| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Advanced Currency Formatting ... Converting a number into currency has been made a snap in .NET. When we want to convert/format a number into currency, for example 12345.67 = $12345.67, we can use a really simple function to do the conversion for us. The trick to manipulating your currency beyond the basics is to use the System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo method... | Go |
| .Net Interview Questions, Resources, Tips & Tricks. ... .Net Interview Questions, Resources, Tips & Tricks.
Jobs in .NET. | Go |
| Creating an extension module for .NET URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy ... Wow that is a long title. Recently I have been looking for quick posts that I can put out each day to keep my blog relevant and also so I don't feel like I am slacking off too much. Today I want to post about a little known feature in my .NET URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy (aka. Managed Fusion URL Rewriter) that I have developed in my spare time, mostly out of necessity for this blog and other projects I have worked on. Here is a quick run through of what it does. | Go |
| Lightweight Live Online User Count WebControl for ASP.NET ... talked in a previous article about How-To Get Current Online Users Count and Infos with ASP.NET and HttpModule. Here is now a simple WebControl that use this HttpModule. | Go |
| Installing sql session state for ASP.Net 2 ... Just running the wizard does not cut it. You actually have to run the command with the various options. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder with Validation ... I've been looking for a way to run custom validation attributes on a model in ASP.NET MVC. This post shows how | Go |
| Declare your ObjectDataSource using lambda expressions ... Configure your ObjectDataSource TypeName, SelectMethod, SelectParameters from a lambda expression. Here is a simple example:
ObjectDataSource ods;
ods.SetSelectMethod<ProductController>(ctrl => ctrl.FetchAll()); | Go |
| The Concept of Shopping Cart in ASP.NET with C# ... This article will just give you the brief idea how to make simple shopping cart with dropdown GridView and data table. | Go |
| Oxite: OpenSource CMS from Microsoft Built on ASP.NET MVC ... Simone Chiaretta writes about the recent announcement by Microsoft Evangelist, Jeff Sandquist, about Oxite which is an open source CMS built by Microsoft as a showcase and sample for ASP.NET MVC. | Go |
| Test for User Group Membership in ASP.NET Visual Basic ... 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 |
| Microsoft Oxite at the CodePlex ... The home and sources of the Microsoft's Oxite CMS at the CodePlex | Go |
| Microsoft Releases Free CMS-Blog System ... Read about the new, free CMS/Blog system released by Microsoft called "Oxite". It is built using the new ASP.NET MVC framework and is highly extensible, touting such features as Microformats and source control integration. | Go |
| Printer Friendly Posts ... One thing I have noticed with BlogEngine is the absence of a printer friendly view of a post and comments. Since this is a technical blog I sometimes write entries that include code samples and such that would make the print out be exceptionally long if printed within the margins of my theme. So I set out to build a view that would provide a clean printer friendly view of a post. | Go |
| Validation in ASP.NET MVC - part 4: example application ... A sample application that shows how you can perform model-based validation in ASP.NET MVC, including client-side validation with jQuery. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Oxite - Lab - MIX Online | Go |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control: - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| Oxite - Home | Go |
| Using jQuery with ASP.NET: Part 2 - Making Ajax Callbkacs to the Server | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough | Go |
| Tracking User Activity | Go |
| Controlling HTML in ASP.NET WebForms - Craig Shoemaker | Go |
| Web Development at a Glance: Autocomplete using jQuery, MVC, and JSon | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| Dec 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight/WPF ... I'm flying out later today on a pretty intense business trip (22,000 miles, 5 countries, 3 continents, 1 week, no sleep... :-), so my blog activity over the next week and a half will be pretty light. To keep you busy till I return, 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 Geolocation/Geotargeting Reverse IP Lookup Code : Scott Hanselman has a cool sample that demonstrates how to perform IP address lookups on users visiting your site to determine where they are located on the globe (down to the latitude and longitude). Pretty cool stuff. Tracking User Activity : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to track end-user activity when visiting an ASP.NET web site. iTunes Data Grid Skin : Matt Berseth continues his cool series showing off cool new skins you can apply to ASP.NET controls (especially the GridView and DetailsView controls). This post shows off a pretty sweet iTunes like skin. Using ETW to Troubleshoot AppDomain Restarts and other Issues : Tess Ferrandez has another great post that demonstrates how to use the ETW tracing features built-into ASP.NET and Windows to trouble-shoot runtime issues. ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has 6 nice ASP.NET Dynamic Data "How Do I?" videos posted on www.asp.net that you can check out to learn about the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature in .NET 3.5 SP1. A "Many to Many" field template for Dynamic Data : David Ebbo has a great post that talks about how to enable Many To Many scenarios with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. Customizing ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Customizing a Template Field : Laurent Duveau has two nice posts in a series he is doing on using ASP.NET Dynamic Data and customizing the UI generated from it. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Routing : Rachel Appel has a nice post that talks about how to use the new ASP.NET routing features with ASP.NET Dynamic Data to enable customized URLs. Fun with T4 Templates and Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has a cool post on how to use the T4 templating engine built-into Visual Studio to automate ASP.NET Dynamic Data form generation. Using User Controls as Page Templates in Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has another nice post that talks about how to use user controls with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX - Observing Updates to Plain Old JavaScript Objects: Dave Reed has a great blog post about one of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX - support for observing updates on plain old javascript objects. Using the Power of Binding to Animate Changes : Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about the new ASP.NET AJAX binding features coming and how you can use them with jQuery to animate changes. Instantiating Components on template markup : Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about client-side AJAX templating approaches and some of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX. Putting more than one behavior on one element and Getting a Reference to a Behavior : Bertrand Le Roy has two nice articles that talk about how to use the client-side behaviors feature of ASP.NET AJAX. Check/Uncheck all Items in an ASP.NET Checkbox List using jQuery: A nice article by Suprotim Agarwal that shows how to write client-side jQuery code to enable check/uncheck for all items within a checkbox list. ASP.NET MVC How to Setup ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 : Phil Haack has a great post that walks-through how to enable ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 servers (including how to enable it on a hosting server that you can't install anything on). Fluent Route Testing in ASP.NET MVC : Ben Scheirman has a nice post where he blogs about new helper methods he is creating that make it easier to unit test ASP.NET MVC routes using a fluent API. Autocomplete using jQuery, ASP.NET MVC and JSON : Faraz Tabibian has a nice blog sample that demonstrates how to implement an autocomplete t | Go |
| 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| TextBoxFor(u => u.Name) - Unleash the power ... Leverage the full flexibility of ASP.NET MVC to build truly domain-driven applications. Learn to use Expressions to automagically generate UI elements and validation from your domain. | Go |
| Dynamic Data - Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog ... I spent some time customizing the delete confirmation dialog in the Dynamic Data site I have been blogging about recently. Specifically, I looked at replacing the browsers default confirm dialog with a jquery thickbox and displaying a confirmation message that includes contextual information regarding the row being deleted. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Tip: Dependency Injection with Unity Application Block ... Demonstrate how to use dependency injection pattern in ASP.net MVC application using Microsoft’s Unity Application Block (Unity). If you want to develop an ASP.NET MVC application fully with Microsoft stack, you can use Unity Application Block to perform dependency injection. | Go |
| ASP.NET 3.5 URL Routing ... This post speaks about basics of URL Routing and how URL Routing related to building a ASP.NET MVC Application. This post specifically speaks about how URL Routing is used in ASP.NET MVC Application. | Go |
| Cloudship: Membership Provider for the Cloud ... Planning to move to the Azure Cloud, but already tied to the Membership API? This article guides you to build a complete Membership provider library which can be leveraged by existing application to link to Microsoft’s cloud platform Windows Azure with no friction. | Go |
| Detecting Session Timeout and Redirect to Login Page in ASP.NET ... In this example i'll show how to detect the session timeout which occurs when user is idle for the time specified as Session.Timeout,using C# asp.NET,if timeout occurs than user is redirected to login page to login again, for this i've set time out value in web.config file to 1 minute | Go |
| A Dynamic Menu For Your Dynamic Data ... A Dynamic Menu For Your Dynamic Data
So I am still playing around with building a Northwind Dynamic Data web site. Tonight I thought it would be interesting to see what it would take to create a menu for navigating the tables in the site. I was particularly interested in seeing if I could get some grouping or categorization to the metadata so I could create a multi-leveled menu. It turns out it wasn't too difficult at all (see the screen shot below - the menu is on the left). I have my tables organized into 4 categories: Sales, People, Products and Reports. And the cool thing is that this menu is completely dynamic. You can add, remove or reorganize the categories without touching the UI. And depending where you are keeping your metadata you could even do this without recompiling your app. The grouping is automatically discovered from the metadata and the menu is built solely off the it so everything 'just works'. | Go |
