| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Choosing Between WebForms and MVC ... Another take on what to consider when making a decision between Asp.Net WebForms or Asp.Net MVC. | Go |
| ASP.NET Content Scroller Control. ... This is a free and open source server control to put scrolling areas in both vertical and horizontal directions in ASP.NET web forms. | Go |
| Introducing the ASP.NET MVC (Part 1) - The Model-View-Controller Patte ... About a month and a half ago I announced that I am writing a book, I was really overwhelmed by the amount of support that I received from this announcement. Both myself and Al are really looking forward to the day when this book ships, and we start receiving real feedback on all our hard work. However, both of us would like to start receiving feedback as soon as possible, so.
In an effort to write the book and keep blogging, I decided to open source the last chapter, Chapter 2, that I have to write. I am doing this so I can receive feedback on this chapter as early as possible. Because this chapter, in my opinion, is probably the most critical of the book, it defines the context around ASP.NET MVC and how it differs from ASP.NET Web Forms, as well as giving a historical perspective of the MVC pattern. | Go |
| Export GridView to Pdf using iTextSharp in ASP.NET ... In this example i m exporting Gridview populated with SqlDataSource to Pdf using iTextSharp in click event of Button
This is the html source of the page in which i've created a gridview,Sqldatasource and a Button to export GridView to Pdf | Go |
| Microsoft Released Anti-XSS 3.0 Beta and CAT.NET CTP ... Some information and direct download links of Microsoft new security products for .NET developers: Anti-XSS 3.0 Beta and CAT.NET CTP . | Go |
| Generics in .Net 2.0 made simple ... Generics provide the solution to a limitation in earlier versions of the common language runtime and the C# language in which generalization is accomplished by casting types to and from the universal base type Object. By creating a generic class, you can create a collection that is type-safe at compile-time. | Go |
| Saving dynamically added list items using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC ... The author gives an example of how you can use ASP.NET MVC built in DefaultModelBinder to populate a List of Complex Types for a Controller Action. Taking the example a step further, the author describes how to dynamically add elements in the form using jQuery that eventually get posted to a save action. | Go |
| ASP.NET - Correct way of storing c# property in ViewState ... Correct way of storing c# property in ViewState. Classic example of null-coalesing operator ??. Property in ViewState code snippet. | Go |
| ASP.NET Confirmation Button using JQuery ... Creating a ASP.NET Confirmation Button control that uses JQuery and its plugin SimpleModal to implement modal confirmation popups. | Go |
| DayPilot Scheduler Control for ASP.NET ... Flexible open-source scheduler control (resource booking, project management, timeline and free/busy visualisation). | Go |
| Don't Forget to Check Page.IsValid ! ... In this article I'll talk about ASP.NET Page Validation when working with Validators. In ASP.NET there is a few Validators like RequiredFieldValidator, RegularExpressionValidator etc... Both use JavaScript validation in order to valide Web Forms quicker. But they also perform Server Validation so as to Validate the Page even if JavaScript is disabled in browser ... | Go |
| Intellisense in Spark ViewEngine is coming ... On the other hand if you look at the feedback from people who wouldn't consider it a viable alternative there's a definite theme surrounding Visual Studio integration in general and Intellisense in particular. So I decided a few weeks ago to muster up my courage and take another pass at the task of making a Visual Studio integration package to provide a Spark language service. | Go |
| Some Thoughts on Oxite ... Rob Conery's comments and thoughts on new open-source CMS project 'Oxite'. In this post he analyzed some critical issues in Oxite and suggested some solutions to optimize this ASP.NET MVC powered blog engine. | Go |
| Fill asp.net DropdownList and ListBox controls with DataSource program ... DropdownList and Listbox both are asp.net data controls. They can be directly bound to a data source. But often programmers choose to fill them dynamically using code (in C# or VB.NET !).
I am listing the simple trick to programmatically bind asp.net DropdownList and ListBox controls.
