| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| How to Encrypt Programmatically the Sections of Web.Config File ... Hi, Welcome.
In this tutorial, we are about to discuss how to encrypt the various sections of web.config file. Few sections of web.config are quite crucial as these sections often used to hold sensitive data like userids, passwords, server names, database connection strings and may be other encrypted keys. If we do not make it secure, our information is vulnerable to malicious users. | Go |
| ASP.NET Implementation for PayPal Payments Standard ... ASP.NET code & controls to handle submitting single payments, subscriptions & payments to PayPal standard. | Go |
| Add buttons to share Graffiti posts with social sites ... Add DotNetKicks kick it button (and many other share buttons) to Graffiti CMS | Go |
| How to enable pretty urls with Asp.Net MVC and IIS6 ... Step by step instructions for how to remove the .mvc extension requirement when using asp.net mvc on IIS6 | Go |
| Adding (or Inserting) Subheader Rows into a Gridview ... Ever come across a situation where you needed to manually add (or insert) rows to a Gridview, but weren't quite sure how to do it? A few weeks ago I came across this exact problem, where I needed to create sub headers based on the category for each row. Here's how I did it. | Go |
| Diet plan for ASP .net pages. LOOSE WEIGHT NOW !! ... If we don't take care about how we feed our ASP .net pages. we will find that they will tend rapidly to gain too much weight, this can provide us a lot of headaches. Let's see how to reduce the size of our pages. | Go |
| Who's Online?: A Virtual Earth And User Session Mashup in Asp.Net. ... A tutorial for implementing a modal popup window on your web site which will display a Microsoft Virtual Earth map with pinpoints on the locations of everyone who is currently browsing your web site. | Go |
| .NET Framework FAQ ... The .NET Framework FAQ will give you an insight to the .NET platform. They form the basis of an interview and the interviewer asks them to guage your familiarity with the platform. The q&a have been collected over a period of time using MSDN and other similar sites. | Go |
| Sql server 2005 : OVER clause ... I found it very useful. Let me give you a quick overview of the OVER clause. Not very detailed but a will prove a nice kick start for you guys. | Go |
| Syntax highlighting in BlogEngine.NET ... In forums and blogs in the BlogEngine community issues with the syntax highlighter extension has been brought up. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC - ActionResult... The Good & Not So Bad ... Here's a quick summary of the different types:
1. RenderViewResult
2. ActionRedirectResult
3. HttpRedirectResult
4. EmptyResult | Go |
| How to compress viewstate in ASP.NET 2.0 ... This article demonstrates how to extend the functionality of the new System.IO.Compression namespace to compress and decompress viewstate information in ASP.NET 2.0 pages. | Go |
| Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing ... Using the inversion of control pattern to write testable controllers with the latest ASP.NET MVC bits. | Go |
| Restart SQL in ASP.NET ... this is some vb.net code that shows you how to restart a sql server in asp.net | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| ASP.NET AJAX Web | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview - ScottGu's Blog | Go |
| WorldofASP.NET: Tips to Improve Your ASP.NET Web site performance | ASP.NET | Go |
| Clean Up ASP.NETs Head Tag With ControlAdapters | Go |
| Asp.Net | Go |
| Main Page - ScrewTurn Software | Go |
| Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? | Encosia | Go |
| Master Pages: Tips, Tricks, and Traps | Go |
| How to disable web.config Inheritance for Child Applications in Subfolders in ASP.NET? | Go |
| Open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET | Go |
| Skinned Login Control | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview ... We recently opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex Project that we will be using to provide previews (with buildable source code) for several upcoming ASP.NET features and releases. Last month we used it to publish the first drop of the ASP.NET MVC source code . This first drop included the source for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release that we shipped at MIX, along with Visual Studio project files to enable you to patch and build it yourself. A few hours ago we published a refresh of the ASP.NET MVC source code on the site. This source refresh is not an official new ASP.NET MVC preview release - instead it is an interim drop that provides a look at the current state of the source tree. We will ship the official "ASP.NET MVC Preview 3" release in a few weeks after we finish up some more work (more features and tweaks to existing ones, better VS tool integration, VS express edition support, documentation, etc). If you are someone who wants a hassle-free installation of ASP.NET MVC to use that ships with documentation and full tool support you'll probably want to wait for this official preview release. If you are someone who wants a chance to see an early "preview of the preview" and have the opportunity to start using and giving feedback on some of the features immediately, today's source refresh is probably interesting to look at. Improvements with this ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh This week's update (which you can download here ) includes a number of improvements to ASP.NET MVC. Some of these include: In addition to posting the source code for the ASP.NET MVC framework, we are also posting the source code for the unit tests that we use to test it. These tests are implemented using MSTest and the open source Moq mocking framework. A VS 