| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Showing ESRI Shapefile Layers on a Virtual Earth Map: a simple HowTo ... If you've ever tried to find a way to display an ESRI ShapeFile on a Virtual Earth map, you'll have probably noticed how little information there is on the Internet about how to accomplish this apparently arduous task.
With the technique described in this article, you're going to be able to not only display Shapefiles as layers on Virtual Earth, but also interact with them in countless ways: extract data from them, show data associated with a shape when you click on it on the map, even modify or create new Shapefiles. | Go |
| ASP.NET Tips: Debugger command you may not know about - procinfo ... procinfo debugger command | Go |
| LINQ to SQL ObjectTrackingEnabled and Deferred Loading of Related Data ... LINQ to SQL supports object tracking by default, but if running queries it's often more efficient to turn off object tracking. This can be done with ObjectTrackingEnabled, but unfortunately this option has a rather severe side effect on deferred object loading. | Go |
| How to store files in a MS-SQL Server database using ASP.NET ... This post shows you have to upload- and store a file in a MS-SQL Server database using ASP.NET. | Go |
| PayPal IPN C# Class ... this is a cool C# class for ASP.NET 2.0 to use for IPN handling for PayPal. It's free and you get the source code as well. | Go |
| Creating Your First Facebook Application using MVC ... My focus today isn't on how to develop your first Facebook application in ASP.NET, because there are already many great articles on that, and even some starter kits. My focus is going to be on developing your first Facebook application with ASP.NET MVC, however this article will assume that you have the basic understand FBML (Facebook Meta Language) and MVC. | Go |
| .NET - Some Top Must-Have Tools for an ASP.NET Developer ... Of all these years, working as a .NET developer, I have collected and compiled a set of tools that will help you out in your ASP.NET projects, the same way as it has done for me. Since the number of utilities in my Software folder will take more than one post to mention, I have decided to pick up a few of them, which are used frequently in my ASP.NET projects. | Go |
| MVC: Membership Starter Kit Updated ... The MVC Membership Starter Kit has been updated to include OpenID, MVC components, password recovery, and basic client-side validation. | Go |
| ASP.NET Performance counters missing ... Ways to fix the problem of perf counters missing for ASP.NET | Go |
| ASP.NET FTP with SSL ... Connecting to an FTP server with SSL using ASP.NET | Go |
| Must Have Tool for ASP.NET Developer ... NetFXHarmonics DevServer is a web server hosting environment built on .NET 3.5 using WPF, WCF, and LINQ technologies that allows multiple instances of VS-like web servers to run in parallel | Go |
| ASP.NET - Continuous Dynamic Downloading ... How to provide a dynamic download to your users. | Go |
| ASP.NET High Memory Usage Debugging with CLR Profiler ... Here's how I used CLR Profiler and WinDbg to find and correct a serious high memory usage problem on an ASP.NET 2.0 / IIS 6.0 website. | Go |
| VB.net an C#. The same language but different accents WIN $100 ... I've been thinking of setting up a community that helps developers realize how easy it is to transition between VB.net and C#, does anyone fancy helping me develop it? Leave your details in the comments or email me at martin@thewayithink.co.uk if you do. If you have a decent idea for a domain name (check it's available) then post it up here too, I'll pay the winner £50. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Kirk Allen Evans's Blog : Calling WebServices via AJAX Part 1 | Go |
| Coolite Inc. - ASP.NET Web Controls | Go |
| .Net Adventures : 6 free online editors for your asp.net site | Go |
| ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview Available - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC: Introducing The MVC Storefront Series : Rob Conery | Go |
| Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Putting ASP.NET Dynamic Data into Context | Go |
| MVC: Membership Starter Kit | Go |
| ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview - Home | Go |
| Matt Berseth: Building a VS2008 Styled Grid with the ListView and DataPager Controls | Go |
| How to get detailed info about all online visitors that are currently browsing your ASP.NET website? | Go |
| How to enable pretty urls with Asp.Net MVC and IIS6 : Bia Securities | Go |
| Daniel Cazzulino's Blog : Expression tree usage in ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 rocks! | Go |
| inline asp.net tags... sorting them all out (<%$, <%=, <%, <%#, etc.) | Go |
