| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Using jQuery to consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services ... An overview of consuming ASP.NET web services that are JSON serialized by the ASP.NET AJAX extensions, including a specific example of using jQuery to do so. | Go |
| Javascript show Session timeout counter ... Download code Introduction To display the remaining minutes as a counter for a Session to timeout on the webpage that will change after every minute and a message will be displayed when the Session timeout will be equal to 0 (zero). One thing to keep in consideration that the code pr... | Go |
| Async Actions in Monorail ... MonoRail gets support for asynchronous controller methods, a major improvement for scaling an application | Go |
| jQuery for ASP.NET MVC preview 2 ... Updated jQueryMvc project so that it works with ASP.NET MVC preview 2. | Go |
| MyShortcuts is a free handy application to organize your shortcuts ... MyShortcuts provides quick access to your favorite programs, shortcuts, folders, documents and websites | Go |
| The ASP.NET community's only real problem is education ... After reading this post from Dan Hounshell, I'm drawn to more questions about "what's wrong with the ASP.NET community," and I'm still convinced that people are asking the wrong questions. | Go |
| Accessing data using Language Integrated Query (LINQ) in ASP.NET ... Part 2, sequel and the last of the article Accessing data using Language Integrated Query(LINQ) in ASP.NET WebPages - Part 1 explains how to create entity classes to represent SQL Server database and tables using Object Relational Designer and display data in a web page using LinqDataSource control. | Go |
| Accessing data using Language Integrated Query (LINQ) in ASP.NET WebPa ... 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. Part 2 explains how to create entity classes to represent SQL Server database and tables using Object Relational Designer and display data in a web page using LinqDataSource control. | Go |
| ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and WebServices ... This article explains the use of webservices in ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX environment and it tells how to call web service methods from a client-side javascript. It also outlines the new System.Web.Script namespace and explores the ways of defining the client-call to a web service method. | Go |
| Kigg - Upgraded to MIX08 ASP.NET MVC Release ... Kigg upgraded and few thoughts on ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| Using Custom BasePage Class in ASP.Net ... This article explains the implementation of custom BasePage class in ASP.Net projects. Also, it discusses some of the sample scenarios where it can be used like adding meta tags using basepage and error handling using basepage. | Go |
| POP QUIZ: What to do next? - part 1 ... Troubleshooting a high memory case. | Go |
| ASP.NET Tips: Working with large SQL tables ... Large Database tables and how to handle them and why. | Go |
| Add Flash Charts to Your ASP.NET Web Site. Part 2: Data binding ... This part of the series looks at how to bind our pie chart to a real data source and covers a couple of visual enhancement options. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| ASP.NET - Home | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| CodeProject: ASP.NET MVC - Part 1. Free source code and programming help | Go |
| ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| 10 AJAX Effects to Boost Your Website’s Fanciness Factor | Six Revisions : Web Development and Design | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC: Building Web Apps without Web Forms | Go |
| More on GZip compression with ASP.NET Content - Rick Strahl's Web Log | Go |
| .NET - How to open popup windows in IE/Firefox and return values using ASP.NET and Javascript | Go |
| WatiN | Go |
| ASP.NET AJAX > ASP.NET Model View Controller Applications | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| New Log Reporting, Database Management, and other cool admin modules for IIS 7 ... One of the core priorities we focused on when building IIS 7 was to enable a rich .NET extensibility model that provides developers with the hooks to easily plug-in and extend the web server. These extensibility hooks are provided in the web-server pipeline (enabling scenarios like the new IIS7 Bit Rate Throttler ), within the configuration system (enabling developers to create new web.config schema settings), within the health monitoring system (enabling developers to add custom trace events), and within the admin tool (enabling developers to plug-in new admin UI modules). We added these extensibility hooks so that anyone can easily extend and enhance the web server using .NET. We also selfishly wanted them so that we can ship regular feature packs that add additional features to the core web server. IIS 7 Admin Pack Preview 1 Released Last week the IIS team shipped the first technical preview of some really cool administration modules that I think web developers will find super useful. This preview adds several new features to the IIS7 Admin Tool: Database Manager : Built-in SQL Server database management, including the ability to create, delete, and edit tables and indexes, create/edit SPROCs and execute custom queries. Because it is integrated in the IIS administration tool it all works over HTTP/SSL - which means you can use the module to remotely manage your hosted applications (even with low-cost shared hosting accounts), without having to expose your database directly on the Internet. Log Reports : Built-in report visualization with charting support for log files data. Full range selection and custom chart creation is supported, as