| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Anatomy of a Design Change ... One example (among many) of how a seemingly small design change ends up requiring a lot of thought and work. | Go |
| Using an smtp pickup directory during ASP.NET development ... Instead of sending mail from your development environment over the net like normal, why not have all that email sent during development saved to a local folder. It makes debugging much easier, you won't have to wait for your email client to download your messages and means you won't accidentally email any 'dummy' recipients. | Go |
| Code Snippet - A new way to share your codes. ... Recently , we have added a new section at dotnetslackers by which you can share your code to public. Before, letting you get started let me tell you that code snippets are tiny piece of code that can work as a unit, can come handy and be a real time-saver when building up complex solution or can be some interesting piece of lines which in turn can make out someone's day. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC CSS Sprite ... I build on my last technique of generating CSS Sprites and make a unique solution for the MVC framework using a custom ActionResult. | Go |
| Guide For Cross Browser Development Series 2 – Session Variables ... The 2nd article of the series, discusses the cookie loss problem in IE 6.0 when using frames | Go |
| Using the same encryption method in ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider ... MembershipProvider automatically encrypts most of the sensitive information such as password, secret-question-password. | Go |
| Better ASP.NET Exception Management ... Take advantage of ELMAH for managing web exceptions. | Go |
| ASP.NET Tips: How to use DebugDiag to track down where a performance p ... Figuring out what is causing your application to hang can be half the battle to actually fixing the problem. Find out how to narrow down the issue here. | Go |
| Build Scalable ASP.NET Websites using Asyncronous Programming Models ... Excellent MSDN Webcast on how to use Asynchronous Programming model in your ASP.NET 2.0 pages to avoid using up all your threads from threadpool for some lengthy operation (remote web service call, remote sql server query etc).. A must-watch! | Go |
| Umbraco rocks and this is why ... I had a little trouble getting ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX working in Umbraco. The incredible community makes it the best CMS out there. | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC - Legacy Url Routing ... When converting web form applications to MVC, it requires a new Url structure. Learn how to handle legacy Url's within an MVC application by appropriately redirecting them to the correct MVC Url. | Go |
| List of usefull ASp.NET stuff ... Interesting links for Web Developers | Go |
| 47 ASP.NET MVC Resources to Rock Your Development ... Get the grand tour of today's best ASP.NET MVC resources | Go |
| 47 ASP.NET MVC Resources ... Craig Shoemaker highlights some of the best ASP.NET MVC resources available. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| 47 ASP.NET MVC Resources to Rock Your Development - Craig Shoemaker | Go |
| Dimebrain: Five recommendations for starting a startup with ASP.NET | Go |
| ASP.NET AJAX Web | Go |
| RestLess - A Simple REST Framework : ndepth.net | Go |
| Performance: Scaling Strategies for ASP.NET Applications | Go |
| Why you should not place your whole site in an UpdatePanel | Encosia | Go |
| ProgTalk - File Upload control in C# as a friendly web user control. Easy upload, delete, and view options | Go |
| CodeProject: .NET Page Life Cycle. Free source code and programming help | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| Slides from my ASP.NET Connections Orlando Talks ... Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day. You can download my slides+samples below: General Session The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here . In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code. You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here . I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support - which you can learn more about here . I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework - which you can learn more about here . I also showed off the new Hard Rock Memorabilia site built with Silverlight 2. You can try out the Hard Rock application yourself here . You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here . Building .NET Applications with Silverlight The slides + demos for Silverlight breakout talk can be downloaded here . You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here . In particular, I recommend reading my tutorial posts here and here . ASP.NET MVC The slides + demos for my ASP.NET MVC talk can be downloaded here . You can learn more about the latest ASP.NET MVC source refresh here . Stephen Walther also just posted a really good set of slides + demos from his post conference tutorial on ASP.NET MVC here . Hope this helps, Scott | 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 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 |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Unit Testing Membership and Role Providers ... Unit Testing allows the developer to create solid applications that will last the changes in the future. There are several articles on GridViewGuy that covers the concepts and benefits of Unit Testing. In this article we are going to go one step further and create Unit Tests for our Membership and Role providers. | Go |