| Configuring and customizing the health monitoring system of ASP.NET | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET More ASP.NET Security Tutorials : The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials . His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts. Building a VS 2008 Styled Grid with the ListView and DataPager Controls : Matt Berseth has a great article that talks about techniques you can use with the new ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to create a nicely styled Grid UI - while preserving total control over the HTML and CSS used. Also read his follow-up post here that talks about how to achieve the same UI with the GridView control. 50 Useful CSS Tips and Tricks: A useful page that provides a nice listing of various CSS tips, tricks and tools you can use for common web scenarios. Using a DataPager with the GridView Control - Implementing IPageableItemContainer : Matt Berseth has a cool article that shows how to use the new IPageableItemContainer interface to implement paging support with the new ASP.NET 3.5 DataPager control. ASP.NET AJAX Accessible UpdatePanel : Bertrand Le Roy from the ASP.NET team has an article that describes how to make the ASP.NET AJAX's UpdatePanel control accessible for screen-readers. ASP.NET AJAX Meets Virtual Earth : Alessandro Gallo, author of the excellent ASP.NET AJAX in Action book, has a nice series of articles that talks about using ASP.NET AJAX with Virtual Earth to implement mapping on your site. Faster Page Loading by Moving ASP.NET AJAX Scripts after visible content : Omar Al Zabir (the co-founder of www.PageFlakes.com ) has a great article that describes a nice technique you can use to improve the perceived loading performance of an ASP.NET AJAX page. I also highly recommend reading Omar's great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book to learn some of his other suggestions and techniques. 3 Tips for Working with ASP.NET AJAX's TabContainer Control : Matt Berseth continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX with some tips on working with the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Building ASP.NET AJAX Components: Mike Ormond has written an excellent 8-part series that covers building re-usable ASP.NET AJAX components that work on both the client and server. ASP.NET MVC An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC using VB : Bill Burrows from www.MyVBprof.com has put together a great set of online videos that introduce ASP.NET MVC using Visual Basic. Also make sure to check out his video series on LINQ to XML using VB and LINQ to SQL using VB . ASP.NET MVC: Membership Starter Kit : Troy Goode has a built an awesome membership starter kit for ASP.NET MVC that provides registration and login pages for users to authenticate on your site, as well as a set of administration functionality that allows admins to create/manage users and roles. Download it here . ASP.NET MVC: Action Filter for Handling Errors : Troy Goode has another good post that provides some ASP.NET MVC action filters for catching and handling runtime errors. How to Enable Pretty URLs with ASP.NET MVC and IIS6: James Geurts posts a useful article that describes how to enable extension-less URLs with ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 (note: you do not need to configure anything special with ASP.NET MVC on IIS7 to enable extension-less URL support). Visual Studio PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 : A free set of useful extensions for VS 2008 that add a bunch of cool features to the IDE. Coding Productivity: Macros, Shortcuts and Snippets : Kirill Osenkov has a nice blog post that shows of how to use Visual Studio's macro feature to custom record useful time-savers. Silverlight Dave Campbell's Excellent Silverlight Link Series : Dave Campbell posts a regular series of links to new Silverlight articles and conte | Go |
| ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview Available ... A few months ago we released an ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview that contained a bunch of new features that will be shipping later this year (including ASP.NET AJAX Improvements, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Silverlight Support, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data). The ASP.NET Dynamic Data support within that preview provided a first look at a cool new feature that enables you to quickly build data driven web-sites that work against a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities object model. ASP.NET Dynamic Data allows you to automatically render fully functional data entry and reporting pages that are dynamically constructed from your ORM data model meta-data. In addition to supporting a dynamic rendering mode, it also allows you to optionally override and customize any of the view templates using any HTML or code you want (given you full control of the experience). ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview Today we released an updated ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview. You can learn more about it and download it here . This new dynamic data preview now works with the standard built-in ASP.NET data controls (GridView, ListView, FormView, DetailsView, etc). The dynamic data support enables these controls to automatically handle foreign-key relationships. For example, on a gridview you'll now get automatic friendly name display of foreign key column values and automatic drop-down list selection support of these values when in edit mode: The new dynamic data support also provides automatic UI validation support (both client-side and server-side) based on the constraints you set on your data model classes. For example, if a column in the database is limited