| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| ScottGu:Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight ... Great collection of links. Again. | Go |
| Passing through extra values with the CascadingDropDown ... Shows how to invoke a CascadingDropDown ajax callback sending through extra known category values (knownCategoryValues). | Go |
| SiteCore: Is the ultimate CMS also the ultimate ASP.NET app overall? ... I think SiteCore v6 sets the bar for all web applications to try to measure up to. | Go |
| A case study of bad API design: ASP.Net MVC Routing ... I am doing a spike in ASP.Net MVC now (and I'll talk about this at length at another time). I hit the wall when I wanted to do something that is trivially simple in MonoRail, limit a routing parameter to be a valid integer. | Go |
| Simple ASP.NET MVC Beta AJAX with jQuery! ... ASP.NET MVC is all the rage these days - and after Microsoft announced their partnership with the great folks over at jQuery and started shipping it - I knew I had to explore the whole AJAX experience again. I've still not played too much with the MVC framework, but I am working on switching a few projects over from WebForms - and I must say that the experience is quite different. So I've set out to do the smallest (simple) demo possible of ASP.NET MVC AJAX with jQuery - just to get (and give you) the flavor of it. | Go |
| The Dummy Provider: Testing membership and roles ... Asp.net has a wonderful system built in for handling user accounts and roles. The administration interface is encapsulated in a separate web site that can be accessed from within Visual Studio but it is difficult to integrate into the site. This often leads to building a new user administration area in each site. The problem I have with this is going into the data store and deleting the incomplete test data and not having "known good" data for testing. | Go |
| Custom Error Handling in ASP.Net ... Custom Error Handling in ASP.Net,
User friendly Error Handling in ASP.net | Go |
| Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC ... question that often comes up is how do you group controllers when building a large application with ASP.NET MVC. Often, the question is phrased as whether or not ASP.NET MVC supports "Areas", a feature of Monorail. According to the Monorail documentation,
MonoRail supports the concept of areas, which are logical groups of controllers. All controllers belong to an area. The default area is an empty (unnamed) one | Go |
| App Areas in ASP.NET MVC, take 2 ... So the discussion continues: How do you partition an ASP.NET MVC application into separate "areas" or "modules" (e.g., blog module, e-commerce module, forums module), then compose a finished app from those areas or modules? | Go |
| Tracking User Activity ... Scott Mitchell talks about tracking user activity in web applications. | Go |
| Introduction to CSS Adapters ... An introduction to ASP.NET CSS Adapters, a quick showcase on them, and info on how to replace <SPAN> tags around Label's with a <DIV>! | Go |
| The simplicity that is the Asp.Net MVC ... Today I was browsing my list of RSS feeds and I stumbled upon a posting that showed some Asp.Net code. This code was nothing out of the ordinary, it was simply someone building a table with a repeater. . . | Go |
| Using Active Directory to authenticate users to your ASP.NET Web Site ... ASP.NET membership provides the ability to authenticate users to your web application using forms based authentication against a database of users or directory services. This article explains the steps required to provide authentication against Active Directory, either for new sites with no authentication, or for existing sites using database authentication. | Go |
| Navigate to default document of current directory ... An easy, generic way to reference the root or default document of the directory a web page is in. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX Demo Code - Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| ASP.Net MVC on Azure | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF ... Last week was our big PDC conference, and I've been busy catching up back at work this week. I'm hoping to publish a bunch of new posts soon (including some on the PDC announcements we made). Until then, here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos : Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1. Download Hotfix: False C# Compilation Errors for ASP.NET Code Behind Files with VS 2008 SP1 : The C# team added support for live semantic errors with background compilation in VS 2008 SP1. There were a few cases where this caused false errors to be shown with ASP.NET Web site projects. You can fix these either by disabling live semantic errors (tools->options allows you to disable this), or by downloading a recent hotfix patch which is now public. Omar Khan has a useful blog post with more details on it. Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13 : Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles. This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database. For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos . ASP.NET Patterns Developers Should Know : Alex Homer from the Patterns and Practices (PAG) team at Microsoft has a nice article that introduces a number of common design patterns (MVC and MVP, Repository, Singleton, etc) and how you can apply them within ASP.NET applications. If you are interested in learning more about pattern based development I also highly recommend reading the Head First Design Patterns book (which has more than 250 positive reviews on Amazon). ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008 : Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery. Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today. ASP.NET and jQuery : Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free. Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation. jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2 : Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery. Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial. ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples. Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX : Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution. ASP.NET MVC Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC. This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work). Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC : Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC. I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms. Phil cove | Go |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you t | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here . The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release. UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup. Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size). Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download. This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications. This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility. I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it. To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application. To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item. We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template wit | Go |
| ASP.NET 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Access JavaScript variables on PostBack using ASP.NET Code ... In this article, we will see how to pass javascript values on postback and then access these values in your server side code using ASP.NET. This article will primarily showcase two techniques of doing so. One using Hidden variables and the other using the __doPostBack() javascript method. | Go |
| Using AutoComplete in the AJAX Toolkit in C# ... In this tutorial, you will learn how to implement something similar using the AutoComplete AJAX Control and a Web Method.
