| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| How-To Handle Empty Data With ASP.NET Repeater ... In this article I'll provide a simple trick in order to solve the missing ASP.NET Repeater Empty Data Template | Go |
| An Extensive Examination of the DataGrid Web Control ... This article is the first in a multi-part series on using the DataGrid Web control | Go |
| Traditional yet Powerful : Data Access Layer for ASP.Net ... This is a complete example of creating Data Access Layer(DAL) using the traditional yet powerful "Object to Relational mapping model" or "Custom Entity Classes" that support Paging too.. | Go |
| Custom TextBox Required Field Validator ... Today I'll talk about ASP.NET Validators and specially about TextBox Required Field Validator. Here is a simple TextBox Validator which change BackGround and Border Color if Validation Rule is not good | Go |
| ASP.NET Podcast Show #127 - Dynamic Data ... A short overview of the Dynamic Data that is shipped in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1. | Go |
| [PSA] Using the Code Behind in MVC causes blindness ... Just a PSA on why NOT to use the Code Behinds in Asp.Net MVC framework | Go |
| Refresh BlogEngine.net Posts - Clear Cache ... From now on, whenever you need to edit your blog post files offline, you can clear the cache at the push of a button. | Go |
| Building a simple multiplayer game with ASP.Net MVC and jQuery ... Last weekend I had presented a small multiplayer-game built in MVC and jQuery as a sample for a speaking engagement. There isn't much to the "game", as you currently can only move around, but it helps illustrate how easy it is to use jQuery and MVC together to make something interesting. Who knows, maybe the source could kick-start development on your own game? | Go |
| Web Profile Builder for Web Application Projects - Joe Wrobel ... If you work with the ASP.NET Profile implementation within VS2K8 you might have noticed that the C# intellisense seems to have stopped working. This build task makes that possible again. | Go |
| Adding multiple client-side event handlers to ASP.NET controls ... An article on using jQuery to attach multiple handlers to client side events of ASP.NET server controls like click, change,blur ..etc., from code behind. | Go |
| 99.99% available ASP.NET and SQL Server SaaS Production Architecture ... Best practices for designing production architecture for a highly available ASP.NET website running on SQL Server. Guarantees 99.99% availability for Level 3 SaaS. | Go |
| SharePoint Quick Start FAQ Part 2 ... In the previous session of SharePoint article we had discussed about the basics of SharePoint | Go |
| Use image for error display in ASP.Net validators ... This articles demonstrates the use of images to display errors in ASP.Net for all kinds of validators. | Go |
| 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 |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Oxite - Lab - MIX Online | Go |
| Oxite - Home | Go |
| ASP.NET.4GuysFromRolla.com: Key Configuration Settings When Deploying a Web Application | Go |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control: - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| CodeProject: 99.99% available ASP.NET and SQL Server SaaS Production Architecture . Free source code and programming help | 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 |
| GridView with DataPager in ASP.NET 3.5 ... To page through data in a control that implements the IPageableItemContainer interface, DataPager control can be used. GridView has its own paging and does not implement IPageableItemContainer interface. | Go |
| The 3 Musketeers: - Model, View and Controller using HTTP Handler – Part 1 ... This article describe about the basics of MVC and then see how we can implement the same in ASP.NET using HttpHandlers. | Go |
| The 3 Musketeers: - Model, View and Controller using ASP.NET MVC – Part 2 ... This article describe steps of how to use ASP.NET MVC to build the three Musketeer’s Model, View and Controller. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Introduction to Building FireFox Add-onsExtensions ... Basic knowledge facts to firefox add-ons creation | Go |
| ViewState and Postback ... Why some web controls like Textbox retain values even after disabling the ViewState while some does not? | Go |
| Managing State with HTML Forms in ASP.Net - A Lightweight Alternative ... A flexible, lightweight library for form processing without using viewstate, postbacks, or server-side form elements. | Go |