to 50 characters in size, and is marked as non-nullable, appropriate UI control validators will automatically be applied by ASP.NET dynamic data to enforce this constraint in the UI pages as well. If you change the constraints within your LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities data model classes, the UI will automatically pick up these changes and enforce the new constraints on the next web request. In addition to standard data model metadata, you can also declare custom metadata to further control validation and the default display of UI of objects. You will be able to use all of the above features with both LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. Visual Studio Dynamic Data Project Wizard In addition to the core ASP.NET dynamic data runtime support, the VS web tools team today also shipped a first preview of a new dynamic data project wizard that enables you to quickly get a data driven web-site started. The wizard allows you to select a database, and then the tables, views and sprocs within it that you want to build a LINQ to SQL data model around: After creating a data model, the wizard allows you to easily choose dynamic data driven template pages to build UI around it: You can then choose what type of inserting/editing/updating UI is supported on each page: And when you click finish it will setup a project with your data model classes and data UI pages setup to run. You can learn more about the wizard and watch it in action in a blog post and screencast here . How to Get Started You can learn more about this new dynamic data preview and download and run it locally here . You can watch David Ebbo's dynamic data presentation at MIX 08 to learn more about how it works. Also check out Scott Hunter's screen-cast here , and Brad Millington's screen cast here . David also has a post here that talks about the changes made between the December preview and today's preview release. You can ask questions and submit feedback via the www.asp.net forums here . Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| Tip/Trick: Creating and Using Silverlight and WPF User Controls ... One of the fundamental design goals of Silverlight and WPF is to enable developers to be able to easily encapsulate UI functionality into re-usable controls. You can implement new custom controls by deriving a class from one of the existing Control classes (either a Control base class or from a control like TextBox, Button, etc). Alternatively you can create re-usable User Controls - which make it easy to use a XAML markup file to compose a control's UI (and which makes them super easy to build). In Part 6 of my Digg.com tutorial blog series I showed how to create a new user control using VS 2008's "Add New Item" project item dialog and by then defining UI within it. This approach works great when you know up front that you want to encapsulate UI in a user control. You can also use the same technique with Expression Blend. Taking Existing UI and Encapsulating it as a User Control Sometimes you don't always know you want to encapsulate some UI functionality as a re-usable user control until after you've already started defining it on a parent page or control. For example, we might be working on a form where we want to enable a user to enter shipping and billing information. We might begin by creating some UI to encapsulate the address information. To-do this we could add a <border> control to the page, nest a grid layout panel inside it (with 2 columns and 4 rows), and then place labels and textbox controls within it: After carefully laying it all out, we might realize "hey - we are going to use the exact same UI for the billing address as well, maybe we should create a re-usable address user control so that we can avoid repeating ourselves". We could use the "add new item" project template approach to create a blank new user control and then copy/paste the above UI contents into it. An even faster trick that we can use within Blend, though, is to just select the controls we want to encapsulate as a user control in the designer, and then "right click" and choose the "Make Control" menu option: When we select the "Make Control" menu item, Blend will prompt us for the name of a new user control to create: We'll name it "AddressUserControl" and hit ok. This will cause Blend to create a new user control that contains the content we selected: When we do a re-build of the project and go back to the original page, we'll see the same UI as before - except that the address UI is now encapsulated inside the AddressUserControl: We could name this first AddressUserControl "ShippingAddress" and then add a second instance of the user control to the page to record the billing address (we'll name this second control instance "BillingAddress"): And now if we want to change the look of our addresses, we can do it in a single place and have it apply for both the shipping and billing information. Data Binding Address Objects to our AddressUserControl Now that we have some user controls that encapsulate our Address UI, let's create an Address data model class that we can use to bind them against. We'll define the class like below (taking advantage of the new automatic properties language feature): Within the code-behind file of our Page.xaml file we can then instantiate two instances of our Address object - one for the shipping address and one for the billing address (for the purposes of this sample we'll populate them with dummy data). We'll then programmatically bind the Address objects to our AddressUserControls on the page. We'll do that by setting the "DataContext" property on each user control to the appropriate shipping or billing address data model instance: Our last step will be to declaratively add {Binding} statements within our AddressUserControl.xaml file that will setup two-way databinding relationships between the "Text" properties of the TextBox controls within the user control and the properties on the Address data model object that we attached to the user control: W | Go |