We will be using a SQL database to match the typed text against and retrieve matches to the user. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - Part I - New Solution ... Catharsis web-app framework | Go |
| Handle session variable problems between classic ASP and ASP.NET web applications ... A solution to handle session variable problems between classic ASP and ASP.NET web applications. | Go |
| How to save data from a DataSet into a T-SQL table ... This article tells you how to save data from a DataSet into T-SQL tables. | Go |
| Ajax ComboBox in Asp.net ... I have created a ComboBox control that mimics the functionality of google suggest. As you type a search phrase, It automatically displays a list of matching entries in a dropdown. | Go |
| jQuery Based Ajax.Net library ... jQuery Based Ajax.Net library | Go |
| REST Web Services in ASP.Net 2.0 (c#) ... This article describes how to cheat your way to an elegant url REST web service. | Go |
| Synchronous Javascript call using Scriptable XML webservice (S-AJAX) ... Call ASP.net AJAX Webservice or PageMethods Synchronously from client java script to use in custom validator | Go |
| 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks ... 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks | Go |
| Integrating Help In Your Iron Speed Designer Application ... Learn how to integrate a help system into any Iron Speed Designer generated application. | Go |
| Fast gridview ... A Fast GridView optimized | Go |
| Display image gallery in ASP.NET GridView Control ... Here we can use GridView control to display images in a gallery view with internal paging. | Go |
| 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 |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Handle session variable problems between classic ASP and ASP.NET web applications ... A solution to handle session variable problems between classic ASP and ASP.NET web applications.... 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 |
| Grid client-side data-binding performance with 1 mil. records ... Just before our Q3 release I've made quick test to see how the grid will perform with 1 mil. records table and here is the result:
In this example the grid is bound with our new client-side declarative approach to a static page method:
...
< DataBinding Location = "~/Default.aspx" SelectMethod = "GetData" SortParameterType = "Linq" FilterParameterType = "Linq" />
...
...
[System.Web.Services.WebMethod]
public static Telerik.Web.UI.GridBindingDataGetData( int startRowIndex, int maximumRows, string sortExpression, string filterExpression)
{
return RadGrid.GetBindingData( "DataClassesDataContext" , "MyTables" ,startRowIndex,maximumRows,sortExpression,filterExpression);
}
...
and I've used our OnDataBinding/OnDataBound client-side events to measured the grid binding performance:
< script type = "text/javascript" >
varstart = null ;
functionRadGrid1_DataBinding(sender,args){
start = new Date();
}
functionRadGrid1_DataBound(sender,args){
$get("div1").innerHTML = String .format("Timetoretrieveandbinddata: < span style = 'color:red;font-weight:bold;' >{0} </ span > ms",newDate()-start);
}
</ script >
[Live | Download | Database ]
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Another Sitefinity Case Study on Telerik TV ... Telerik Sitefinity evangelist Gabe Sumner and Telerik Chief Evangelist Todd Anglin co-host another case study on Telerik TV . This month, they interview Amith Nagarajan from Aptify as he discusses why his company chose Telerik as their CMS provider and shows off how they use Sitefinity on their website, Aptify.com . Aptify, which Amith founded in 1993, provides powerful enterprise-level software built to meet the specific needs of many industries. So be sure to drop by Telerik TV and watch as Amith shows how easy it was to use Sitefinity CMS to build a powerful and flexible web site.
