| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Download xml file from web services ... how to download xml file from web services | Go |
| ASP.NET JSON Sample ... Download code A sample application written in ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX, C# that call a web service via an AJAX call that return a JSON object. JavaScript eval() method get used to convert the string to a JavaScript object. | Go |
| Debugging ASP.NET - Irish Style ... All the tools and methodologies in existence will not make the slightest bit of difference if your mindset and approach are out of whack for the job at hand. | Go |
| Has Microsoft Killed RSS? ... With the release of Microsoft .NET 3.5 the .NET framework finally comes with native support for web content syndication, and provides the ability to parse and generate Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndicated content. But some issues may lead to a move away from RSS to Atom. | Go |
| MVC UI Validation Framework ... Initial stab at an integrated UI Validation framework for ASP.NET MVC. | Go |
| Another .NET Google Charts API Wrapper ... I know there are other C# Google Chart solutions out there but none of them seemed to accomplish what I needed for my particular situation. They all seem to be geared towards generating simple graphs from a small static data set. | Go |
| RECAP: ASP.NET Blog Chat ... Recap of the Blog Chat around ASP.NET | Go |
| Webforms is dead. Long live MVC! ... WebForms are now legacy. Enjoy your MVC koolaid! | Go |
| How to set an IIS Application or AppPool to use ASP.NET 3.5 rather tha ... Includes good description of what is included in the different versions of the .NET framework. | Go |
| Accessing HTML elements in ASP.Net 2.0 ... With the introduction of .Netframework 2.0 there are lots of new features added. One such thing is accessing HTML elements programmatically, meaning in Codebehind class. This gives us the power of handling some of the html elements dynamically which will be really useful in some scenarios. | Go |
| Matt Berseth: Building a VS2008 Styled Grid with the ListView ... Great article from Matt Berseth | Go |
| ASP.NET Blog Chat ... Blog chat about ASP.NET and Debugging at 10:00 AM EST/4:00 PM CET | Go |
| How to easily insert row in GridView with SqlDataSource? ... Asp.Net 2.0 GridView control is very powerful control. Developers at Microsoft really did a great job when designing it.
Its like Swiss Army knife for selecting, editing, sorting, paging and displaying data.
Combined with various DataSource controls (ObjectDataSource, SqlDataSource) it helps you execute most of your Read, Update and Delete operations without writing a single line of code.
Off course, nothing is perfect. For example, creating new data is is one common task that is not so simple to accomplish with GridView.
Let see how we can easily insert new rows of data using GridView and SqlDataSource... | Go |
| ASP.Net dynamic update of web.config without loosing comments ... I used to think you could not dynamically rewrite config files and keep comments still intact. But I discovered recently this was very possible. Read to find out how to do this! | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| C# and VB .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Live Services, Google and other Web 2.0 APIs | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Action Filter - Caching and Compression - Kazi Manzur Rashid's Blog | Go |
| Using jQuery to Consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services | Encosia | Go |
| inline asp.net tags... sorting them all out (<%$, <%=, <%, <%#, etc.) | Go |
| Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC Part - 1 | Go |
| SingingEels : Real-Time Progress Bar With ASP.NET AJAX | Go |
| CodeProject: ASP.NET Internals: Viewstate and Page Life Cycle. Free source code and programming help | Go |
| iridescence.no: Defining Routes using Regular Expressions in ASP.NET MVC | Go |
| acts_as_aspdotnet (a Ruby on Rails Plugin) | Go |
| Scott on Writing - Security tutorials | Go |
| Security Tutorials : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site | Go |
| ASP.NET Debugging : Hangs and how to solve them - part 1 - Deadlocks | Go |
| Silverlight Charts | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| Unit Testing with Silverlight ... One of the important capabilities we shipped with the Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 was a unit test harness that enables you to perform both API-level and UI-level unit testing. This testing harness is cross browser and cross platform, and can be used to quickly run and verify automated unit tests: In addition to shipping this unit test harness for Silverlight, we also shipped the source to ~2,000 unit tests built with it that provide automated coverage for the Silverlight control source that we also shipped under a permissive license (you can take the control source, modify it, run the unit tests to verify the behavior, then re-ship the controls however you want). Learning How to Unit Test Silverlight Jeff Wilcox (who developed the Silverlight unit test framework and harness) has a great blog post that talks about how to add a Silverlight Unit Test project to a solution here . You can download the chat application that he shows testing from this expression blend blog post tutorial I did last month. You can also watch this cool video post that Jeff created where he walks through the unit test framework and test cases we've shipped. As Jeff shows in his post, you can now add a "Silverlight Test Project" to your Visual Studio solution which encapsulates unit tests for an application you are working on: You can then add unit test classes to the test project that test APIs or simulate UI action within the Silverlight controls (simulate button clicks, etc). You can then run the test