| Unit Testing with Silverlight ... One of the important capabilities we shipped with the Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 was a unit test harness that enables you to perform both API-level and UI-level unit testing. This testing harness is cross browser and cross platform, and can be used to quickly run and verify automated unit tests: In addition to shipping this unit test harness for Silverlight, we also shipped the source to ~2,000 unit tests built with it that provide automated coverage for the Silverlight control source that we also shipped under a permissive license (you can take the control source, modify it, run the unit tests to verify the behavior, then re-ship the controls however you want). Learning How to Unit Test Silverlight Jeff Wilcox (who developed the Silverlight unit test framework and harness) has a great blog post that talks about how to add a Silverlight Unit Test project to a solution here . You can download the chat application that he shows testing from this expression blend blog post tutorial I did last month. You can also watch this cool video post that Jeff created where he walks through the unit test framework and test cases we've shipped. As Jeff shows in his post, you can now add a "Silverlight Test Project" to your Visual Studio solution which encapsulates unit tests for an application you are working on: You can then add unit test classes to the test project that test APIs or simulate UI action within the Silverlight controls (simulate button clicks, etc). You can then run the test project and execute the tests within it to verify and report their status. Jeff's test framework automatically provides a browser based test harness and reporting system (which means you can run it on any browser/OS combination that Silverlight runs on): Jeff's test framework supports quickly re-setting controls after each test (and avoids needing to re-launch a new browser instance for each test cases - which makes it really fast). You can quickly rip through hundreds or thousands of automated tests in seconds: Green results mean the tests passed. Red results flag that a test case failed and log the assertion failure and/or runtime exceptions that occurred. Summary If you've ever struggled to try and come up with a strategy for doing automated unit testing or TDD with AJAX applications, I think you'll find Silverlight provides some much nicer test options. Using Visual Studio you can also separate your tests into a separate project in your solution, and you do not need to embed the tests within your Silverlight application in order for them to run. In addition to supporting the above unit test harness and framework, we are also going to support UI automation APIs with the final release of Silverlight 2. These will enable accessibility scenarios (allowing screen readers to work with Silverlight and enable Section 508 compliance of Silverlight applications). These UI automation APIs will also enable UI testing scenarios where you can build end to end browser UI automation that simulates real mouse and keyboard interactions and enables automated end to end experience testing. The combination should enable you to build much more solid and maintainable RIA solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. For more tutorial posts and links on Silverlight 2, check out my new "Silverlight Tips, Tricks, Tutorials and Links" page. | Go |
| 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.
<Download Code> Click here to download a completed version of this sample. </Download Code>
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 appli | 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.com Community Links |
| GridView with Expandable/Collapsable Rows ... Using C# and Javascript to show gridview rows with expanded and collapse features. Allows parent/child view while providing easy navigation of child details using client side script. | Go |
| Design Custom Editor for a Property ... In the previous article we discussed type converters. Type converters come handy when you want to accept property values in plain text form. However, at times you may not want to allow the user to enter text values directly. You may want to present a custom value picker in the form of a dropdown control or a dialog box. This is possible with the help of Type Editors and this article examines them with an example. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC ... Is the new MVC pattern right for you?
ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 provides Model-View-Controller routing and testing improvements as well as the first Visual Studio 2008 template support for MVC development in the IDE and Dynamic Data enhancements. | Go |
| Virtual Earth Meets SQL Server 2008 and ASP.NET AJAX ... In this tutorial we'll analyze Microsoft Virtual Earth, the new SQL Server 2008 GEOGRAPHY data type and ASP.NET AJAX. We'll build a database of longitude and latitude records for specific locations, we'll then use ASP.NET AJAX and Virtual Earth to exploit these locations. | Go |
| ASP.NET AJAX Best Practices ... This article demonstrates AJAX best practices based on ASP.NET AJAX. | Go |
| Sorting a GridView bound to Custom Data Object ... This article presents a technique for sorting a GridView populated from a list of custom data objects. It relies on the ViewState and does not require additional calls to the database. | Go |
| GridView Tips and Tricks using ASP.NET 2.0 ... The article discusses ten tips and tricks that you can use while using the GridView control. | Go |
| Getting Started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework ... We have made a long journey from classic ASP to ASP.NET. But the journey is far from over. ASP.NET framework introduced code behind model which eliminated the spaghetti code written in classic ASP. Although the code behind model made the life of an ASP.NET developer comfortable but it was far from being perfect. The biggest drawback was not able to test the code written in the code behind. The model was also dependent on the ViewState and Postback which introduced many other issues related to web programming. Recently, Microsoft released the CTP version of the ASP.NET MVC framework that solves some of these issues. In this article we are going to take a look at the different aspects of the MVC framework by creating a small application. | Go |
| Accessing data using Language Integrated Query (LINQ) in ASP.NET WebPages – Part 2 ... 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 |
| Working with ADO.NET Schema APIs ... In majority of data driven applications developers deal with SQL queries that select, insert, update or delete data from the database. However, at times you need to retrieve schema information from the database. Suppose you are building applications that performs data import and export between two or more databases. As a good solution you would want to retrieve table schema at runtime rather than hard coding it. Luckily, ADO.NET provides a set of classes that allow you to query database schema. In this article I will illustrate how these classes work. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Calling ASP.NET Server Side Events using JavaScript ... Calling ASP.NET Server Side Events using JavaScript | Go |
| A wrapper for using .NET to submit credit card transactions via the Authorize gateway ... A .NET wrapper for Authorize | Go |
| See search results as you type - An ASP.NET Ajax Control ... A searchbox that updates the page with search results as you type. | Go |
| Index XML Documents with VTD-XML ... Introduce a simple, efficient, human-readable XML index called VTD+XML | Go |
| PowerShell Script for Reviewing Text Shown to Users ... A script for extracting string literals from source code for review | Go |
| Zeta Resource Editor ... A small utility application to edit string resources inside multiple resource files in parallel. | Go |
| Encapsulating Google's MapData "feature" in a WebControl ... Show how to build a simple image WebControl to encapsulate the DataMap feature "from" Google. | Go |
| Deploying an ASP.NET AJAX RSS Reader on Linux ... Written by Jonas Martinsson, an entrepreneur and member of Mainsoft's development team. Jonas helped to integrate Mainsoft's .NET-Java EE interoperability products with the Visual Studio IDE. | Go |
| Introduction to Web Services Simulation with SOAPSimulator: a Hands-on Tutorial ... Learn how to simulate web services for rapid SOA development when endpoints are unavailable. | Go |
| Graph Library ... This article addresses the construction of a simple graph library using C#. | Go |
| ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview - AJAX History Management ... Storing ajax history points and navigating using the browser's back and forward buttons | Go |
| An ASP.NET/AJAX Interface for Utorrent ... An ASP.NET/AJAX interface for the utorrent application. | Go |
| A base SharePoint web part for AJAX in ASP.NET 3.5 ... A base SharePoint web part to support AJAX in ASP.NET 3.5 | Go |
| A XCalendar Class for Web Programmers ... Compatiable with IE/Firefox, never need extra CSS files appending with XCalendar | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Calling ASP.NET Server Side Events using JavaScript ... Calling ASP.NET Server Side Events using JavaScript... 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 |
| Graffiti CMS Blog Extensions now in Google Code ... Earlier this week we published the Graffiti CMS Blogging Extensions. Graffiti is a publishing platform that makes it really easy to create great looking, interactive web sites. Graffiti can also be used as a blogging platform, as Jeff (of Channel9 fame) and other's have done. We heard from some bloggers using Graffiti that they wanted more blog-specific functionality. The new Graffiti CMS Blog Extensions is just that - it adds additional blog specific features into Graffiti! For more specifics, Jeff... 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 |
| Beware the $(...) in jQuery: $(""#elementId"") != document.getElementById(""elementId"") ... Lately I've been playing a bit with jQuery, one of the raising javascript frameworks and I found out something I was not expecting to find.
