| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| AccessDataSource Control in ASP.NET 3.5 ... In this article, I will describe how to use AccessDataSource control in ASP.NET 3.5 | Go |
| Using the BackgroundWorker Component with composite user controls ... In this article you will learn how to use the BackgroundWorker Component with user controls in VB. | Go |
| HowTo Get Current Online Users Count and Infos with ASP.NET ... Getting current online users count and informations about them using ASP.NET and HttpModule. | Go |
| Continuous Integration and SIMILE ... Beefy demonstration of visualizing your continuous integration logs using the SIMILE timeline. NICE usage of this awesome timeline tool. | Go |
| ASP.NET Contact Forms ... I've seen some blog postings out there recently on what to do if your contact form fails for some reason. Some have suggested including your email address using JavaScript, which I do not recommend | Go |
| Deciding Between ASP.NET MVC and WebForms ... Does this diagram make sense? | Go |
| Exporting Data From AJAX GridView with Image to Excel Sheet ... This article explains the concept of exporting data from an AJAX GridView control to Microsoft Excel Sheet with an Image, Decimal and DateTime columns. | Go |
| ASP.NET Application Level Error Handling with HttpModule ... Some of ASP.NET Developers I saw use the Global.asax file in order to Handle Application Level Errors... It's a pretty simple way, yes. But .. HttpModules might be a better way to Handle HttpRequests. | Go |
| HowTo Set DefaultButton on ASP.NET Page Containing Multiple Action But ... Today a little tips in order to set the DefaultButton on "Enter" press on an ASP.NET Page containing multiple action buttons | Go |
| Adding HTTPS/SSL support to ASP.NET MVC routing ... Unfortunately, as of Preview 4, routing has a missing feature (oh noes!): it's got no support for absolute URLs. Everything it does works in terms of application-relative "virtual paths", so you simply can't generate links to other subdomains, port numbers, or even switch from HTTP to HTTPS (or vice-versa). As they say, the design is never perfect first time. | Go |
| upload csv file and read using asp.net ... upload csv file and read using asp.net | Go |
| filter-column-data-in-a-gridview-using-aspnet ... filter data in gridview | Go |
| ASP.NET Cookies Extensions Methods ... Tonight a simple way to manage Cookies on an ASP.NET Application with Strongly Typed Objects. | Go |
| Get Previous Page Control Values after Cross-Page Posting ... A little trick in order to get Previous Page Control Values after a Cross-Page Posting. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control: - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| 2008/11/26 - ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough | Go |
| .NET Cheat Sheets " Just Sayin' More Words | Go |
| Combining JQuery Form Validation and Ajax Submission with ASP.NET | Go |
| Tracking User Activity | Go |
| jQuery Ajax uploader plugin (with progress bar!) | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - The Weekly Source Code 37 - Geolocation/Geotargeting (Reverse IP Address Lookup) in ASP.NET MVC made easy | Go |
| ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know - developerFusion - the global developer community | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control: ... Microsoft recently released a cool new ASP.NET server control - <asp:chart /> - that can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios: Download the free Microsoft Chart Controls Download the VS 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Documentation Visit the Microsoft Chart Control Forum Once installed the <asp:chart/> control shows up under the "Data" tab on the Toolbox, and can be easily declared on any ASP.NET page as a standard server control: <asp:chart /> supports a rich assortment of chart options - including pie, area, range, point, circular, accumulation, data distribution, ajax interactive, doughnut, and more. You can statically declare chart data within the control declaration, or alternatively use data-binding to populate it dynamically. At runtime the server control generates an image (for example a .PNG file) that is referenced from the client HTML of the page using a <img/> element output by the <asp:chart/> control. The server control supports the ability to cache the chart image, as well as save it on disk for persistent scenarios. It does not require any other server software to be installed, and will work with any standard ASP.NET page. To get a sense of how to use the <asp:chart /> control I recommend downloading the Microsoft Chart Controls Sample Project . This includes over 200 ASP.NET sample pages that you can run locally. Just open the web project in VS 2008 and hit run to see them in action - you can then open the .aspx source of each to see how they are implemented. The below example (under Chart Types->Line Charts->3D Line and Curve Charts) demonstrates how to perform Line, Spline and StepLine charting: The below example (under Chart Types->Pie and Doughnut Charts) demonstrates a variety of pie and 3D doughnut options: The below example (under Chart Types->Advanced Financial Charts) demonstrates some graph charts: In addition to the above samples, you can download the Microsoft Chart Control Documentation or ask questions on the Chart Controls Forum to learn more. This should provide a useful (and free) addition to your standard ASP.NET toolkit of functionality, and enable you to easily add richer visualization and data workflow scenarios to your ASP.NET applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 ... Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery . Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use. Steps to Enable jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 To enable intellisense completion for jQuery within VS you'll want to follow three steps: Step 1: Install VS 2008 SP1 VS 2008 SP1 adds richer JavaScript intellisense support to Visual Studio, and adds code completion support for a broad range of JavaScript libraries. You can download VS 2008 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 here . Step 2: Install VS 2008 Patch KB958502 to Support "-vsdoc.js" Intellisense Files Two weeks ago we shipped a patch that you can apply to VS 2008 SP1 and VWD 2008 Express SP1 that causes Visual Studio to check for the presence of an optional "-vsdoc.js" file when a JavaScript library is referenced, and if present to use this to drive the JavaScript intellisense engine. These annotated "-vsdoc.js" files can include XML comments that provide help documentation for JavaScript methods, as well as additional code intellisense hints for dynamic JavaScript signatures that cannot automatically be inferred. You can learn more about this patch here . You can download it for free here . Step 3: Download the jQuery-vsdoc.js file We've worked with the jQuery team to put together a jQuery-vsdoc.js file that provides help comments and support for JavaScript intellisense on chained jQuery selector methods. You can download both jQuery and the jQuery-vsdoc file from the official download page on the jQuery.com site: Save the jquery-vsdoc.js file next to your jquery.js file in your project (and make sure its naming prefix matches the jquery file name): You can then reference the standard jquery file with an html <script/> element like so: Or alternatively reference it using the <asp:scriptmanager/> control, or by adding a /// <reference/> comment