Alliagator Tags Archive for Monday, March 17 2008



DotNetKicks.com Links
K. Scott Allen : The Passion and the Fury of URL Rewriting ... During the Page_Load event, it's important to use RewritePath again to point to the original URL if your form will POST back to the server...Go
IISAdmin - Free tool for creating multiple websites on IIS5 ... IISAdmin - Tool for creating multiple asp.net websites on IIS5 and winxpGo
JavaScript Console - a DOS-like console ... recently had the need for a DOS-like console I could put in a browser and manipulate with JavaScript. Specifically, I needed a "window" with a fixed number of rows and columns...Go
Grid Inside a Grid ... This code snippet will help to create a Nested Grid. The sub grid depends on the each row element in the parent grid control .Go
Infragistics WPF XML DataGrid for .NET at Microsoft .NET Support ... xamDataGrid is UI component for .NET WPF applications developed by Infragistics, which can provides rich UI grid interface for you data. you can bind this control to ObjectDataProvider and XmlDataProvider.Go
Carousel(flying) Movement for Images using .NET DataGrid at Microsoft ... Now you can provide Carousel Movement or flying nature for images in .NET applications as shown in bellow picture by xamDataCarousel.Go
Displaying Row Details Tooltip on GridView using JQuery ... Displaying Row Details Tooltip on GridView using JQueryGo
DotNetKicks.com asp.net integration ... This class adds either a DotNetKicks image with your "Kick" count or a hyperlink to DotNetKicks.com for the specified url. These can be combined to display the "Kick It" icon as a link to DotNetKicks.comGo
Grayed out ASP.NET Toolbox Controls? Check your Mouse! ... Have you run into a problem with the ASP.NET where you can't access toolbox items for add-on controls? You're not the only one. Apparently there's a bug that causes some hardware configurations involving Microsoft Laser mice to cause problems with the idle state that the designer uses to refresh controls and certain designer aspects.Go
Create Date Calendar as User Control ... Create a Ajax enabled web site and create a Date User Control and copy paste the code listed below into the user control page after that drag and drop the on all the report pages that use Start Date and End DateGo
5 More Tips To Speed Up Windows Vista ... Following my Latest article 7 Tips to Speed Up Windows Vista, here are some more tips I have collected and think will be useful for every one who is using Windows Vista...Go
LINQ to XML ... Working with XML using Microsoft's .NET Framework in version 2.0 and below is a cumbersome task. The API available follows the W3C DOM model and is document-centric.Go
Validation of viewstate MAC failed error ... viewstate error due to a page not loading completely.Go
How Scott Guthrie gets so much work done. ... did you know scott guthrie was a triplet???Go
Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links
Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications - Daptivate > by Kyle BeyerGo
CodeProject: Google Maps in HTML, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP etc. with ease. Free source code and programming articlesGo
Mircea Trofin's blog : LINQ Framework Design GuidelinesGo
Rob Conery » ASP.NET MVC: Securing Your Controller ActionsGo
Using Routing With WebFormsGo
20 Websites That Made Me A Better Web Developer | Six Revisions : Web Development and DesignGo
Never Write an Insecure ASP.NET Application Ever AgainGo
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC Cheesy Northwind Sample CodeGo
ScottGu: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and .NETGo
GraffitiCMS: Content Made SimpleGo
Asp.NetGo
How I lost my WinDbg virginityGo
Matt Berseth: Building a Vista Style Folder Browser with ASP.NET 3.5 and a Custom Hierarchical DataSource ControlGo
Welcome!Go
Scott Gu Blog Links
March 14th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and .NET ... I'm slowly recovering from keynoting at MIX last week, and have been digging my way out of backlogged email the last few days.  I'm going to try and finish catching up on blog comments this weekend - apologies for the delay in getting back to some of your questions. To kick-start my blogging again I thought I'd post a new link-listing series .  Today's post is mostly focused on ASP.NET and web related links.  I'm going to be doing more Silverlight and WPF posts soon. ASP.NET Tag Cloud Filters with ASP.NET 3.5's LinqDataSource and ListView Controls : Matt Berseth has a cool post that shows off using LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET 3.5 to build a tag-cloud navigation UI. Five New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available : Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials .  These 5 new ones (all in both VB and C#) cover using the ASP.NET membership system. Building a Vista Style Folder Browser with ASP.NET 3.5 and a Custom Hierarchical DataSource Control: Matt Berseth continues his great posts with a nice one that shows how to build a custom HierarchicalDataSourceControl to implement file browsing functionality using ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Release: David Anson blogs about a new ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit release that the team made right before MIX.  This release includes a number of patches (including a bunch from the community) with bug fixes and improvements in a bunch of areas. LinkedIn Style Theme for the ASP.NET AJAX Tab Container Control: Matt Berseth posts some cool new themes you can use with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's tab control. ASP.NET AJAX In-Depth: Object Inheritance : Stephen Walther, author of the recently published ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed book , posts an incredibly in-depth article about how object inheritance is handled with ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX In-Depth: Creating JavaScript Properties: Stephen Walther continues his series with an in-depth article discussing how JavaScript Properties are handled with ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX In-Depth: Application Events : Yes another Stephen Walther article discussing how application events are handled with ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX Localization Slides and Code: Joel Rumerman has a nice post with samples + slides about how the localization features in ASP.NET AJAX work. JScript Intellisense: working with Ext JS : The VS web tools team enabled JQuery intellisense last month with the VS 2008 Web Development hot fix .  In this more recent post they talk about enabling intellisense support for Ext JS (another popular JavaScript framework).  VS 2008 Intellisense support for Prototype is coming in the next few weeks. JavaScript Intellisense for the Virtual Earth Map Control: Marc Schweigert is driving a project to add great VS 2008 JavaScript intellisense support for the Virtual Earth Map Control.  Check out his video and visit his codeplex project to learn more. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Preview 2: Last week at MIX the ASP.NET team shipped a second preview release of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  This release has a number of improvements in it (see my earlier MVC roadmap post that covers some of them).  Watch the Scott Hanselman videos on the http://www.asp.net/mvc page, as well as the quickstart samples to learn more. Thoughts on ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Beyond : Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team has a great post where he talks about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release, as well as some of the features and work that will show up in the next preview drop.  One of the major focuses in Preview 3 will be improvements to the testing workflow of controllers. Cheesy Northwind Sample Code: Scott Hanselman has posted a sample application that shows building a simple data driven application using the ASP.NET MVC Framework and the Northwind sample database. Securing Your Controller Actions : Rob Conery shows how to use the new ASP.NET MVC ActionFilterAttribute feature to apply declarative secuGo
My Presentations in Arizona this Tuesday ... This week I'm visiting Scottsdale Arizona and will be presenting at a free user group event during the day.  I'm presenting two sessions myself: 1) Developing Applications using Silverlight 2 : This will be a drill-down into the new Silverlight 2 Beta1 release, and how you can build applications with it using VS 2008 and Expression Blend.  You'll leave this session with a good understanding of the basics of Silverlight programming and how to start building applications with it. 2) Developing Applications using ASP.NET MVC : This session will be a drill-down into the new ASP.NET Model-View-Controller framework option (which last week was updated .  You'll leave this session with a good understanding of what it is, how it works, and how to start building ASP.NET web applications with it. In addition to my sessions above, there will also be great sessions at the event from Microsoft employees on "Consuming Web Services with Microsoft Silverlight", "Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight", and "Serving Applications with Microsoft Silverlight Streaming".  You can sign up and attend the sessions for free.  Click here for more details on the events, and click here to register online to attend.  Hope to see some of you there, ScottGo