| Reading RSS powered by FeedFlare™ using ASP.NET and LINQ ... This article explores an ASP.NET application built on LINQ to XML. In this article, we will see how to read a RSS Feed using LINQ to XML. | Go |
| Implementing Windows Desktop Search with ASP.NET ... Windows Search provides an easy and comprehensive desktop solution for finding content, whether it's on your PC, in an e-mail message or attachment, on a remote file share, or on the Web. In this article, we will see how to access the indexed data using ASP.NET as the programming language. | Go |
| CRUD operations using the List View Web Server Control ... Using the ASP.NET ListView Control we can insert,edit, or delete records without writing any code. This post explains how to display and update data using the ListView control. We will use SqlDataSource control to retrieve results from the data source and act as the data source for the ListView control. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Export DataSet to Multiple Excel Sheets ... Exporting multiple tables in a DataSet to multiple sheets in an Excel file | Go |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - Part II ... Catharsis web-app framework | 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 the Responsibility-Centric-Singleton DataContexts pattern. | Go |
| jQuery Based Ajax.Net library ... jQuery Based Ajax.Net library | Go |
| Creating a Contact Form Web Part for SharePoint ... An article that introduces SharePoint web part development by creating a simple contact form web part. | Go |
| ASP.NET AJAX TreeView control with templates ... ASP.NET AJAX TreeView control with templates, event binding, client and server events and more... | Go |
| ToolTip AJAX Client Control ... General Purpose Tooltip control using ASP.NET AJAX | Go |
| Beginner's Walk - Web Development ... This Table of Contents is editable by all Silver members and above. What we want you to do is replace the entries in the Table of Contents below with links to articles that represent the entries. | Go |
| Beginner's Guide to ASP.NET Application Folder ... This Article Describe you about Asp.Net Application folder like App_Code,App_Theme, App_Data, etc.. | Go |
| Data Visualization with the Virtual Earth ASP.NET Controls ... An introduction on how to use Virtual Earth's ASP.NET Controls to show data on a map. | Go |
| nopCommerce - An open-source shopping cart framework ... Implementing a website with e-commerce features in ASP.NET. | Go |
| REAL JS dynamic image browsing capabilities ... You will find this extreme useful and easy to use with 4 unique modes | Go |
| Ajax XML Project ... The article shows how to periodically refresh the data on a web page through Ajax XmlHttpRequest | Go |
| TextBoxEx: A Little Enhanced TextBox ... Learn how to create a TextBox with ToolTips in-place and OnFocus colors | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Barack Obama the Internet President would be force to go offline for the next 4 to 8 years. ... For first time a president that understands the Internets will come into office on January 20th, 2009. Seems like the leader of the free world should be required to be able to use email, twitter and blogging, should be a required question on the campaign trail, as well as part of their resume. Yet we have to wait until 2009 to get a president that understands technology and uses as a via of communication. Yet the old laws about the president correspondence will force the president elect to depart... 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 |
| ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript 1.2 was released ... Great news from JavaScript developers, the new version is now available. Ive used this new version that includes the new Dojo version as well and support for ESRI Image Server Release details I wrote an overview map dijit pictured above that you can download and play with it. Cheers AlPosted from http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual... 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 |
| Adding Conditional Get Support to the WCF REST Starter kit ... Some weeks ago, I discussed how important "Conditional Get" can be for some scenarios, specially when we want to make a better use of the network traffic.
The WCF REST Starter kit introduced a new extension "WebCache", implemented as an operation behavior, to automatically add caching support to any "Get" operation in a service contract. Using this new feature is a simple as annotating an existing service operation with a "WebCache" attribute, as it is shown below:
[WebCache(CacheProfileName =... 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 |
| Docs for creating custom controls ... This is a question about the documentation on MSDN. There's a section on how to create custom ASP.NET controls, which starts at Developing Custom ASP.NET Server Controls:We're looking at maybe updating this, so we'd like to know from you:Have you used these docs?If so, what information did you not find?If you tried using them but gave up, what was missing? Any feedback you might have about this section of the ASP.NET docs would be very welcome.Thanks!... 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 |
| Download Oxite - the Code we use to run the MIX Web site. ... Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management
platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.
