| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Add Flash Charts to Your ASP.NET Web Site. Part 3: Auto-reloading Data ... In the first two parts of the series we've learned how to add a simple pie chart to your pages and how to bind the chart to real data. This time we will learn the way of making the chart reload it's data in specified intervals and see more options for visual customization. | Go |
| Absolute Positioning inside of a Relative Element with CSS ... Getting elements positioned absolutely inside of a container is not terribly obvious and not very discoverable using CSS. But it can make for a cool effect and is a useful feature for many overlay type operations in Html markup. Here's an example of a hover over delete button that pops up on focus of an element. | Go |
| Integrate PayPal Checkout Button with ASP.NET 2.0 ... I recently posted a solution to the eternal PayPal / ASP.NET form submission problem using Jeremy Schneider's custom GhostForm class. Since then, several people have made mention of a problem of a problem that I came across myself when coding this, namely getting your project to recognize the reference to the new custom form class. | Go |
| Woot Watcher - ASP.Net MVC Demo ... Woot Watcher was inspired by a few simultaneous events. A woot-off was occurring, I was learning the ASP.Net MVC framework, and my finger became cramped beyond control from repeatedly tapping the F5 key. With that I decided I needed to simplify my ability to keep up with what was going on at Woot.com and that the best way to do that would be to use the ASP.Net MVC framework to do it. | Go |
| Sub-web Misconfiguration Solution ... Tonight I attempted to place a virtual directory on my server, where I run BlogEngine.Net. This virtual directory contained an ASP.Net MVC app. The root (not BE.Net, it was innocent) configuration overrode the sub-directory's configuration, causing mass chaos. Steven Smith explains a nice technique here for solving problems like this - use the <location> tag instead of the <system.web> tag in the root. Must-have tip! | Go |
| New features in the next BlogEngine.NET ... Mads Kristensen describes many of the features coming in the next release of BlogEngine.net. "This is by far the biggest release in BlogEngine.NET history" | Go |
| Cardspace for BlogEngine.Net ... Chris show how easy it is to add Windows Cardspace support to any ASP.NET website | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Action Filter - Caching and Compression ... Playing with Action Filters | Go |
| ASP.NET Tips: Debugger command you may not know about - aspxpages ... Useful ASP.NET Debug command | Go |
| Scripting an ASP.NET installation in Win2k3 ... A concrete example of setting up an ASP.NET website using a batch file. | Go |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Using jQuery to Consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services | Encosia | 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 |
| WatiN | Go |
| Welcome! | Go |
| Building a Volta Control : A Flickr Widget | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .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 Three New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available : Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials . These three new ones cover creating and managing roles, assigning roles to users, and implementing role based authorization. You can also find more security articles by reading posts on my blog tagged with security . .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 APIs : Scott Hanselman's latest "weekly source code" review looks at .NET APIs that you can use to call popular web 2.0 services. Hangs and how to Solve Them (Part 1) and (Part 2) : Tom has some useful posts that talk about deadlocks and request queuing in ASP.NET, and how to detect and debug what might be causing them. ASP.NET AJAX Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Part 1) , (Part 2) , and (Part 3) : Mike Ormond has started a nice blog post series that talks about how to build ASP.NET AJAX Controls. Make sure to check out Part 2 - Components and Part 3 - Properties and Events as well. New ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos : Joe Stagner has published a number of new ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos. Learn about the re-order control , retrieving values from server-side AJAX controls , two techniques for triggering updates to update panels , and using the cascading drop down control . Real-Time Progress Bar with ASP.NET AJAX: SingingEels shows a technique for displaying real-time progress notifications using AJAX as a long-lived activity runs on the server. Using JQuery to Consume ASP.NET AJAX JSON Web Services : Dave Ward has a nice post that describes how to use the JQuery AJAX library on the client to call an ASP.NET Web Service on the server that is JSON enabled (using ASP.NET AJAX on the server). ASP.NET MVC Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC : Kazi Manzur Rashid published an excellent Digg-clone sample built with ASP.NET MVC last February. He recently updated the code to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 (full details here ). You can download the latest version of his source code here . ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET Request : Stephen Walther has a great post that details the exact steps that occur when an ASP.NET MVC request executes. ASP.NET MVC Action Filters - Caching and Compression : Kazi Manzur Rashid has another great post that shows how to use the new ActionFilterAttribute support in ASP.NET MVC to implement output caching and compression attributes. Read this quickstart article to learn more about how Action Filters work, or watch Scott Hanselman's video that covers them. Defining Routes using Regular Expressions with ASP.NET MVC : Someone asked me the other day how to use regular expressions to define route rules with ASP.NET MVC. Turns out Fredrik Kalseth already has a nice sample that shows how to-do this. Testing with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Simone Chiaretta has a great article that discusses how to test controllers using ASP.NET MVC Preview 2. Note: the next ASP.NET MVC preview release will include a number of refactorings that will simplify controller testing considerably (and avoid the need to mock anything for common scenarios). Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio 2008 Unit Tests : Stephen Walther has a really nice post that describe how the unit testing features now built-in VS 2008 Professional work (using an ASP.NET MVC project). Also check out Stephen's excellent Introduction to Rhino Mocks blog post that describes how to use the open source Rhino Mocks framework with VS unit test projects. Visual Studio VS 2008 Web Deployment Hot-Fix Roll-Up Now Available for non-English Languages: Last month we shipped a hot-fix release that fixes a number of bugs, adds a few features, and improves performance for web development scenarios in VS 200 | Go |
| 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ - Part 3 ... In the third part of this series, Keyvan talks about the data model in his simple blogging engine. He shows some concepts related to the LINQ side of the data model to retrieve data for the blogging engine in controllers and pass them to views with the help of screenshots and source code. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Nesting the DropDownList to Gridview in ASP.NET 2.0 to update ... Nesting the DropDownList to Gridview in ASP.NET 2.0 to update a column | Go |
| AxiomaticTokenizer ... Financial security with one-time tokens | Go |
| Zeta Resource Editor ... A small utility application to edit string resources inside multiple resource files in parallel. | Go |
| Extending Cuyahoga FullText Indexing (Lucene.NET) ... In this article we will extend classes in Cuyahoga.Core.Search namespace in order to provide more generic full text indexing service | Go |
| ASProxy: Surf in the web invisibly using ASP.NET power ... A powerfull web proxy that able you pass through the blocked web pages. | Go |
| 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 |
| Saving DB access ... A CACHING technique for data that changes in a strict cycle. | 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 |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Nesting the DropDownList to Gridview in ASP.NET 2.0 to update ... Nesting the DropDownList to Gridview in ASP.NET 2.0 to update a column... 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 |
| Links for 2008-03-27 [del.icio.us] ... ASP.NET MVC: Store Routes in the Database
It's better than Global.aspx.cs!
Url Routing Debugger
Rewrites the route handlers to point at a debugging handler to allow testing without actually hitting the handlers.