Lets say myTable is the DataTable filled from the method FillMyDataTable. Now we can
start out the journey. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Oxite ASP.NET CMS | Go |
| Oxite - Home | Go |
| ASP.NET.4GuysFromRolla.com: Key Configuration Settings When Deploying a Web Application | Go |
| CodeProject: 99.99% available ASP.NET and SQL Server SaaS Production Architecture . Free source code and programming help | Go |
| New ASP.NET Charting Control: - ScottGu's Blog | 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 |
| ASP.NET AJAX TabContainer - Tips and Tricks ... An ASP.NET AJAX TabContainer creates a set of Tabs that can be used to save screen space and organize content. The TabContainer contains a number of TabPanel controls. You can place your controls inside each TabPanel. In this article, we will explore some common tips and tricks with the ASP.NET AJAX TabContainer control. | Go |
| Pouplating Multiple DetailsView based on single GridView using DataKeyNames in ASP.NET ... This is a example of populating three different DetailsView based on selection of of record in a GridView using DataKeyNames in C sharp and ASP .NET
In this example GridView is populated from a table called Website using SqlDataSource, on GridVies i have defined 3 DataKeyNames separated by comma, which will be used to fetch the record related to those DataKeyName from 3 tables in 3 DetailsViews | Go |
| ASP .NET -Populating dropdown based on the selection of first drop down in DetailsView using FindControl and ItemTemplate ... Here is the code for populating a DropDown based on selection of another drop down list in Details view control of ASP .NET , in this example i've added two DropDowns in DetailsView control using TemplateField and InsertItemTemplate
The Second DropDown (ddlProducts) is getting populated based on Category selected in Category DropDown , For this i've used SelectedIndexChanged event and findControl method to find the control and sqldataSource is used as datasource for the dropdowns and DetailView | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part IV - Localization ... Catharsis web-app framework - localization | Go |
| jQuery Based Ajax.Net library ... jQuery Based Ajax.Net library | Go |
| DayPilot Scheduler Control for ASP.NET ... Flexible open-source scheduler control (resource booking, project management, timeline and free/busy visualization). | Go |
| Tom and Jim Podcast #2 ... Tom and Jim continue their CodeProject Article Adventure | Go |
| Visual Studio Tips & Tricks for Developers:- This includes some shortcuts features in Visual Studio 2008 which will increase your productivity ... Visual Studio Tips & Tricks to increase development productivity | Go |
| How to Perform a Database-independent Databind with UDLA Framework ... How to perform a database-independent databind with UDLA (Universal Database Layer Access) | Go |
| Introduction to Building FireFox Add-ons/Extensions ... 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 others do 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 |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Oxite - Oh Dear Lord Why?! ... A couple weeks ago Microsoft released their first public version of Oxite - a blogging engine built using ASP.NET MVC. One of the goals of Oxite is "to provide a real-world sample written using ASP.NET MVC". When you take into consideration that ASP.NET MVC is relatively new and scarcely documented, it should come as no surprise that people are seeing this as a recommended guideline for how to build MVC websites. One would expect Microsoft to realize this and seize the opportunity to showcase... 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 Content Scroller Control ... Scroll vertically or horizontally any ASP.NET server side or html controls... 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 |
| Guy Kawasaki reveals great ideas yet is against twitter! ... A fantastic Guy Kawasaki interview by Robert Scoble to promote his new book Reality Check: the Irrreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition. A must have for anybody in technology that wants to spend $19 in a book. Did you read the book? Do you think is worth the money you paid for it? Is an evangelist somebody with a huge ego sharing his ideas?