2008 project file for the unit tests is included to make it easy to build and run them locally within your VS 2008 IDE. Significantly easier support for testing Controller classes. You can now unit test common Controller scenarios without having to mock any objects (more details on how this works below). Several nice feature additions and usability improvements to the URL routing system (more details below). Creating a New ASP.NET MVC Project You can build your own copy of the ASP.NET MVC assemblies by downloading the MVC source and compiling it locally, or alternatively you can download a VS Template package to get a pre-built version of them along with a Visual Studio project template that you can use to quickly build a new ASP.NET MVC Project that uses the latest bits. After you install the ASP.NET MVC source refresh .VSI template, a new "ASP.NET MVC Application" project template will show up under the "My Templates" section of your "New Project" dialog: This new "My Templates" version of the MVC project template lives side-by-side with the previous ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release (which you can see above it in the main project templates section of the dialog). This allows you to safely create new projects and and use both the latest source version and the last official preview version on the same machine. When you create a new project using this updated ASP.NET MVC Project template you'll by default get a project that looks like below: This new project solution contains one Controller ("HomeController") under the "\Controllers" directory and two View templates ("About" and "Index") under the "\Views\Home" sub-directory. Both view templates are based on a common master page for the site ("Site.master"), all of whose styles are defined within a "Site.css" file under the "\Content" directory. When you run the application the built-in web-server will automatically start up and you'll see the site's "Home" content: Clicking the "About us" tab will then display the "About" content: The "HomeController" class in the project is responsible for handling both of the URLs above and has two action methods like below: The default "Site.master" templat | 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 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Using Syndication Classes to Read RSS Feeds ... RSS and ATOM feeds dominate the syndication systems today. If you run a web site you probably use RSS and ATOM for two purposes:
1) Expose your site content for syndication using these formats
2) Consume content exposed by other web sites and aggregate it on your web site
Whatever be the case until recently developers either coded their custom solution or made use of some third party component. Luckily .NET framework 3.5 introduced a set of classes that can simplify your job. This article explains how. | Go |
| Client Application Services - Part 1 ... In this first part of the three part series, Bilal Haidar introduces Client Application Services (CLAS) that shipped with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. These services allow Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation applications to access ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0 Extensions Application Services. He begins with a brief introduction followed by a detailed discussion of ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX Extensions 1.0, and Client Application Services. He concludes the article by providing a list of classes used for CLAS. | Go |
| File Upload control in C# as a friendly web user control. Easy upload, delete, and view options ... Web User control written in C# using VS2005 to allow file upload, delete, and view option. Easy property settings, makes it easier for developers to use. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Framework – Part 2: Testing ... In this article Simone will cover one of the main reasons for adopting the ASP.NET MVC framework: testability. | Go |
| Create Control Extenders ... Learn how to create Control Extenders using Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET 3.5, and AJAX. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Explicitly binding data to ListView web control ... Binding data without ObjectDataSource and Eval / Bind methods... 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 |
| MvcContrib release now works with 4/16 MVC Framework drop ... MvcContrib is upgraded to account for the recent changes with the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Eric Hexter has more details.
... 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 |
| The dark side of static members ... Often we find it easy to create a class with a static event to keep the controls in our web application loosely coupled. The easiest way to make a number of controls interact without "knowing" about each other is to have a static event distributor class.
public class EventDistributor
{
public static event EventHandler SomethingHappened;
public static void RaiseSomethingHappened(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (SomethingHappened != null)
{
SomethingHappened(sender, e);
}
}
}
Some of the controls raise the events of the distributor.
protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
.
EventDistributor.RaiseSomethingHappened(sender, e);
.
}
.and others subscribe to them
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
EventDistributor.SomethingHappened += new EventHandler(EventDistributor_SomethingHappened);
.
}
The problem
Let's say we add an IScriptControl (e.g. from the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite) in the control tree inside the event handler of the static event. After postback we get an InvalidOperationException with the message "Script controls may not be registered after PreRender".