project and execute the tests within it to verify and report their status. Jeff's test framework automatically provides a browser based test harness and reporting system (which means you can run it on any browser/OS combination that Silverlight runs on): Jeff's test framework supports quickly re-setting controls after each test (and avoids needing to re-launch a new browser instance for each test cases - which makes it really fast). You can quickly rip through hundreds or thousands of automated tests in seconds: Green results mean the tests passed. Red results flag that a test case failed and log the assertion failure and/or runtime exceptions that occurred. Summary If you've ever struggled to try and come up with a strategy for doing automated unit testing or TDD with AJAX applications, I think you'll find Silverlight provides some much nicer test options. Using Visual Studio you can also separate your tests into a separate project in your solution, and you do not need to embed the tests within your Silverlight application in order for them to run. In addition to supporting the above unit test harness and framework, we are also going to support UI automation APIs with the final release of Silverlight 2. These will enable accessibility scenarios (allowing screen readers to work with Silverlight and enable Section 508 compliance of Silverlight applications). These UI automation APIs will also enable UI testing scenarios where you can build end to end browser UI automation that simulates real mouse and keyboard interactions and enables automated end to end experience testing. The combination should enable you to build much more solid and maintainable RIA solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. For more tutorial posts and links on Silverlight 2, check out my new "Silverlight Tips, Tricks, Tutorials and Links" page. | Go |
| March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Three New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available : Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials . These three new ones cover creating and managing roles, assigning roles to users, and implementing role based authorization. You can also find more security articles by reading posts on my blog tagged with security . .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 APIs : Scott Hanselman's latest "weekly source code" review looks at .NET APIs that you can use to call popular web 2.0 services. Hangs and how to Solve Them (Part 1) and (Part 2) : Tom has some useful posts that talk about deadlocks and request queuing in ASP.NET, and how to detect and debug what might be causing them. ASP.NET AJAX Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Part 1) , (Part 2) , and (Part 3) : Mike Ormond has started a nice blog post series that talks about how to build ASP.NET AJAX Controls. Make sure to check out Part 2 - Components and Part 3 - Properties and Events as well. New ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos : Joe Stagner has published a number of new ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos. Learn about the re-order control , retrieving values from server-side AJAX controls , two techniques for triggering updates to update panels , and using the cascading drop down control . Real-Time Progress Bar with ASP.NET AJAX: SingingEels shows a technique for displaying real-time progress notifications using AJAX as a long-lived activity runs on the server. Using JQuery to Consume ASP.NET AJAX JSON Web Services : Dave Ward has a nice post that describes how to use the JQuery AJAX library on the client to call an ASP.NET Web Service on the server that is JSON enabled (using ASP.NET AJAX on the server). ASP.NET MVC Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC : Kazi Manzur Rashid published an excellent Digg-clone sample built with ASP.NET MVC last February. He recently updated the code to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 (full details here ). You can download the latest version of his source code here . ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET Request : Stephen Walther has a great post that details the exact steps that occur when an ASP.NET MVC request executes. ASP.NET MVC Action Filters - Caching and Compression : Kazi Manzur Rashid has another great post that shows how to use the new ActionFilterAttribute support in ASP.NET MVC to implement output caching and compression attributes. Read this quickstart article to learn more about how Action Filters work, or watch Scott Hanselman's video that covers them. Defining Routes using Regular Expressions with ASP.NET MVC : Someone asked me the other day how to use regular expressions to define route rules with ASP.NET MVC. Turns out Fredrik Kalseth already has a nice sample that shows how to-do this. Testing with the ASP.NET MVC Framework : Simone Chiaretta has a great article that discusses how to test controllers using ASP.NET MVC Preview 2. Note: the next ASP.NET MVC preview release will include a number of refactorings that will simplify controller testing considerably (and avoid the need to mock anything for common scenarios). Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio 2008 Unit Tests : Stephen Walther has a really nice post that describe how the unit testing features now built-in VS 2008 Professional work (using an ASP.NET MVC project). Also check out Stephen's excellent Introduction to Rhino Mocks blog post that describes how to use the open source Rhino Mocks framework with VS unit test projects. Visual Studio VS 2008 Web Deployment Hot-Fix Roll-Up Now Available for non-English Languages: Last month we shipped a hot-fix release that fixes a number of bugs, adds a few features, and improves performance for web development scenarios in VS 200 | Go |