But let's step back a bit: in jQuery the dollar sign function $ is a shortcut for the main function of the framework which is used to select html elements in the page. This $ method accepts a css-like selector as argument, so if you want to select a specific element by its id you have to use the hash: $("#myElementId") returns a reference to the DOM element boosted... 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 |
| April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET More ASP.NET Security Tutorials: The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials. His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts. Building... 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 |
| Finally ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Many years developers have been looking for applications that will allow you to talk to the database in intellisense. Many expensive products like PDSA came out. Difficult to configured and the results were not that great. Scott Guthrie as always release the news about Microsoft releasing something better than the old dataAdapters. The old data Adapters from Microsoft were buggy and difficult to release in a production environments. From Scott's post looks like this is the answer to our requests.... 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 |
| Handling Large Data Sets in ASP.NET and Crystal Reports ... I receive a lot of feedback from my ASP Alliance articles, usually comments.
I don't typically answer via e-mail, since that doesn't help the community.
Today I received the following message, and felt it was blog worthy.
Referring URL: http://aspalliance.com/532 Dear Rechard, I have always been using Datasets and they have given me consistent Results. In
fact, I DO NOT USE Report Viewer but export CR Report to a PDF File and then give
it to the user as a URL. BUT, WHEN DATA IS VERY LARGE, THE DATASETS GIVE PROBLEMS such as out of Memory,
server not available, Timeouts, hanging etc. I have asked this question to many forums
as to how to handle large data sets in ASP.Net with CR.Net. But, nobody has given
me any satisfying answer. I really want to know as to how to solve this problem. Will You please Help Me. With Warm Regards, DN
Here's the problem--the amount of memory which can be utilized by an ASP.NET web app
is 2GB (3GB if you use the /3GB switch). If your dataset exceeds 2GB on a Windows
2003 Server, you will get a Server Not Available error. Less than but close
to 2GB will cause a significant decrease in performance or warnings about memory.
The answer is simple--you need a smaller dataset! A 2GB dataset is far too large,
especially when you're feeding it into Crystal Reports. It sounds like you are
dumping every bit of raw data into the report, and having the report process and present
the data. You really need to have your database queries doing more of the filtering
and processing, then return a significantly smaller dataset. In a web environment,
it's best if you only do presentation in your reports--leave the calculations and
filtering to the database.
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 Dynamic Data - Don`t skip over it! ... Today Scott Guthrie posted about the new preview availability of ASP.NET Dynamic Data. [Click HERE to read his post.] I know, the pace of new releases makes it hard to keep up and you need to pick and choose which things you invest your time in! When you hear about ASP.NET 3.5 "Dynamic Data", you often see a screen-shot like the one Scott blogged. Resist the temptation to say "Yea, another datagrid control". This is one of the most exciting new ASP.NET Technologies. I'll be presenting on ASP.NET... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Upcoming Changes In Routing ... Weve been making some changes to routing to make it more powerful and useful. But as Uncle Ben says, with more power comes more responsibility. Ill list out the changes first and then discuss some of the implication of the changes. Routes no longer treat the . character as a separator. Currently, routes treat the . and / characters as special. They are separator characters. The upcoming release of routing will only treat the / as separator. Routes may have multiple (non-adjacent) url parameters... 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 Dynamic Data - Don`t skip over it! ... Today Scott Guthrie posted about the new preview availability of ASP.NET Dynamic Data. [Click HERE to read his post.] I know, the pace of new releases makes it hard to keep up and you need to pick and choose which things you invest your time in! When you hear about ASP.NET 3.5 "Dynamic Data", you often see a screen-shot like the one Scott blogged. Resist the temptation to say "Yea, another datagrid control". This is one of the most exciting new ASP.NET Technologies. I'll be presenting on ASP.NET... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview Available ... A few months ago we released an ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview that contained a bunch of new features that will be shipping later this year (including ASP.NET AJAX Improvements, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Silverlight Support, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data). The ASP.NET Dynamic Data support within that preview provided a first look at a cool new feature that enables you to quickly build data driven web-sites that work against a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities object model. ASP.NET Dynamic Data allows... 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 |
| My First IronRuby Unit Test Spec For ASP.NET MVC ... Way down the road, it would be nice to be able to build ASP.NET MVC applications using a DLR language such as IronRuby. However, enabling DLR language support isnt free. There are going to be places in our design that are specific to statically typed languages (such as Attribute based filters) that just wouldnt work (or would be too unnatural) with a dynamic language. Ideally we can minimize those cases, and for the ones we cant, we need to make sure the extensibility of the framework allows for... 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 |
| Expression tree usage in ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 rocks! ... The latest MVC release adds some pretty cool usage of LINQ expression trees. It's another example of how cool (and WAY beyond querying) LINQ is. Specifically, you can now replace untyped, "magic" strings when rendering links like:<%= Html.ActionLink("Sign up", "SignUp", "UserController", true) %>
to type-safe and therefore compile-time checked code:<%= Html.ActionLink((UserController c) => c.SignUp(true), "Sign up") %>
or the equivalent syntax:<%= Html.ActionLink<UserController>(c... 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 |
| Building a Storefront using ASP.NET MVC ... If you're interested in what's going on with the new ASP.NET MVC project, Rob Conery has just launched a new series of webcasts that document the process of him building out an MVC Storefront . He's been iterating on this idea for a few weeks and it's coming together very nicely - I think you'll find it a nice change of pace from standard webcast fare. Rob's ASP.NET MVC Storefront Series 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 base SharePoint web part for AJAX in ASP.NET 3.5 ... A base SharePoint web part to support AJAX in ASP.NET 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 |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Data Access - The SqlDataSource Part 1 ... Welcome back!