ASP.Net MVC Framework 2 - Define Routes in Web.config - Fredrik Normn
Putting the route definitions in the web.config for no-code changes when you don't want to use a database
ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET MVC Request - Stephen Walther's Blog
A detailed description... 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 |
| Personal Goal -- Do more ScreenCasts ... Today, I ran across the Developer Express ASP.NET blog, where they have several screen casts about using their grid products with LINQ. I love screen casts. You can really tell a story, and show so much more than you could with just words and pictures. And the best part is, the right screen cast can highlight a feature in just a few minutes. Seeing this makes me a little jealous. We've created so many screen casts and video products for other companies, but like more companies, we've not used our... 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 |
| Testing ASP.NET MVC on DotNetSlackers ... My second article on the ASP.NET MVC is now live on DotNetSlackers. This time the article is about how to test ASP.NET MVC web applications: unit testing, how the ASP.NET MVC framework facilitates testing and how to test Controllers, both with mocking and with the Extract and Overide Call method. Check it out here: ASP.NET MVC Framework Part 2: Testing Any comment is welcome. If you missed the first article, with a introduction to the ASP.NET MVC framework you can read it here: ASP.NET MVC Framework... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC: Goodbye SmartBag, Hello ViewDataExtensions ... A while back, I thought up the idea of the SmartBag, which has a very friendly API for working with viewdata objects. With the December CTP, adding objects to ViewData was a bit difficult, but now that the ViewData property is an IDictionary on the Controller base class, getting objects in is very easy. If you like this post, subscribe to my feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeffreypalermo. Consider the following usage [Test]public void ShouldRetrieveSingleObjectByType(){ var bag... 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 |
| 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.com Links |
| March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .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 Three New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available : Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials . These three new ones cover creating and managing roles, assigning roles to users, and implementing role based authorization. You can also find more security articles by reading posts on my blog tagged with security . .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 APIs : Scott Hanselman's latest "weekly source code" review looks at .NET APIs that you can use to call popular web 2.0 services. Hangs and how to Solve Them (Part 1) and (Part 2) : Tom has some useful posts that talk about deadlocks and request queuing in ASP.NET, and how to detect and debug what might be causing them. ASP.NET AJAX Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Part 1) , (Part 2) , and (Part 3) : Mike Ormond has started a nice blog post series that talks about how to build ASP.NET AJAX Controls. Make sure to check out Part 2 - Components and Part 3 - Properties and Events as well. New ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos : Joe Stagner has published a number of new ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos. Learn about the re-order control , retrieving values from server-side AJAX controls , two techniques for triggering updates to update panels , and using the cascading drop down control . Real-Time Progress Bar with ASP.NET AJAX: SingingEels shows a technique for displaying real-time progress notifications using AJAX as a long-lived activity runs on the server. Using JQuery to Consume ASP.NET AJAX JSON Web Services : Dave Ward has a nice post that describes how to use the JQuery AJAX library on the client to call an ASP.NET Web Service on the server that is JSON enabled (using ASP.NET AJAX on the server). ASP.NET MVC Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC : Kazi Manzur Rashid published an excellent Digg-clone sample built with ASP.NET MVC last February. He recently updated the code to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 (full details here ). You can download the latest version of his source code here . ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET Request : Stephen Walther has a great post that details the exact steps that occur when an ASP.NET MVC request executes. ASP.NET MVC Action Filters - Caching and Compression : Kazi Manzur Rashid has another great post that shows how to use the new ActionFilterAttribute support in ASP.NET MVC to implement output caching and compression attributes. Read this quickstart article to learn more about how Action Filters work, or watch Scott Hanselman's video that covers them. Defining Routes using Regular Expressions with ASP.NET MVC : Someone asked me the other day how to use regular expressions to define route rules with ASP.NET MVC. Turns out Fredrik Kalseth already has a nice sample that shows how to-do this. Testing with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Simone Chiaretta has a great article that discusses how to test controllers using ASP.NET MVC Preview 2. Note: the next ASP.NET MVC preview release will include a number of refactorings that will simplify controller testing considerably (and avoid the need to mock anything for common scenarios). Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio 2008 Unit Tests : Stephen Walther has a really nice post that describe how the unit testing features now built-in VS 2008 Professional work (using an ASP.NET MVC project). Also check out Stephen's excellent Introduction to Rhino Mocks blog post that describes how to use the open source Rhino Mocks framework with VS unit test projects. Visual Studio VS 2008 Web Deployment Hot-Fix Roll-Up Now Available for non-English Languages: Last month we shipped a hot-fix release that fixes a number of bugs, adds a few features, and improves performance for web development scenarios in VS 200 | Go |
| Interesting 3rd Party Controls and Demo Applications for ASP.NET and Silverlight ... I'm one of those developers that likes to build things myself mainly because the challenge is fun. However, lately I've been taking time to look at some of the 3rd party controls out there mainly because some of the things I've needed to do are already done (and done well) and I'd save time and money by using them. I'm not against re-inventing the wheel if I think I can do it better, but that's impossible for many things especially when companies are throwing multiple developers at a single control or framework. So, here are a few of the 3rd party controls and/or sample applications that I've come across recently that were interesting.