at the top of a standalone .js file. When you do this VS will now look for a -vsdoc.js file in the same directory as the script file you are referencing, and if found will use it for help and intellisense. The annotated For example, we could use jQuery to make a JSON based get request, and get intellisense for the method (hanging off of $.): As well as help/intellisense for the $.getJSON() method's parameters: The intellisense will continue to work if you nest a callback function within the method call. For example, we might want to iterate over each JSON object returned from the server: And for each of the items we could execute another nested callback function: We could use the each callback function to dynamically append a new image to a list (the image src attribute will point to the URL of the returned JSON media image): And on each dynamically created image we could wire-up a click event handler so that when it is pressed it will disappear via an animation: Notice how the jQuery intellisense works cleanly at each level of our code. JavaScript Intellisense Tips and Tricks Jeff King from the Web Tools team wrote up a great post earlier this week that answers a number of common questions about how JavaScript intellisense works with VS 2008. I highly recommend reading it. One trick he talks about which I'll show here is a technique you can use when you want to have JavaScript intellisense work within user-controls/partials (.ascx files). Often you don't want to include a JavaScript library <script src=""/> reference within these files, and instead have this live on the master page or content page the user control is used within. The problem of course when you do this is that by default VS has no way of knowing that this script is available within the user control - and so won't provide intellisense of it for you | Go |
| Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 ... We shipped Silverlight 2 last month. Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed. Silverlight 2 was a major release, and delivered an impressive set of cross-browser, cross-platform functionality for Media and Rich Internet Application experiences. It has been great watching new sites launch using it. Media Experiences Silverlight 2 enables the highest quality video on the web, and delivers it with the lowest TCO of any media platform. One of the capabilities built-into Silverlight 2 is its support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables video to be delivered at multiple bitrates (for example: 400Kbits, 800Kbits, 1.5Mbits, 2Mbits) with Silverlight dynamically choosing the optimal bitrate to use depending on the network bandwidth and CPU capability of the client (it can also automatically switch bitrates seamlessly if conditions change later). Silverlight's adaptive streaming support is extensible. Move Networks (who helped pioneer the concept of adaptive streaming) have already integrated their adaptive streaming solution with Silverlight. Silverlight 2 and Move were used to stream the Democratic National Convention live on the web this summer. Last month we announced that Microsoft will be adding adaptive streaming support as a free feature of our IIS7 web-server. IIS Smooth Streaming will provide an integrated way to deliver HD quality adaptive video over the web. Visit Akamai's www.smoothhd.com site to see some awesome examples of Silverlight 2 and IIS Smooth Streaming in action (with adaptive streaming up to 2.5Mbits). The NBC Olympics site used Silverlight 2 to serve more than 3,500 hours of live and on-demand Olympic coverage to over 60 million unique visitors this summer. Visitors to the site watched an average of 27 minutes of video - which is stunningly high for online video. The site used the new Silverlight adaptive streaming capability to support 1.5Mbit bitrates - which helped deliver an awesome video experience: In addition to powering the Olympics experience in the US, Silverlight was also used in France (by FranceTV ), the Netherlands (by NOS ), Russia (by Sportbox.ru ) and Italy (by RAI ). In addition to video quality, a big reason behind these broadcasters decision to use Silverlight was the TCO and streaming cost difference Silverlight provided. In the August 2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine (a Dutch publication) a NOS representative reported that they were able to serve 100,000 concurrent users using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media Servers, whereas it would have required 270 servers if they had used Flash Media Servers. Over the last month we've seen several major new deployments of Silverlight for media scenarios. For example: CBS College Sports is now using Silverlight to stream NCAA events from its 170 partner colleges and university. Blockbuster is replacing Flash with Silverlight for its MovieLink application. And Netflix two weeks ago rolled out its new Instant Watch service using Silverlight. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Experiences Silverlight 2 delivers a cross-browser, cross-platform subset of the .NET Framework, and enables developers to build Rich Internet Applications. Developers can use either VS 2008 or the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects, and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment. Designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the same projects and use a creative tool to sculpt and create rich user experiences. I recently blogged about the nice dev | Go |
| Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 ... Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications. One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt and create optimal user experience designs. The WPF UI framework shipped in Silverlight further enables a great designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts like layout management, controls, styles, templates, and resources - which help avoid scenarios where designers and developers end up tripping over each other when integrating functionality, behavior and expressive design. Silverlight 2 Twitter Sample Last month I posted an in-depth blog tutorial on how to build a Silverlight 2 Digg application which you can read here . This tutorial was aimed primarily at developers, and focused on introducing the fundamental programming concepts involved when building a Silverlight 2 application. Today Celso Gomes and Peter Blois posted a cool 10 minute video tutorial that shows off using Expression Blend to stylize a Silverlight 2 Twitter Messenger application. You can watch the video here . You can download the source code for the completed Silverlight Twitter application here . The video does a nice job demonstrating how designers can re-style a Silverlight application without having to mess with the code behind it. In the process it shows some of the power and capability that Expression Blend 2 provides to build really rich user experiences. Celso starts with a developer version of the application, and then customizes and sculpts the UI to have a fun twitter character theme: The Application Model The Silverlight Twitter client is hosted within an ASP.NET server application that exposes a web service that enables the Silverlight Twitter application to communicate to the Twitter service (since Twitter does not allow direct access from client applications). Communication between the Silverlight client and the ASP.NET web server is done using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The client application uses a Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern (also known as the Model-View-ViewModel pattern) which is commonly used in large WPF applications. Even though this is a fairly simple application they wanted to take advantage of the flexibility that MVP allows and allow room for future growth. Maintaining the separation between the visuals and the application logic also enables designers to make fairly complex visual changes without impacting the basic application flow. The video goes through some examples of the styling flexibility this architecture facilitates. The Styling Process In the video, Celso highlights how Resources can help designers quickly change colors. A common Brush Resource, for example, can be used to change the color of all the text elements in the application: Celso shows how easy is to create new User Controls from graphics using Expression Blend 2 SP1 (just select multiple elements in the designer, right-click, and choose the "Make Control" menu option): And also how to create new states inside this new User Control (using the Visual State Manager feature - which is also now supported with WPF), to animate the bird (fly, blink, etc...) Celso also shows how to create animations for each state, changing advanced properties like Key Spline curves, and Repeat Behavior: He also shows how to create custom buttons from drawings (which can come from XAML or any other design tool like Photoshop or Illustrator). All the states of a Button Control are available out of the box. Expression Blend also enables you to easily change complex controls like List Boxes. Designers have acce | Go |
| Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF ... Last week was our big PDC conference, and I've been busy catching up back at work this week. I'm hoping to publish a bunch of new posts soon (including some on the PDC announcements we made). Until then, here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos : Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1. Download Hotfix: False C# Compilation Errors for ASP.NET Code Behind Files with VS 2008 SP1 : The C# team added support for live semantic errors with background compilation in VS 2008 SP1. There were a few cases where this caused false errors to be shown with ASP.NET Web site projects. You can fix these either by disabling live semantic errors (tools->options allows you to disable this), or by downloading a recent hotfix patch which is now public. Omar Khan has a useful blog post with more details on it. Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13 : Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles. This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database. For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos . ASP.NET Patterns Developers Should Know : Alex Homer from the Patterns and Practices (PAG) team at Microsoft has a nice article that introduces a number of common design patterns (MVC and MVP, Repository, Singleton, etc) and how you can apply them within ASP.NET applications. If you are interested in learning more about pattern based development I also highly recommend reading the Head First Design Patterns book (which has more than 250 positive reviews on Amazon). ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008 : Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery. Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today. ASP.NET and jQuery : Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free. Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation. jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2 : Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery. Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial. ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week. You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples. Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX : Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution. ASP.NET MVC Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC. This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work). Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC : Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC. I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms. Phil cove | Go |
| October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch : Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more. A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta : Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module : Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET : Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation : Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know : Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer : A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets. Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight : Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download. This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development. Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex : .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface. This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates : Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers : Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Beta Released ... Today we released a beta of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Click here to download it. You can also visit www.asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials , quickstarts , and videos to learn more. The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types). Today's ASP.NET MVC Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments. The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion). Today's release is clearer about this in the license. The beta release is getting close to V1 feature complete, although there are still a few more features that will be added before the final "V1" release (including several VS tooling enhancements). The team decided to call this release a "beta", though, because the quality and testing of it is higher than the previous previews (a lot of bug fixes and performance tuning work went into it), and they feel that the core features that are in it are now "baked enough" that there won't be major changes from this release to the final product. This post contains a quick summary of some of the new features and changes in this build compared to the previous "Preview 5" release: New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute Better Validation Error Messages HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment I am also planning to publish a few end to end tutorials in the weeks ahead that explain ASP.NET MVC concepts in more depth for folks who have not looked at it before, and who want a "from the beginning" set of tutorials on how to get started. New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio With previous ASP.NET MVC preview releases you had to manually add views through the Project->Add New Item dialog in VS, and creating and wiring up everything required several manual steps (making sure the directory/file structure is right, going into the code-behind file to specify the strongly typed ViewData model type, etc). Today's beta makes the steps much easier. You can now just move your source editor cursor to be within a Controller action method in the source editor, and then right-click and select a new "Add View" context menu item (alternatively you can type the Ctrl-M Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut to invoke this without having to take your hands off the keyboard): This will bring up a new "Add View" dialog that allows you to specify the name of the view you want to create, its master page, and optionally its strongly typed ViewData "Model" type: Visual Studio will automatically pre-populate the view name based on the action method your cursor is within (you can then override this if you want). For example, if our cursor had been within an "Edit" action method when we selected "add view" it would have pre-populated the view name textbox with "Edit" instead of "Browse". The strongly typed ViewData "model" for a view can be selected from an editable ComboBox that lists all classes in (or referenced) from the MVC project: You can either select a type from the list, or manually type one in the ComboBox. You can also optionally pick an initial type from the list and then tweak it. For example, we could select the "Product" class from the list and then use the ComboBox editing support to wrap it as an IEnumerable<Product> - meaning a sequence of pr | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Released ... Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2. You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here . Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). Silverlight provides a rich set of features for development including: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications. Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions. Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). It also includes built-in sockets networking support. Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework. Rich Media Support : Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support). Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. The final Silverlight 2 release delivers a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that enables you to really push the boundaries of what can be done in a browser, and enable great end user experiences. Silverlight Customers Over the last few months a number of very high profile sites have successfully launched using the beta releases of Silverlight 2. In August, NBC hosted the Olympics live on nbcolympics.com and served up 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video content - makin | Go |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| 3 Different Ways to Display Progress in an ASP.NET AJAX Application ... In this article, we will study three different techniques that allow you to visually display progress to users while performing partial-page updates using the UpdatePanel | Go |
| Test for User Group Membership in ASP.NET C# ... This article describes a simple approach to determining whether or not a logged in user is a member of a group within the context of an asp.net web based application. | Go |
| Building applications for Windows Azure ... This article walks you through the steps to build an application from scratch on the recently released Windows Azure CTP, Microsoft’s answer to cloud computing. | Go |
| Executing async task in asp.net ... This article explores different ways to deal with long running tasks in Asp.net, leveraging PageAsyncTask and Asyncronous Delegates. | Go |
| Retain position of a DragPanel Extender after postback using ASP.NET AJAX ... The DragPanel extender makes it extremely simple to add a ‘drag’ to your controls. However there is a functionality missing in the DragPanel extender. The DragPanel extender does not have the built-in capability to retain the position of controls that have been dragged, after a page postback. In this article, we will see how to retain the position of the DragPanel extender, after a postback. | Go |
| Storing and Retrieving Connection Strings in ASP.NET 2.0/3.5 ... This article demonstrates how to store database connection strings in Web.config in ASP.NET 2.0/3.5 and retrieve it for creating connection objects. | Go |
| Loading Images Asynchronously Inside an ASP.NET GridView ... Retrieving and displaying images in a GridView is a time consuming task. If done synchronously, this task can at times test the user’s patience. One way to provide a good user experience is to load the images asynchronously. So when the GridView loads, we initially display a default image for the user to view, while the actual images are being loaded from the database. In this article, we will see how to do so. | Go |
| XML DataSource control in ASP.NET 3.5 ... In this article I am going to discuss how to use XmlDataSource control in ASP.NET 3.5 | Go |
| Tracking User Activity ... Scott Mitchell talks about tracking user activity in web applications. | Go |
| ASP .net Template Server Control ... The article shows a great use of Template server controls. In the example you will see how you can create a template server control and have access to all the other asp .net controls enclosed within. Here in the example we are trying to retrieve the values of the controls and restore them at later point. With .net if we design our base controls in right way it can save us thousands of lines of code. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Efficient Software Development ... Describes theory of how software development can be simplified even for mission critical applications | Go |
| Creating an ASP.NET GridView Custom Field of type DropDownList ... Sometimes you need to use a DropDownList in a GridView in a way to see the text of the field and save the value to the database. Here we extended the “BoundField” class, and add features to create a column type of “DropDownList”. | Go |
| Create Composite Control using Ajax Toolkit Controls ... How to create a Composite Control containing the features of Ajax ResizableControlExtender, CollapsiblePanelExtender and DragPanelExtender | Go |
| Ajax Quick Start FAQ ... Ajax quick start FAQ | Go |
| Beginner's Guide To View State ... This article is a step by step guide to view state with details | Go |
| Session Vizualizer for Visual Studio 2005 ... Debug tool for analyzing Session content in web applications. | Go |
| Simple Reverse Proxy in C# 2.0 (description and deployment) ... This article describes how to develop a reverse proxy in C# using the IIS HTTPHandlers. | Go |
| LINQ and WF Based Custom Profile Provider for ASP.NET 3.5 ... A new implementation of the Custom Profile Provider for ASP.NET 3.5, using LINQ, Workflow Foundation and Responsibility-Centric-Singleton DataContexts pattern | Go |
| ASP EasyForm: ASP.NET-like forms in two minutes ... EasyForm allows you to create ASP.NET-like forms, with state keeping and server side event handling | Go |
| Fully JavaScript Enabled Editor ... Fully JavaScript enabled editor which also contains some server coding | Go |
| The Two Interceptors: HttpModule and HttpHandlers ... The two interceptors: HttpModule and HttpHandlers | Go |
| Ajax Tutorial for Beginners with XML & JSON: Part 2 ... This article will give you a brief idea about Ajax with XML & JSON | Go |
| 7 Steps to Write Your Own Custom Rule using FXCOP ... 7 steps to write your own custom rule using FXCOP | Go |
| How To Update Assembly Version Number Automatically ... A small utility which allows to modify AssemblyVersion attribute specified in AssemblyInfo.cs files | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Ivonna, an Asp.Net unit testing tool, version 1.2.0 is released ... Ivonna is an Asp.Net testing tool that allows writing unit tests for
your WebForms applications. What makes it different is that Ivonna runs
in the same process as the test runner.