You can watch the video here:
http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/guy-kawasaki-gives-a-reality-check
After... 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 |
| Laying the Foundation of a Semantic Web Application ... Learn how to select the components that form the core of your semantic web framework.... 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 |
| ViewState and Postback ... Why some web controls like Textbox retain values even after disabling the ViewState while some does not?... 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 |
| 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 |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Static Constructor throws the same exception again and again ... Here’s a little gotcha I ran into today – if you have code in a class’s static constructor that throws an exception, we will get a TypeInitializationException with the original exception as the InnerException – so far, nothing new. However, if we keep on calling methods on that object, we’ll keep receiving TypeInitializationExceptions. If it cannot be initialized, it cannot be called. Every time we try, we’ll receive the exact same exception . However, the static ctor will not be called again. What appears to happen is that the CLR caches the TypeInitializationException object itself, InnerException included, and rethrows it whenever the type is called. What are the ramifications? Well, we received an OutOfMemoryException in our static ctor, but the outer exception was caught and tried again. So we got an OutOfMemoryException again, even though the memory problem was behind us, which sent us down the wrong track of looking for persistent memory problems. Theoretically, it could also be a leak – the inner exception holding some sort of reference that is never released, but that’s an edge case. Here’s some code to illustrate the problem. The output clearly shows that while we wait a second between calls, the inner exception contains the time of the original exception, not any subsequent calls. Debugging also shows that the static ctor is called only once. 1: class Program
2: {
3: static void Main(string [] args)
4: {
5:
6: for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
7: {
8: try
9: {
10: Thread.Sleep(1000);
11: StaticClass.Method();
12:
13: }
14: catch (Exception ex)
15: {
16: Console.WriteLine(ex.InnerException.Message);
17: }
18: }
19:
20: Console.ReadLine();
21: }
22: }
23:
24: static class StaticClass
25: {
26: static StaticClass()
27: {
28: throw new Exception("Exception thrown at " + DateTime.Now.ToString());
29: }
30:
31: public static void Method()
32: { }
33:
34: }
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } | Go |
| Visual WebGui helps Quebec apps firm cut down development time ... Symbiose Technologies gains four times more productivity with the help of an open source development platform from Gizmox. You could win $10,000 if you can hack into Visual WebGui Building Web-based applications can cause great demand on a company's servers, often creating network bottlenecks which mean costly delays for development teams. Symbiose Technologies, a Quebec-based data processing application builder however manage to dramatically cut development schedules with the help of a development...(read more ) | Go |
| My WPF Bookshelf ... For future reference a quick list of WPF-related books I own: Charles Petzold: Applications = Code + Markup This was my first WPF book and I bought it pretty soon after it came out, so I didn't have a chance to read the bad reviews of other people. The main problem is the lack of images, leaving you just with the text and your imagination if you're not following each and every step at your computer. Contrary to other WPF books, XAML is introduced pretty late (in the second half). In his excellent PDC pre-conference session about WPF, Petzold himself admitted that this was a mistake and chose a different, XAML-first (instead of code-first) approach for the session. According to a buddy from my .NET user group the book may be nice for reading about some deep-down details, but I cannot comment on that. Bottom line: No recommendation from me. Adam Nathan: Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed This was my second WPF book and it is the exact opposite to Petzold's book: lots of images, lots of color. I really liked that at first, but it's actually pretty hard to read the book for longer periods of time with the pages being cluttered with colored boxes ("Warning", "Digging Deeper", "FAQ", "Tip") - a bit less color sometimes would have been better. And I would have liked more body text here and there, having the feeling that some things could have been explained in more detail. Bottom line: By no means a bad book, but I'm not entirely convinced. Chris Sells & Ian Griffiths: Programming WPF (2nd Ed.) My third WPF book. The layout is easy on the eyes, a good mixture of images and longer body text. Like the WPF Unleashed book it has side notes (warnings, tips, recommendations), but they are shown in a less obtrusive way. I really liked the writing: Enough text for explaining things, but never boring. I read large parts of the book away from the computer and enjoyed it. Bottom line: My favorite "first WPF book". Sam Noble, Sam Bourton, Allan Jones: WPF Recipes in C# 2008 Not a book for learning WPF from scratch, but a collection of problems and their solutions. It may seem a bit old-fashioned to have this in a book in the age of Google search, but you'll notice the difference between most things you find on the Internet and the content of this book where the authors actually have spent quite some time on polishing. Each entry in the book consists of a short description of the problem (Always starting with "You need to ...", very effective wording by the way), a short description of the solution ("Use an X and do Y") and is then followed by a longer part "How it works". Bottom line: Having this book on your bookshelf may save you a lot of time. | Go |