The reason
To find the reason for the error we need to know that static classes and members are alive until the application is restarted. They are not destroyed after the page lifecycle completes. So what happens? A control subscribes to the event of the event distributor in the Page_Load handler. After the postback the event is raised and the control's event handler method from the first request gets executed. The life cycle of that previous page was already executed and adding a RadControl to the Controls tree will throw the aforementioned exception. This exception is thrown by the ScriptManager control which cannot register script controls after the Prerender event of the Page object.
There is one more problem here - the event distributor holds a reference to the user control and thus it cannot be garbage collected. This leads to a memory leak on the server.
The solution
What we need to do is guarantee that the event distributor does not keep a reference to our object. This can be done easily by detaching the event handler in a later stage of the page lifecycle. Still, this is not the best approach. As the static members are alive as long as the application is, it is possible that concurrent requests to the same page execute simultaneously. This will raise the event twice for both page instances and will execute their event handler methods twice. We can avoid that by making sure our class is page-specific. We can create a singleton static class, which is stored in the Items collection of the Page object and use it. The singleton will be destroyed when the page gets destroyed, so we even do not need the code to remove the event handler.
I'm attaching a demo project to this post. It contains two folders - one of them contains a page, demonstrating the problem and the other contains the suggested solution.
P.S. Tess Ferrandez , Microsoft Escalation Engineer describes another drawback of using static members.
Cheers,
Erjan
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 Session Helper (scope, categories) ... Use scopes and categories to avoid collision and confusion between you session values... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| A few issues installing MVC release 4/16/2008 ... Are you already tied of hearing ASP.NET MVC? Microsoft first open source is getting lots of blogging time for the reason that they are adding lots of value for us to decide how would you like to code, instead of going to another Open Source initiative. And that believe it or not is a good thing. I downloaded and install the VS template package with the version 4/16/2008 In a clean computer, Still I received the error below. Having said that the install said successfully. After creating... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| New ASP.NET AJAX Web Site - Kleenex.com ... We just launched the site earlier this week. It uses ASP.NET AJAX as well as jQuery for the dynamic UI used throughout the site.Kleenex.com ... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| MVC coding in VB ... Don't ask why, but I decided to try to use the porridge that was "just right" in VB while trying to create a site using the new ASP.NET MVC framework . As I will no doubt forget the syntax to use in about 42 seconds, I'm including it here. Others may find it useful as well.
ActionLinks :
<%=Html.ActionLink(Of ViewEngines.CategoryController) _ (Function(c As ViewEngines.CategoryController) c.Add(), _ "Add Category")%>
Form definition :
<% Using Html.Form(Of ViewEngines.CategoryController) _ (Function(c As ViewEngines.CategoryController) c.Update(ViewData.CategoryID), _ FormMethod.Post)%>
The Function(c as ViewEngines.CategoryController) c.blah syntax is the equivalent syntax to the shorter, more symbolrific C# syntax: c => c.Add() .
That was still giving me an error. What I found (see below) was that the trick seems to be to change your methods into functions (instead of the Subs that I was using), and it would work:
Public Function Update(ByVal id As Integer) As Object Dim c As New Category() c.LoadByKey(id) c.LoadFromPost() c.Save() RedirectToAction("List") Return Nothing End Function
Now someone can please tell me I'm wrong, and there is a simpler solution. Barring that, I think I might stick with using the "less correct " versions of the calls (or, more likely, using C# for all my MVC sites)
(Special thanks to Chuwanga on the asp.net forums for the original solution . I wouldn't have figured out that last step) 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 Preview of a Preview ... Its no secret that Microsoft can get better at naming non RTM (Release to Manufacturing) releases. We have terms like CTP, Preview, Alpha, Beta, RC (Release Candidate), and so on. On the other hand, at least Microsoft does try to move things along to RTM rather than keeping products in perpetual Beta. With ASP.NET MVC, we also need to add yet another type of release. For now Ive been calling this a CodePlex Source Release meaning its simply sharing source code that is in progress. ScottGu called... 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 Source Refresh Preview ... We recently opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex Project that we will be using to provide previews (with buildable source code) for several upcoming ASP.NET features and releases. Last month we used it to publish the first drop of the ASP.NET MVC source code. This first drop included the source for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release that we shipped at MIX, along with Visual Studio project files to enable you to patch and build it yourself. A few hours ago we published a refresh of the 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 MVC Framework - new build available - source includes unit tests ... Just today, the MVC Framework team dropped the soure code refresh on its CodePlex workspace. This includes a big controller base class refactoring along with other enhancements. A big deal, also, is that the source code drop now includes the unit tests! That's awesome. Great job Levi, Eilon, Phil and Rob!! Now we have some work to do to upgrade MvcContrib and CodeCampServer to the new drop. :-) The biggest deal is that controllers and actions are now more DRY and... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Examining ASP.NET`s Membership, Roles, and Profile - Part 10 ... The Membership system automatically tracks the last
date and time each user's account has been accessed. With the SqlMembershipProvider , this information is
stored in the aspnet_Users database table in a datetime column named LastActivityDate . This
column is automatically updated to the current UTC date and time whenever a user
logs into the site, whenever their user account information is updated, and whenever their user account information is retrieved.