| The Making of Blogo.NET ... This article explains in detail how I developed Blogo.NET, a N-tiered blog application based upon the .NET 3.5 Framework. | Go |
| ASP.NET Validation Controls – Important Points, Tips and Tricks ... ASP.NET validation controls provide an easy-to-use but powerful mechanism of ensuring that data is entered correctly on the forms. There are 6 validation controls included in the ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 versions. In this article, let us see some tips and tricks that can be applied to the validation controls. | Go |
| How to call Server-Side function from Client-Side Code Using PageMethods in ASP.NET AJAX ... You cannot call server-side code ‘directly’ from client-side code. However, there are some workarounds. To call server-side code from Javascript, you will need to use AJAX, and the easiest way out is to use the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. In this article, we will be using PageMethods to call server-side functions using Javascript. | Go |
| How to Create Your Own Auto Suggest Textbox Without Any AJAX Frameworks ... We will use basic Javascript and .NET to create a feature to allow auto suggests as a user types. | Go |
| Using Design Time Attributes ... Developing a nice custom control is just one part of the story. You can enhance the experience of other developers using your control by providing proper designer support. A set of attributes often called as Design Time Attributes allow you to accomplish this. | Go |
| Dissecting LINQ to SQL ... Where LINQ to SQL shines as compared to other ORM tools in the market is the fact that it abstracts away the database structure behind our business objects, it also supports a query language called LINQ. The article talks about LINQ to SQL execution plans and how it manages its object state. | Go |
| 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 |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| ASP.Net C# MessageBox ... This article explains how to create a messagebox class to use in web applications | Go |
| Using a Web Deployment Project with a Web Application Project ... This article explains some common problems when creating a WDP of a WAP | Go |
| A Code Project Article Information Library ... This library provides a framework for using Code Project article information in applications, and provides a utility for monitoring articles | Go |
| Duplex Web Services ... Using multi-threading techniques to create a duplex(two-way) web service that can push events/messages to the client. | Go |
| Index XML Documents with VTD-XML ... Introduce a simple, efficient, human-readable XML index called VTD+XML | Go |
| Integrating a Blogger.com Blog into an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site ... How to integrate a blogger.com blog into an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site | Go |
| ASP.NET Page Life Cycle ... This article describes the life cycle of the page from the moment the URL is hit from the web browser till the HTML code is generated and sent to the web browser. | Go |
| Building ASP.NET Web Pages Dynamically in the Code-Behind ... This article shows a technique for building ASP.NET web pages where the entire page contents are created dynamically in code-behind. | Go |
| Auto Resize Tabcontainer ... Automatically resize a TabContainer or TabPanel | Go |
| TDL: Protocol for .dan.g.'s ToDoList, Useful for SVN Users ... Register a fake protocol of TDL: to make tdl:///filename.tdl?tid available | Go |
| Search User Controls for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) ... A set of user controls to provide Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) search functionality | Go |
| Navigation Custom Control for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) ... Renders navigational nodes using list tags. | Go |
| An introduction to using a DataGrid control in Silverlight 2.0 ... An introduction to using the DataGrid control in Silverlight 2.0. | Go |