| SonicFileFinder 2.1 Released ... My colleague Jens Schaller has put out a small bugfix release of his Visual Studio add-in SonicFileFinder , a free tool for quickly navigating inside Visual Studio projects and solutions. ReSharper users may argue that R# offers the same functionality (among many many other features of course), but being a R# user myself I still prefer SonicFileFinder's file search. More information on his blog , download on the SonicFileFinder website . | Go |
| Improve the performance of your ASP.NET application with Silverlight 2.0 ... Silverlight 2.0 Release just came out and developers are creating great flashy websites using this great plug-in technology. Yet there isn’t much about how Silverlight would provide a architecture to improve performance by using the clients CPU instead of the server running ASP.NET. The great communication between Silverlight and JavaScript will give developers a way to provide “compiled JavaScript” objects that would run on the clients CPU instead of the servers hosting the web application. In previous post I gave a few samples of the communication between Silverlight 2.0 and JavaScript using the ScriptableMember attribute. There are many improvements that you can make using Silverlight to improve the performance and user load of your web server. Isolated Storage Instead of keeping the Session State on the web server, it can be pushed to the Silverlight client and stored on the hard disk using. The biggest problem on web application were that you didn’t had access to the local hard disk to store information. Now Silverlight 2.0 More info about Isolated Storage . IsolatedStorageFile storage = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication(); I created a Silverlight class called SilverlightSession that stores all the session state with the reference to the ASP.NET Session ID. Silverlight only sends the encrypted information need it per method to the server, so the web server is on to know basis instead of having to store every bit of information from every user. Web Services. Instead of creating a web services endpoints for your Ajax to call, you can instead just call Silverlight methods to do the processing. There is a great sample of that by Michael Schwarz about how to encrypt AJAX communication. Those Silverlight Methods can include processing that might take a long time to run in JavaScript or mathematical calculations. If you revise your ASP.NET application, you will encounter many Web Forms that can be moved to Silverlight. Another examples of that is anything that parsers, like an XML parser. Security by User Roles. ASP.NET provides you with a role based security so the user role will restrict what the user can do. I am in the process to move those rules into a Silverlight xap that will be download it for the javascript to restrict what the user can see without having to render the page and go through the page cycles. The role based security rules will be compiled into Silverlight that will callback javascript to make those div visibility change depending of that user role. I’ll provide all source code as always shortly. Cheap SSL or better SSL? For years the most secured communication for a browser was to use the 443 port with a SSL 126 bits encryption key. Now, thanks to Silverlight you can provide that same encryption between the client and the server without installing SSL certificates or paying a third party provider like Verisign for that capability. All communication between the client and the server does not need to use the POST can be called to a Silverlight method for 128 bits encryption and be sent to the server. I have already seen profs of developers wanting that control in their hands for a faster communication as well as avoiding the nightmare of the browser alerting you about unsecured items you didn’t want inside the SSL page. Would take time until users trust the Silverlight encryption without displaying the yellow lock in the browser or waiting the long latency of the SSL post. Multiple file upload. Finally I would like to shine a light at this great post http://www.codeplex.com/SLFileUpload about going beyond the one file at the time restriction on the browser, now with Silverlight 2.0 you can process and send multiple files to the server using Silverlight 2.0. I hope this post will give you a few ideas on your own to move the performance hog from your web server and push them to your client’s CPU to improves your website speed. You do not need to provide in the silverlight object a front end, | Go |
| Back in the saddle. Asp.net moderation and DotnetNuke Gallery module, here I go. ... My daughter's birth caused major changes in my life. Unlike with my first child, I dedicated part of my day to take care of her. Last Thursday we celebrated her first birthday and I took some time to evaluate the impact the decision had on my professional life. I reduced the number of hours dedicated to programming, I dedicated fewer hours to reading technical books and, in general, I spent fewer hours in front of the computer. All of this obviously influenced the amount of time I had available to dedicate to community endeavors. The result was diminished participation in both the DotNetNuke web development platform as the Gallery Project Lead, and being almost absent from asp.net forums where I was an All-star poster as well as forum moderator.