In addition to tracking each user's last activity date and time, the Membership system includes a method named
GetNumberOfUsersOnline .
This method returns the number of users whose last activity date and time is within a specified window; by default, this method returns the number of
users whose aspnet_Users.LastActivityDate value falls within the last 15 minutes.
This article, the tenth installment of a multipart article series on ASP.NET's Membership, Roles, and Profile systems, examines
the GetNumberOfUsersOnline method and see how to extend the Membership system to include additional user
activity information. Specifically, we will add a new table to the database used by the SqlMembershipProvider that associates a description
of each user's current action. We will then update our ASP.NET pages to update the records in this table to include a description of the user's
current action. For example, when visiting the home page we may use the description, "Viewing the home page." Finally, we will create a web page that displays
the list of currently logged on users and their last known action. Read on to learn more!
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 |
| Examining ASP.NET`s Membership, Roles, and Profile - Part 10 ... The Membership system automatically tracks the last
date and time each user's account has been accessed. With the SqlMembershipProvider, this information is
stored in the aspnet_Users database table in a datetime column named LastActivityDate. This
column is automatically updated to the current UTC date and time whenever a user
logs into the site, whenever their user account information is updated, and whenever their user account information is retrieved.
In addition to tracking each user's last... 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 |
| Action behavior using ASP.NET MVC and MvcContrib ... This post is a quick rundown of action method behaviors. This will be halfway obsolete with the next MVC drop on codeplex, but here goes: You can download MvcContrib from http://mvccontrib.org. The convention controller is there. The ConventionController takes away nothing from System.Web.Mvc.Controller, but it adds some useful things on top. My example controllers inherit from ConventionController. First, To get an action method to fire and run, just make it public. ... 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 |
| Stephen Forte joins Telerik ... It's a great pleasure to announce thatStephen Forte will be joining Telerik as Chief Strategy Officer.
A bit of background for the people who don't know who Stephen is: he is a long-time Microsoft MVP (13 years!),dasBlog founding contributor,Microsoft Regional Director for NYC, former CTO of Zagat , one of the greatest speakers in the world, and above all, a remarkable person for whom I've always had great respect.
In his new role Stephen will be helping Telerik to choose the right path and ensure that you, our customers, are always in the center of our product strategy.
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 |
| What About ALT.NET Calgary Group? ... We have some very talented and blade sharp people here. So why can't we start ALT.NET Calgary local group? This would definitely promote excellent ideas around, enrich our dev community, put more stress on quality, agility, and much more. Feel free to contact me if interested. PS: I am quite inspired by what is going on right now at the ALT.NET conference. Wish would be there... | Go |
| For SharePoint & Groove Users - Collaborative Solution Survey ... Collaborative Solution Survey This survey is in support of a graduate-level special project by students at Central Connecticut State University. The purpose of this project is to create a model which evaluates available collaborative solution(s) for their applicability and fit for common tasks in the software development lifecycle. Please find below a link to the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=A63ZF8m5ufzdBdZpyUC6Jg_3d_3d In the survey, you will find questions regarding: the team that participates in specific collaborative tasks, and the solutions used to support that task. A few questions to gather demographic information about you and your organization are also included. Please fill out the survey as accurately as possible. If any particular part of the survey is inapplicable to you, please use the available options to skip ahead. We truly appreciate your time in completing this survey. It will be a tremendous help to the success of the project. Please respond to the survey by May 1, 2008. If you're interested to know the results of the survey, leave your contact information in the space provided on the last page of the survey. Please email any questions or concerns pertaining to this survey to: collaborativesolutionsurvey@officeliveusers.com | Go |
| Mocking static methods with Typemock ... There are mocking tools like Rhino Mock, Moq, NMock, Typemock and many more. Recently, I was kinda evaluating mocking tools to mock out REST calls in Linq.Flickr. Almost all of the mock tools requires some sort of interface reference to work on. When, to mock out methods like XElement.Load or File.Open is impossible with most of the tools, Typemock is one step ahead of others as it supports mocking of static methods. Since, all the queries in Linq.Flickr goes through REST and all is tied with somehow with XElement.Load for getting the response in a LINQToXml fashion (I have mentioned already in my earlier posts, how :-)). I wanted to fake out the HTTP layer completely so that sitting in an airplane and with no Internet it is possible to test the product. Before going to any downloads , lets see how easy is Typemock in this regard. Now, all starts with a NUnit test class, where I have referenced the Typemock lib and during initialization of the test I faked out XElement.Load method for particular URL request to Flickr. Fragment of the code could be like [SetUp]
public void Initialize()
{
...