| New Log Reporting, Database Management, and other cool admin modules for IIS 7 ... One of the core priorities we focused on when building IIS 7 was to enable a rich .NET extensibility model that provides developers with the hooks to easily plug-in and extend the web server. These extensibility hooks are provided in the web-server pipeline (enabling scenarios like the new IIS7 Bit Rate Throttler ), within the configuration system (enabling developers to create new web.config schema settings), within the health monitoring system (enabling developers to add custom trace events), and within the admin tool (enabling developers to plug-in new admin UI modules). We added these extensibility hooks so that anyone can easily extend and enhance the web server using .NET. We also selfishly wanted them so that we can ship regular feature packs that add additional features to the core web server. IIS 7 Admin Pack Preview 1 Released Last week the IIS team shipped the first technical preview of some really cool administration modules that I think web developers will find super useful. This preview adds several new features to the IIS7 Admin Tool: Database Manager : Built-in SQL Server database management, including the ability to create, delete, and edit tables and indexes, create/edit SPROCs and execute custom queries. Because it is integrated in the IIS administration tool it all works over HTTP/SSL - which means you can use the module to remotely manage your hosted applications (even with low-cost shared hosting accounts), without having to expose your database directly on the Internet. Log Reports : Built-in report visualization with charting support for log files data. Full range selection and custom chart creation is supported, as well as the ability to print or save reports. Like the database manager you can use this module remotely over HTTP/SSL - which means it works in remote shared hosting scenarios. Configuration Editor: This is a power module that provides complete control over editing all web.config settings within the admin tool. You can configure it to track the changes you make using the UI and have it auto-generate configuration change scripts that you can then save and tweak to re-run later in an automated way. Request Filtering UI: This admin module provides more control over the new request filtering feature in IIS7. Check out Carlos' blog post here for details on how to use it. .NET Authorization: This admin module provides a custom authorization rules editor which allows you to more easily manage the ASP.NET <authorization> configuration section. FastCGI UI: This admin module provides more support for editing all the new <fastCGI> settings (for when you use FastCGI modules with IIS7 like PHP). Below are some screen-shots and simple walkthroughs of the Log Reporting and Database Manager administration UI modules: Log Reporting Admin Module Have you ever deployed a web application onto a server and wondered how much load it is getting?, what the average response time from the server is?, or whether many server errors are occurring (and if so on what URLs)? All of these settings are carefully logged by IIS in a text based log file. Today most people use command-line tools like the IIS Log Parser utility to query and analyze these files. The IIS 7 Admin Pack and the new "IIS Reports" admin module now enable you to also query and chart your reports graphically within the IIS admin tool: Out of the box the "IIS Reports" admin module comes with a bunch of pre-built logparser-based reports that you can easily run on your sites and applications: Below is a simple graphical report we could pull up that looks at the HTTP status codes being returned by my "TestSite" application (note how we are using the "bar graph" visualization option): Reports can optionally be filtered using a date range. You can also push the print or save buttons within the report page to generate a printer or a local saved version of the report. The IIS7 Admin To | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available ... Last month I blogged about our ASP.NET MVC Roadmap . Two weeks ago we shipped the ASP.NET Preview 2 Release . Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team published a good blog post about the release here . Scott Hanselman has created a bunch of great ASP.NET MVC tutorial videos that you can watch to learn more about it here .
One of the things I mentioned in my MVC roadmap post was that we would be publishing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and enable it to be easily built, debugged, and patched (so that you can work around any bugs you encounter without having to wait for the next preview refresh release).
Today we opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex project that we'll be using to share buildable source for multiple upcoming ASP.NET releases. You can now directly download buildable source and project files for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release here .
Building the ASP.NET MVC Framework
You can download a .zip file containing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework for the release page here . When you extract the .zip file you can drill into its "MVC" sub-folder to find a VS 2008 solution file for the project:
Double-clicking it will open the MVC project containing the MVC source within VS 2008:
When you do a build it will compile the project and output a System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly under a \bin directory at the top of the .zip directory. You can then copy this assembly into a project or application and use it.
Note: the license doesn't enable you to redistribute your custom binary version of ASP.NET MVC (we want to avoid having multiple incompatible ASP.NET MVC versions floating around and colliding with each other). But it does enable you to make fixes to the code, rebuild it, and avoid getting blocked by an interim bug you can't work around.