Unlike other testing tools, Ivonna is not a "client-side" tool. It
doesn't just test the HTML output (although such a possibility exists),
it creates and runs an Asp.Net request and allows you to examine the
intrinsic objects, such as the Page object. This opens many new
possibilities, such as
Examining... 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 |
| Poll on Moving Subtext To ASP.NET 3.5 ... How many of you out there who use Subtext host it on a hosting provider who does not have ASP.NET 3.5 available? Id like to make the next version of Subtext 2 take a dependency on 3.5. Note that it wouldnt have to take a dependency on SP1. Just ASP.NET 3.5 proper as I believe most hosting providers support it. If youre stuck with a hosting provider who only supports ASP.NET 2.0 and not 3.5, do leave a comment. Note that were still in the planning stages for Subtext 3, which will be built on ASP.NET... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Customizing ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... From Wikipedia: ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a web application scaffolding framework from Microsoft, shipped as an extension to ASP.NET, that can be used to build data driven web applications. So if you use VS2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 you can take advantage of ASP.NET Dynamic Data to quickly create a full administration website (UI and CRUD) over a model (LINQ To SQL or better Entity Framework) on top of some db tables, and all this in about 3 minutes! Furthermore the system is very flexible and you... 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 |
| Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL ... Yesterday I saw that the Expression Blend and Design team had blogged about the new DeepZoomTool.dll: In our most recent release of Deep Zoom Composer, one of the major changes we made was to change how we generated the image tiles both for designing as well as exporting your Deep Zoom Content. In the past, ever since our first release at MIX, our image encoding was done using a combination of SparseImageTool.exe and ImageTool.exe command line tools. Starting with this release, we have retired... 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 |
| LINQ and WF Based Custom Profile Provider for ASP.NET 3.5 ... A new implementation of the Custom Profile Provider for ASP.NET 3.5, using LINQ, Workflow Foundation and Responsibility-Centric-Singleton DataContexts pattern... 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 |
| EDMX vs. EDM ... In EDM
misconceptions, Alex James wrote about something he and I discussed at DevConnections
- a diagram in one of my slides that says "EDM" where he thinks it should be "EDMX".
But I beg to differ about the representation in the diagram.
Here is the offending diagram that caused Alex such pain.
On the right, I show the CSDL, MSL and SSDL files that make up the EDM as seen by
the Entity Framework.The EF's EDM has a conceptual model as well a means to interact
with a backing store, something... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Dock panels in ASP.NET WebForms ... Hi friends,
Wanna create dock panels in your ASP.NET web applications? Zee WebDock can create tabbed panels that can be pinned, autohidden, slide-opened and maximized. It's never been easier to create a web UI that has the look-and-feel of your favorite IDEs or web design applications. Plus, you can style the panels with CSS and Themes.
Check out the demo at http://www.zeecontrols.com/.
... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| The Two Interceptors: HttpModule and HttpHandlers ... The two interceptors: HttpModule and HttpHandlers... 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 |
| Solving a Mystery About `BC30205: End of statement expected` ... A reader of my book ran into the strangest problem that had me going around in circles. He was working through one of the ASP.NET 3.5 examples in Visual Web Developer 2008 and was getting weird errors like these: error BC30205: End of statement expected...(read more)... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| How to add a test run configuration to test project with Visual Studio 2008 ... When you create a test project from scratch the test run configuration file is automatically added by the project template, but if the test project is created by the ASP.NET MVC web application project template its not. And if you want to enable Code Coverage you have to it manually. It took me a while to find out how to add a test run configuration to a test project. The problem was: it cannot be added to the test project, but must be added as Solution Item to the solution that contains it. ... 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 MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough ... Ive seen a lot of reports where people have trouble getting ASP.NET MVC up and running on IIS 6. Sometimes the problem is a very minor misconfiguration, sometimes its a misunderstanding of how IIS 6 works. In this post, I want to provide a definitive guide to getting ASP.NET MVC running on IIS 6. I will walk through using the .mvc or .aspx file extension for URLs first, then I will walkthrough using extension-less URLs. If youre running into problems with IIS 6 and ASP.NET MVC, I recommend trying... 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 |
| www.aspnetquest.com A Unique ASP.NET search engine ... Dear friends, In our effort to enhance the ASP.NET community, we have launched ASP NET Quest, a unique resource for all ASP.NET developers.ASP NET Quest is a vertical search engine for everything .NET -- and we're building the largest database of .NET resources, topics, and information in the universe. ASPNET Quest is targeted towards helping the growing ASP.NET developer community -- and it will help you find relevant search results and valuable content without getting all of those extra... 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 |
| Microsoft Releases Free Chart Controls ... Microsoft has rolled out a software package for the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 users that allows developers to quickly setup interactive charts and graphs for applications without writing any code.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| New Charting Controls Available ... I just wanted to let everyone know, in case you were not already aware. Microsoft recently released a very impressive Charting Control for both Winforms and ASP.NET. From briefly viewing the WebSamples project, there are many different charting controls available that offer both a 2D and 3D perspective. Finally there is a set of professional and very impressive looking set of controls available. You can read more about them and get the download links from ScottGu's Blog announcement below.http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Extend Forms Authentication Ticket Depending on Session Time Out ... I know that this subject is not new! but last week one of my students asked me about how we can extend client authentication ticket according to session time out. We should do some coding to achieve such a goal. I’ll suppose that you have a master page or a main page with frames (no frames for master page) step by step let us do the following; Create such a JavaScript inside your main page <script type="text/javascript"> var timeOut = setInterval("ExtendSessionPopup();", 19 * 60 * 1000) function ExtendSessionPopup() { indow.open('puppoPageUrl,'anycontent','width=455,height=435, status'); }</script> In the code above we created a small counter to count the session time out time which is 20 min by default. Here I used 19 min because I’ll give the popup 1 min to count done. Create a popup page that will tell the client that his session will expire within 1 min and ask him/her if he/she want to extend it. But 2 buttons on the popup, one to extend the session and the other to close session. On page load do this protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!Page.IsPostBack) { StringBuilder st = new StringBuilder(); st.Append("<script type=\"text/javascript\">"); st.Append("setTimeout(\"ClosePopup();\", 60 * 1000);"); st.Append("function ClosePopup()"); st.Append("{window.opener.parent.location = \"Login.aspx\";window.close();}"); st.Append("</script>"); Response.Write(st); } } you may use a small counter to count down on the popup window for 60 sec. Here the code above tells the popup to redirect Client to login page after 60 sec for popup rise. Now; let us edit the click event of the Buttons; Session Extend button protected void lnkExtendSession_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { FormsIdentity fi = (FormsIdentity)HttpContext.Current.User.Identity; FormsAuthentication.RenewTicketIfOld(fi.Ticket); Response.Write("<script>window.close();</script>"); } The code above extends session for another 20 min (if the user stays ideal all that time). End Session Button protected void lnkEndSession_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("<script type=\"text/javascript\">window.opener.parent.location = \"Login.aspx\";window.close();</script>"); } The code above will close the session if client click end session link button. In this way we can give our client to extend his/her session from the popup and if the client is a way from the pc the popup will end the session and redirect the main page to login page. By the way in this article I used session duration as 20 min, there for its hard coded. Hope this Helps | Go |
| Links of the Month. November 2008. ... In my absence many things has happened in the blog world, that I need to catch up. Those post were interesting enough for me to want to share them with you. ASP.NET Scott Gu "released" the new "free" charting control for ASP.NET Very overdue yet now is going to compete with Telerik and Dundas for the market. Silverlight An overlook to Silverlight 3.0 by Scott Guthrie . All this are more is coming on the next released of Silverlight Encrypt your AJAX communication using Silverlight scriptable methods by Michael Schwarz Microsoft Live Microsoft Live training by Woody Pewitt SubText SubText 2.1 released … finally. By Phil Haack GIS MVC? Geolocating in MVC by Scott Hanselman using HostIP api Test Driven Design A fantastic idea with all the details here at Domain Driven Design by Lee Carter Cheers Al | Go |
| ASP.NET Dynamic Data: Customize a template field ... Following my first post on ASP.NET Dynamic Data , I want to show you that you can customize existing fields used by Dynamic Data very easily. With the Northwind db, here is the generated edit screen for the Employees table: We could make this default user experience a lot better by changing the date input, why not add some AJAX here ? Template fields used by Dynamic Data are stored in DynamicData/FieldTemplates folder as simple user controls: You can see that there is a DateTime_Edit.ascx control, open it and add an Image for the calendar icon and a CalendarExtender from the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit . <%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajax" %>
< asp:TextBox ID ="TextBox1" runat ="server" CssClass ="droplist" Text ='<%# FieldValueEditString %>' Columns ="20" />
< asp:Image ID ="imgCalendar" runat ="server" ImageUrl ="~/DynamicData/Content/Images/calendar.png" />
< ajax:CalendarExtender runat ="server" TargetControlID ="TextBox1" PopupButtonID ="imgCalendar" />
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font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
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}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
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.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;
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Now you get:
The calendar looks weird due to some CSS applied to the DetailsView. A quick workaround is to remove the CssClass attribute from the DetailsView1 control in DynamicData/PageTemplates/Edit.aspx :
Doing that (or fixing the CSS in Site.css file) will make the calendar looks good:
Note that the field is still fully functional without adding code, in a next post I will show how to create a new template field.