| nopCommerce - An open-source shopping cart framework ... Implementing a website with e-commerce features in ASP.NET. | Go |
| Switching Between HTTP and HTTPS Automatically: Version 2 ... An article on automatically switching between HTTP and HTTPS protocols without hard-coding absolute URLs | Go |
| A collection class for classic ASP ... A class that allows the creation and manipulation of collections in classic ASP. | Go |
| 99.99% available ASP.NET and SQL Server SaaS Production Architecture ... Production Architecture for a SaaS web application built using ASP.NET and SQL Server that guarantees 99.99% availability and super performance | Go |
| SharePoint Quick Start FAQ Part 2 ... In the previous session of SharePoint article we had discussed about the basics of SharePoint. In this session | 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 |
| GridView:Sorting & Paging Using Generics And Nullable Datatype Function Of C# GetValueOrDefault() ... This article demonstrate the Sorting mechanism for Nullable datatype when used with IList collection. | Go |
| An ASP.NET AJAX TreeView control with templates ... An ASP.NET AJAX TreeView control with templates, event binding, client and server events, and more... | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Some issues added in codeplex for the WCF REST Starter kit ... I just created some issues in codeplex for the features I discussed last week in these two posts:
Add support for switching the content type dynamically
http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=2846
Related Post: http://weblogs.asp.net/cibrax/archive/2008/12/05/dynamic-content-type-a-nice-to-have-feature-for-the-rest-starter-kit.aspx
Add support for conditional get in WebCache behavior
http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=2847
Related Post: http://weblogs.asp.net/cibrax/archive/2008/12/08/adding-conditional-get-support-to-the-wcf-rest-starter-kit.aspx
Feel... 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 |
| 3 Reasons To Reduce ASP.NET Server Requests ... Here are 3 reasons to make fewer web request calls and why it benefits your website: Browser Connection Limit Internet Explorer only allows two simultaneous connections to any single domain. Other browsers allow anywhere from 2 to 5-6 connections at a time. IE8 will support 6 connections per host. However, by reducing the number of requests, you help the end users to load pages faster. Since they don't need to wait for additional requests/connections to become available. Best Practice... 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 |
| 404 Error while using ASP.NET URL Routing ... I’m heavily using the new ASP.NET URL Routing feature introduced in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 in my new ASP.NET Applications instead of traditional URL Rewriting. I actually wanted to use IIS7 URL Rewriting, but there’s no way to test your rewrite rules if you are using the built-in VS2008 Cassini Webserver for development (yet).So I’ve [...]... 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 |
| 404 Error while using ASP.NET URL Routing ... I’m heavily using the new ASP.NET URL Routing feature introduced in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 in my new ASP.NET Applications instead of traditional URL Rewriting. I actually wanted to use IIS7 URL Rewriting, but there’s no way to test your rewrite rules if you are using the built-in VS2008 Cassini Webserver for development (yet).So I’ve [...]... 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 |
| MenuStrip may expand the first ToolStripMenuItem for any Access Key ... 960880 ... MenuStrip may expand the first ToolStripMenuItem for any Access KeyThis RSS feed provided by kbAlerz.com.Visit kbAlertz.com to
subscribe. It's 100% free and you'll be able to recieve e-mail or RSS updates for the technologies you pick