well as the ability to print or save reports. Like the database manager you can use this module remotely over HTTP/SSL - which means it works in remote shared hosting scenarios. Configuration Editor: This is a power module that provides complete control over editing all web.config settings within the admin tool. You can configure it to track the changes you make using the UI and have it auto-generate configuration change scripts that you can then save and tweak to re-run later in an automated way. Request Filtering UI: This admin module provides more control over the new request filtering feature in IIS7. Check out Carlos' blog post here for details on how to use it. .NET Authorization: This admin module provides a custom authorization rules editor which allows you to more easily manage the ASP.NET <authorization> configuration section. FastCGI UI: This admin module provides more support for editing all the new <fastCGI> settings (for when you use FastCGI modules with IIS7 like PHP). Below are some screen-shots and simple walkthroughs of the Log Reporting and Database Manager administration UI modules: Log Reporting Admin Module Have you ever deployed a web application onto a server and wondered how much load it is getting?, what the average response time from the server is?, or whether many server errors are occurring (and if so on what URLs)? All of these settings are carefully logged by IIS in a text based log file. Today most people use command-line tools like the IIS Log Parser utility to query and analyze these files. The IIS 7 Admin Pack and the new "IIS Reports" admin module now enable you to also query and chart your reports graphically within the IIS admin tool: Out of the box the "IIS Reports" admin module comes with a bunch of pre-built logparser-based reports that you can easily run on your sites and applications: Below is a simple graphical report we could pull up that looks at the HTTP status codes being returned by my "TestSite" application (note how we are using the "bar graph" visualization option): Reports can optionally be filtered using a date range. You can also push the print or save buttons within the report page to generate a printer or a local saved version of the report. The IIS7 Admin To | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available ... Last month I blogged about our ASP.NET MVC Roadmap . Two weeks ago we shipped the ASP.NET Preview 2 Release . Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team published a good blog post about the release here . Scott Hanselman has created a bunch of great ASP.NET MVC tutorial videos that you can watch to learn more about it here .
One of the things I mentioned in my MVC roadmap post was that we would be publishing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and enable it to be easily built, debugged, and patched (so that you can work around any bugs you encounter without having to wait for the next preview refresh release).
Today we opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex project that we'll be using to share buildable source for multiple upcoming ASP.NET releases. You can now directly download buildable source and project files for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release here .
Building the ASP.NET MVC Framework
You can download a .zip file containing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework for the release page here . When you extract the .zip file you can drill into its "MVC" sub-folder to find a VS 2008 solution file for the project:
Double-clicking it will open the MVC project containing the MVC source within VS 2008:
When you do a build it will compile the project and output a System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly under a \bin directory at the top of the .zip directory. You can then copy this assembly into a project or application and use it.
Note: the license doesn't enable you to redistribute your custom binary version of ASP.NET MVC (we want to avoid having multiple incompatible ASP.NET MVC versions floating around and colliding with each other). But it does enable you to make fixes to the code, rebuild it, and avoid getting blocked by an interim bug you can't work around.
Next Steps
Our plans are to release regular drops of the source code going forward. We'll release source updates every time we do official preview drops. We will also release interim source refreshes in between the preview drops if you want to be able to track and build the source more frequently.
We are also hoping to ship our unit test suite for ASP.NET MVC in the future as well (right now we use an internal mocking framework within our tests, and we are still doing some work to refactor this dependency before shipping them as well).
Hope this helps,
Scott | Go |
| IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module Released ... Video on the web is now one of those common scenarios that every user takes for granted, and increasingly every major site is incorporating in some form (product videos, training videos, richer advertising scenarios, user generated content, customer testimonials, etc).
One of the challenges when adding video to a site, though, is delivering it in a way that doesn't cost a fortune. Network bandwidth costs a lot of money, and the cost of high quality video usage can quickly add up.
The blog post below provides a quick overview of some of the options you can use to reduce the cost of delivering video, and discusses a new free download - the IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module - that was released a few days ago and which enables you to easily save money when serving video from an IIS web server using any video technology (including Silverlight, Windows Media Player and even Flash).