First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2 ... Last week I did a First Look at Silverlight 2 post that talked about the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta1 release.  In the post I linked to some end-to-end tutorials I've written that walk through some of the fundamental programming concepts behind Silverlight and WPF, and demonstrate how to use them to build a "Digg Search Client" application using Silverlight: Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008 Part 2: Using Layout Management Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details Scenarios Part 7: Using Templates to Customize Control Look and Feel Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Version of our Application using WPF In this first set of Silverlight tutorials I didn't use a visual design tool to build the UI, and instead focused on showing the underlying XAML UI markup (which I think helps to explain the core programming concepts better).  Now that we've finished covering the basics - let's explore some of the tools we can use to be even more productive. Expression Blend Support for Silverlight In addition to releasing the upcoming Beta1 of Silverlight 2, we are also going to ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support for targeting it.  These tools will offer a ton of power for building RIA solutions, and are designed to enable developers and designers to easily work on projects together. In today's post I'm going to introduce some of the features in the upcoming Expression Blend 2.5 March preview.  After demonstrating some of the basics of how Blend works, we are going to use it to build a cross-platform, cross-browser Silverlight IM chat client: The above screen-shot shows what the application looks like at runtime on a Mac.  Below is a screen-shot of what it looks like at design-time within Expression Blend: We'll use Expression Blend to graphically construct all of the UI for the application, as well as use it to cleanly data-bind the UI to .NET classes that represent our chat session and chat messages. All of the controls we'll use to build the chat application are built into Beta1 of Silverlight 2. Disclaimer: I am not a designer (nor am I cool) Let me say up front that I am a developer and not a designer.  I'm also not very cool.  While I understand the techniques to create UI, I sometimes choose bad colors and fonts when putting it together (only after I did all the screen-shots for this post did a co-worker helpfully point out that there is actually a site dedicated to banning some of the fonts and colors I used . Ouch). For those of you with artistic skill out there - please be gentle with me and focus your attention on the features and techniques I demonstrate below, rather than on the font and color choices I use. :-) Getting Started: Creating a new Silverlight 2 Project Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008 share the same solution/project file format, which means that you can create a new Silverlight project in VS 2008 and then open it in Expression Blend, or you can create a new Silverlight project in Expression Blend and open it in VS.  You can also have both Expression Blend and VS 2008 open and editing the same project as the same time. Since in my previous Silverlight tutorial series I already showed how to create a new Silverlight project using VS 2008, let's use this post to show how to create a new Silverlight application using Expression Blend.  To do this, simply choose File->New Project in Expression Blend, select the "Silverlight 2 Application" icon, and click ok: This will create a new (VS-compatible) solution file and Silverlight application project: Blend includes a full WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight 2 applications.  When opening Silverlight pages and controls you can switch the design-surface to be in design vieGo
First Look at Silverlight 2 ... Last September we shipped Silverlight 1.0 for Mac and Windows , and announced our plans to deliver Silverlight on Linux. Silverlight 1.0 focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser, and supports a JavaScript/AJAX programming model. We are shortly going to release the first public beta of Silverlight 2, which will be a major update of Silverlight that focuses on enabling Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. This is the first of several blog posts I'll be doing over the weeks and months ahead that talk in more depth about it. Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). We will ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer / designer workflow and integration when building Silverlight applications. This upcoming Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 provides a rich set of features for RIA application development. These include: WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich WPF-based 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. This upcoming Beta1 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, 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). The built-in 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). Beta1 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 also 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. Silverlight 2 does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer in order to run. The Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to enable all the above features (and more we'll be talking about shortly) on a vanilla Mac OSX or Windows machine. The Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 is 4.3MB in size, and takes 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. Once Silverlight 2 is installed you can browse the Web and automatically run rich Silverlight applications within your browser of choice (IE, FireFox, Safari, etc). Silverlight 2 Tutorials: Building A Simple Digg Client To help people come up to speed with Silverlight 2, I wrote a Silverlight application and put toGo
.NET 3.5 Client Product Roadmap ... A few months ago I did a .NET Web Product Roadmap blog post where I outlined some of the product plans we have to build on top of the web development features we’ve shipped with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Over the next few months we will also be releasing a number of enhancements specific to client development as well.  We have put a lot of effort into addressing some of the biggest areas of customer feedback, while also trying to really push the envelope on the capabilities developers have when building Windows applications. All of these improvements build on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, and will make .NET client development even better going forward. Below is a roadmap of some of the upcoming releases we have planned for the months ahead: Improved .NET Framework Setup for Client Applications One of the biggest asks we’ve had over the years from customers and ISVs building client applications is to make the setup and installation of the .NET Framework easier and faster. This summer we are going to ship a new setup framework for .NET that makes it easier to build optimized setup packages for client applications. This setup framework can be integrated with existing installation frameworks (for example: products like InstallShield), and enables a smaller and faster end-user setup experience of the .NET Framework. Windows Forms and WPF client applications will be able to use this setup framework to cleanly “bootstrap” getting the .NET Framework installed onto machines. The setup “bootstrap” utility will support automatically downloading the minimal set of .NET Framework packages needed to enable .NET 3.5 client applications on a machine. For example, if a user already has .NET 2.0 installed on their machine, setup will be smart enough to automatically download only the upgrade patches necessary to update .NET 2.0 to 3.5 (and not have to re-download the components already provided by .NET 2.0). This will significantly shrink the payload size of client setup programs, and speed up the installation experience. We’ll also be delivering improvements that enable a more integrated application install experience for both MSI and ClickOnce based solutions, and support a more consumer friendly user experience that is easy to build. Improved Working Set and Startup Improvements for .NET Client Applications One of the other common asks we receive is to enable .NET client applications to launch faster in “cold startup” scenarios. “Cold startup” scenarios occur when no other .NET client applications are running (or have recently run) on a machine, and require the OS to load lots of pages (code, static data, registry, etc) from disk. If you are loading a large .NET client application or library, or are using a slow disk, these cold startup scenarios can require many seconds for your application to start. This summer we are going to ship a servicing update to the CLR that makes some significant internal optimizations in how we optimize our data structures to cut down on disk IO and improve memory layout when loading and running applications. Among many other benefits, this work will significantly improve the working set and cold startup performance of .