If you are following along from the last post , you'll notice that two controls were automatically created on our page when we dropped the Customer table onto the page. The first control is called a GridView. The GridView control is used to display data in much the same way that the SQL manager shows you results when you have run a query directly out of it (that is row by row). The GridView is very powerful and flexible; we'll go into the GridView control a little deeper in later posts but for now let's focus on how we are getting data from the database to the page.
The SqlDataSource serves as the plumbing that connects the web page to the database. Let's take a look at how Visual Studio created our control and talk a little bit about the parameters it set up for us.
Here's the code it created for us:
<asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:NORTHWNDConnectionString1 %>" DeleteCommand="DELETE FROM [Customers] WHERE [CustomerID] = @CustomerID" InsertCommand="INSERT INTO [Customers] ([CustomerID], [CompanyName], [ContactName], [ContactTitle],
[Address], [City], [Region], [PostalCode], [Country], [Phone], [Fax]) VALUES (@CustomerID,
@CompanyName, @ContactName, @ContactTitle, @Address, @City, @Region, @PostalCode, @Country, @Phone, @Fax)" ProviderName="<%$ ConnectionStrings:NORTHWNDConnectionString1.ProviderName %>" SelectCommand="SELECT [CustomerID], [CompanyName], [ContactName], [ContactTitle], [Address], [City], [Region],
[PostalCode], [Country], [Phone], [Fax] FROM [Customers]" UpdateCommand="UPDATE [Customers] SET [CompanyName] = @CompanyName, [ContactName] = @ContactName,
[ContactTitle] = @ContactTitle, [Address] = @Address, [City] = @City, [Region] = @Region,
[PostalCode] = @PostalCode, [Country] = @Country, [Phone] = @Phone, [Fax] = @Fax WHERE [CustomerID] = @CustomerID"> <DeleteParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="CustomerID" Type="String" /> </DeleteParameters> <InsertParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="CustomerID" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="CompanyName" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ContactName" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ContactTitle" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Region" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="PostalCode" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax" Type="String" /> </InsertParameters> <UpdateParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="CompanyName" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ContactName" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ContactTitle" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Region" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="PostalCode" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="CustomerID" Type="String" /> </UpdateParameters> </asp:SqlDataSource>
There's a lot in there right? Imagine if you had to type all that out!
So what you've got there is a control that will handle all of your CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) operations for the Customer table. Let's go through the properties and parameters a little.
They're a little out of order but that's okay.
The first one is pretty self-explanatory, that's the ID. It's just a unique name to identify the control. We can use this ID in our code behind page if we need to make any programatical changes to our control.
The next one is really important: it's the connection string that resides in our Web.Config and was put there by Visual Studio wh | Go |
| ASP.NET Tips: Debugger command you may not know about - procinfo ... Here is another debugger command that you may not know about that is in the sos.dll file included with the debugger package for .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1. !procinfo will print out the environment variables, CPU times and memory usage statistics. This Read More......(read more ) | Go |
| The Differences in Profile between Web Application Projects (WAP) and website ... The profile services is a very helpful and easy way to add custom properties for your users which is not contained in the Standard MembershipUser Properties...
for example , you may need to add the Marital status , Date of Birth, Address.... all of these are custom properties that you may need them while developing your projects ...