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 |
| Read a Tab Delimited Text File ... This tip shows how to read from a log file using a specified format.... 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 |
| Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC ... A question that often comes up is how do you group controllers when building a large application with ASP.NET MVC. Often, the question is phrased as whether or not ASP.NET MVC supports Areas, a feature of Monorail. According to the Monorail documentation, MonoRail supports the concept of areas, which are logical groups of controllers. All controllers belong to an area. The default area is an empty (unnamed) one While theres no out of the box support for this in ASP.NET MVC, the extensibility... 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 |
| Six New Videos on ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Today I'm happy to announce the first six videos in a new series on ASP.NET Dynamic
Data.
I'm work to have another batch for next week.
#1
| Getting Started with Dynamic Data23#2
| Begin Editing the Templates in ASP.NET Dynamic Data Applications#3 | Begin
Modifying Dynamic Data Applications with URL Routing#4 | Enable
In-Line Editing in ASP.NET Dynamic Data Applications#5 | How
to Enable Table Specific Routing in Dynamic Data Applications#6 | How
to Use Attribute Validation in ASP.NET Dynamic... 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 |
| 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 |
| AutoCompleteBox control / Worker Threads ... I recently began a discussion of the Silverlight Toolkit and on the way towards explaining the AutoCompleteBox I became distracted by creating a list of words to use as our datasource. I've actually reworked that example, slightly to build the list using a worker thread (to explore threading and to improve the UI) but I have broken through and actually managed to get to the point, which is adding an AutoCompleteBox to the page, and while I was at it, I included (per one of the examples provided)... 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 |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 ... Great news! Microsoft has released a collection of free charting controls for both ASP.NET and Windows Forms! The only inconvenience is that they only work with .NET 3.5 (is it really an inconvenience? :-)), but they look great and offer the most commonly required functionality, at no cost.
Related links are:
Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en
Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework Documentation download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EE8F6F35-B087-4324-9DBA-6DD5E844FD9F&displaylang=en
Microsoft Chart Controls Add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1D69CE13-E1E5-4315-825C-F14D33A303E9&displaylang=en
Samples Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls download and documentation: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart
Windows Forms/ASP.NET Chart Control forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/MSWinWebChart/threads/ | 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 |
| PDC, an impressive stage for Microsoft future innovation, and for Microsoft partners as well... ... HI, We would like to use this stage and share with this blog readers our impressions and feeling. This is our first participation in PDC and we must say, we are impressed. Microsoft really presents its power by attracting top technologist and by presenting new biotechnologies. Marketing event that really has its impact. But From a Microsoft partner point of view, we would like to see some more 'partner's support' in presenting product and solutions, which after all are targeted to 'fill gaps' that...(read more ) | Go |
| Working with ADO.NET Data Services in AJAX ... Introduction If you haven't heard, we've shipped ASP.NET AJAX CodePlex Preview 3. It's live and available here . I'm really excited about this release because it includes client-side support for ADO.NET Data Services, replacing the AJAX Client Library for ADO.NET Data Services that we had on CodePlex before. The new library currently has read-only declarative integration with the DataView, but on its own, includes support for query, insert, update, and remove operations. We also support optimistic concurrency and POST verb tunneling. In this blog post, I'm going to walk through building a simple ASP.NET Web Site that showcases using ADO.NET Data Services with our new client library, while also using familiar features