| MultiThread in MOSS Page by implementing PageAsyncTask ... To implement PageAsyncTask for web part rendering in Parallel instead of RegisterWorkItem | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Digging into ASP.NET MVC - Part 2 ... I got a bit sidetracked from the MVC stuff as I didn't have as much time between projects as expected, but had a chance today to play around with it a bit more at home. I don't really have any earth shattering things to share, but I did run into a couple of beginner gotchas here and there. Still not quite wrapping my head around certain things. I had set up my home machine with Visual Studio 2008, but I guess I never finished setting things up. I had copied my MVC projects over and was having trouble getting certain things to work properly until I realized I hadn't installed the MVC bits yet. Doh. So that helped. I had a couple of the dlls in the bin directory, so a lot of things actually worked, but the Visual Studio tie-ins weren't there. Also, you really can't run an MVC project by opening from the file system, you do have to use the MVC project type in order to get everything wired up correctly. That might be obvious, but if you have gotten used to just pointing at a directory to quickly open a web site to play around with, that won't work. On my new project we are using LINQ extensively, so when I last played around with MVC I was also trying to figure out LINQ and between the two had a bit of a learning curve. I'm starting to get more comfortable with LINQ, so that helped me get up and running a lot more quickly this time. I figured out how to use the LINQ to SQL objects as a ViewData source for my MVC views, so that is kinda cool. If you want to just spit our html using a for each type pattern, you can even cast the objects back into your LINQ to SQL object and get strong-typing in your view. Not sure if that is kosher or not, but hey I'm still learning. Guthrie does it a bit, so I think I might be safe. You can also use the standard ASP.NET data controls like grid views, repeaters, etc., but that might get you into trouble. More on that later. My personal web site has a lot of simple pages where I just get and display some data, such as favorite movies, music and so forth. MVC works great for that. In fact, I was able to rewire about 6 pages in an afternoon, including LINQ data access. So that is pretty sweet. Also really like the Html.ActionLink syntax for links, as it gives you a lot of security against moving stuff around. As long as your controllers know where to find the views, the actual view can change as much as you want in location, name, etc. I'm still looking for a good way to use an image rather than text though. People have a few ideas, but this feels like an area that needs improvement. After getting data display working on a number of pages, the next thing I need to investigate is saving data back to the database. There are a couple of things that are a bit of a paradigm shift here. One, you don't have server controls, postback, viewstate, etc. So in some ways it is a step back to some older ways of doing things, but it gets you back to a very clean html entry form again, but with all the power of the latest .NET stack working for you. Two (and this is the trouble I was talking about), you can't have a server form on the page or stuff just doesn't work. I was trying to follow some tutorials and couldn't figure out what I was missing. Typically you create a standard html form and set it to post to an action your controller understands. Mine was just posting back to the same view and I couldn't figure out why until I realized I also had another standard asp.net form (runat = server) on the page that was confusing things. Once I removed that, I started getting the behavior I expected. Unfortunately, I was at a point where I needed to stop so I'll have to continue that learning curve on another day. Seems reasonably straight-forward now that I'm starting to wrap my head around it though. 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 |
| Where should the ASP.NET team release stuff? ... One of the things I love about working on the ASP.NET team is that the team is very focused on getting customer feedback. One of the ways we do this we need to ship bits early and often. While I think this is great, it does present some challenges in terms of helping customers find the right bits for their need. Scott Galloway has been doing some thinking about this and has a good conversation over on his blog. I encourage you to chime in! Where should the ASP.NET team release... 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 |
| Integrating a Blogger.com Blog into an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site ... How to integrate a blogger.com blog into an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site... 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 ASP.NET Web Pages Dynamically in the Code-Behind ... This article shows a technique for building ASP.NET web pages where the entire page contents are created dynamically in code-behind.... 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 |
| Easy, proficient and generic Web form validations ... Generic web form validations that can be used in all web forms... 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 |
| SEO & ASP.NET: Put keywords in the URL ... See the first post in this series | Previous Post Tip #3 - Put keywords in the URL, the sooner the better. There are 3 documented areas that Google looks for keywords: URL, Title, and finally the body of your content. So if you are not embedding keywords into your URL then you are missing an opportunity to help increase the odds of your content getting pushed higher in natural search results. How does Google find keywords in the URL? Take the following 4 URLs (I'm also assuming you read the previous... 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 |