...
// initialize mock
MockManager.Init();
string frobUrl = "http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?
method=flickr.auth.getFrob&api_key=xxxx
&api_sig=cdeb9a73a771d5ea374d014680b33a0e" ;
// custom method to get element locally
XElement element1 = MockElement(frobUrl, "LinqToFlickrTest.GetFrob.xml" );
// create the mock object.
Mock mock1 = MockManager.Mock(typeof (XElement));
mock1.ExpectAndReturn("Load" , element1).When(frobUrl);
...
...
}
.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; }
So, I created a mock object of Type XElement and set it up for an URL so that when request comes in, it will return my response instead of looking into the sky for it. Finally, its all plain old test class, with no suspicious code :-)
[Test]
public void Test()
{
var query = from photo in _context.Photos
where photo.SearchMode == SearchMode.TagsOnly
&& photo.SearchText == "microsoft"
select photo;
int count = query.Count();
...
...
}
.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; }
.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% | Go |
| WPF - Fun with borders (building a playing card) ... Two weeks ago, I posted about my Solitaire program with improved WPF animations. I'm still working on code cleanup to release the source, but I'd like to document some cool tricks I learned about Borders that might come in handy. (As an aside, I said I had an interview. Well, after two cross-country flights, and two grueling rounds of interviews I've been offered a job which I'm going to accept. I'll talk more about that when I can) All of the cards used in the WPF version of this program were from OpenClipart, including the card backs. I've no problem with the card faces, but I wanted to include several different backs, including the ability to import custom ones. There were a couple of challenges with this. I wanted a rounded corners, a drop shadow, and the ability for the picture to fill the entire inside of the border with it's rounded edges. The rounded corners were easy enough, just use the CornerRadius property. <Canvas x:Name="mainCanvas" Background="Green" Width="250" Height="250"> <Border BorderBrush="White" BorderThickness="5" CornerRadius="15"> </Border> </Canvas>
The drop shadow proved to be a little more difficult, since WPF doesn't provide 3D Borders by default. However, a little searching turned up a method to create the a 3d look for square borders by nesting two borders. Some experimentation, and I found this would work quite well for a drop shadow.
<Canvas x:Name="mainCanvas" Background="Green" Width="250" Height="250"> <Border BorderBrush="DarkGray" BorderThickness=".0,.0,2,2" CornerRadius="18"> <Border BorderBrush="White" BorderThickness="5" CornerRadius="15" > </Border> </Border> </Canvas>
Note that you have to set the CornerRadius on the outer Border to a slightly larger value or you get a gap between the outer and the inner border.
Now comes the hard part, getting the image inside the border.
I used the following image, and dropped the <image> tag right into the inner border.
As you can see, it doesn't completely fill the border AND the square corners of the image overlap the rounded corners of the border. Not good. I turns out one more trick is all that's necessary. Instead of putting the image inside the border, you make the image the border of the background. Also, a third nested border gives the black border around the image to give some demarcation to the inner image, and completes the card.