from ASP.NET AJAX CodePlex Preview 2, such as the DataView and Client-Side Databinding. I'll also include a simple master-detail view with support for DataView placeholders and the concept of a selected item (new features in Preview 3). I built this demo using Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite SP1. You will need a version of Visual Studio with SP1 in order for the demo to work properly, and you will also need to have the AJAX CodePlex Preview 3 bits, which you can download here . Note that certain dialogs may appear differently if you are using a different version of Visual Studio than I am. I'm also going to assume some level of familiarity with the features we shipped in AJAX Preview 2. The finished product will be a website that allows you to manipulate an ADO.NET Data Service from JavaScript, including insert, delete, and update operations. It may help you before you start to download the zipped up project (AdoNetDemo.zip ) attached to this post to get a feel for what the final product is like. Website Setup Let's start by creating a blank website. Open Visual Studio and navigate to File->New Website. I'm going to create my site in my Documents folder and call it AdoNetDemo. You should now have a website set up with an App_Data folder, web.config, and Default.aspx/Default.aspx.cs. Let's go ahead and make the following changes to the head section of Default.aspx: < head runat ="server" >
< title > AdoNetDemo</ title >
< style type ="text/css" >
@import url(Default.css);
.sys-template { display:none }
</ style >
</ head >
.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; }
Here we're adding the sys-template class to support the DataView features we'll be using later on. I've also imported a default stylesheet to clean up the appearance of the site, feel free to substitute your own (mine, Default.css, is available in this zip ). Now, let's copy over MicrosoftAjaxAdoNet.js and MicrosoftAjaxTemplates.js to a Scripts sub-folder in the website (don't forget to create the Scripts folder through the designer), and add the files to the project as existing items by right clicking on the Scripts folder, as shown below.
Now we can add the references to the client libraries, as well as namespace support for the DataView, as shown by the following code snippets for the body:
< body xmlns:sys ="javascript:Sys"
xmlns:dv ="javascript:Sys.UI.DataView"
sys:activate ="*" >
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: blac | Go |
| KaizenConf Wrapup - Approaching Functional Programming ... This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend and give a workshop at the Continuous Improvement in Software Development, or KaizenConf. I'm grateful to Scott Bellware and Dave Laribee for organizing this event. The tone and subject matter at this conference was both refreshing and interesting. This conference had a focus on continuous improvement through methodology, communication, as well as technology, which was a bit different than the ALT.NET Conferences, which had much more of a technology tilt. The conversations had not only in the sessions, but also the hallways in between were enlightening, and it was enjoyable to get so many perspectives on software development issues.
Approaching Functional Programming
I want to thank everyone who attended my workshop on Thursday on functional programming. It's a topic that I'm passionate about in regards to how it can improve your code significantly. The title of my workshop was "Functional Programming - Is It A Game Changer", and instead, I think the talk is better titled "Approaching Functional Programming". In this talk, I not only talked about the basics of functional programming, but how to mix and match the object oriented and imperative styles as well. I had a pretty good attendance, even though I was up against a Domain Driven Design talk by Mr. Laribee and Textual DSLs in Boo with Ayende. This was one of the sessions that was not recorded, but instead, I hope to give you some basic ideas of what I covered. This talk was also given as part of an open space discussion as well.
Some of the topics I covered were:
What is Functional Programming?
Why is it important?
How can I do it in .NET? With C#? With F#?
How does it affect your code?
Moving from imperative to functional
Many times when we're faced with functional programming, many people look with a blank stare on several topics, including immutability, functional composition, currying and most of all, monads. Let's just go through some simple examples of each and learn how they might help us.