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 applications and will dramatically improve end-user experiences with .NET-based client applications. Depending on the size of the application, we expect .NET applications to realize a cold startup performance improvement of between 25-40%. Applications do not need to change any code, nor be recompiled, in order to take advantage of these improvements so the benefits are automatic. WPF Performance Improvements This summer we are also planning to release a servicing update to WPF that includes a bunch of performance optimizations that improve its text, graphics, media and data stack. These include: - Moving the DropShadow and Blur bitmap effects, which are currently software rendered, to be hardware accGo
Feb 17th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications : Kyle has a nice post that summarizes a number of good best practices to follow when deploying your ASP.NET applications into production. Paging Through Data with the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView and DataPager Controls : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on the new ASP.NET 3.5 data control features.  In this latest article he shows how to page using the ListView and DataPager controls. ASP.NET AJAX How to install and use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit in VS : Nannette Thacker has a nice post that details step-by-step how to install and use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit controls within Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer. JavaScript Stack Traces in ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Error Publishing using ASP.NET AJAX : Joel Rumerman has put together two nice posts that detail some god ways to capture JavaScript stack trace information, as well as to report JavaScript errors using ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX History Tutorials : Jonathan Carter has published a good series of tutorials that demonstrate how to use the new ASP.NET AJAX History support that we'll be shipping later this year (it is currently available in the ASP.NET Extensions CTP download).  This enables you to add forward/back button navigation support within AJAX applications. Using JQuery with VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense : One of the improvements we shipped in our recent VS 2008 Hotfix Roll-Up last week was to address issues with JavaScript intellisense support for JQuery (another popular AJAX framework).  Brennan Stehling, James Hart, and Lance Fisher have done blog posts recently that discuss how to enable even richer JQuery intellisense inside VS 2008 using intellisense-friendly JQuery libraries that are referenced while coding (and then swapped out for the real library at runtime).  You can read their blog posts about how this works here and here and here . ASP.NET MVC Tip: Submitting an AJAX Form with JQuery : While on the subject of JQuery, I thought I'd link to a post in Mike Bosch's ASP.NET MVC series that shows how you can integrate JQuery in the browser on the client with the ASP.NET MVC framework on the server. Visual Studio Visual Studio Programmer Themes Gallery: Visual Studio enables you to customize the color settings of the text editor and IDE, as well as to export and import the settings (use the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu to do this).  Scott Hanselman has a great post that provides previews of a bunch of cool pre-built themes that people have published that you can download and use for free. Did you know: the Solution Explorer Supports Type-Ahead Selection : Sara Ford has another nice post in her series on Visual Studio tips and tricks.  This post talks about a shortcut you can use to quickly select files in the solution explorer. Code Profiler Analysis in VS 2008 : Maarten Balliauw has a nice post that describes how to use the code profiling features in the Developer edition of Visual Studio Team System to analyze code performance. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition Power Tools : Greg Duncan posts about the new power tools download that has been released by Microsoft and which delivers a bunch of cool new database development features for the Database editions of Visual Studio Team System. Japanese Release of VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects : Late last month I announced the release of the VS 2008 Web Deployment Project support.  This past week the team also released a localized Japanese version of it.  Note: you can read a Japanese translated version of my blog here (thanks Chica!). .NET LINQ to JSON , LINQ to SharePoint , LINQ to Active Directory , LINQ to TerraServer , LINQ to FlickR : Just a few of the new LINQ providers now availableGo
ASP.NET MVC Framework Road-Map Update ... This past December we released the first preview of a new ASP.NET MVC Framework as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Release . I also wrote a number of blog posts that provide more detail on what the ASP.NET MVC framework is and how you can optionally use it: Introducing the ASP.NET MVC Framework ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 1) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 2: Url Routing) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 3: Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 4: Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios) We've had great feedback on the framework since then, and had a ton of downloads and excitement around it.  One of the common questions people have asked me recently is "when will a new build be released and what will be in it?". The below post provides a few updates on what the ASP.NET MVC feature team has been working on, and some of the new features that will be available soon.  I'm going to do a separate blog post in the future that will cover the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data and ASP.NET AJAX feature work that is progressing along nicely as well.  All of these features (ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and the new ASP.NET AJAX improvements) will ship later this year and work with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. Upcoming ASP.NET MVC MIX Preview Release We are planning to release the next public preview of ASP.NET MVC at the MIX 08 conference in a few weeks.  This build will be available for anyone on the web to download (you do not need to attend MIX to get it).  We have incorporated a lot of early adopter feedback into this release.  Below are some of the improvements that will appear with this next preview release: 1) The ASP.NET MVC Framework can be deployed in the \bin directory of an app and work in partial trust The first ASP.NET MVC preview release required a setup program to be run on machines in order for the System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly to be registered in the machine's GAC (global assembly cache). Starting with this upcoming preview release we will enable applications to instead directly reference the System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly from the application's \bin directory.  This means that no setup programs need to be run on a sever to use the ASP.NET MVC Framework - you can instead just copy your application onto a remote ASP.NET server and have it run (no registration or extra configuration steps required). We are also doing work to enable the ASP.NET MVC framework to run in "partial/medium trust" hosting scenarios.  This will enable you to use it with low-cost shared hosting accounts - without requiring the hosting provider to-do anything to enable it (just FTP your application up and and it will be good to run - they don't need to install anything). 2) Significantly enhanced routing features and infrastructure One of the most powerful features of the ASP.NET MVC framework is its URL routing engine (I covered some of these features here ). This upcoming ASP.NET MVC preview release contains even more URL routing features and enhancements.  You can now use named routes (enabling explicit referencing of route rules), use flexible routing wildcard rules (enabling custom CMS based urls), and derive and declare custom route rules (enabling scenarios like REST resources mappings, etc). We have also factored out the URL routing infrastructure from the rest of the MVC framework with this preview, which enables us to use it for other non-MVC features in ASP.NET (including ASP.NET Dynamic Data and ASP.NET Web Forms). 3) Improved VS 2008 Tool Support The first ASP.NET MVC preview had only minimal VS 2008 support (basically just simple project template support). This upcoming ASP.NET MVC preview release will ship with improved VS 2008 integration.  This includes better project item templates, automatic project default settings, etc.  We are also adding a built-in "Test Framework" wizard that will automatically run when you create a new ASP.NET MVC Project via the File->New PrGo
VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available ... One of the things we are trying to do with VS 2008 is to more frequently release public patches that roll-up bug-fixes of commonly reported problems.  Today we are shipping a hot-fix roll-up that addresses several issues that we've seen reported with VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 web scenarios. Hot Fix Details You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download).  Below is a list of the issues it fixes: HTML Source view performance Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties. “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects. Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents. Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup. The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections. Design view performance Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations. HTML editing Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled. Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page. JavaScript editing When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds. JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing. JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used. Web Site build performance Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects. Installation Notes For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here .  In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error). To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item.  Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’.  If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove". Summary Obviously it goes without saying that we would have liked to have shipped without any bugs.  Hopefully this hot-fix enables you to quickly solve them if you are encountering them.  Thank you to those who helped us identify the causes of these issues, as well as to the group of customers who have helped us verify the above fixes the last few weeks. Note: If you do encounter issues with VS 2008 features for web development in the future, I recommend always asking for help in the VS 2008 Forum on www.asp.net .  The VS Web Tools team actively monitors this forum and can provide help. Hope this helps, ScottGo
Feb 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, WPF ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET ASP.NET Security Tutorial Series : Scott Mitchell (who wrote the excellent Data Access Tutorial Series for us last year), has recently begun a new free tutorial series focused on ASP.NET Security.  Today we published the first three article in the series on the www.asp.net site: ASP.NET Security Basics , Overview of Forms Authentication , and Forms Authentication Configuration and Advanced Topics .  For even more ASP.NET Security Information, please check out the security tutorials I've also done on my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page . 10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Secrets : Omar Al Zabir, the CTO and co-founder of www.pageflakes.com (a Web 2.0 portal site built with ASP.NET), has written another in his excellent series of articles on ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX.  This article discusses tips and tricks to maximize ASP.NET performance and scalability.  To learn even more about how to build great sites using ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, make sure to read Omar's excellent new Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book. .NET Debugging Demos Lab : Tess Ferrandez, who is an ASP.NET escalation engineer for Microsoft support and who also posts incredible articles on the art of debugging production ASP.NET applications, has started a new tutorial series that provides a sample "buggy" application and a series of questions/problems you can work through to learn how to debug problem applications in production environments. 4 Alternative View Engines for ASP.NET MVC : The open source MvcContrib project has been adding lots of cool goodness on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  Jeffrey Palermo posts about 4 alternative view rendering engines now in the project that you can use if you don't want to use the default .aspx based view engine.  BTW - I'll be doing a new post on ASP.NET MVC within the next week talking about some of the cool new features coming soon with the next refresh.  ASP.NET AJAX Boost ASP.NET Performance with Deferred Content Loading : Dave Ward continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX.  This article talks about how you can improve the perceived load-time of a page by using an AJAX callback to retrieve HTML content once the page loads on the client.  This approach is similar to the one I wrote about in my tip/trick post here . Build Yahoo UI Style Glowing Buttons with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit GlowButtonExtender Control: Matt Berseth continues his excellent series on using ASP.NET AJAX.  In this post he discusses how to create cool glowing button effects. Visual Studio Resolving Namespaces and Removing Unused Using Statements : David Hayden has a nice article that discusses a few Visual Studio code editing features that developers often overlook.  Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison : Several people have sent me email in the past asking for a page that describes the differences between the various Visual Studio 2008 editions (Standard, Professional, Visual Studio Team System, etc).  This link is useful to bookmark if you want to learn more about this. Did you know...You can Shift+ESC to close a tool window: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know..." VS 2008 tips and tricks series.  I confess I didn't know this one.  One productivity tip I always recommend is to really learn the keyboard shortcuts of your development tool environment well - since using them over time can yield significant productivity savings.  Click here to download a VB 2008 key bindings poster, or click here to download the C# 2008 key bindings poster equivalent.  Print them out and put them under your pillow to absorb them while you sleep. .NET The Power of Yield : Joshua Flanagan has a nice article on one of the coolest, yet underused, feature of C# in .NET 2.0 Go
MIX08 ... MIX is a Microsoft web development conference we hold in Las Vegas each year.  MIX tends to be a pretty fun event, both because it covers cutting edge content (we used MIX07 to announce our Silverlight plans), and also because it tends to attract a really diverse set of attendees (including both those who use Microsoft technology today, and a large % of attendees who don't).  The conference structure includes a healthy blend of sessions and interactive panels, and the layout and organization is designed to facilitate great conversations. This year's MIX is being held March 5th-7th in Las Vegas.  Ray Ozzie and I are both giving keynotes the first day of the event, and Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki will be doing a keynote the second day of the event. The conference (and especially my keynote) is going to cover a lot of new web technology.  Attendees will be able to attend sessions covering: IE 8 IIS 7.0 ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data)  VS 2008 and Expression Studio WPF Silverlight 2 And much more.... Channel 9 recently did an interview with me where I talked about some of these new technologies.  In Part 1 of the interview I talked about IIS7, and in Part 2 of the interview I talked about ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight 2. Register Soon Or You'll Miss Your Chance MIX is held at a smaller venue then some of our larger events like TechEd and PDC.  This gives the conference a more intimate feel (which is fun).  It also means that it sells out each year, and once it is sold out it is really sold out.  Last year I received about 50 emails from people begging for tickets after it was full, and many people even flew to the event hoping to somehow be let in at the door (only to be unfortunately told they couldn't get in).  Unfortunately because of size constraints (and fire marshal restrictions) once it is sold out there really are no more tickets to be had.  Even my own team members get turned away if they haven't registered in time. This year's registration is filling up faster than any of the previous MIX conferences.  If you want to attend I highly recommend registering really soon to ensure you can go.  You can learn more about the event and register online here . Hope to see some of you there - it is going to be fun.... ScottGo