Speedy Grid Controls
Tonight I came across a nice set of controls from DevExpress that support a "server mode" so that only the data used by a grid is loaded into it as opposed to loading all of the records that may need to be paged and then filtering them on the Web server. They provide a nice option to bind to any LINQ provider which makes it really cool. You can of course write this type of thing yourself (with some effort), but with their solution you can get the "server mode" feature out of the box with no coding on your part. They have two screencasts available including one for ASP.NET and one for Windows Forms if you're interested in more details.
Validation Controls
Awhile back I blogged about Peter Blum's nice suite of validator and security controls and how they could be used to secure Web forms and validate data entered by end users. They're definitely something you'll want to check out if you want to ensure your pages are locked down as much as possible and that data is getting thoroughly scrubbed and validated before going into your database.
Silverlight 2 Demos
Infragistics released a really nice Silverlight 2 demo called FaceOut that leverages many of the new features in Silverlight 2. All of the source code is available for free and it's a great way to learn from experts like J. Ambrose Little who does this cool stuff everyday (in between naps of course :-)).
OrgChart Controls
OK...I'll admit that this one is a shameless plug for my Smart Web Controls company (I could pretend I'm not associated with it but too many of my buddies know what I'm up to and would call me out :-)). If you're interested in displaying OrgCharts, product hierarchies, site maps, etc. check out the SmartChartLite and SmartChartPro controls for ASP.NET.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program..... | Go |
| Many new Admin modules for IIS7 ... Hi
Its been a few days that I have not been able to post blogs. I have been very busy these while. But yesterday I found this blog which talks about lot of cool new admin modules for IIS7. The blog also explains how to use the modules. Do check it.
Vikram | Go |
| searchme beta ... My better half turned me on tonight on a new search engine in beta. searchme.com is an interesting twist on an old thing. When you log in you get the main screen. Lots of black and kind of retro looking. Enter a search term and it dynamically fetches the results and shows you where your hits are in a category fashion. For example here's my results: Pretty good as it shows Software, Web Development, Computer Programming, Architecture, and Blogs. All relevant. When you go further into results you get a Web 2.0 look and feel that resembles something like the Windows Vista task switcher, but done for the web. It's Flash rather than (what I thought was Silverlight) but it's still pretty cool. You can page through the results like flipping through your iTouch and see previews of the pages in your search results. Clicking on a page takes you to it. There's also a text description below that lets you navigate that way and the title of these items scroll and attach themselves to the search result page as you flip through them (you can also maximize the search results and only see the graphical navigator if you prefer). If you click on one of the categories the engine puts the search results into (how it decides what goes where is black magic) the results will filter down to only that category. Also if you prefer night over day, you can change this in the minimal settings dialog in the top right corner: The big advantage to this is you can not only see the result page (and decide visually if you want to go there) but also if you hover over the bottom of the preview it pops up the text of the page and highlights your search term. Again, this will help you decide if it's worth going to the page or not without loading it up. Form and functionality, now that's a first! I seriously feel like my web browser turned into an iPod or iTouch and the it makes vanity searching that much more fun now. Me likes Web 2.0 (some days). If you're interested checkout searchme.com but you'll have to hurry. When I signed up there were only a few hundred beta slots left and by the time I finished this blog entry (about 15 minutes with screen caps) 50 of them were gone! | Go |
| Help Wanted: ASP.NET Experience Not Considered ... One way to make sure you're current in your developer skills is to surf the job sites. I'm very happy with my current position but I know I need to keep my skills current and marketable so every once in a while I surf the job boards and see what technologies are in hot demand. If I'm unfamiliar with a skill or technology, I make an effort to get on it. Usually doing this results in no shockers but I just found a recent exception. One local company is seeking a Principal Software Engineer with strong C# experience in .NET 1.1 and 2.0. Then the ad goes on to state, "Please Note: ASP.NET experience not considered ". What?!? How can this be? An ASP.NET developer doesn't need to know .NET code? Now I can maybe see someone looking for a C# developer not considering Classic ASP experience as relevant, but ASP.NET? If you are on the level to be considered for a Principal Software Engineer, the font-end interface of your development projects shouldn't matter. That's the beauty of OO and multi-tiered programming. A DAL and BAL written in C# should be able to be plugged in to a Windows form app or Web form app with little or no changes. In today's .NET world a Windows form developer and Web form developer need the same C# skills because it's all the same code base, same objects, same everything until you get to the UI. I've switched back and forth from Web and Windows forms development and I prefer the stateless challenges of Web form development but never considered either type of app less demanding of coding skills. Does anyone else think different? I can't even come up with a remotely feasible argument why ASP.NET experience should be discounted for a senior level C# coder position. | Go |
| SharpToolbox and JavaToolbox newsletters and updates ... I've just started a new wave of updates on SharpToolbox and JavaToolbox . You can see what the latest feature looks like on the following screenshot: I've also sent out new newsletters editions. You can read them online here and here . More features are coming soon... Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletters to be notified when they become alive, on this page for SharpToolbox and on this one for JavaToolbox . | Go |
| IoC and Unity - Configuration Changes for the Better ... In my previous post about Unity and IoC containers, I made note of some changes in the latest drop of the Unity Application Block. As Grigori Melnik , the PM of the Unity and Enterprise Library team noted, Unity should be released in its final form on April 7th, so stay tuned. In the mean time, the latest drop of Unity was on March 24th, so go ahead and it pick it up.