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 |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Silverlight Tip: Splash screen issues. ... Today I worked on silverlight splash screen for our site and found that documentation about splash screen is very poor and cause many misunderstandings. In this post i'll try to make some of them disappear. =) Because of silverlight splash screen is managed with JavaScript many people thinks that they cannot use layout controls (grid, stackpanel etc) which appeared only in silverlight 2.0. As I found out this is not true. You can use them, but if you open your splashscreen.xaml in blend you will get some errors, because all xaml files inside web project are recognized as silverlight 1.0 files. It is very useful to use grid for building splash screen, because your can easily ceter it with this control. With canvas centering of your splash screen will be little javascript nightmare =) Here i will give u simple example of splash screen, which consists of centered textblock, where i will show current download progress. SplashScreen.xaml: 1: < Grid
2: xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
3: xmlns:x ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
4: >
5: < Grid x:Name ="LayoutRoot" Background ="{x:Null}" Width ="200" Height ="200" >
6: < TextBlock x:Name ="ProgressText" Margin ="0,0,0,0" Text ="0%" TextWrapping ="Wrap" HorizontalAlignment ="Center" VerticalAlignment ="Center" FontFamily ="Trebuchet MS" FontSize ="24" FontWeight ="Bold" Opacity ="1" Foreground ="#FF716770" />
7: </ Grid >
8: </ Grid >
SilverlightTestPage.aspx:
1: < head runat ="server" >
2: < title > SilverlightApplication</ title >
3: < script type ="text/javascript" > 1: 2: function OnSourceDownloadProgressChanged(sender, args) { 3: var root = sender.get_element().content; 4: var progress = Math.round((args.get_progress() * 100)) 5: root.findName("ProgressText" ).Text = progress + "%" ; 6: } 7: </ script >
4: </ head >
5: < body style ="height:100%;margin:0;" >
6: < form id ="form1" runat ="server" style ="height:100%;" >
7: < asp:ScriptManager ID ="ScriptManager1" runat ="server" ></ asp:ScriptManager >
8: < div style ="height:100%;" >
9: < asp:Silverlight ID ="Xaml1" runat ="server"
10: SplashScreenSource ="~/MyApp.xaml" OnPluginSourceDownloadProgressChanged ="OnSourceDownloadProgressChanged"
11: Source ="~/ClientBin/SilverlightApplication.xap" MinimumVersion ="2.0.31005.0" Width ="100%" Height ="100%" />
12: </ div >
13: </ form >
14: </ body > | Go |
| First Milestone ... I learned from a wise man that celebrating small successes as important as the having big one, if not even more. So today I would like to thank my team for the effort they made in such a short period of time and with a quiet a steep learning curve they had to go through. One picture is worth a thousand words. Some statistics: Project size - small Project form scratch to functional all T/BDD time - 2 weeks* Team - no TDD, no principles, no solid OO till about 3 months only Components - web components, windows service component OSS projects used - NHibernate Testing frameworks used - MbUnit 3, Rhino.Mocks 3.5, WatiN 2 Testing performed - unit, integration (load is not there yet, but I am sure next iteration it will) * we literally started from absolutely nothing, bringing no code from existing projects. Great work team! | Go |
| eXpert RoadShow Terminado! ... Hemos terminado el eXpert Roadshow, la verdad ha sido un fabuloso evento. Personalmente tuve la oportunidad de brindar dos charlas en Costa Rica y dos charlas en El Salvador, ha sido una experiencia inolvidable, fue muy interesante poder conocer a colegas de estos dos países y también a los diferentes speakers de la región, quienes tienen un excelente nivel de conocimiento y experiencia. Lo prometido es deuda!, a continuación les comparto la presentación utilizada en el evento y los proyectos de demostración utilizados: Presentación Demo Live Services Demo Deep Zoom Saludos, Carlos A. Lone Etiquetas de Technorati: s+S ,asp.net ,eXpert Road Show | Go |
| UI Unit Testing with WatiN - Part #1 - Introduction ... There is an arsenal of tools readily available for unit testing web applications. Unit testing both the data access and business logic tiers is a common best practice and a requirement for developing complex web applications. Solutions typically contain hundreds of unit tests exercising every possible use case and edge case covering the data access and business logic tiers but the UI tier is consistently ignored because the tools to create UI unit tests are not robust enough and hard to use.
If you are familiar with VSTS you may be wondering if Web Tests can fit the bill. Although it is possible to exercise the UI using Web Tests they don’t really help you get down to the granularity of being able to assert that clicking a button causes a textbox to reset, and in this crazy world of AJAX and Web 2.0 we need a tool that handles dynamic changes to the DOM without breaking a sweat.