Source code:
Technorati Tags: ASP.NET Dynamic Data | Go |
| Interesting Finds: 2008.11.31 ... .NET Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Tip: Ctrl+- / Ctrl+Shift+- Did you know… There’s a way to have Visual Studio log its activity for troubleshooting? - #366 Basic Linq in the Real World CodeRush Shortcuts and Templates - Quick Start Sheets - download DnSmtp - A .NET SMTP Client Library Opening the Current Directory From the Command Line Simple Reverse Proxy in C# 2.0 (description and deployment) Web How do you know when you need more memcache servers? Lunascape Browser: Firefox, Internet Explorer And Chrome All-In-One HowTo: Basics of ASP.NET MVC or why MVC? - HowTo: First steps with ASP.NET MVC Packer for .NET 4.0.1 Released - download Debug Video of my TechEd presentation of Common Issues in ASP.NET and how to debug them with Windbg - Watch Creating a Custom View Engine in ASP.NET MVC Other Intel Core i7 920 - Initial Thoughts, Overclocking and Windows Vista Test Getting started with automated white box testing (and Pex) Database SQL SERVER - Interesting Observation - Use of Index and Execution Plan | Go |
| Powershell provider for Coral8 - update and code release ... I've released updates for the Coral8 PowerShell provider . Get the code and binary at http://code.google.com/p/coral8shell/ Two primary changes Pure C# - using PowerShell to do some of the heavy lifting around XML was somewhat fun to write, but it was slow and hard to debug. Added the following cmdlets for management. Get-C8App , Add-C8App , Remove-C8App , Start-C8App , Stop-C8App One thing that remains the same is that the interface Coral8 server still uses literal XML strings, despite the Coral8 server having a SOAP api. despite my efforts I was not able to get WCF and Coral8 talking. | Go |
| .netTiers 2.3.0 Beta 2 ... The .netTiers team released .netTiers 2.3.0 Beta 2 today.
.netTiers 2.3.0 is a maintenance release containing many bug fixes and
patches. We have also added various requested features like Enterprise
Library version 4.1 as well as support for Visual Studio 2008. I would
have to say the biggest and most requested feature that went into
.netTiers 2.3.0 Beta 2 was support for Oracle ! For a complete list of changes and more information please continue reading at source . | Go |
| Visual Studio Talk Show #87 is now online (French) ... http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com
Matthieu Mezil: Entity Framework
Nous discutons avec Matthieu Mezil de Entity Framework. Entre autres, nous discutons des capacités ORM (Object Relational Mapper) de Entity Framework.
Matthieu MEZIL est consultant formateur à Winwise . Passionné par .Net, il est MVP C#. Il s'intéresse tout particulièrement aux développements d'application WinForms, BCL, ADO .Net et aux questions d'architecture. Il a animé des sessions lors des TechDays 2008 sur LINQ et l’Entity Framework. Il publie des articles dans la revue Programmez , sur le portail Developpez et plus récemment sur Tech Head Brothers et DataDeveloper.Net . Il blogue sur http://blogs.codes-sources.com/matthieu et « tente » depuis peu de bloguer en anglais sur http://msmvps.com/blogs/matthieu . Dans un domaine plus personnel, Matthieu est marié et a deux enfants.
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| Blend Tip: How to remove gradient stop. ... It was a real headache for me to find how to remove gradient stop from the color slider. After 1 hour of mouse freestyling i found out that you can do it by dragging the stop down from the slider. =) No doubt this is lovely feature, but it is to hard to understand how it works at first time =) | Go |
| More ISV Startup Resources ... My earlier post on resources for startups generated a lot of interest and so I thought another instalment would be worthwhile. Most of the things I pointed to in the previous post are still valid but there are a few different/new things worth mentioning. I should say these are resources which have been useful for us at Contigo where we build applications for Energy and Utility companies using Microsoft technology - they may be more or less useful to you depending on your type of company/application!
The first is a new initiative from Microsoft called BizSpark , aimed at wooing software startup companies to use Microsoft technology, it is a sexier version of the existing Empower program and provides access to the latest tools and technologies, including Visual Studio Team Suite, for an initial cost of $0. There a few conditions but seems a great opportunity for new software companies.