<Canvas x:Name="mainCanvas" Background="Green" Width="250" Height="250"> <Border BorderBrush="DarkGray" BorderThickness=".0,.0,2,2" CornerRadius="18" Height="190" Width="140" Canvas.Top="30" Canvas.Left="55" > <Border BorderBrush="White" BorderThickness="5" CornerRadius="15" > <Border BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="1.5" CornerRadius="12"> <Border.Background> <ImageBrush> <ImageBrush.ImageSource> <BitmapImage UriSource="c:\temp\happy.jpg" /> </ImageBrush.ImageSource> </ImageBrush> </Border.Background> </Border> </Border> </Border> </Canvas>
So there you have it, all the steps to make a card, and hopefully some tricks to add to your bag of tricks. | Go |
| MCTS in WCF ... So a little while ago, I mentioned that I did a WCF beta exam for a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist. Its been a long time since I did that and I had kinda forgotten about it, but today I received the good news that I am now a MCTS in WCF! WooHoo! I really thought I had bombed that exam due to the very little prep that I had done, but fortunately that is not the case. I would love to hear from anybody else (particularly any fellow australians) who have also done the beta exam and received their congratulatory email. | Go |
| LiveVideo Acquires Pageflakes ... TechCrunch has reported that Live Universe has acquired Pageflakes and plans to integrate it into LiveVideo . In fact you can already get some sense of how the integration will look by visiting the beta site at http://livevideo.pageflakes.com/
This is a very interesting merger because both of these sites use ASP.NET technology. It will introduce the vlogging community to mash ups using RSS feeds and widgets. I hope LiveVideo intends to permit custom pageflakes because I would love to create some pageflakes for the vlogging community.
I've been using the LiveVideo web site for a long time because it is the second most popular vlogging site and they clearly understand vlogging's potential for social networking. In fact, I've usually included LiveVideo Featured Videos in my web parts experiments and JSON mash ups. I am well prepared to take advantage of this new social networking application platform.
Live Universe seems to be very aggressive in their attempts to dominate the social networking market. They have already expanded LiveVideo to include text blogging and social broadcasting. Most other social networking sites are completely missing the significance of vlogging to form a real sense of community and even YouTube has failed to move into social broadcasting.
I spent most of the day learning how to create a custom pageflake. This was fairly difficult because it is not well documented. I could only find three examples of sample code on the Internet, all from the Pageflakes developer documentation. The developer forum does not show much activity. I had to struggle with some advanced JavaScript (i.e. prototypes and closures). It was quite difficult to use a timer within a function prototype but I managed to create a countdown timer pageflake for a vlogger gathering I plan to attend, the YoTube gathering in Philadelphia on 07/12/2008.
According to Mashable , Live Universe may have also just wanted to acquire some top ASP.NET innovators like Pageflakes co-founder Omar Al-Zabir who blogs on http://weblogs.asp.net/ . Congratulations Omar! | Go |
| Not getting IntelliSense in your web.config for system.webServer sections in Visual Studio 2008? ... Today I was playing a bit with Visual Studio 2008 and was surprised to see that I was not getting IntelliSense in my web.config. As you might already know IntelliSense in Xml in Visual Studio is implemented by using a set of schemas that are stored in a folder inside the VS folder, something like: \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas. After looking to the files it was easy to understand what was going on, turns out I was developing using .NET 2.0 settings and Visual Studio now ships...(read more ) | Go |
| SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services - save your time! ... Some time ago I tried out SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services and I was amazed. I'm serious MS Paint terrorist and nice pictures are not one of my strong skills. So, if something makes things look nice to me I'm very happy. I downloaded last CTP of SQL Server 2008 and installed it on my Virtual PC that runs Windows Server 2008. There were no problems during installation and after installing I was able to create my sample database. I also installed Reporting Services. During installation the reporting services web site was created on my server. One thing we got is new Report Designer. It looks like application form Office family, specially user interface. It is easy and user friendly. After setting up data source I was able to start building the reports. Now comes the most exciting part - I was able to create a nice looking report and it took only 20 minutes to get it done. You can see the result on the following screenshot. Everything was very simple and I was able to create my report fast. When you look at the picture you may notice exporting features on top of the page. It doesn't work yet but the formats list was very cool. If new SQL Server will be available on market I'm sure it is worth to buy it. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Broncode Refresh Preview ... Onlangs openden we een nieuw ASP.NET CodePlex Project dat we zullen gebruiken om previews aan te bieden (met bewerkbare broncode) voor verschillende verwachte ASP.NET toepassingen en releases. Vorige maand hebben we het gebruikt om de eerste drop van ASP.NET MVC broncode te publiceren. Die eerste drop bevatte de bron voor de ASP.NET MVC preview 2 release die we hebben geintroduceerd op MIX, samen met de Visual Studio project bestanden om het zelf te patchen en bouwen Enkele uren terug hebben we een refresh gepubliceerd van de ASP.NET MVC broncode op de website. Deze bron refresh is geen officiële nieuwe ASP.NET MVC preview release. Het is een tijdelijke drop dat een blik gunt op de huidige staat van de bron boomstructuur. We zullen de officiële “ASP.NET MVC preview 3” release binnen een paar weken lanceren, nadat we wat meer werk hebben verricht (meer functies en kneepjes dan de bestaande, betere VS tools integratie, VS express editie ondersteuning, documentatie, enz…). Als je zelf iemand bent die liever een eenvoudige installatie heeft van ASP.NET MVC dat uitgebracht wordt met documentatie en volledige tool ondersteuning, dan zal je waarschijnlijk wel willen wachten op de officiële preview release. Als je integendeel graag de kans krijgt om een vroege ‘preview van de preview” te zien en graag de mogelijkheid krijgt om bepaalde delen al uit te testen en feedback te geven, dan is de bron refresh van vandaag zeker interessant voor jou.