Option 1: Using a Video Hosting Service
One approach you can take to reduce video bandwidth costs is to use a video hosting service like YouTube or the free Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service . This allows you to use someone else's network to deliver the video content, and avoid having to pay the bandwidth costs yourself.
If you aren't familiar with the Silverlight Streaming service, it allows you to upload up to 10GB of videos and download 5 Terabytes/month of video content (at up to a 1.4 Mbps bit-rate) for free. You can build any custom Silverlight client player application you want to embed the video within it. This means it doesn't require a specific video player look and feel, nor a service logo/watermark to play the video. This allows you to fully integrate the video into your site and use whatever UI you want to host it.
Option 2: Hosting Video on Your Own Servers
Sometimes using a video hosting service doesn't make sense (for example: you want to use custom authentication to grant/deny user's access, you want to play really long video segments, or you want to serve up custom ads in your videos). Instead you might want to serve the video up from your own servers and have complete control over it.
There are typically two options you can use to deliver the video from your servers: using a streaming approach or a progressive video download approach:
Streaming Server Scenario
In a streaming scenario a client (like Silverlight, Windows Media Player, Flash or Real Networks) connects to a streaming server. The streaming server then sends down the video stream to watch, and typically enables a user to dynamically skip ahead/behind, pause or stop the video stream. When the user closes the browser or navigates away from the page the video stream automatically stops transmitting.
Windows Media Services (WMS) is a free streaming server download available for Windows, and can stream video to both Windows Media Player and cross-platform Silverlight browser clients. It is generally regarded as the most server scalable and cost effective way to enable video streaming on the web, and handles both on-demand file streaming scenarios (for example: streaming a .wmv file) as well as live stream scenarios (for example: a sporting event like the Olympics that is happening live in real time).
Windows Media Services can be used on any version of Windows Server - including the new Windows Server 2008 Web Server edition (which only costs $469, enables up to 4 processors and 32GB of RAM, and supports IIS, ASP.NET, SharePoint, and Windows Media Services).
Progressive Download Scenario
In a progressive download scenario a client (like Flash or Silverlight) downloads a video directly off of a web-server, and begins playing it once enough video is downloaded for it to play smoothly.
The benefit of using a progressive download approach is that it is super easy to setup on a web-server. Just copy/ftp a video up to a web-server, obtain a URL to it, and you can wire it up to a video client player. It doesn't require any custom web-server configurat | Go |
| 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 secu | Go |
| My Presentations in Arizona this Tuesday ... Update: You can now download the slides + demos I used during my talks. Click here for the Silverlight Talk . Click here for the MVC Talk .
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,
Scott | Go |
| 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 vie | Go |
| 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 to | Go |
| .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 acc | Go |
| 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 available | Go |
| 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 Pr | Go |
| 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, Scott | Go |
| 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.... Scott | Go |
| 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, Scott | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Unit Testing ASP.NET Pages Using WatiN ... Unit testing is an integral part of the application design. Unit testing is applied at different levels of the application. In this article we will focus on the User Interface level unit testing. We will use WatiN to test our ASP.NET application. | Go |
| Supporting Complex Types in Property Window ... Whenever you set any property of a control in the property window, the property window needs to save this property value in the .aspx file. This process is known as code serialization. For properties that are of simple types (such as integer and string) this code serialization happens automatically. However, when property data types are user defined complex types then you need to do that work yourself. This is done via what is called as Type Converters. This article is going to examine what type converters are and how to create one for your custom control. | Go |
| Adding Multiple Rows in the GridView Control ... A while back an article was published on www.gridviewguy.com which explained how to add a single row at the bottom of the GridView control. You can read the article using this link. Many readers were interested in the idea of adding multiple rows to the GridView. This article explains how to add multiple rows to the GridView control. | Go |
| Building a Volta Control : A Flickr Widget ... This article illustrates how to create a Volta control around Flickr, the popular image hosting service. | Go |