Enter WatiN (pronounced as what-in); a fantastic open source API that leverages the browser to conduct web tests instead of emulating it. WatiN integrates easily with the VSTS framework and tests can be coded using C# or VB.NET. Currently WatiN uses IE7 but a CTP has been released that allows you to test with Firefox as well.
The most impressive feature of WatiN is the level of access you have to the DOM. Web tests are able to find elements by id, index, name, text, CSS class, etc., iterate through collections of elements, and invoke any event.
The following is an example and explanation of how to use WatiN using VSTS. The source code is available at the end of the post.
Environment Setup
Download WatiN 1.3 here
Extract the files and if you are using Vista unblock the assemblies
Creating the Project
The downloadable source consists of a C# Test Project that contains a single Unit Test. Be sure to add a reference to the WatiNCore.dll and also copy the Interop.SHDocVw.dll into your /bin. The code I’ll be showing below will differ from the downloadable source to save some space.
The Test
I’ll show the test first and then explain what’s going on.
Figure 1 – “Hello World” test
The test first creates an instance of IE and instructs it to navigate to live.com on a separate process. By creating the test on a separate process the session will not be stored across IE instances. The next instruction, which WatiN will call only after the entire page has loaded, queries the DOM to find a text field with the specified Id and once found enters the text. Next, the DOM is queried again to find a button with the specified name and the click event is triggered. Finally we assert true if the page contains our search text, and our IE object is disposed.
This test is very simplistic and very similar to the example test shown on the WatiN homepage except I’m searching live.com instead of google.com (Yes I like Kool-Aid!). In my next post I’ll cover some more advanced scenarios and some tips and tricks to help make your own WatiN experience a little easier.
Source code here | Go |
| An interesting find on virtual machines. ... I recently stumbled across an interesting find. Virtual machines existed way back in the 1960's. There was O-code for BCPL and p-code for Pascal. Look them up on Wikipedia for details. Then later, after such long years, JVM came in to place for Java. And while Java was at its peak, Microsoft came up with its Virtual Runtime. So, here we are, still working on the concept of virtual runtimes. We have in addition to runtimes, many other words and word acronyms. Are we re inventing something here? | Go |
| The new CPU Laptop MonKey (monitor+keyboard) ... Face it, laptops are flimsey. We have 5. They constantly have problems and 3 recently broke down. Just in time for Christmas.
Our girls like to sit on the couch and use their laptops. They don't haul them around, just pick them up off the end table and put them on their laps and use them.
We have Desktop CPU's, 10 of them. They are great. We only need to replace them when we want to go bigger and better.
So, I want a CPU MonKey (monitor+keyboard).
I want to set a CPU on the floor. Then hook a laptop-like Monitor and Keyboard to it wirelessly, and then the user can sit on the couch and use their MonKey (monitor+keyboard) to control their CPU which is sitting on the floor.
The MonKey unit is much cheaper than a laptop and the CPU is much more rugged and affordable as well. So no more expensive, broken laptops.
So then, people like my daughters and millions of gamers, who always sit in the same chair, etc., can now use their MonKey to laptop-enable their CPU.
So, has that been invented? Where can I get one?
May your dreams be in ASP.NET and may you get a MonKey for Christmas!
Nannette | Go |
| SharePoint jQuery deployment feature ... After reading Jan Tielen's blog entries Integrating SharePoint 2007 and jQuery Part One and Part Two I wrote a simple SharePoint solution on Visual Studio 2008 that installs jQuery scripts to SharePoint. Features Deploys jQuery standard and minified versions to SharePoint site. Deployment script activates only Packed version, so you don't get three parallel versions of jQuery activated at same time. Features use AdditionalPageHead Delegate control and you don't have to modify any page or master page to get scripts included. Downloads SharePoint deployment package for with jQuery 1.2.6 Visual Studio 2008 project with jQuery deployment solution Notes Beofre deployment change the URL of SharePoint site in setup.bat. When using source don't forget to change deployment URL under project properties Build tab. Licence There is no licence from me. Feel free to download the source and deployment package and modify these how you like. jQuery is under MIT Lince , so don't break the rules of this licence. Enjoy! :) | Go |
| SharePoint for Lunch with Joel Oleson: Thanks Everyone! ... I just got back from the Toronto SharePoint User Group 's year-end holiday party and it was a pretty excellent experience.
