaple in this table could be Manual Drive, Automatic Drive. Now, I know that these values will not change, and the point is made stronger when the number of types is great and static or will not be changed that often at all. So that I can communicate these values back to the database and take advantage of the C# Enum Type I create an Enum called TransmissionType. pubilc enum TransmissionType{
ManualDrive = 1,
AutomaticDrive = 2
}
Notice the format of the text between the enum names and the table fields i.e. Enum is CamelCase and the field values have a space to make good language and sense. Now I want to assign this enum as the DataSource to a DropDownList and even more than that I want the actual value of the enum to be the value of the ListItems in the DropDownList.
You can simply bind a list of Enums to a DropDownList and it will render but will not contain the value of each of the Enum Names, assuming you have values. I simply created a quick ASP.NET Server Control, derived it from the DropDownList and added a few more bits:
1. Define a private collection of ListItems
private ListItemCollection collection;
2. Define a custom property in the control called EnumType [Bindable(true )]
[Category("Behaviour ")]
[Localizable(false )]
public string EnumType
{
get
{
String s = (String)ViewState["EnumType "];
return ((s == null ) ? String.Empty : s);
}
set
{
ViewState["EnumType "] = value ;
}
}
3. Define a custom property in the control called TextTransaformationPattern [Bindable(true )]
[Category("Behaviour ")]
[Localizable(false )]
[DefaultValue("[A-Z] ")]
public string TextTransaformationPattern
{
get
{
String s = (String)ViewState["TextTransaformationPattern "];
return ((s == null ) ? String.Empty : s);
}
set
{
ViewState["TextTransaformationPattern "] = value ;
}
}
4. Define a custom property in the control called TextTransaformationReplacement [Bindable(true )]
[Category("Behaviour ")]
[Localizable(false )]
[DefaultValue(" $0 ")]
public string TextTransaformationReplacement
{
get
{
String s = (String)ViewState["TextTransaformationReplacement "];
return ((s == null ) ? String.Empty : s);
}
set
{
ViewState["TextTransaformationReplacement "] = value ;
}
}
5.Instantiate the collection in the OnInit Event Handler, add the List Items whilst formatting the names to give a slightly better effect and also enabling the value of the enum to go into the value of the ListItem. protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
{
base .OnInit(e);
collection = new ListItemCollection();
foreach (string s in Enum.GetNames(Type.GetType(EnumType)))
{
ListItem li = new ListItem(
Regex.Replace(s, TextTransaformationPattern, TextTransaformationReplacement),
((int )Enum.Parse(Type.GetType(EnumType), s)).ToString());
collection.Add(li);
}
}
6.Override the ListItemCollection getter and return our new list of ListItems. public override ListItemCollection Items
{
get
{
return collection;
}
}
The need for the regular expressions is just one way I came up with to format the text in a way which avoided the Camel Case look. In the regular expression replace I simply tell it to replace the Matched | Go |
| Best Decision to Kill LINQ to SQL ... I fully agree with Tim Mallalieu to recommend LINQ to Entities as the data access solution for your application. Sure, for an object-oriented view of the database LINQ to SQL was somewhat useful but in essence this is a scenario that the Entity Framework supports as well. Yes, in some ways the Entity Framework does add a bit of complexity but then again creating a direct mapping with the Entity Framework isn't much more difficult then it would be with LINQ to SQL. Apart from the fact that Microsoft shouldn't have released LINQ to SQL as a product I was quit surprised about the wave of people adopting this piece of technology. A tool for direct mappings misused as an object-relational mapper felt awkward from the start. I hoped for a little while that LINQ to SQL would evolve in a fully fledged object-relational mapper, but the Entity Framework with it's EDM investment had more potential from the start. We've spend a good amount of time talking with Tim (@PDC) on the future of the Entity Framework. The team is working hard on better POCO and TDD support and to deliver stories that support Domain-Driven Design over the next two releases. Most scenarios Alex and I explained to Tim have been thought through thoroughly and despite certain design choice which are arguable seen in isolation make perfect sense in a broader scope and the vision for the Entity Framework platform. I'm looking forward to V2 and V3 with input from the dp advisory council ... and can't wait to taste mEntity. To bad since I was looking forward to another technology deathmatch with Alex . | Go |
| C# dynamic: A bad idea? ... It seems like the most talked about thing on the street for code monkeys coming out of PDC is the introduction of dynamic typing. I'm trying very hard to understand why this is a good idea. Nikhil Kothari makes a good case for it interacting with Javascript from Silverlight , but that strikes me as a fringe case. I guess there's a part of me that is curious to know if this came out of a science project or actual customer need. With all of the mucking around I've done in Javascript the last two years, given the various AJAX frameworks, I can't say I'll ever be particularly happy about the lack of real types. It's just such a pain to debug. And in C#, ever since the invention of generics, which still clue in the compiler and Intellisense, dynamic typing seems even less useful. Maybe my biggest fear is abuse. While I've worked in very good shops with solid code review practices and some decent ground rules on coding standards, I've also seen the crap out there. I still cringe at things like DataSets and DataAdapters. Perhaps my fears are unfounded. I thought using the var keyword was a recipe for death, and now I can't imagine not using it. In the mean time, it'll be interesting to see the various computer science geeks debate this one. | Go |