| GridViewImages from DB in ASP.NET using C# ... GridViewImages from DB in ASP.NET using 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 |
| Providing Web Applications with Context Sensitive Help Using RoboHelp WebHelp ... This article shows how to implement context sensitive help for your ASP.NET web applications using RoboHelp WebHelp.... 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 |
| SEO & ASP.NET: How content is linked really does matter ... See the first post in this series Tip #2 - How people link to you really does matter Have you ever taken the time to look at all the different ways you link to your content? For ASP.NET developers there are typically 3 ways to link to the default page (usually default.aspx). For example, let's say there is a landing page in your site for "Products" under the directory /products with a default.aspx page. Therefor you could link to it as: example.com/products example.com/products/ example.com/products/default.aspx... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET Quick `n Dirty Exception Logging* ... If you need an easy way to handle logging exceptions in your ASP.NET web application but want to avoid all the complexities of using a logging library and / or setting up all the database "Stuff", here is an easy way to handle it: In web.config: <appSettings> <add key="logExceptions" value="true"/> </appSettings > <system.web> In Global.asax.cs: public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { ... 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 |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for ASP.NET Developers ... I recently put together a presentation for a developer conference about SEO for ASP.NET Developers. I was a little surprised at how little content there was when I researched this topic. There was a lot of great content about SEO, but only a handful of articles for developers. I've decided to take my talk and convert it into a series of blog posts about SEO for ASP.NET. As it turns out about 50% of it actually requires technical understanding of ASP.NET - a lot of SEO goodness can be achieved without... 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 |
| NTM: How to send email using Exchange in ASP.NET ... I always forget how to send emails using exchange, so I thought to put it on a post for me to find it when I need it.<system.net>
<mailSettings><smtp>
<network host="exchangeServer" username=userName@mydomain.com password="password" /></smtp> </mailSettings>
</system.net>
Cheers
Al... 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 |
| DevConnections Slides and Demos ... Below are links to the slides and demos I presented April 2008 at DevConnections: ASP.NET Internals ASP.NET Search Engine Optimization ASP.NET Performance Tips & Tricks... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| How to create an Http Handle to re write the URL ... This question keeps coming back to the ASP.NET forums, people wanting to write an Http Handler to re write the url. This is a common use in blogs and forums, when people wants to redirect from URL /blog/1093/post.aspx to /blog/post.aspx?id=1093 however keep the previous displayed for better url usage. Create a class on the project and inherit from IHttpHandler public class MyHandler : IHttpHandler Right click the IHttpHander and select "Implement Interface" to create the method... 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 |
| Slides van mijn ASP.NET Connections uiteenzetting in Orlando ... Vorige week heb ik deelgenomen aan de ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. Ik heb op maandag een algemene sessie gepresenteerd, en later die dag ook nog twee specifieke uiteenzettingen. Je kunt mijn slides en de voorbeelden hieronder downloaden:
Algemene sessie
De slides van mijn keynote kan je hier downloaden. In de uiteenzetting heb ik aangetoond hoe je de .NET Framework broncode kunt debuggen. Je kunt hier leren hoe je dit kan instellen met VS 2008. Ik heb ook gedemonstreerd hoe je een website kan bouwen met de nieuwe ASP.NET Dynamic Data support – waarover je hier meer kan leren.
Ik heb ook het nieuwe ASP.NET MVC Framework gedemonstreerd – waarover je hier meer kan leren. Ik heb verder ook nog gepronkt met de nieuwe Hard Rock Memorabilia website die gebouwd werd met Silverlight 2. Je kunt zelf de Hard Rock applicatie hier uitproberen .
Je kan meer leren over Silverlight via verschillende tutorials, tips en trukjes die je kan hier vinden op mijn Silverlight linkpagina.
. NET Applications bouwen met Silverlight
De slides + demo’s die gebruikt werden tijdens de specifieke uiteenzetting van Silverlight kan je hier downloaden. Je kan meer leren over Silverlight via mijn linkpagina hier . Ik raad vooral aan om mijn tutorial posts hier en hier te lezen.
ASP.NET MVC
De slides + demo’s van mijn ASP.NET MVC uiteenzetting kan je hier downloaden. Je kunt meer leren over de nieuwste ASP.NET MVC source refresh hier .