If you are familiar with Profile .. you will know that the first thing that must done when working with profiles is to set the Profile properties in web.config File ,
for example ,you can add the Date of Birth, address, Marital status for the user profile as follows,
<profile> <properties > <add name="DateOfBirth" type="DateTime"/> <add name="Address" type="String"/> <add name="MaritalStatus" type="String"/> </properties> </profile>
after saving the file , and working under a website project ,
you will notice that if you typed profile in the page code behind , you will see the properties generated for you as in the picture below:
this happened because the Visual studio created a new class called ProfileCommon Thats inherits ProfileBase , and adds the new properties to it ..
Note that visual studio will always update that class when you change the Profile properties in web.config ...
Now , if you are working with web application projects , you will notice that adding the Profile properties to web.config will not add any properties to Profile object in the code behind of the page.... this is because Visual studio doesn't generate a profileCommon class ...
instead you need to access the properties using ProfielBase.GetPropertyValue(PropertyName)
for example , to access the DateOfBirth property , you need to use this code
Dim DOB As DateTime = CDate(HttpContext.Current.Profile.GetPropertyValue("DateOfBirth"))
In this post , I talked about the Differences in Profile between the normal website and WAP projects , Note that there is a lot of other differences between them, for example ,
when working with resource files , the webiste will provide a string typing for resources properties which is also handled by Visual studio ...
Regards,
Anas Ghanem | Go |
| Redirecting the Users to different pages based on there roles ... while working with login control , you can redirect the users to a different pages base on there roles , to do this , you need to handle theLoggedIn event for login control which is fired after the user logged in successfully , Assume we have 2 roles , Admins and Editors .. and assume that every role has its own directory , in login page , you can write the following code to redirect the users to its own directory: protected void Login1_LoggedIn(object sender, EventArgs e) { if(Roles.IsUserInRole("Admins")) Response.Redirect("~/Admins/Default.aspx"); else if(Roles.IsUserInRole("Editors")) Response.Redirect("~/Editors/Default.aspx"); } Regards, Anas Ghanem | Go |
| Heroes Happen Here - Launch in Phoenix, AZ ... On April 1st, the "Heroes Happen Here" launch event ran successfully in Phoenix, AZ. I had the privilege of speaking with Rob Bagby in the developer track entitled "Defy Occasionally Connected Challenges Smart Client Application". Rob did an amazing job presenting throughout the day, interweaving different technologies across a common business scenario. If you were at the event, leave a comment here and tell Rob and I what you thought of the event. Be sure to get resources related to the launch event! Technorati Tags: heroes happen here ,rob bagby | Go |
| LinkShrink - Learning Ruby on Rails ... The best way to learn something is to develop an application with it. So when it comes to Rails , I decided [*] to develop a clone of TinyUrl .
Here is the screen shot of the website. The source code is hosted at google project hosting and you can find the summary of the development here .
[*] The suggestion to develop this as a starting point came via Adnan Masood who is running LinkCutter . | Go |
| Scrolling Data Pagination using Ajax ... Tired of continuously clicking next page, next page, next page to find the data you are looking for? I always thought this was just something you had to deal with when viewing data on the Internet, that was until I took a look at the new Microsoft live image search . Instead of forcing the user to click next page to paginate the data the page catches the scroll event and fetches the next page of data and adds it to the output asynchronously. In this project I will expand upon my previous project...(read more ) | Go |
| .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit is available for Download ... I found on couple of blog so though to share this information as well.... ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET AJAX History ASP.NET Silverlight controls ADO.NET Data Services ADO.NET Entity Framework Download the training kit...(read more ) | Go |
| Useful Extension methods ... In this article, Brian examines extension methods and how they can be used with .NET Framework applications. He begins with a short introduction and then provides a detailed explanation of the application of extension methods with the help of source code in C#. Read more......(read more ) | Go |
| Encapsulating Google's MapData ... Florian Drevet show you how to build a basic ASP.NET WebControl whose goal is to use Google MapData “feature” (in few words : an dynamically generated image with basic Google Map features) You will learn how to derivate your own WebControl from an existing one, make some Attributes, use the viewstate, etc… Read more......(read more ) | Go |