We know this because it runs MIX Online.
You can download it from here (http://www.visitmix.com/Lab/oxite).
... 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 Northwind Demo Using the Spark View Engine ... While at PDC, I met Louis DeJardin and we had some lively discussions on various topics around ASP.NET MVC. He kept bugging me about some view engine called Flint? No Electricity? No Spark! I had heard of it, but never got around to actually playing with it until after the conference. And the verdict is, I really like it. Spark is a view engine for both Monorail and ASP.NET MVC. It supports multiple content area layouts much like master pages, which is one thing that seems to be lacking in many... 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 |
| Live Services Jumpstart Day 1 Morning Session ... As mentioned previously I am over at the Live Services Jumpstart Training in Sydney this week along with a few other kiwis.
Day 0 for me was a chance to do a photo walk in Sydney.
It has been a while since Ive been in Sydney and it was great to get reacquainted with an old friend.
Day 1 has kicked off with Dr Neil doing an all up technical overview of existing Live Services.
This is a bit of a refresher for me as Im quite familiar with what services are available at http://dev.live.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 |
| Having Problems Registering Client Scripts with The ClientScript Object, Try the ScriptManager ... This morning I was trolling the ASP.NET Forums and saw this question about registering the Virtual Earth control (it is really not a control, but that is not relevant to this post) and realized I had the same issue just the other day. The person posting...(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 Retrieve a GridView Based on a CheckBoxList of Items with Asp.Net using ObjectDataSource with a little LINQ Thrown In ... So, the problem is you have a list that you want to retrieve from that contains multiple values. Say for example, you have a list of 5 cities and you want to retrieve a list of people in some...This site is a resource for asp.net web programming. It has examples by Peter Kellner of techniques for high performance programming... 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 |
| Data Visualisation with the Virtual Earth ASP.NET Controls ... An introduction on how to use Virtual Earth's ASP.NET Controls to show data on a map... 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 |
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from the Microsoft Knowledge Base.... 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 |
| SEO Tip Move Hidden ASPNET Fields To Bottom of Page ... Heres a quick SEO tip from Teemu (via email) that Ive been meaning to mention theres a new feature in .NET 3.5 SP1 that lets you control where hidden form fields are rendered by ASP.NET. To set it, go into web.config and add the following: < pages renderAllHiddenFieldsAtTopOfForm ="false" />
The default for this is true (which is how its always behaved since 1.0). You can read more about it on MSDN .
Whats the point?
There are pros and cons to which way you go with this setting. The default setting ensures that the data in hidden form fields like __VIEWSTATE is available early in the browser-side page loading cycle, so that if a user clicks a button and posts back the page before it has fully rendered/loaded, the server will still get the contents of these hidden fields. This is a good thing, as otherwise the server will likely be unable to process the page.
On the other hand, theres a good argument to be made that search engines tend to weight content higher based on how close to the top of the page it is, and that in some cases search engine bots may only grab a relatively small chunk of a page (from the top) as part of their indexing process. Assuming there is some truth to this, then pushing real page content as high up in the actual HTML as possible would tend to yield better placements in search engines. Thus, setting this so that hidden fields render at the bottom of the page could make a big difference in how close the pages real content is to the top of the HTML file, especially if there is a great deal of viewstate on the page.