First to thank our meeting sponsors: Quest Software and Nonlinear Creations for picking up the lunch tab; that was an unexpected but much appreciated holiday surprise. And thanks again to Quest for bringing Joel to town! After a few logistical hurdles at the restaurant, Joel presented a thought-provoking and insightful talk on SharePoint governance, and eventually we let him eat too. There were no less than 5 MVPs in attendance - myself, Reza Alirezaei, and Bill Brockback representing SharePoint, and Rob Windsor and Ed Musters representing VB and C# respectively. There were also a number of local luminaries and past user group speakers including Ruven Gotz, Jason Bero, Ali Kheradvar, and Kanwal Khipple (apologies if I've missed anyone, let me know). Put those names together and that's probably half the speaker line-up of the SharePoint Camp!
It was a great room to be in.We welcomed some new faces, and there were a lot of great questions and discussion all around. We waited a little while for the food (and apologies to those who had to leave sooner) but once it started it was like a never-ending flow of dishes from the kitchen.
I'd like to give an extra special thank-you to the Toronto chapter of "Collaborators Collaborating for Collaboration ," also known as the people who make TSPUG meetings work: Bill Brockbank and Susie Ibbotsen, this group continues to exist because you exist. You're the best! Also thanks to our sponsors and all those who provided facilities, catering, speakers, publicity, prizes and photocopiers in 2008 including: Nexient , Microsoft , ISPA , Wrox , INETA , Cyberplex , Infusion Development , Nonlinear Creations , Navantis , SharePoint Buzz , Ideaca , ObjectSharp and MindSharp .
Our January meeting will be a pre-SharePoint Camp volunteer meeting where we'll be stuffing the goodie bags and sharing tips to any first-time (or returning) speakers. That's January 21 at Nexient (NW corner of Yonge and Bloor). All are welcome to attend!
[Photo: Rob Windsor, Reza Alirezaei, Joel oleson, and Eli Robillard]
Happy Holidays, Eli. | Go |
| Another shot of nostalgia regarding DotNetNuke ... So I’ve been a busy guy lately, I’ve been taking night classes and I’ve been travelling all over the place, August and September included trips to New York/New Jersey, Boston, Amsterdam, Dubai, Las Vegas, in October and November. Next week I am headed to California, and then I have another trip scheduled in January to Connecticut. On top of all that I have been working with Patrick Renner on our forthcoming DotNetNuke book, DotNetNuke A User’s Guide that will be printed by WROX . What else...(read more ) | Go |
| MSBuild trick for making calls more maintainable ... One of my pet peeves with MSBuild’s <Exec> task is how long the lines get when you have lots of arguments. I ran across a trick yesterday in a blog comment made by someone named Romain and thought it was a very nice solution to this problem. When you expand items using this form @(items, ‘DELIMITER’), it allows you to specify a delimiter to use between the items. In the case of a command line, you use a space. Thanks Romain. <ItemGroup> <XmlPreprocessArgs Include="/nologo"/> <XmlPreprocessArgs Include="/v"/> <XmlPreprocessArgs Include="/x:"$(InstallDir)\Environments\$(ApplicationName).EnvironmentSettings.xml""/> <XmlPreprocessArgs Include="/i:"$(InstallDir)\UI.Shell.exe.config%3B$(InstallDir)\ClientLogging.config""/> <XmlPreprocessArgs Include="/e:"$(Environment)""/> </ItemGroup> <Exec Command=""$(InstallDir)\Environments\XmlPreprocess.exe" @(XmlPreprocessArgs,' ')" WorkingDirectory="$(InstallDir)\Environments" /> | Go |