From Mutable to Immutable
One of the easiest examples to understand is moving from mutable data structures to mutable ones. The advantage of doing so is especially apparent when moving to data parallel applications. If you don't have to worry about data ownership and which thread is writing to the structure, the less opportunity for unintended consequences. Let's take a simple point class as our first example:
public class Point2D
{
public int x;
public int y;
public Point2D(int x, int y) {
this .x = x;
this .y = y;
}
public void MoveBy(int dx, int dy) {
x += dx;
y += dy;
}
}
Classes such as the above scream to me to be a value object, in the Domain Driven Design parlance. As identity is not important to us, if we need to change it, we through it away and get a new one. This stresses that these value objects are immutable. Let's move this class to be an immutable data structure instead.
public class Point2D
{
public readonly int x;
public readonly int y;
public Point2D(int x, int y)
{
this .x = x;
this .y = y;
}
public Point2D MoveBy(int dx, int dy)
{
return new Point2D(x + dx, y + dy);
}
}
As you can see, there is no unnecessary mutation here, instead, when we want to move the point, we are given a new point class. This isn't to say that given a standard object oriented approach, that all values must be immutable, but instead, the state must be explicit. I like the approach that F# takes in which you have to go out of your way to make your mutability explicit through either the mutable keyword or a reference cell.
type Point2D =
val mutable x: float
val mutable y: float
new ( dx, dy) = { x = dx; y = dy; } member this. MoveBy( dx, dy) =
this. x <- this. x + dx
this. y <- this. y + dy
Projects such as Spec#, which is being pr | Go |
| There's still time to register for OpenForce ... With just 6 days until OpenForce starts in Las Vegas there is still time to get registered! This will be the ultimate DNN gathering for 2008. I've spent a lot of time this week with the rest of the guys here at Engage Software putting together the materials for the post conference training we're providing on Friday the 14th , there's still time to register for that as well! In case you haven't seen it yet, Bill posted about the OpenForce Social going on Wednesday night . I hope to meet everyone in...(read more ) | Go |
| Dynamic Data Entities Web Application ... When you opened up your Visual Studio 2008, you may have seen the ASP.net News on the Start Page promoting Joe Stagner's Six New Videos on ASP.NET Dynamic Data .
I viewed each one with interest and thought I'd do a bit more research on the topic. Some questions came to my mind, such as: Which Dynamic Data project/website do I build? An Entities or a LINQ to SQL?
It appears the answer to that is Entities. Based on Microsoft's post Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap , it may appear that LINQ to SQL is already becoming obsolete. This strongly worded post indicates that LINQ to SQL is Dead, killed by Microsoft. In answer, a Microsoft member of the LINQ to SQL team responds in LINQ to SQL Next Steps .
Okay, that decided, I went with the Dynamic Data Entities application.
The next question I encountered was, is this really something to be used for a full-blown web application with the bells and whistles? Sidebars, menus, professional-looking forms, etc.? Seriously, it looked to me like an admin tool I might use to populate helper tables and not something to be used for a full-blown professional web application.
David Hayden says "Out-of-the-box it can provide admin pages for your database tables, but with a little imagination you can do so much more than that. " Here is another post that clarifies Dynamic Data Entities Websites - EntityDataSource and ASP.NET Website Scaffolding - Rapid Application Development ( RAD ) . Here are numerous other dynamic data posts from the same author , David Hayden.
In ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Dynamic Data , Eric Moreau indicates "I would say that it builds great data-driven web site to administer your data without requiring much coding if you are ready to accept default behaviours."
Now, I've viewed numerous videos on this topic, including David Ebbo's most excellent, Developing Data Driven Applications Using ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls and the MSDN Webcast: geekSpeak: ASP.NET Dynamic Data with Rachel Appel , but if you want to actually follow step by step instructions with images on how to setup one of these applications, I highly recommend Eric Moreau's post, even though it is LINQ to SQL.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc488546.aspx Topics include: Walkthrough: Creating a New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Web Site Using Scaffolding . How to: Customize ASP.NET Dynamic Data Default Field TemplatesHow to: Customize Data Field Appearance and Behavior in the Data ModelHow to: Customize the Layout of an Individual Table By Using a Custom Page TemplateHow to: Customize Data Field Validation in the Data Model .How to: Add Dynamic Behavior to Data-Bound Controls by Using a DynamicField . How to: Use ASP.NET Dynamic Data in Templated Data-Bound Controls .