YMMV
Your Mileage May Vary. The best way to determine whether or not this setting is of any use to you is to try it out. Its really only appropriate for public-facing pages, and most of those shouldnt be using ViewState or posting back in any event if theyre meant to be indexed by search engines. That said, if theyre not posting back, they really should have ViewState disabled and/or pushed to the bottom of the page since theres really now down side to doing so. 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 |
| nopCommerce - An open-source shopping cart framework ... Implementing a website with e-commerce features in ASP.NET.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Can you use Web Forms controls with MVC? ... As more people delve into ASP.NET MVC, we see more questions from people who are used to the Web Forms model and are curious where these technologies overlap. We have noted in the docs that views can be .aspx pages. Ok, that being the case, can you use normal Web Forms controls on an .aspx page that is being used as V in MVC? Someone posed the question on an internal list this way: "Which existing controls can you safely use in MVC? Can you use the GridView control? Can you use the TextBox control?"This... 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 |
| A few comments on the Microsoft Dynamics 5.0 sneak peek ... Simon Hutson wrote about the new features of CRM 5.0 and was forced to remove it again. Fortunately Stefano Demiliani posted it too , and now the content is reblogged all over:) The release time for CRM 5.0 is indicated to be late 2009, or 2010. From the looks of it I would guess 2010 with the changes they're making, and with an indicated tighter relation to Sharepoint it's not unlikely that the release of these two products will go hand-in-hand. There are a few interesting things to notice between...(read more ) | Go |
| Microsoft Ajax Client Templates and declarative jQuery ... Apparently Brian likes our declarative syntax. And jQuery . And he did something quite fun with them, something we had clearly not anticipated: using Microsoft Ajax’s new declarative syntax to call jQuery plug-ins instead of Microsoft Ajax behaviors as was the original intent. < input type ="text" maxlength ="20" size ="40"
sys : key =”self”
sys : attach =”wajbar”
wajbar : submit =”{{ $( self ) .next ( ’input : submit’ ) }}” />
The way he made that possible is by adding a registration step to make the plug-in accessible through sys:attach. This registration API actually creates a wrapper behavior for the plug-in that gets Microsoft Ajax to believe the plug-in is a regular behavior. The actual plug-in gets called during initialization of the wrapper behavior, using the behavior itself as the options for the plug-in. This works because the declarative engine in Microsoft Ajax will just set plain expando fields for namespaced attributes such as “wajbar:submit” that don’t correspond to a property. Clever.
This is quite interesting and opens up a number of possibilities, such as enabling our declarative syntax to instantiate components from any framework (without the hack of wrapping them in a Microsoft Ajax behavior) if we open up the right extensibility points. This is definitely something I’ll investigate.
What do you think?
Brian’s post:
http://weblogs.manas.com.ar/bcardiff/2008/12/declarative-jquery-with-microsoft-ajax/ | Go |
| Debugging with VS2008 at the Dallas ASP.NET UG ... Some time back, I gave a talk at the Dallas ASP.NET User Group on the topic of "Debugging with Visual Studio 2008". In case anyone can find the notes, slides, and demos useful, they are located at http://www.dallasasp.net/Meetings/238.aspx . Some things have changed since Silverlight has gone RTW (Released To Web/World).
At the meeting, we discussed ways to think like an efficient debugging developer and then we walked through the demos to see it in action. We walked performed some debugging actions and looked at a few things that a typical debugging session doesn't encounter. We looked at the rarely used attributes that are good for debugging, IE Developer toolbar, and Firefox's FireBug.
I will repeat some advice that I was given over 13 years ago. Anyone can work and produce but more valuable are people who solve problems. Now that's good debugging advice. This was one of my favorite talks and I hope the demos will be helpful to others. The demo concept entails a meeting RSVP system. The data is random based on the time but the numbers change just the same.
Demos:
RSVPSilverlightWeb : A simple ASP.NET web site with three example technologies: Standard ASP.NET AJAX, JSON, and a Silverlight control. We performed some debugging with the three components that are located on a single web page.
RSVPModule : An HTTP Module used in the website to display the page load time.
RSVPHandler : An HTTP Handler that will perform work for urls with the "RSVP" extension such as ShowDallasASPNetUG.rsvp. I noticed that the demo zip file does not have the extremely simple RSVP application that was deployed to my IIS. You can reproduce this extremely simple demo. It is an ASP.NET application with a simple default.aspx and nothing added. The web.config has one line added to to the httpHandlers node as shown below. This register the handler to call the handler for debugging.
<add verb="*" path="*.rsvp" type="RSVP.RSVPHandler" /> </httpHandlers>
RSVPSilverlight: This is a Silverlight component that uses a web service file, WebServiceSilverlight.cs, in the RSVPSilverlightWeb website project. Beware - this was the beta2 version without considerations for cross-domain web service calls. To get it working properly with the RTW version, we follow the link at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197955(VS.95).aspx and re-create the service reference in the Silverlight control.
RSVPGadget : A Windows Vista Gadget using our existing WCF with JSON that is consumed on the RSVPSilverlightWeb page. The files that are in the RSVPGadget files are copied to a folder such as
"C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\RSVP.gadget".