Stephen Walther heeft hier net ook een hele goede reeks slides + demo’s gepost van zijn conferentie tutorial over ASP.NET MVC. Hopelijk kan je hiermee aan de slag,
Scott | Go |
| Remix in Oz ... Remix , is heading downunder and registrations are now open. You can register here .This event is especially cool for the many people who did not get a chance to attend the actual Mix event in the United States (which is many of us). Dates and locations are: Sydney May 20 Powerhouse Museum Harris Street, Ultimo Melbourne May 22 Melbourne Town Hall Cnr Swanston & Collins Street, Melbourne There will be heaps of quality technical content from a bunch of local technical rockstars , and I will be attending and participating as an expert in one of the "Ask the Experts" areas. Look forward to seeing you there! Oh, by the way, each attendee receives a copy of Expression Studio 2 (rrp$1040) for free when they register! | Go |
| Slides from my ASP.NET Connections Orlando Talks ... Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day. You can download my slides+samples below: General Session The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here . In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code. You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here . I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support - which you can learn more about here . I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework - which you can learn more about here . I also showed off the new Hard Rock Memorabilia site built with Silverlight 2. You can try out the Hard Rock application yourself here . You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here . Building .NET Applications with Silverlight The slides + demos for Silverlight breakout talk can be downloaded here . You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here . In particular, I recommend reading my tutorial posts here and here . ASP.NET MVC The slides + demos for my ASP.NET MVC talk can be downloaded here . You can learn more about the latest ASP.NET MVC source refresh here . Stephen Walther also just posted a really good set of slides + demos from his post conference tutorial on ASP.NET MVC here . Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| Talks: Pure AJAX Talk from ASP.NET Connections Orlando ... Thank you everyone who came to my Building "Pure" Ajax Applications talk in Orlando! Here are the performance results recorded during the talk: Server-Side ASP.NET : 2,884 bytes (response size) Server-Side ASP.NET AJAX (Update Panel) : 1,663 bytes (response size) Client-Side AJAX (with Web Service Call) : 778 bytes (response size) Here is a link to the updated PowerPoint slides: Pure Ajax PowerPoint Slides Finally, here is the code for the different approaches discussed during the talk: Talk Code The talk code includes the pure declarative client-side control sample. This sample also demonstrates how to create templates that can be parsed and used entirely on the client. | Go |
| The square of the sum vs. the sum of the squares ... The sixth Project Euler problem poses an exercise that, to me, offers no major hurdles: What is the difference between the sum of the squares and the square of the sums [of a sequence of natural numbers]? The functional C# solution is fairly easy to write and read: 1 public int SquareSumsLessSumSquares(IEnumerable <int > sequence) 2 { 3 var sum = sequence.Sum(); 4 var sumSquares = sequence.Select(i => i * i).Sum(); 5 return sum * sum - sumSquares; 6 } We get any sequence of integers (list, array, etc.) and we find the sum of its elements at line 3. The Select() in line 4 generates a new sequence with the square of each item from the original sequence and then we add them up. From there, getting the answer to Problem 6 is easy. Actually, the specific value that the problem asks for is to find out this difference for the first 100 natural numbers, so the corresponding call is: var result006 = SquareSumsLessSumSquares(Enumerable .Range(1, 100)); Now, given that the sequence we are focused on is 1, 2, 3, ..., 100, we can leverage a couple of math formulas: y Isn't the Wikipedia something? With this information in our hands we can re-write our solution this way: 1 public int SquareSumsLessSumSquaresFirstNumbers(int n) 2 { 3 var sum = n * (n + 1) / 2; 4 var sumSquares = n * (n + 1) * (2 * n + 1) / 6; 5 return sum * sum - sumSquares; 6 } Clearly this latter way of solving the problem uses far less memory and CPU time. My first solution follows what is called a "brute force" approach, contemption intended. It works, for sure, but there are more elegant and efficient ways of solving the problem. The moral of this story is that a little research can take us a long way towards fresh solutions, probably better than our first approach. How frequently have you seen brute force solutions in production environments? | Go |