VS 2008 Web Deployment Project Support Released ... This past Friday we released the final RTW (release to web) support for VS 2008 Web Deployment projects.  You can learn more about it and download it for free here .  Web Deployment projects can be used with either the "ASP.NET Web Site" or "ASP.NET Web Application Project" options built-into VS 2008, and provide a few additional build, packaging and deployment options for you to use.  You can read an old tutorial post of mine here to learn more about they work. The VS 2008 Web Deployment Project version supports all of the existing features provided by the VS 2005 web deployment download.  It also adds additional support for: Easily migrating VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects to VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects Replacing output only if web deployment builds succeed IIS7 Support This RTW (release to web) version fixes bugs and adds some small features that people requested in the December CTP version we released last month.  Please make sure to run setup and uninstall any older version of the VS 2008 Web Deployment Project support you have installed before installing this final version.  VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects can be installed side-by-side with VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects - so there is no need to uninstall the VS 2005 version if you are still using it with older projects. More Deployment Features In my last link-listing post I pointed at the new Web Deployment Tool being released by the IIS team.  This tool works with both IIS6 and IIS7 and enables automated copy deployment, file synchronization, and migrating of applications onto web servers.  If you are looking for a great way to automate the deployment of your ASP.NET applications onto remote servers then this tool is definitely one to check out.  You can use VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects as a post-build step within your build environment to fix up last minute deployment settings - and then use the IIS Web Deployment tool to copy them remotely onto server machines.  Alternatively you can also use the IIS Web Deployment Tool to copy vanilla "ASP.NET Web Site" or "ASP.NET Web Application" projects to remote machines (no VS 2008 Web Deployment Project required). To learn more about the new IIS Web Deployment tool, read the walkthroughs at the bottom of this page (in particular the "Introduction to MS Deploy" one).  I will also be doing a blog post in the future that talks more about how to use it to automate your web server deployments. Hope this helps, ScottGo
Jan 24th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, IIS ... I just arrived back from my trip from Asia, and decided to celebrate (since I'm jet-lagged and can't sleep) with a new post in my link-listing series .  You can check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Extending the GridView to Include Sort Arrows : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to add a visual indicator to the GridView control to indicate the current sort order on columns. Using ASP.NET 3.5's ListView and DataPager Controls: Sorting Data : Scott Mitchell continues his ListView control series with a good article on enabling sorting scenarios with the new ListView control. Building a Grouping Grid with the ListView and LinqDataSource Controls : Matt Berseth has an awesome post that shows off using the new ListView control and LinqDataSource controls to build a hierarchical grouping grid.  A post to bookmark. Using the ListView, DataPager and LinqDataSource Controls : Matt Berseth has a good tutorial post that shows off using these new controls to join data from two database tables using LINQ. Some ASP.NET 3.5 ListView Control Examples : Mike Ormond has a nice post that provides a number of samples that show how to use the new ASP.NET ListView control.  For even more ListView articles, check out my last link-listing post which pointed to a bunch of them. Large File Uploads in ASP.NET : Jon Galloway has a nice post that provides some good details on handing large file uploads using ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX Four ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript UI Methods You Should Learn : Dave Ward has another great post in his series about ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript Helper Methods . Five Tab Themes Created for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit : Matt Berseth posts some really cool themes created for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's Tab control. Very slick! CNN Style Scrolling Ticker with the Marquee Toolkit Control : Matt Berseth posts another great one that shows how to implement a scrolling marquee UI using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Visual Studio Did You Know?: Lisa Feigenbaum from the VB team has posted a really cool series of blog posts that talk about some of the new VS 2008 editor and IDE features.  Read Part 1: Intellisense Everywhere , Part 2: IntelliSense is now Transparent , Part 3: Ctrl+Tab to Navigate Windows , Part 4: What You Can Do with Debugger DataTips , and Part 5: VB IntelliSense now filters as you type . Web Server Settings for ASP.NET Web Application Projects can now be stored per user as well as per project : The VS Web Tools Team has a nice post that describes how you can now store web server settings per-user instead of per-project.  This is very useful for multi-developer scenarios (where you don't want to check-in these values into source control). Using Ctrl-Break to Stop VS Building : Steven Harman points out a cool tip/trick, which is that you can use the Ctrl-Break key within Visual Studio to kill the current compilation build.  A useful tip if you've accidentally kicked off a long build or get tired waiting for it to finish. Visual Studio 2008 Trouble Shooting Guide : If you run into any issues installing VS 2008, make sure to check out this blog post.  It details a bunch of common causes of failures, and how to fix them. .NET Marshaling between Managed and Unmanaged Code : Yi Zhang and Xiaoying Guo from my team in Shanghai have written a great MSDN article that describes how to use the marshaling interop features of the CLR to call native code.  One of the tools they highlight is an awesome P/Invoke Interop Assistant application they built that makes it much, much easier to generate p/invoke interop signatures when calling native methods.  A must-have tool for anyone doing native/managed interop! .NET Framework 3.5 Poster : Brad Abrams posts about the cool new .NET Framework 3.5 posters now available for download (now in multiple file formats). IIS Microsoft WGo
.NET Framework Library Source Code now available ... Last October I blogged about our plan to release the source code to the .NET Framework libraries , and enable debugging support of them with Visual Studio 2008.  Today I'm happy to announce that this is now available for everyone to use. Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries: .NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc). ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions) Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms) Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows) ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml) We are in the process of adding additional framework libraries (including LINQ, WCF and Workflow) to the above list. I'll blog details on them as they become available in the weeks and months ahead. Enabling Reference Source Access in Visual Studio 2008 Enabling .NET Framework source access within Visual Studio 2008 only takes a few minutes to setup. Shawn Burke has a detailed blog post that covers the exact steps on how to enable this in more depth here . If you run into problems or have questions setting it up, please post a question in the Reference Source Forum on MSDN here . Stepping into .NET Framework Library Source Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .NET Framework libraries and step into the source code. VS 2008 will download both the symbols and source files on demand from the MSDN reference servers as you debug throughout the framework code: Developer comments are included in the source files. Above you can see an example of one in the Dispose method for the Control base class. Sometimes you'll see comments that reference a past bug/tracking number in our bug/work-item tracking database that provides additional history about a particular code decision. For example, the comment above calls out that a particular field shouldn't be nulled to maintain backwards compatibility with an older release of the framework, and points to a backwards compatibility bug that was fixed because of this. Reference License The .NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license. When we announced that we were releasing the source back in October, some people had concerns about the potential impact of their viewing the source. To help clarify and address these concerns, we made a small change to the license to specifically call out that the license does not apply to users developing software for a non-Windows platform that has “the same or substantially the same features or functionality” as the .NET Framework. If the software you are developing is for Windows platforms, you can look at the code, even if that software has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the .NET Framework. Summary We think that enabling source code access and debugger integration of the .NET Framework libraries is going to be really valuable for .NET developers. Being able to step through and review the source should provide much better insight into how the .NET Framework libraries are implemented, and in turn enable you to build better applications and make even better use of them. Hope this helps, ScottGo
Visiting China, South Korea and Japan the Next Two Weeks ... This Friday I'm leaving for a 10 day trip to Asia.  Traveling on business doesn't usually get me excited (I was on a plane ~70 times last year), but I am really looking forward to this trip as it will be my first trip to Asia.  I'll be visiting China (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen), South Korea (Seoul), and Japan (Tokyo), and I will be presenting at events, meeting with customers, and visiting one of the development teams in my group that is based in China.  I'm also hoping to get a chance to see immerse myself a little in the countries. Below are some details on the presentations I'll be doing during the trip if you are interested in attending or learning more: China (Beijing, January 13th) China (Shanghai, January 14th) <= Update South Korea (Coex Conference Center 310 on January 17th) Japan (Izumi Garden Gallery in Roppongi, Tokyo on January 21st) I've been extremely fortunate the last year to have had some great people volunteer to translate my blog posts into other languages (including Chinese and Japanese).  Below are links to a few of the feeds if English isn't your first language: My Blog Posts in Chinese My Blog Posts in Japanese My Blog Posts in Spanish I'm hoping to meet Xuegen Jin (who has been translating my posts to Chinese and hosting them on HongChao Wang's site) and Chica (who has been translating my posts into Japanese) on the trip and have the chance to thank them personally. :-) Thanks, ScottGo
ASP.net.com Community Links
Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC Part - 1 ... Learn how to develop a Digg like application with ASP.NET MVC, LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET AJAX.Go
iCallback & JSON Based JavaScript Serialization ... In this article, Muhammad examines how to accomplish JavaScript Serialization using ICallback and JSON.Go
Export Crystal Reports to PDF file ... Explains how you can export crystal reports to PDF, Excel, Word and HTML formats with ASP.NET application.Go
Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ - Part 2 ... In the second part of the article series about ASP.NET MVC Framework, Keyvan adds controllers to his blogging engine in order to describe how to use controllers in ASP.NET MVC and discusses some details related to controllers. He first discusses the concept of URL routing patterns and then explores the anatomy of a controller class. Finally, he examines how to implement the controllers in his sample blog application.Go
Working with Callback and Control Rendering (Manually) ... This article is mainly about callback and rendering controls but through this tutorial you can also learn many other things: how postbacks work, how rendering works, how to dynamically create server-side controls, how to create DataTables dynamically in memory to bind with, how to get server-side controls during client-side execution and set their properties, and how to register client-side events of server side control from the server-side code.Go
Accessing data using Language Integrated Query (LINQ) in ASP.NET WebPages – Part 1 ... This article comprises of two parts; Part 1 deals with the introduction to LINQ and LinqDataSource control in ASP.NET and describes how to define and retrieve an in-memory data collection and display data in a web page.Go
File Denial ... Learn techniques for letting authorized users download files from your ASP.NET web site while keeping unauthorized users out!Go
ASP.NET AJAX meets Virtual Earth – Part One ... Get up to speed with ASP.NET AJAX by building a simple Virtual Earth mashup.Go
Handling the back button from server code ... One common drawback of Ajax applications is the loss of the browser's back button. This article by Bertrand Le Roy shows how to restore it using ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview and server code.Go
Introduction to SubSonic ... An introduction to SubSonic, a data-layer builder.Go
CodeProject.com ASP Links
AJAXConnectableWebPart ... With Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, you can build more dynamic applications that come closer to the rich style of interruption-free interaction. This web part will give full insight of site collection as tree view and respective attributes in as a data grid, which are connected to each other.Go
HTML Report with break page using XSL and CSS ... One possible way to build an HTML report that has a dynamic number of pages.Go
ASP.NET Internals: Request Architecture ... Explains in depth the ASP.NET request architectureGo
Generic Data Exchange Framework with AJAX ... Generic Data Exchange Framework with AJAXGo
JavaScript Console - a DOS-like console for browsers ... Source code for a console window, allowing print and input operations to a fixed sized HTML element is provided.Go
Grid Inside a Grid - Nested Grid in C# ... Grid Inside a Grid Control on a web pageGo
Expanding Image Animator ... Animation of an image. Using multiple images as thumbnail you can enlarge it to a specific sizeGo
The Anatomy of Forms Authentication ... In this article, I will attempt explain in “gory” technical details how Forms Authentication worksGo
Object oriented JavaScript class library in C#/.NET style ... JavaScript classes ported from .NETGo
A CAPTCHA Control for ASP.NET 2 ... A CAPTCHA control that is simple, secure, and easy to use.Go
VTD-XML: XML Processing for the Future (Part II) ... Use VTD-XML as cutter, splitter, incremental modifier and why Document-centric XML Processing is the futureGo
Two DropDownList with Client Call-Back ... An article on how to fill in a list by another list's client-selected itemsGo
Facebook Application Development with FBML, FBJS, ASP.NET and C# ... Build simple and sophisticated Facebook Apps with FBML, ASP.NETGo
How to pass value from Ajax Enabled Base User Control to Client User Control and to the Parent aspx page ... How to pass value from Ajax Enabled Base User Control to Client User Control and to the Parent aspx pageGo
DotNetSlackers.com Links