Now a potential problem is, what if you have a need for a Many to Many relation? LINQ to SQL version evidentally won't handle that. David Ebbo shares with us A ‘Many To Many’ field template for Dynamic Data , which adds a ManyToMany.ascx and AutoFieldGenerator class to allow using checkboxes on edit to select multiple fields from another table. This is in C#.
Another post, Many to Many FieldTemplates with Dynamic Data and Entity Framework , also shares source code on how to do this. Another author shares "I have modified the standard page templates though for being more user-friendly (like having the parent set automatically in the dropdown when inserting a new item going from parent details) and also have implemented a generic many-to-many editor (two actually, one with two listboxes and move left/right) and one with a checkboxlist, pretty simple although you have to use reflection."
There currently is also a problem with the framework in that it may generate an error like "'System.Web.UI.WebControls.EntityDataSourceWrapper' does not contain a property with the name 'Orders.OrderID'" due to foreign key relations. This post, Dynamic Data Entity Framework Workaround , you add a dll in your bin folder for websites, or add a ref | Go |
| Linkbutton with image and text ... I ran across the need to have a linkbutton that contained an image and text. A little background... I was creating a file structure-like list in a repeater control. Each row had to be clickable by the folder name or folder icon; just like in Windows Explorer. By default, the linkbutton has a Text property but this was of no help for trying to also squeeze in an image too. But did you know you could do this with a linkbutton:
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE
MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}
< asp : LinkButton ID ="lbYear" runat ="server" CausesValidation ="false">
< asp : Image ID ="imgFolder"
runat ="server"
ImageUrl ="~/images/folder.jpg"
/>
<% #
Container.DataItem %>
</ asp : LinkButton > Here you see the LinkButton control acts like a template for the image control and text it needed to display. Seriously, I know this isn't rocket science but it took me a few minutes to think about how this works because how often do you do this with the linkbutton control? Enjoy! | Go |
| Need for Light Weight View engine from Microsoft and Evil of Codebehind in ASP.net MVC. ... Some how I had an impression in my mind that current version of ViewEngine was just a temporary solution until Asp.Net MVC reaches to Beta stage. It seems now that current version is going to be final at least for V1. If you are like me who do not like ViewPage, then you will have to relay on MVC Contrib for either Brail or NVelocity.
What is wrong in using current version of ViewPage?
I always thought of Web application MVC View as a light weight template engine capable of sending gestures back to controller. Current Version of ViewPage interits from Page class and includes all lifecycle events that are not necessary in MVC View. I cannot imagine my self using ViewPage in real world complex application with multiple partials.
Why do we need light weight ViewEngine from Microsoft team when similar implementation are available from MVC contrib?
Its very difficult to convince architecture committee in big companies to use the piece of software that comes from open source world, more so when alternate version from Microsoft is available with full support.
Most of the Microsoft developers will find themselves more comfortable with the ViewEngine that supports CLR languages rather then Brail or NVeloicity.
Evil of code behind in view
We continue to see lot of Asp.net MVC samples from MS team which uses code behind in View, Although in most of those cases code behind files are empty they do clutter solution with unnecessary file and gives wrong impression to developer community.
Code Behind in a View can easily promote bad design specially when most of the developers are coming from traditional asp.net development and are still learning MVC concepts. Making Code Behind file available to developer has potential risk of promoting them to write business logic or even make service call directly from Code Behind. | Go |
| Learn how integrating Visual WebGui into Visual Studio simplifies development and saves time and money in the next MSDN Webcast ... Hi Eyal is going to broadcast Visual WebGui's next MSDN Webcast on November 24. The Webcast demonstrates how Integrating Visual WebGui into Visual Studio Simplifies Development and Saves Time and Money (Level 200) Here are some more details about the upcoming Webcast: Language(s): English. Product(s): Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. Audience(s): Developer. Duration: 60 Minutes Start Date: Monday, November 24, 2008 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) Event Overview Visual WebGui...(read more ) | Go |