The hours I enjoyed being near my little Renata have been really fulfilling and with renewed strength I decided to go back into my dedication to my preferred community activities. Starting today I've scheduled in my daily agenda some time to dedicate to moderating and replying to forum questions in the asp.net forum .With the submission of the DotNetNuke Gallery module , I am also starting the planning phase of the next version. And even though I envision full leverage of newer technologies like Silverlight and JQuery to give the module the necessary visual "umph", I will be sharing vision with the rest of the team, continuing to experiment with an agile-like approach to development in this open-source distributed-team effort. AJAX is a no-brainer of course and the development of a DAL will be one of the most active areas of work.
If you are interested in DotNetNuke in general and the Gallery module specifically, I suggest you follow the respective project area over the DotNetNuke website , as most of the action related to the development of the next version will be visible in the Blog and Forums that reside there.
And yes, Renata is pictured at the top of this blog. | Go |
| Palestra Garbage Collector ... Ontem apresentei uma palestra sobre Garbage Collector (CLR), na FTI Tecnologia em Londrina. Particularmente um conteúdo muito importante e interessante, mas pouco disseminado. Baixe o arquivo PPTX utilizado :) Abraços! | Go |
| MVC/JQuery meets X-Mas Music Project ... My friend Dave and I embarked on a project a few weeks ago, initially just meant to be a audio CD for our family, that included some rockin' versions of everyone's christmas favorites. As we started to record it, we got more and more excited about how it might turn out. Being the uber code master that I am, I opted to make a website... then in a blink, a friend who is incredible at Flash offered to help. This turned out to be a great experience for all of us, and the feedback has been tremendous.
I'm very proud to share with you (make sure your speakers are on) www.metalxmas.com
The code-behind I wanted to have a spot for friends, family, and haters to post their honest ramblings, so I decided to go with the much-loved JQuery/ASP.NET MVC combo; what a joy as always. One bug I ran into, that seems to have been noticed before me, is the ability to cache the root page of your ASP.NET MVC site using the OutputCache attribute. According to this thread , the mvc team will have a fix soon. For the time-being, I ended up caching at the repository level by just sticking the data response from disk into the HttpContext cache to ensure I only read and parse my xml file every 10 seconds.Nothing else too interesting came up. I added some spam protection, input validation (client and server-side), and HtmlEncoding to protect any hijacks. All in all, another great experience. I would share the code, but I have a certain Oxitephobia .
Scalability In the hopes (and delusions of grandeur) of this thing being picked up as even a semi-viral hit. I wanted to make sure the site wouldn't go down. I placed the flash file, the four mp3 files, the images, and the css file on a CDN. I initially started with Amazon S3... but at 15cents/gig compared to SimpleCDN's 6cents/gig I had to switch. I've been very happy with my experience, and they even include $15 worth of free credit when you first sign-up. A friend of mine suggested I use the YSlow plugin to analyze my site; this ended up with the following configuration:
HTTP Compression enabled on CDN (via url configuration) and IIS (c'mon, if you haven't done this yourself already, DO IT NOW )
Set content expiration on all files on CDN to have 10 year expiration headers (I named the files themselves with version numbers to allow for forcefully expiring if needed)
JQuery and SWFObject scripts hosted via google
All scripts at the bottom
XHTML 1.0 Strict validated by W3
This ended me with an A score with YSlow. I felt accomplished.
Parting thoughts I hope you enjoy it, it's definitely meant to be funny - so don't take it too seriously. Feel free to pass it along to your friends and family! | Go |
| My UG Talk on ASP.NET MVC ... I did an another UG presentation on the ASP.NET MVC Framework for
K-Mug (Kerala Microsoft User Group) at Technopark , India. You can download the presentation material from here | Go |
| CTDOTNET gets a new logo ... The Connecticut .NET Developers Group gets a new logo on their website and FaceBook group. | Go |