Three Requests for ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 ... I have three things that have been on my wish list for ASP.NET and/or Visual Studio that I'm curious to know what others think. I've mentioned some of these before on my blog or elsewhere - they're not exactly earth shattering and I'm not saying that I want them more than any other feature they might add. But each one would make my life at least a little bit easier, if they were included by default. So, in no particular order, here they are: Support For Generics in ASPX Markup Eilon posted not too long ago about this topic . The idea here is that you should be able to write controls that take advantage of generics, and be able to declaratively specify them within your ASPX/ASCX markup. This would allow for things like strongly typed DropDownList controls or even TextBoxes, and would also allow for MVC views to specify their ViewDataType without having to resort to code. In the WPF world, I understand that this can be done by using the x:TypeArguments attribute. As Silverlight 2.0 takes off, it would be great to see support for generics in its XAML markup, as well. Limiting the discussion to ASP.NET for the moment, what should the markup look like? Mikhail Arkhipov discussed some of the options and challenges 4 years ago, and apparently the solution was not trivial or I have to believe we would already have it. However, I have confidence in the ASP.NET team's ability to figure this one out. Save VS Preferences in the cloud Since VS 2005 we've been able to save out our VS preferences to disk and then import them. This is a great feature that I've never used - I just usually don't have access to my primary dev machine when I sit down at another one, and if it's a coworker's machine I don't want to mess with their settings. With things like pair programming, it can be tough to use customized settings since there is no easy way to swap back and forth depending on who's at the controls. What I would like to see is a way to recover my settings from "the cloud" so that I can get them anywhere I go via my Live ID or OpenID or whatever. Having a quick way to switch between a couple of these would make the pair programming scenario even better. I suggested this four years ago, and I still want it. Another option that might help this situation is being able to run VS from a USB drive, so that it's completely portable. This would be cool for the "walk up to any machine" scenario but a bit less useful in the pair programming scenario. I'd go for both. The other thing I think would be invaluable for the service method is that Microsoft would be able to mine data about users' preferences (with opt-in for the privacy paranoiacs) so that their future versions of Visual Studio would ship with defaults that were informed by thousands of real world users' preferences. Recursive FindControl Do a quick search for this and you'll find a number of similar implementations. This generic recursive findcontrol looks like a pretty good one, based on some code from Palermo and myself . Basically, these let you get a reference to a control even if it is not in the current control's Controls collection. This happens quite often with templated controls like CreateUserWizard or LoginView or MultiView, and having a recursive findcontrol is quite a bit more flexible than hardcoding the name with $ etc (see tip 4 here ). Since I found the need for this technique, I've been adding it to my Base Page class or common class in every ASP.NET project I work on, so it seems to me it should really be built into the framework. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here .Go
A few more solutions to the dreaded ""Validation of ViewState MAC failed"" ... I posted about this some time ago. My previous post: Potential solution for "Validation of viewstate MAC failed"http://aspadvice.com/blogs/joteke/archive/2007/08/14/Potential-solution-for-_2200_Validation-of-viewstate-MAC-failed_2200_.aspx And the original one:ASP.NET 2.0 and "Validation of ViewState Mac failed" exceptionhttp://aspadvice.com/blogs/joteke/archive/2006/02/02/15011.aspx Now there's a few more solutions listed and explained with a nice sample code at: Validation of viewstate MAC failed error http://blogs.msdn.com/tom/archive/2008/03/14/validation-of-viewstate-mac-failed-error.aspx by an ASP.NET Engineer. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here .Go
A brand new ASP.NET Community WebSite ... Hello All ASP.NET Professionals We are proud to announce a brand new ASP.NET Community website named, http://riverasp.net , with FORUMS, BLOGS, NEWSLETTRS, ARTICLES and over 11,000 ASP.NET related RESOURCES all in one place. Please visit us by clicking the following http://riverasp.net . We like to hear what you have to say. Thanks Josh Coswell Chief Architect of the WebSite @ support@riverasp.net http://riverasp.net... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here .Go
ASP.NET MVC Framework Scaffold Generator 1.1 ... Hello, I have updated my MVC Scaffold generator to support the March CTP. You can download the program from http://www.twinforms.com/aspmvc-home.htm Following are its features: Ability to create a common controller that links all the Selected table's List and Add action. You can also view the demo screencast at http://www.twinforms.com/screencast/asp.net/mvc_scaffold/ -Guru Kathiresan http://www.twinforms.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
Grayed out ASP.NET Toolbox Controls? Check your Mouse! ... I've heard from several of my customers that have upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 that they've been unable to access custom controls on the toolbox. It doesn't matter whether the controls were auto-installed or manually added. According to several of the customers the controls simply show greyed out and apparently disabled so that they can't be accessed. You can't access the controls on the toolbox although standard controls work just fine. It turns out that the cause is: Interaction with... 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
Getting up to speed with ASP.NET 3.5 and the 3.5 Extensions ... I get hundreds of email a day from customers. Yesterday I received three email with the same question. Do you have a few good links for getting up to speed with ASP,NET 3.5 So.... Here you go. ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 http://www.asp.net/downloads/vs2008/ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s57a598e.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700830.aspx http://csna01.libredigital.com/?urvs5cn3s8 3.5 Extensions Links http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/ http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-extensions-videos/... 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 Scott Guthrie gets so much work done. ... I've known Scott for almost 10 years but when he hired me a few years ago I had no idea how much work he gets done. Apart from managing the teams that deliver a dozen products for Microsoft, he travels and speaks everywhere, writes these detailed blog posts, and seems to know everything that's going on everywhere. (Like if the www.asp.net site if down for 40 seconds in the wee hours of the morning.) Well, I've finally figured it out ! Check out this rare photo that PROOVES Scott Guthrie is... 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 Scott Guthrie gets so much work done. ... I've known Scott for almost 10 years but when he hired me a few years ago I had no idea how much work he gets done. Apart from managing the teams that deliver a dozen products for Microsoft, he travels and speaks everywhere, writes these detailed blog posts, and seems to know everything that's going on everywhere. (Like if the www.asp.net site if down for 40 seconds in the wee hours of the morning.) Well, I've finally figured it out ! Check out this rare photo that PROOVES Scott Guthrie is... 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
Getting up to speed with ASP.NET 3.5 and the 3.5 Extensions ... I get hundreds of email a day from customers. Yesterday I received three email with the same question. Do you have a few good links for getting up to speed with ASP,NET 3.5 So.... Here you go. ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 http://www.asp.net/downloads/vs2008/ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s57a598e.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700830.aspx http://csna01.libredigital.com/?urvs5cn3s8 3.5 Extensions Links http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/ http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-extensions-videos/... 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 Sample Resume ... AJ... 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 and IE8 WebActivities ... One of the great things in readify is the ability to do Professional Development at scheduled intervals to keep up to speed with the latest industry technologies and advancements. My latest foray into this (amongst other things) has been looking at the ASP.NET MVC framework and Internet Explorer 8 WebActivities . Both of these technologies are quite cool and I wanted a way to learn about them both and link them in some way where I could learn about them at the same time. To that end, I created a solution in Visual Studio 2008 which utilises the ASP.NET MVC framework and allows a user to enter some fields to create an IE8 Web Activity definition. You can then view the XML definition, and click the 'Add' button to add that activity to Internet Explorer 8 as a proper web activity. The web activity generated is not particularly functional, but does allow previews, icon definition, execute actions, however has no current support for parameters. Again, not really intended as a fully fledged utility or application, but a good way to learn about both the MVC framework and IE8 activities. The solution can be downloaded here . Obviously, you need Visual Studio 2008, the ASP.NET MVC preview 2 framework , and have Internet Explorer 8 beta installed. Feel free to download, play, chop up etc... 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