Configuration Changes
As I noted from above, the public APIs really haven't changed all that much. Instead, most of the efforts recently have been around performance improvements in the ObjectBuilder base and the configuration of the container itself. I must admit that previous efforts left me a little cold with having to decorate my classes with the DependencyAttribute. Well, you shouldn't have to do that anymore, now that the TypeInjectionElement has been added so that you can map your constructor arguments and so on. Let's walk through a simple example of doing so.
First, let's go through my basic anti-corruption container that I use for Unity and any other container that I use for registration and so on.
namespace UnitySamples
{
public static class IoC
{
private static IDependencyResolver resolver;
public static void Initialize(IDependencyResolver resolver)
{
IoC .resolver = resolver;
}
public static T Resolve<T>()
{
return resolver.Resolve<T>();
}
public static T Resolve<T>(string name)
{
return resolver.Resolve<T>(name);
}
}
}
Remember this is just a quick spike sample of my anti-corruption container which was taken from Ayende. And then in order to configure my UnityContainer through the implementation of my IDependencyResolver interface. Let's take a brief look at that:
namespace UnitySamples
{
public interface IDependencyResolver
{
T Resolve<T>(string name);
T Resolve<T>();
}
}
And then the implementation of the interface for Unity would look like:
using System.Configuration;
using Microsoft.Practices.Unity;
using Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration;
namespace UnitySamples
{
public class UnityDependencyResolver : IDependencyResolver
{
private IUnityContainer container;
public UnityDependencyResolver()
{
container = new UnityContainer ();
UnityConfigurationSection section = (UnityConfigurationSection )ConfigurationManager .GetSection("unity" );
section.Containers.Default.Configure(container);
}
public T Resolve<T>()
{
return container.Resolve<T>();
}
public T Resolve<T>(string name)
{
return container.Resolve<T>(name);
}
}
}
Now, if you look at the constructor for the UnityDependencyResolver above, I am using the default container in order to configure my container. But, I have the option of specifying a name for it as well or even just an index. I could just easily change that code to this and it would work if I name my container default. This is a little bit of a change from before when I had to use the GetConfigCommand() method in order to configure the container which was a bit too chatty for my tastes.
container = new UnityContainer ();
UnityConfigurationSection section = (UnityConfigurationSection )ConfigurationManager .GetSection("unity" );
section.Containers["default" ].Configure(container);
So, the idea that I want to do is create an object graph so that I have classes with dependencies that have dependencies. Without doing AOP and some basic interception, we could take the approach of keeping around something like an IContext which would have our cross-cutting concerns in one location such as logging and whatnot in one area so your objects don't sit there with 16 constructor parameters, and instead has a context from which i | Go |
| API Libraries for Popular Web Applications ... Scott Hanselman just posted a really good collection of the APIs for many popular web applications such as DIGG, Twitter, Live Services, etc. You can read Scott's full posting by clicking here . | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Action Filter - Caching and Compression ... Caching plays a major role in developing highly scalable web applications. We can cache any http get request in the user browser for a predefined time, if the user request the same URL in that predefined time the response will be loaded from the browser cache instead of the server. You can archive the same in ASP.NET MVC application with the following action filter: using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
public class CacheFilterAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the cache duration in seconds. The default is 10 seconds.