| Extending the GridView to Include Sort Arrows ... While the GridView supports built-in, bi-directional sorting, it does not provide any visual feedback as to what column the grid is sorted by. This article looks at how to add an up or down arrow image to the header of the column the GridView is sorted by. | Go |
| How to open popup windows in IE/Firefox and return values using ASP.NET and Javascript ... With the forums flooded with questions of opening a popup window, passing values to the popup window and then return values back to the parent page using both Internet Explorer and Firefox, I decided to take a plunge into the subject and experiment with an easy implementation. This article explains how to transfer values between the Parent page and a Pop-up window. The code has been tested against IE7 and Firefox. | Go |
| Creating Client And Server-Side Form Validation Using The Validator Toolkit For ASP.NET MVC ... This article describes how to validate a HTML form on client and server-side in conjunction with the jQuery JavaScript library. | Go |
| Extending Base Type Functionality with Extension Methods ... Extension methods allow a developer to tack on her own methods to an existing class in the .NET Framework. For example, imagine that our developer created a method named StripHtml, that strips HTML elements from a string using a regular expression. By associating this method with the System.String class, it could be called as if it was one of the System.String class's built-in methods | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Event Calendar [ ASP.NET 2.0 / C# ] ... Basic Calendar Control of ASP.NET 2.0 can be extended to cater one of most frequent requirement of tracking events, project milestones, history, schedule etc. | Go |
| Javascript to show Session timeout counter ... To display the remaining minutes as a counter for a Session to timeout on the webpage | Go |
| Index XML Documents with VTD-XML ... Introduce a simple, efficient, human-readable XML index called VTD+XML | Go |
| Extending DataPager: Creating a google analytics data pager ... The GooglePagerField webcontrol extends the DataPager webcontrol to create a google analytics pager looks like. | Go |
| A templated PleaseWait Button, introduction to template Control ... The purpose of this article is to present the construction of a templated control, working as a PleaseWait button | Go |
| SimpleZip ... Generate Zip archives without third-party support | Go |
| ASP.NET Internals: Request Architecture ... Explains in depth the ASP.NET request architecture | Go |
| ASP.NET Internals: Viewstate and Page Life Cycle ... Discusses asp.net viewstate and page life cycle in depth | Go |
| How To Make Anthem Ajax Work With Url ReWriting ... How To Make Anthem Ajax Work With Url ReWriting | Go |
| Schemaless C#-XML data binding with VTD-XML ... Agile, efficient XML data binding without schema | Go |
| Schedule your web tasks with WebTaskScheduler ... This tool provides easy web task scheduling, designed for ASP.NET and using Caching technique. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC - Part 1 ... A look at the ASP.NET MVC Application in ASP.NET Extensions 3.5 | Go |
| Change Textbox/Input background color on focus ... Change the background color of asp.net textbox and listbox when selected. | Go |
| Rss Reader Web Control ... A simple to use, scrolling news reader web control | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| A templated PleaseWait Button, introduction to template Control ... The purpose of this article is to present the construction of a templated control, working as a PleaseWait button... 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 |
| Porting Tutorials: ASP.NET and Windows.Forms ... These tutorials are quite popular to help developers that have a Windows.Forms or ASP.NET application port it to Unix. They walk you through the process of bringing your software to Linux, MacOS X or Solaris: Porting ASP.NET Applications Porting Windows.Forms Applications It is also useful to look at the general porting guidelines.... 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 |
| Compliments for ASP.NET 3.5 For Dummies ... I'm still trying to get www.asp.net to include ASP.NET 3.5 For Dummies in their Starter Books section. Not sure what's going on there. They list other Dummies books, so it can't be an anti-Dummies thing. In the meantime, here are a couple of kind reader...(read more)... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Fixing an ASP.NET 2.0 App after upgrading to 3.5 ... When you first open an ASP.NET 2.0 website in Visual Web Developer / Visual Studio 2008, VS asks you if you want to upgrade the project to 3.5. As some of you who are using Microsoft AJAX and who say YES to upgrade to 3.5 have noticed, when you go to run your newly upgraded application (which worked fine before the upgrade), you get build errors !!! The build error complains that it can't load System.Web.Extensions Version 1.0.61025.0 That's the OLD version of Web.Extensions (AJAX) ... 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 |
| State of the ASP.NET community ... Dan wrote a great piece on the state of the ASP.NET community and there is quite an interesting discussion happening now.... 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 |
| AutoFormats: Consistent and Preview ... Our ASP.NET controls now support a common set of visual styles across the entire library. You can now select from the 10 most popular styles. Click the link for a preview image of each style:
Default
Office Blue
Plastic Blue
Glass
Youthful
Office Silver
Office Olive
Red Wine
Black Glass
Soft Orange