Send Email with VB.NET windows application ... Send email with attachment using windows app by posting to ASP.net App... 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
Two DropDownList with Client Call-Back ... An article on how to fill in a list by another list's client-selected items... 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
Using Routing With WebForms ... In my last post I described how Routing no longer has any dependency on MVC. The natural question Ive been asked upon hearing that is Can I use it with Web Forms? to which I answer You sure can, but very carefully. Being on the inside, Ive had a working example of this for a while now based on early access to the bits. Even so, Chris Cavanagh impressively beats me to the punch in blogging his own implementation of routing for Web Forms. Nice! One of the obvious uses for the new routing mechanism... 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
IE8 Beta 1 Whitepapers ... Doing a little search on some of the new IE8 features, I found this page listing a series of IE8 whitepapers:http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ie8whitepapers Amongst other things, you'll find documents on Activities, WebSlices and the Developer Tools. Interesting enough, eBay supports Activities and WebSlices right now:http://ie8.ebay.com/Go
Spam Catch without Captcha ... By Nannette Thacker Here is an example of how to set a spam trap without using Captcha. In your web form, typically a Register or Log In page, simply place a hidden textarea field. Then on your form action page, check the value and if it contains any content, you can redirect them to another page or do anything you like. Since a real human won't see or have access to this form field, only the bots will fill in the field.ASP.net VB Example <asp:TextBox ID="ReasonCatch" runat="server" Rows="3" Style="display: none;" TextMode="MultiLine"></asp:TextBox> <asp:Button ID="GoButton" runat="server" Text="Go" TabIndex="5" OnClick="GoButton_Click" /> Retrieve Protected Sub GoButton_Click(ByVal sender As Object, _ ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Dim spamtrap As String = "" spamtrap = Me.ReasonCatch.Text If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(spamtrap) Then Response.Redirect("~/byefool.aspx", False) Else ' further processing End If End Sub ASP Classic Example <textarea id="ReasonCatch" name="ReasonCatch" rows="3" cols="4" style="display: none;"></textarea> Retrieve spamtrap = Request.Form("reasoncatch") if cstr(spamtrap) <> "" then Response.Redirect("/byefool.asp") end if In my actual code, I retrieve the IP address, and send an email to myself with the phrase they sent, along with the IP address, date and time, etc. This helps to keep these spammers from mucking up your database with garbage records. So far I have caught and stopped a russian website spammer, a geocities spammer, and some really nasty porn links. I found the original suggestion at the bottom of this page on A CAPTCHA Solution Built With Classic ASP, CSS And Javascript and it works great! I can't tell who the author is from looking at the site, but thanks! May your dreams be in ASP.net!Nannette Thacker"Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?" - Jayne Cobb, Serenity/FireflyGo
Job openings on the .NET Framework Core Team ... We have been incubating ideas about building a simple extensibility framework for some time. Now, as plans for the next version of the .NET Framework crystallize a bit more, we decided to productize the project. As a result, we have opened a job position (and most probably will be opening more) on the .NET Framework team. If you are interested, please see details here and send me an email at “kcwalina at microsoft.com.” So, what is this extensibility framework? Initially, it will be a low level core .NET Framework feature to make it easy for applications to expose extensibility points and consume extensions. Think about what for example FxCop has to do define rule contracts and load rule implemented by the community. These are the basics, and we can talk about the broader and longer term vision when you come to Redmond for an interview :-) This is a technical Program Manager position in Redmond, WA, and it’s basically exactly the job I did when I joined Microsoft. Besides working on the Framework features, all Program Managers on the core team have opportunities to work on API design and architecture projects. [Job Openings on the .NET Framework Core Team ] I'm a developer on Kyzysztof 's team and we are looking for a few good people for PM and D e v positions so by all means if you are interested in extensibility and API design please apply.Go
How To: Prevent running ASP / ASP.NET code in specific folder ... Sometimes, you may want to prevent running ASP or ASP.NET code in specific folder, for security reasons for example. In this case, you have to follow these instructions (Windows Server 2003, IIS6): run inetmgr, the IIS management console Right-Click on the folder you want to disable ASP/ASP.NET inside Open the properties window. In the "Directory" tab, in the "Execute Premissions list, choose "None". Now, It's impossible to execute ASP files or CGI scripts in this folder. Make an application for this folder, by clicking "Create" button. Click on the "Configuration" button. In the "Wildcard application maps" section, choose the aspnet_isapi.dll item, and click Removee. That's it! Now, it's impossible to execute ASP or ASP.NET code on this folder. Shahar.Go
CPU Scheduling Simulator 0.5 released! ... Download CPUSS 0.5 I got bored today (I really should be preparing for stuff I have coming up in the next few days!!) looking at random stuff in preparation for the next few days, so I broke off for a while and decided to finish up CPUSS 0.5 release which contains: Process resumed event Min/Max wait time achieved by any process during the simulation WaitTime now computed for every process rather than the total average (which is still there) Download CPUSS 0.5Go
LINQPad ... [From Eric Moreau ] Ever wish you could test a LINQ query without pressing F5 in Visual Studio? Book author Joseph Albahari who wrote C# 3.0 in a NutShell has released LINQPad , a free tool that let you do just that. Coolness factor: 11!Go
Visual Studio 2008 PowerCommands ... [From Eric Moreau ] PowerCommands is a set of cool and useful Visual Studio 2008 extensions. Free + source code is included. http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionID=df3f0c30-3d37-4e06-9ef8-3bff3508be31Go
Mix08: Qixing Zheng in the WideOpen Web ... At Mix08, I had the chance to record a quick interview with Qixing Zheng. Qixing is a UX advisor for Microsoft Canada. If you're doing anything UX related and you're in Canada, make sure to bookmark the Canadian UX Connection blog . Mix08-Qixing.mp3 (2.6 MB)Go
Dark Colored Visual Studio Color Scheme ... Someone asked me by email if I can share my VS.NET Color scheme as shown in this video .  Well,  Here it is .Go
Omea Open Source, finally... but where? ... I've been using Omea Pro as my primary news reader for a long time now. It's one of the better ones IMHO as it let's me track RSS feeds and newsgroups (I don't use the mail integration). It's not as bloated as I found with RSS Bandit, chewing up memory all over the place, but it has its share of bulge and it tends to bog the system down a bit. Still, I like it and it's from one of my favourite software publishers, JetBrains. A few months ago Omea (and Omea Pro) went free and they announced they would release the product as open source at some point in the future. It's been a long time coming and now it appears to be available, or at least the announcement was made : Dear JetBrains Omea Users, We are pleased to finally come to you with these news. We know that many of you were waiting for this news for so long, and we would like to thank you for your patience. So, after several months of thorough work on polishing the software itself and its API, we are happily ready to announce the full availability of our "Omea" line of products in their open-source incarnation. We hope that this step will allow us to rise the development of this great product to a new level and to attract energy and talents of everybody who likes to participate in this "adventure". Omea - both source and companion files - is now distributed under GNU GPL v2 License ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html) . Problem is, I can't find it? The regular page still offers the 2.2 version and I've combed the Confluence site but can't seem to find a download or the name of the subversion repository to get the code from. I must be blind. Anyone know where it is? Update: Michael left a comment that the SVN repository is here .Go










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