| Interesting Finds: 2008.04.28 ... Web 51+ Best of jQuery Tutorials and Examples .NET GDIdotNETgames - a basis for 2D strategy games using Visual C# with .NET managed code and GDI+ ASP.NET MVC CSS Sprite Beautiful Code - Back To Basics - Please read this C code quickly My "Better Know a Framework" Talk at IndyCodeCamp Link Dew Drop - April 26, 2008 - Dew Drop - April 27, 2008 Interesting Finds: April 26, 2008 - Interesting Finds: April 27, 2008 | Go |
| Code Snippet - A new way to share your codes. ... Recently , we have added a new section at dotnetslackers by which you can share your code to public. Now, code snippets are tiny piece of code that can work as a unit, can come handy and be a real time-saver when building up complex solution or can be some interesting piece of lines which in turn can make out someone's day. To get started, lets go to www.dotnetslackers.com Navigate to Community -> Code snippets. Here, either you can browse snippets posted by others and share your comments or hit on the "Add new" button to make one by yourself. It will firstly direct you to the login page, if you are not logged in already. Finally, you will get a clean form to add your snippet and give some title, detail and tags for it and its done. Let us know, how do you feel about the new feature and what are the things you would love to see which will make it work for you. Anything you want to share, just write them down at http://dotnetslackers.com/community/forums/t/1823.aspx Enjoy!! | Go |
| Microsoft Health & Life Sciences Event Presentations ... Thanks to everyone who attended my AJAX Sessions at the Microsoft Health & Life Sciences Developer's Conference in Atlantic City last week. Here are links to the PowerPoints and Demos ASP.NET AJAX Security [Demo Code ] [PowerPoint Deck ] ASP.NET AJAX Patterns [Demo Code ] [PowerPoint Deck ] .... and here are links to the free ASP.NET Security Books from Microsoft Patterns and Practices. Building Secure ASP.NET Applications: Authentication, Authorization, and Secure Communication Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures Happy Reading. | Go |
| IconHandler 2.0: file icons in your ASP.NET applications ... Since its release, IconHandler has been a pretty popular module (on its own and with the custom DirectoryListingModule ). Today, I am releasing v2.0 of IconHandler, which contains some much-requested functionality and fixes a few issues that people have reported with the original version. Read all about it (and I mean all ) and download at http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2008/04/27/IconHandler-2.0-File-icons-in-ASP.NET-applications.aspx . Thanks, Mike Read More......(read more ) | Go |
| تحديث شيفرة المصدر للإصدارة الأولية من ASP.NET MVC ... مؤخراً قمنا بافتتاح مشروع جديد على ASP.NET CodePlex والذي سوف يدعم استعمال الإصدارات الأولية مع (شيفرة المصدر Source Code) لعدد من الإضافات والمزايا الجديدة المتعلقة بالـASP.NET. الشهر الماضي استعملنا هذا المشروع لإصدار النقطة الأولى في شيفرة المصدر لـ ASP.NET MVC . هذه النقطة احتوت على شيفرة المصدر للإصدارة الأولية الثانية والتي شحنت خلال حدث MIX بالإضافة إلى ملفات المشاريع الخاصة بالـ Visual Studio والتي تمكنك من إصلاح وبناء هذه النسخة بنفسك.
قبل بضعة ساعات قمنا بإصدار تحديث لكود المصدرلـ ASP.NET MVC على الموقع ، هذا التحديث ليس إصدارة أولية جديدة من الـ ASP.NET MVC ، بل على العكس إنها نقطة مؤقتة تقدم نظرة إلى الوضع الحالي الذي وصلته شجرة المصدر. سوف يتم شحن الإصدار الأولية الثالثة من الـ ASP.NET MVC خلال عدة أسابيع قادمة بعد أن يتم الانتهاء من بعض الأعمال (مزايا جديدة والتحسين على بعض المزايا الموجودة ، تحسينات على التوافق مع VS ، دعم لـ VS express edition ، التوثيق ... الخ). إذا كنت تريد تنصيب نسخة ASP.NET MVC خالية من العيوب مع التوثيق والدعم فعليك أن تنتظر على الأرجح لحين إصدار النسخة الرسمية من هذه الإصدارة الأولية. وأما إذا ممن يحبون أن يحصلوا على فرصة مبكرة للنظر إلى" نسخة أولية من النسخة الأولية"وأن يكون لك الفرصة في أن تبدأ باستعمال وإبداء آرائك بخصوص بعض المزايا مباشرة فالنظر إلى هذا التحديث لشيفرة المصدر سيكون ممتعاً.