Or you can preview these AutoFormats online using the demos. You'll now see a "Select Appearance" option at the... 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 |
| Schedule your web tasks with WebTaskScheduler ... This tool provides easy web task scheduling, designed for ASP.NET and using Caching technique.... 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 do you measure a technical blog? ... How to measure a successful blog? For the past 4 months my blog reader count haven’t increase or decrease, the traffic to my blog is without any doubt not going anywhere. I was thinking what could be the problem? Am I blogging to much about the iPhone? Opening the other blog at the asp.net site hurt me in anyway? Should I promote my blog? Should I go around asking other people to link by blog? Without any doubt that’s how you increase your blog view count for a short period of time,... 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 - Part 1 ... A look at the ASP.NET MVC Application in ASP.NET Extensions 3.5... 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 |
| Change Textbox/Input background color on focus ... Change the background color of asp.net textbox and listbox when selected.... 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 |
| Excel Reports in ASP.NET 2.0 ... In this article you will learn how to read data from Excel, generate report using the Response objects and to play with the Microsoft Excel 11.0 objects involved. Indeed, it is impossible to cover all features in this tutorial but many important techniques were covered to help you down the line. It is up to you to be creative and adapt the techniques to your scenarios. read more By Tushar Dabhi 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 |
| Implementing ASP.NET XML providers - Part 1 (Persistance) ... In this series I'll go through the steps of my implementation of ASP.NET XmlProviders.... 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 |
| So much easier to test plain ASP.NET MVC controllers!! ... I was having a hard time easily testing controller classes with the MVC Framework December CTP. Now it's easier. Consider the following controller: using System.Web.Mvc; namespace MvcApplication.Controllers{ public class HelloWorld1Controller : IController { public void Execute(ControllerContext controllerContext) { controllerContext.HttpContext.Response.Write( "<h1>Hello World1</h1>"); } }}
And... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| New online resources for the past three weeks (02/25/2008 - 03/16/2008) ... Below is a summary of the new online resources available for our ASP.NET controls/WinForm controls:
ASP.NET
RadEditor
Knowledge base articles
Error: Web.config registration missing! The Telerik dialogs require a HttpHandler registration in the web.config file:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hek-b454T-ctb-b454c-ctb.aspx
RadEditor Content Not Saved After Ajax Update in Firefox:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hee-b454T-ctb-b454c-ctb.aspx
Applying external stylesheet to the content of RadEditor in Preview mode
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hed-b454T-ctb-b454c-ctb.aspx
RadSpell
Knowledge base articles
RadSpell "Prometheus" for DNN - FormatException: Invalid length for a Base-64 char array:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hdh-b454T-a-b454c-cbetemdget.aspx
RadTreeView
Knowledge base articles
Checking online single treeview node at a time:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hdm-b454T-bgk-b454c-bgk.aspx
RadComboBox
Code library entries
RadComboBox AJAX - Allow only certain items to postback:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bctaaa.aspx
RadControls
Knowledge base articles
Using RadConfirm to confirm item change in RadComboBox:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-heb-b454T-cec-b454c-cec.aspx
Code library entries
ContextMenu over a specified column in RadGrid:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bckbch.aspx
WINFORMS
Knowledge base articles
Scroll view with predefined horizontal and vertical scrolling steps:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-tth-b454T-ckd-b454c-ckd.aspx
Inherit themes from RadControls:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-mhd-b454T-ckd-b454c-ckd.aspx
Optimizing RadComboBox and RadListBox performance:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hcd-b454T-ckk-b454c-ckk.aspx
Using UI Virtualization in RadComboBox and RadListBox:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hcc-b454T-ckk-b454c-ckk.aspx
Creating numeric textbox:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-hce-b454T-ckt-b454c-ckt.aspx
Videos
Using Project Update Utility:
http://www.telerik.com/support/videos/preview/b221i-bbd-b221c-kcd.aspx
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Moving Blog and News to Come! ... Just a note for anyone still subscribing, I'm moving my blog to my own host. You can continue reading at http://blog.eworldui.net or if you'd like to update your feed, point it towards http://blog.eworldui.net/syndication.axd . I'm going to start blogging again, it's been too long! I've got some exciting news coming up that I can't wait to share, so stay tuned for my announcement! | Go |
| Microsoft should take over CPU architecture. ... CPU, such as Intel's or AMD's CPUs are complex "hard-wired" systems. CPU structure is very loosely coupled with the .NET structure. This kind of abstraction is becoming a fundamental bottleneck in evolution of computer systems since silicon is getting cheaper and more capacious.