/// </summary>
/// <value> The cache duration in seconds. </value>
public int Duration
{
get ;
set ;
}
public CacheFilterAttribute()
{
Duration = 10;
}
public override void OnActionExecuted(FilterExecutedContext filterContext)
{
if (Duration <= 0) return ;
HttpCachePolicyBase cache = filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Cache;
TimeSpan cacheDuration = TimeSpan .FromSeconds(Duration);
cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability .Public);
cache.SetExpires(DateTime .Now.Add(cacheDuration));
cache.SetMaxAge(cacheDuration);
cache.AppendCacheExtension("must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate" );
}
}
You can apply the filter in your Controller action method like the following. [CacheFilter (Duration = 60)]
public void Category(string name, int ? page)
The following shows the screen-shot in firebug when cache filter is not applied :
and this is the screen-shot when the cache filter is applied :
Another important thing is compression. Now a days, all modern browsers accept compressed contents and it saves huge bandwidth. You can apply the following action filter to compress your response in your ASP.NET MVC application: using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
public class CompressFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public override void OnActionExecuting(FilterExecutingContext filterContext)
{
HttpRequestBase request = filterContext.HttpContext.Request;
string acceptEncoding = request.Headers["Accept-Encoding" ];
if (string .IsNullOrEmpty(acceptEncoding)) return ;
acceptEncoding = acceptEncoding.ToUpperInvariant();
HttpResponseBase response = filterContext.HttpContext.Response;
if (acceptEncoding.Contains("GZIP" ))
{
response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding" , "gzip" );
response.Filter = new GZipStream (response.Filter, CompressionMode .Compress);
}
else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("DEFLATE" ))
{
response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding" , "deflate" );
response.Filter = new DeflateStream (response.Filter, CompressionMode .Compress);
}
}
}
Just decorate your controller action with this filter: [CompressFilter ]
public void Category(string name, int ? page)
The following shows when compression is not applied :
and this is the screen-shot when the compress filter is applied :
You can also apply both these filter in the same action method, like the following: [CompressFilter (Order = 1)]
[CacheFilter (Duration = 60, Order = 2)]
public void Category(string name, int ? page)
And this is the screen-shot:
Enjoy!!!
Download : Source.zip | Go |
| MSBuild 3.5 just made my day ... While doing some troubleshooting on a project I needed to manually copy some debug assemblies around after every build. But there were a lot of them, and whenever I need to do something repeatedly I try automate it with a script of some sort...because I'm lazy of course. There are a lot of choices today for a little quick and dirty script like this, Batch files, VBScript, Powershell, NAnt, but I thought I'd give MSBuild a try because I figured it would be the least amount of hassle, since moving files around is one of it's main duties during a build. The script was simple to write, but I hit a snag...the destination files were read only, and the copy errored out. MSBuild 2.0's copy task doesn't have an option to overwrite read only files. But MSBuild 3.5 does, so I learned a couple of tricks. 1. Run MSBuild.exe from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5 (instead of C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727). I have an external tool macro set up in my text editor (Textpad) to run the script currently being edited with a shortcut key, so this was simple to re-point. 2. Tell MSBuild you are using 3.5 features by adding ToolsVersion="3.5" to the Project element. < Project DefaultTargets ="Copy"
xmlns ="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"
ToolsVersion ="3.5" >
< ItemGroup >
< Assembly Include ="Project1\bin\Debug\Project1.*" />
< Assembly Include ="Project2\bin\Debug\Project2.*" />
<!-- etc... -->
</ ItemGroup >
< Target Name ="Copy" >
< Copy SourceFiles ="@(Assembly)"
DestinationFolder ="Destination\bin"
OverwriteReadOnlyFiles ="True" />
</ Target >
</ Project >
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
| Go |