Once you are up and running, you'll find that there are other things you have to do other than develop software. One of the most important is sales and marketing - if you don't have anyone to buy what you're developing, what's the point. There are some very expensive ways to achieve this but as a small company you need some shortcuts. The Sales and Marketing books from the Beermat Entrepeneur guys are great guides to undertaking sales and marketing activities on a limited budget.
You will at some point need a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to manage all your sales and marketing activity. We use Microsoft Dynamics but there are plenty of free or cheap alternatives such as Sugar CRM , Highrise from 37Signals, Salesforce Group Edition and Zoho CRM . It is important to capture and track as much as you can about your current and potential customers.
One obvious tip is to make yourself stand out; the world is not short of software companies so you need to define why you are different by selecting a particular niche market or USP (Unique Selling Point). Seth Godin has plenty of advice on how to make yourselves stand out and has written several books on marketing with a difference.
At some point you will need to deliver presentations to potential clients, investors or partners. This is a good opportunity to look dynamic and different rather than delivering another "Death by PowerPoint" presentation. Garry Reynolds Presentation Zen book and blog presents a more graphical method of designing presentations as does Cliff Atkinson in his Beyond Bullet Points book. Once you follow this approach, you need lots of images to use - we use iStockPhoto and stock.xchng for cheap and/or free, high quality graphics for our presentations, brochures and web site.
Once you have your application out there, you are probably going to have to support it. We use an online help desk from zendesk to provide web and email based support to our customers. It is not dissimilar in approach to Basecamp from 37signals which we also use. This allows us to present a professional support operation to our customers for very little cost.
Finally, there are a few other web sites which I monitor regularly that are interesting or useful for startup ISV's which you may or may not be aware of:
TechCrunch and TechCrunch UK - very well known blog/news sites following startups and new technology companies
OnStartups - blog by serial entrepreneur Dharmesh Shah
47 Hats - ISV community support site by Bob Walsh with mostly a MS focus
Microsoft Startup Zone
Techmeme - aggregated technology news site | Go |
| Working out with Amazon S3 ... Recently, I was bit playing around with amazon S3. This is said to be the cheapest storage for people who don't want to spend much of their brain cells thinking about DB issues. Now, Amazon S3 primarily supports Web service (SOAP) to store and query data out of the S3 server. The concept behind S3 is that you have to create a bucket and under it you can store as many objects you want. Generally for a particular account 100 is the threshold value for buckets. In this post, I will basically focus on configuring your proxy for uploading large files to amazon using WSE and optionally I will point out a cool browser extension for analyzing your S3 space and third party library alternative.
Amazon depends on WSE 2.0 if you want to upload files larger than 1MB. The large file is transferred in the form of DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation) attachment. Microsoft has released WSE 3.0 that uses MTOM which is a W3C recommendation for replacing DIME. But the time of writing this post it is not yet supported by Amazon.
How to prepare your proxy to support DIME ? Well, first you have to get the WSE 2.0 SP3 from Microsoft downloads. Once the step is completed, you can copy the Microsoft.Web.Services2.dll to your local folder. Basically, once the WSE 2.0 pack is installed the DLL is added to the GAC so it is not a required step, but if you want to ship it along with your distribution then you can consider doing that.
Now once you have created the proxy from http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/AmazonS3.wsdl. You need to do some manual tweaks before your project is ready to go with WSE.
From the Diff for Reference.cs we can see that we have to add a reference to Microsoft.Web.Services2 and inherit from WebServicesClientProtocol instead of SoapHttpClientProtocol
Pretty easy but hang on a bit. While you are instantiating the proxy class you have to add/remove some standard WS filters. Therefore, if we have a method called CreateProxyInstance , with the OutputFilters it will look like private AmazonS3 CreateProxyInstance()
{
AmazonS3 proxy = new AmazonS3();
/// Remove the standard WSE soap headers.
proxy.Pipeline.OutputFilters.Remove(typeof (Microsoft.Web.Services2.Security.SecurityOutputFilter));
proxy.Pipeline.OutputFilters.Remove(typeof (Microsoft.Web.Services2.Referral.ReferralOutputFilter));
proxy.Pipeline.OutputFilters.Remove(typeof (Microsoft.Web.Services2.Policy.PolicyEnforcementOutputFilter));
/// Add our custom filter to remove the unwanted WSE soap headers.
proxy.Pipeline.OutputFilters.Add(new HeaderOutputFilter("wsa:" ));
return proxy;
}
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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 the HeaderOuputFilter is a inherited from SoapOutputFilter , where we build the SoapEnvolop header without wsa node. Pretty much that's it for setting up the proxy , now let's upload something to the S3 server. MetadataEntry[] metadataEntries = new MetadataEntry[2];
metadataEntries[0] = mContentType;
metadataEntries[1] = contentLength;
DateTime timestamp = GetCurrentTimeInMilliseconds();
string signature = GenerateSignature("PutObject" , timestamp);
using (AmazonS3 proxy = CreateProxyInstance())
{
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(content);
Microsoft.Web.Services2.Dime.DimeAttachment dimeAttachment = new
Microsoft.Web.Services2.Dime.DimeAttachment("S3Object" ,
| Go |