Currently software code could be served by 1 to 8 hardware servers named CPU cores. This is like if, say, all the FedEx customers would be served not by thousands trucks, but rather 4 super-fast trains.
What needed is NOT a few fast pipes (CPU cores) a code could reach the hardware through, but rather a marketplace where software objects could bid for job being done, described in their contracts; and hardware items be dynamically organized into units to perform the job. That is, when an object instance (in C# or VB.NET) is initialized; it would be assigned some hardware to run on asynchronously. The assignment would be conducted under some “market” policy.
Such hardware organization is not Intel's, or AMD's, or Xilinx's area of activity. They should mass product cheap chips with the huge number of universal items. That’s the job of Microsoft to find a way to get all the units fit the .NET model without bottlenecks. Good luck Microsoft!---This message is posted under the related Microsoft’s Terms of Use ("TOU").
---Vy hochete pesen - ih est' u menya. | Go |
| VAR To Keep It Simple ... Among various things in C# 3.0, one of the syntactical sweets that I find quiet useful is the 'var' keyword. Combined with R# intelligence, you create a very readable code that is not cluttered with excessive type reminders. Just enough to keep it strongly typed and readable. Personally, I favor: var people = new Dictionary<string , IPerson>();
over:
Dictionary<string , IPerson> people = new Dictionary<string , IPerson>(); | Go |
| Opening files from the VS "Quick find combo" ... Ctrl+/ is quickly becoming one of my favorite and most used hotkey in Visual Studio. Pressing it will jump you to the "Quick find Combo" with a ">" already type in for you (which means interpret the text as a VS command). If you are like me you hate hunting through the Solution Explorer looking for files, especially on large solutions, you might be interested in the Ctrl+/ | ">of " command. As Robert Prouse explains: Here is a cool Visual Studio feature that almost nobody knows about. If you want to open up a file in your solution, but can’t be bothered to dig down through your projects and folders to find it, try this, Click in the Find box in the toolbar, Type >of followed by a space, then begin the name of the file you are looking for. An auto-complete drop down will appear as you type filtering all the files in all your projects in your solution. Continue typing until the list is short enough to fine the one you want. Select it and hit enter. The file will open in the editor. [ Quickly Find/Open a File in Visual Studio ] The best part of this auto complete drop down is that it actually gives you a flat list view of all the files in the solution which is just plain cool :) As if that wasn't enough Aaron Lerch posted The Talented Mr. Edit.GoToFindCombo which lists some other cool features of the "Quick find combo". | Go |
| IIS7 - post #64 - Various goodies for your IIS 7 environment. ... The IIS team has been busy releasing all kinds of great stuff. Now that IIS 7 is production and extremely extensible, they have some new items available. Check them out. IIS 7 Admin pack technical preview #1 http://blogs.iis.net/rlucero/archive/2008/03/21/iis7-administration-pack-technical-preview.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/03/26/new-log-reporting-database-management-and-other-cool-admin-modules-for-iis-7.aspx Administration Pack for IIS 7 http://www.iis.net/downloads/default...(read more ) | Go |
| Indy Code Camp: Schedule announced ... The Indy Code Camp's schedule was just published . If you were waiting to register until you could see what kind of content would be available, now is the time! We have 24 sessions with a wide range of topics . It should be a great day! I'm very pleased with the turn out of presenters and topics. When I started thinking about the code camp a while ago, I thought a good event would include six sessions - let's just say my expectations have been exceeded yet again. We've got room for a maximum of 250 people, and I can tell you that the registration list is filling up - so hurry up and register if you are even thinking about coming. I'm also working to organize a fairly informal "after party" at the local sports bar - leave a comment here if you would be interested in coming. I need to gauge a general interest level. :) See you there! | Go |
| Requirements Management with Visual Studio Team System White Paper ... This white paper outlines how to use Visual Studio Team System for successful requirements management using Visual Studio Team System 2005 or Visual Studio Team System 2008. In addition, you can use this paper to learn about some of the challenges that Microsoft intends to address in the next release: Visual Studio Team System code name “Rosario.” Download | Go |
| VSTS (Light Weight) Scrum Process Template 2.1 Launched ... We have released a new version of the VSTS Light Weight Scrum Process Template, version 2.1, for Orcas. Refer to http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSScrum/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=11972 for details. Thanks to Mike , we will shortly release a version that will work with the Project Server connector. Watch this space ... VIA : Willy's Blog | Go |