Resources:
The Ultimate Debugger (Tess Ferrandez)
http://blogs.msdn.com/tess
Books
Debugging Strategies for .Net Developers Apress - Darin Dillon
Debugging .NET 2.0 Applications MSPress - John Robbins
Stay Current on ASP.NET and Silverlight 2.0
http://www.asp.net/downloads/vs2008/
Javascript Debugging
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/19/vs-2008-javascript-debugging.aspx
Debugging ASP.NET AJAX Applications
http://www.asp.net/learn/ajax/tutorial-06-cs.aspx
Firebug: (Tutorial)
http://michaelsync.net/2007/09/08/firebug-tutorial-overview-of-firebug
Production Debugging
http://blogs.msdn.com/tom/archive/2008/07/15/debugging-asp-net-on-a-production-server-101.aspx
WinDbg + SOS
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892277
More on Vista Gadgets:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/vista/gadgets-pt1.mspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163370.aspx
The Vista Gadget:
The Demo Web Page: | Go |
| Dynamics CRM 4 Visio Stencils ... We have decided to release the Visio Stencils we've been using for Dynamics CRM 4 projects, find out more about them here. Sneak peak of the shapes you can use on Create/Update (eg: Popup windows) Here is the Account screen duplicated with the stencil set. You'll notice subtle differences, but to the client it looks like the real thing. Enjoy | Go |
| My SharePoint "Soylent Green" Moment ... When you first start working with SharePoint, like any other new (to you) technology, you turn on the fire hose and start drinking down all the books patterns, samples and articles you can find. The SharePoint learning curve, which forms roughly a 90 degree angle to your former path of progress, is bigger than most. Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because it provides a convenient excuse, you tend to swallow down whole patterns and ways of thinking about web development that may be contrary to how you would approach normal ASP.NET development.
One case in point: SharePoint web parts. To get your first web part up and running you will likely look to samples and documentation on line. MSDN has lots of good samples to choose from like this one . In this sample you will be shown how to add controls to your web part by overriding the CreateChildControls() method like so:
1: protected override void CreateChildControls() 2: { 3: //Create text box 4: newTitle = new TextBox(); 5: newTitle.Text = "" ; 6: Controls.Add(newTitle); 7: 8: //Create button 9: saveTitle = new Button(); 10: saveTitle.Text = "Set Web Part Title" ; 11: saveTitle.Click += new EventHandler(saveTitle_click); 12: Controls.Add(saveTitle); 13: }
Kind of feels strange at first, not like adding web controls to page markup in ASP.NET, or dragging one on to the form using the visual designer if that's the way you roll. But, then, you suck it up and soldier on, "this is SharePoint development men, it's just different ". After all, the options presented at this point like creating custom user controls which then you have to deploy to SharePoint don't make your life, or the learning curve, any easier so you accept and move on.
Then, at some, not-too-distant, future point you get a bug report that goes something like this: "The grid sorting is flaky, sometimes it works and sometimes it loses its sort and goes back to default." Or: "when I select an item in the grid to delete, an item gets deleted, but it's not the same one I clicked on". I tripped over these bugs myself as I was preparing to sign off on dev and hand off to UAT. As I traced the problem, stepped thru the code I realized what was happening. I was storing my current sort order and expression in ViewState to persist the data between calls, familiar approach from ASP.NET projects of the past. ViewState, however was not consistently available to the code that needed it to re-set the sort on post back. That is when it all hit me, in a true Soylent Green moment of stupid realization of the obvious. Only, instead of "It's made of people!" my shocked moment of clarity was: "It's made of dynamic web controls!"
I clearly remember occasions on previous projects where fellow devs came to me with odd problems with ViewState, either not returning what it should or the page post failing validation, or controls not persisting, or posting back, the values that were expected. I would ask if they were dynamically loading controls and, when they replied they were, I would say: "don't do that", or something "clever" like "just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea". Now here I was being bitten by the same stupid bugs. Truth was, in 95% of the cases we didn't really need to load controls dynamically, it was far easier to solve the problem another way then to take on the challenges of managing dynamic controls such as making sure the same exact controls were populated on each post back in the Page.Init() method, or else ViewState and Postback data wouldn't get populated correctly etc. In the rare occasions we deemed it necessary to load controls dynamically, we were, at least, fully aware of the ramifications and dealt with them as needed.