التحسينات على هذا التحديث لشيفرة المصدر لـ ASP.NET MVC
إن تحديثات هذا الأسبوع (والتي يمكنك أن تقوم بتحميلها من هنا ) تحتوي على عدد من التحسينات على الـ ASP.NET MVC. بعضها يشتمل على:
بالإضافة إلى وجود شيفرة المصدر لـهيكل ASP.NET MVC قمنا أيضاً بوضع شيفر المصدر لاختبارات الوحدة unit test التي يمكنك استعمالها، هذه الاختبارات أعدت بواسطة الـ MSTest وهيكل Moq مفتوح المصدر. كما وتم وضع ملف مشروع VS2008 لاختبارات الوحدة لتسهيل بناء وتشغيل الاختبارات من خلال بيئة التطوير المتكاملة VS2008 .
بشكل ملحوظ تم دعم اختبارات دوال الـ Controllers . مما يمكنك من اختبار السيناريوهات الشائعة لـ Controllers دون أن يـتوجــب عليك ختبار أية objects (المزيد من التفصيل عن كيفية عمل ذلك تأتي لاحقا )
مجموعة من المزايا الإضافية الجميلة وتحسينات على نظام تحويل العناوين URL routing تساعد على سهولة الاستخدام(التفاضيل في الأسفل).
إنشاء مشروع جديد لـ ASP.NET MVC:
يمنكن أن تقوم ببناء نسختتك الخاصة من ASP.NET MVC من الملفات التنفيذية assembly بتحميل شيفرة المصدر لـ MVC ومن ثم تجميعها compile على جهازك الخاص. أو بدلاً من ذلك يمكنك أن تقوم بتحميل حزمة القوالب الخاصة بـ VS لتبدأ بنسخة مبنية بشكل مسبق لتسعملها عن طريق الـ VS والذي يمكنك وبشكل سريع بأن تبني مشروع ASP.NET MVC جديداً لتستعمل آخر التحديثات.
بعد أن تقوم بتنصيب تحديث شيفرة المصدر لـ ASP.NET MVC ، ستلاحظ وجود "برنامج ASP.NET MVC" مندرجا تحت جزء "قوالبي الخاصة" في شاشة "مشروع جديد"
هذه النسخة الجديدة من "قوالبي الخاصة" التي تخص قوالب مشروع MVC ستدوم مع وجود النسخة الأولية الثانية من ASP.NET MVC (والتي ستجدها مندرجة تحت قائمة القوالب الأساسية في الشاشة ). هذا يسمح لك ببناء مشاريع جديدة وأيضاً باستعمال آخر إصدارة من من شيفرة المصدر وأيضاً باستعمال آخر إصدارة رسمية من الإصدارات المبدئية على نفس الجهاز.
عندما تقوم بإنشاء مشروع جديد باستخدام النسخة المحدثة من قالب مشروع الـ ASP.NET MVC ، يمكنك بشكل أساسي أن تحصل على مشروع يظهر بهذا الشكل:
هذا المشروع الجديد يحتوي على متحكم Controller واحد ("Home Controller ") تحت مجلد "Controllers" كما ويحتوي على قوالب لشاشاتين views هما ("Index" و"About") تحت المجلد الفرعي "Views\Home". كلا هذان القالبان يعتمدان على شاشة رئيسية عامة واحدة لهذا الموقع تسمى ("Site.master")، كل ملفات الـ style تعرف في ملف "Site.css" وتندرج تحت مجلد "\Content".
عندما تقوم بتشغيل البرنامج في إن خادم الويب المدمج سوف يقوم وبشكل أتوماتيكي بالبدء وسوف يظهرصفحة البداية home في الموقع.
إذا قمت بالضغط على "About us" سوف تظهر محتوى شاشة "About":
إن دالة المتحكم بصفحة البداية "Home controller" في هذا المشروع هي المسؤولة عن معالجة كلا العنوانين URLs وسوف يحتوي على خوارزميتين كالآتي
إن قالب الصفحة الرئيسية "Site.master" يبحث عن قيمة "Title" في مجموعة الـ ViewData ويستعملها لعرض عنصر الـ <title> في صفحة الـ HTML. إن قالب شاشة "Index" يبحث أيضاً عن قيمة "Message" ويست | Go |