Verbeteringen met de ASP.NET MVC Bron Refresh
De update van deze week (die je hier kan downloaden) bevat een aantal verbeteringen op ASP.NET MVC. Een paar voorbeelden:
We posten niet alleen de broncode voor het ASP.NET MVC framework, maar ook de broncode voor de unit tests die we gebruiken om het te testen. Deze tests zijn geïmplementeerd met MSTest en het open source Moq mocking framework. Er is ook een VS 2008 project bestand voor de unit tests in opgenomen. Zo is het eenvoudig te bouwen en lokaal te runnen in je VS 2008 IDE;
Er is beduidend eenvoudigere ondersteuning om Controller classes te testen. Je kunt nu gewone Controller scenario’s zonder andere objecten hoeven te raken (meer details over de werkwijze hieronder);
Er zijn verschillende leuke functies en verbeteringen voor de gebruiksvriendelijkheid toegevoegd (meer details hieronder).
Een nieuw ASP.NET MVC Project creëren Je kunt je eigen versie van de ASP.NET MVC assemblies bouwen door de MVC bron te downloaden en lokaal te compileren. Je kunt ook een VS template pakket downloaden voor een voorgebouwde versie van die bron samen met een Visual Studio project template die je kan gebruiken om snel een nieuw ASP.NET MVC project te bouwen dat gebruik maakt van de nieuwste bits.
Nadat je de ASP.NET MVC bron hebt geïnstalleerd, moet je vernieuwen. Dan zal VSI template een nieuwe ‘ASP.NET MVC applicatie’ project template doen verschijnen onder “My Templates” sectie van je ‘New Project’ dialoog:
Deze nieuwe "My Templates" versie van de MVC project template bestaat parallel met de vorige ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release (die je erboven kan zien in de main project templates sectie van het dialoog). Hierdoor kun je veilig nieuwe projecten creëren en zowel de laatste bronversie als de laatste officiele preview gebruiken op dezelfde computer. Als je een project creëert met deze vernieuwde ASP.NET MVC project template, dan zal je standaard een project krijgen die er als volgt uitziet:
Deze nieuwe project oplossing bevat een controller (“HomeController”) onder de “\Controllers” directory en twee View templates (“About” en “Index”) onder de “\Views\Home” sub-directory.Beide view templates zijn gebaseerd op een gewone master pagina voor de website (“Site master”), waarvan alle stijlen gedefinieerd worden in een “Site.css” bestand onder de “\Content” directory. Als je de applicatie runt, dan zal de ingebouwde webserver automatisch opstarten en zal je de “Home” content zien van de website:
Als je klikt op de “Ab | Go |
| Multiple UpdatePanels - Who caused the update ? ... Does your client code need to know what control caused your update panels to update or which of several UpdatePanels contained the triggering control ? Try this.... (Or do the same thing with addbeginRequest(); 1 < script type ="text/javascript"> 2 <!-- 3 var prm = Sys .WebForms .PageRequestManager .getInstance (); 4 5 prm .add_endRequest (EndRequest ); 7 function EndRequest (sender ,args ) 8 { 9 alert (sender ._postBackSettings .panelID + " -> " + sender ._postBackSettings .sourceElement .id ); 10 } 11 --> 12 </ script > Note that "id" contains the id of the CONTROL that caused the postback. panelId contains a string that appends the event trigger with the UpdatePanel name. Note that if the update was caused by an event configured in the Triggers Collection or updated explicitly in JavaScript, the "Control" name will be the UpdatePanel. | Go |