So, I don't know if it's just me, or if others have experienced during the SharePoint learning "wall", that you almost forget that it's all ASP.NET under the hood, and the "best practices" and lessons you have learned thru the years just get chucked out the window because | Go |
| Groove for Developers (in Stereo) ... I presented at the Western Mass .NET Users Group last Tuesday (Dec 2nd) and it went very well! This session gave an overview of Groove and showed it from a .NET developer’s perspective. The use of the Groove API – GWS (Web Services), CodePlex’s GWS wrapper, DataBridge & SharePoint integration. All with plenty of examples & .NET code. The presentation was on two screens ('stereo') showing the peer-to-peer capabilities of Groove. Download the presentation slide deck from here... | Go |
| TechEd - Common Issues in ASP.NET and how to debug them with Windbg ... Um vídeo muito interessante da Tess sobre como debugar problemas comuns do ASP.NET utilizando WinDBG (em inglês). http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/MSDNSweden/Vanliga-fel-som-grs-med-ASPNET-och-hur-du-hittar-dem-med-WinDbg/ Em breve vou voltar a escrever sobre WinDBG, realmente está faltando tempo :) Abraços. | Go |
| Working with the ASP.NET AJAX Authentication Service ... Believe it or not, but there's more to ASP.NET AJAX than the UpdatePanel control. If you're already a fan of AJAX and your ASP.NET website is using Forms based authentication with the ASP.NET Membership feature to validate users, you might want to consider using the ASP.NET AJAX Authentication Service available in ASP.NET v3.5. It's a great way to seamlessly and efficiently integrate user authentication into your web site that's driven from the client. Let's first talk a bit about the architecture of this feature. Whenever you request an ASP.NET page which has AJAX functionality enabled, a series a JavaScript files is downloaded (and cached) to the client. In one of these files is a JavaScript proxy for calling into the server side Authentication Service. Your client side JavaScript code can use this proxy to perform basic authentication operations like validating users, checking their logged-in status and logging them out of your site. When making the call to the service via the client side proxy, a call is made to a special HTTP Handler which routes the request to the Authentication Service. The service in turn calls down into the Membership system to make the appropriate Membership API call, and then the result is sent back over the wire to the client. Okay, enough background. Let's put this feature into action. I'll be using Visual Studio 2008 as I walk through this example, but it's not required to use the ASP.NET AJAX Authentication Service. It just makes creating the web site a bit easier. First, let's create a new web site and switch the authentication mode from the default of Windows to Forms in the site's web.config file: < authentication mode = "Forms " />
Next, we'll need to enable the Authentication Service. It's disabled by default for security reasons. Add the following section to your site's web.config: < system.web.extensions >
< scripting >
< webServices >
< authenticationService enabled = "true " requireSSL = "false "/>
</ webServices >
</ scripting >
</ system.web.extensions >
Now calls to the JavaScript proxy can execute on the client.
To demonstrate the service in action, we'll want to create a test user. I'm going to assume your familiar with the Membership feature introduced in ASP.NET v2.0. It's enabled by default and uses SQL Server Express as the default backing data store. Go ahead and create a test user. You can do this by either creating a new web page which invokes the relevant Membership API's to create the user or you can launch the ASP.NET Configuration tool from within Visual Studio (Website -> ASP.NET Configuration ) to do this.
At this point, we've configured our site to use Forms based authentication, a test user has been created and we've enabled the Authentication Service. Let's start building a web page which will bring everything together.