| Another simple use of extension methods!! ... While my team and I doing our daily work. One of our new team members asked that he needs the user to select a value from drop-down list and this value should be converted to a nullable integer value. The small issue he faces that he need to parse the value selected in one line of code and make sure that if the user does not select a value the default value will be parsed to null and do not cause a problem -in each drop-down there is a "[Select]" item with empty string value - I wondered a int .Parse function returns null when the parsed value is null but throws "Input string was not in a correct format" exception when try to parse an empty string. And when use int .TryParse it will result with 0 value when parsing operation failed. In such simple scenario extension methods proof it self. Simply we can create an extension method call it SafeParse for example .... public static int ? SafeParse( this String Value) { if ( string .IsNullOrEmpty(Value)) return null; else return int .Parse(Value) ; } and then you could simply use it like this: int ? MyNullableValue ; MyNullableValue = DropDownList1.SelectedValue.SafeParse() ; Extension methods provide a simple and easy use which will ease programmer day day work, and make simple issues disappear just like 1,2,3 Thanks for VS2008,thanks for extension methods, thanks for Microsoft team Happy programming...!! | Go |
| The ASP.NET community's only real problem is education ... After reading this post from Dan Hounshell (via Rob Howard's post ), I'm drawn to more questions about "what's wrong with the ASP.NET community," and I'm still convinced that people are asking the wrong questions. To really understand where we are, I think we need to look at where we've been. There's a history when it comes to this platform, and I don't think you can really get to the meat of the platform's development and community without having that context. In 2001 and 2002, I was yet another person beginning the transition out of the horrible ASP 3.0 world to ASP.NET. I was immediately active on GotDotNet, and then the asp.net forums. I posted a ton in CrystalTech's user forum, and was designated .NET guy of the year or something on SitePoint's forum. I was all about trying to help people out because, by extension, it strengthened my own experience. Let met get back to that in a moment though. In the pre-ASP.NET world, as I mentioned, we were in ASP. Visual Basic 6 and other previous versions were about as common as Windows itself in little shops in every IT department. That Visual Basic world was powerful because you didn't have to be a programming genius to make stuff work. And in the world of drag-and-drop, you didn't even need to be all that handy with code. ASP really required us to know how to write script, but by the very nature of script, we were focused on simply getting things done in the fastest and easiest way possible. These were very task-driven days. Thinking of a Web site as an application was more or less unheard of. It isn't surprising that a great many people, I'm even willing to bet a majority, came to ASP.NET from one of those two worlds. That's a very different world from those who had experience with C++ or Java. It's something that was apparent in my experience with the various communities I frequently visited. I might have been an early adopter and forced myself to better understand the OOP world, but maybe that's because I was in an unemployment phase and had time to learn. To this day, a lot of questions in these communities are along the lines of, "How do I do this in ASP.NET" or "What's the command that does this." These are the wrong questions. A lot of people, in an effort to make something work, are looking for classes as if they were keywords in the language they're using. In my book , I say in the first chapter, "The classes you write are not any different from those written by Microsoft in the .NET Framework." I'm surprised when I run into people with questions that they don't really understand this. It's the first problem with .NET education, that people aren't learning what objects are, or instances, or how a class is different from an instance. Most people fast forward to, "How do I save a cookie," without the slightest understanding or care about the moving parts like HttpCookie or the request/response lifecycle of ASP.NET. That's a problem. I've felt that the lack of instruction involving object-oriented programming and how ASP.NET itself works is a huge problem. It's a problem that I wanted to further write about in my book, but was bullied into the chapter list I ended up with. Honestly, how to do "Hello World" with a Label control is like chapter 10 in my mind, but that's not how it is approached by anyone. There is a lot of failure to throw around in that arena, none of which is attributed to any specific individuals or organizations. Books are written assuming OOP understanding or to learn whatever in seven days. Web articles, blogs and forums have zero cohesive vision, and it's a Google-and-go world. The only way I can think of to overcome this is the desire on the part of the individual to dig deeper, and you can't force that. So by now you're thinking, "Dude, this isn't what community leaders and bloggers are even talking about." Yeah, no kidding, that's my point. That pyramid on Dan's blog post, you see that enormous part at the bottom? That's who we're talking about. The c | Go |