I'm going to create a new web page called "UseAuthService.aspx", and then I'll add the blob of code listed below. It looks like a lot, but that's because I've added a bunch of UI logic to better demonstrate how you might plug this in to a real website. The code for the Authentication Service integration is really minimal. <% @ Page Language ="C#" AutoEventWireup ="true" CodeFile ="UseAuthService.aspx.cs"
Inherits ="UseAuthService" %>
<% @ Register Assembly ="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace ="AjaxControlToolkit"
TagPrefix ="ajaxToolkit" %>
<! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
< html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head runat ="server">
< title > AJAX Authentication Service Sample</ title >
</ head >
< body >
< form id ="form1" runat ="server">
< asp : ScriptManager runat ="server"></ asp : ScriptManager >
< div >
< span id ="welcomeLabel"> Welcome, please</ span >
< | Go |
| Long time no post, here is something for fun, any object to a dictionary using an extension method! ... Long time no post again :(, I will be getting back into it very soon if I can :). I was a little bored tonight so I thought I would share my extension method for converting an object to a dictionary, mainly used to converting an anon type to a dictionary for my url helper, i.e. new { id = 1, name = "bob" } will be converted to a key value dictionary, the extension method is as follows: public static class Extensions { ///<summary> /// Converts an object to a dictionary based on its properties. ///</summary> ///<param name="value"></param> ///<returns></returns> public static IDictionary<string, object> ToDictionary(this object value) { var dictionary = new Dictionary<string, object>(); foreach (var prop in value.GetType().GetProperties()) { // For each property on the type get the name and value. var val = prop.GetValue(value, null); dictionary.Add(prop.Name, val); } return dictionary; } } And to use. do this: var item = new { id = 1, name = "22"}; var itemDict = item.ToDictionary(); This will return a dictionary from the type, but where this might also work is if you have a class say Person with 2 properties ID and Name, p.ToDictionary() will return a dictionary with Id and Name in it from the Person class. Not terribly useful (I guess you could just use the RouteValueDictionary from the System.Web.Routing library, unless there is another way too), but it was helpful to me :) Cheers Stefan | Go |
| Project Templates for SharePoint Development ... I've had the privilege of working with an organization for almost two years now doing alot of SharePoint development. There's a team of approximately 75 developers that cover the gammut of skill sets and experiences, most of whom are working, to some degree, with C# and SharePoint development. One of the things that has come up repeatedly, is "how do I get started"? or "what project template should I be using"? These are good questions without a completely clear answer. This post (and hopefully some following) are intended to discuss what we are using, how it evolves, what options we discarded, and why. I spent last Friday teaching a class attempting to bring our team up to speed as to how to structure their SharePoint solutions/projects in VS and get them integrated with Team Build and packaged for deployment in our organization. As the day wore on, I realized how "janky" the "elegant" solution I had been using felt to someone new to the problem set. The supposed elegance was simply relative to the pain I had been experiencing doing it the "old way"... there has to be a better answer for the causal SharePoint developer. I should stop here to add a caveat that prior to this assignment I spend a year or so (on and off) working on a custom VSIP toolkit for Visual Studio that included custom project and item templates as well as menu items, dockable toolwindows, custom build tools, etc. so I'm a bit biased towards using the built-in extensibility hooks for Visual Studio (especially since its gotten so much easier with the 2008 release). A year and a half or so ago we started by looking at the WSS Extensions for Visual Studio.. these were interesting and "felt" like the right answer because "they were from Microsoft... certainly they must be the best approach". While this sounded good (and in theory should have worked out) we ended up with a handful of issues... the first being their very slow support for VS 2008. Secondly, we often found a webpart project that suddenly stopped working (i.e. F5 deploying) and couldn't figure out how to get it working again... there seemed to be a bit too much "magic" going on behind the scenes. Also, It was completely unclear how one would take the resultant project and integrate it into a build system (i.e. Team Build). I'm sure it is possible, but it didn't seem to add much value beyond the initial development. We then looked at STSDev (codeplex.com/stsdev). This is an interesting project that is *almost* my silver bullet. I like the way the template projects are setup, the layout, and the work that the post-build events work (automatically maintaining the ddf and manifest files as well as building the wsp). I have a handful of gripes with how they layout the project structure (no root folder for the solution) and the variables they use (or don't) for certain things. My biggest gripe is that I'm left wondering why they didn't leverage the existing, built-in templating features for Visual Studio (i.e. why can't I go File --> Add New --> web Part). Why should I have to train developers on yet another paradigm for creating their projects? Is their launcher really any better? I think not. That being said, to this day, this is still the mechanism we are using for the majority of our work, but my dissatisfaction with the tool is the driver for this post and quest for a better end-to-end solution. Because many of our developers were building webparts based on the SmartPart, we found ourselves looking at the SmartTemplates project. There was some very interesting things learned from the way in which Jan implemented this, but still some difficulties presented themselves when we tried to look at this tool relative to the larger problem of our entire SharePoint development environment (webparts, "standard" features such as menu items or application pages, smart parts, and Team Build). While at PDC, I found myself talking with the Blueprint guys (http://codeplex.com/blueprints). Near as I can tell thi | Go |