Next Steps
Our plans are to release regular drops of the source code going forward. We'll release source updates every time we do official preview drops. We will also release interim source refreshes in between the preview drops if you want to be able to track and build the source more frequently.
We are also hoping to ship our unit test suite for ASP.NET MVC in the future as well (right now we use an internal mocking framework within our tests, and we are still doing some work to refactor this dependency before shipping them as well).
Hope this helps,
Scott | Go |
| IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module Released ... Video on the web is now one of those common scenarios that every user takes for granted, and increasingly every major site is incorporating in some form (product videos, training videos, richer advertising scenarios, user generated content, customer testimonials, etc).
One of the challenges when adding video to a site, though, is delivering it in a way that doesn't cost a fortune. Network bandwidth costs a lot of money, and the cost of high quality video usage can quickly add up.
The blog post below provides a quick overview of some of the options you can use to reduce the cost of delivering video, and discusses a new free download - the IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module - that was released a few days ago and which enables you to easily save money when serving video from an IIS web server using any video technology (including Silverlight, Windows Media Player and even Flash).
Option 1: Using a Video Hosting Service
One approach you can take to reduce video bandwidth costs is to use a video hosting service like YouTube or the free Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service . This allows you to use someone else's network to deliver the video content, and avoid having to pay the bandwidth costs yourself.
If you aren't familiar with the Silverlight Streaming service, it allows you to upload up to 10GB of videos and download 5 Terabytes/month of video content (at up to a 1.4 Mbps bit-rate) for free. You can build any custom Silverlight client player application you want to embed the video within it. This means it doesn't require a specific video player look and feel, nor a service logo/watermark to play the video. This allows you to fully integrate the video into your site and use whatever UI you want to host it.
Option 2: Hosting Video on Your Own Servers
Sometimes using a video hosting service doesn't make sense (for example: you want to use custom authentication to grant/deny user's access, you want to play really long video segments, or you want to serve up custom ads in your videos). Instead you might want to serve the video up from your own servers and have complete control over it.
There are typically two options you can use to deliver the video from your servers: using a streaming approach or a progressive video download approach:
Streaming Server Scenario
In a streaming scenario a client (like Silverlight, Windows Media Player, Flash or Real Networks) connects to a streaming server. The streaming server then sends down the video stream to watch, and typically enables a user to dynamically skip ahead/behind, pause or stop the video stream. When the user closes the browser or navigates away from the page the video stream automatically stops transmitting.
Windows Media Services (WMS) is a free streaming server download available for Windows, and can stream video to both Windows Media Player and cross-platform Silverlight browser clients. It is generally regarded as the most server scalable and cost effective way to enable video streaming on the web, and handles both on-demand file streaming scenarios (for example: streaming a .wmv file) as well as live stream scenarios (for example: a sporting event like the Olympics that is happening live in real time).
Windows Media Services can be used on any version of Windows Server - including the new Windows Server 2008 Web Server edition (which only costs $469, enables up to 4 processors and 32GB of RAM, and supports IIS, ASP.NET, SharePoint, and Windows Media Services).
Progressive Download Scenario
In a progressive download scenario a client (like Flash or Silverlight) downloads a video directly off of a web-server, and begins playing it once enough video is downloaded for it to play smoothly.
The benefit of using a progressive download approach is that it is super easy to setup on a web-server. Just copy/ftp a video up to a web-server, obtain a URL to it, and you can wire it up to a video client player. It doesn't require any custom web-server configurat | Go |
| March 14th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and .NET ... I'm slowly recovering from keynoting at MIX last week, and have been digging my way out of backlogged email the last few days. I'm going to try and finish catching up on blog comments this weekend - apologies for the delay in getting back to some of your questions. To kick-start my blogging again I thought I'd post a new link-listing series . Today's post is mostly focused on ASP.NET and web related links. I'm going to be doing more Silverlight and WPF posts soon. ASP.NET Tag Cloud Filters with ASP.NET 3.5's LinqDataSource and ListView Controls : Matt Berseth has a cool post that shows off using LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET 3.5 to build a tag-cloud navigation UI. Five New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available : Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials . These 5 new ones (all in both VB and C#) cover using the ASP.NET membership system. Building a Vista Style Folder Browser with ASP.NET 3.5 and a Custom Hierarchical DataSource Control: Matt Berseth continues his great posts with a nice one that shows how to build a custom HierarchicalDataSourceControl to implement file browsing functionality using ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Release: David Anson blogs about a new ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit release that the team made right before MIX. This release includes a number of patches (including a bunch from the community) with bug fixes and improvements in a bunch of areas. LinkedIn Style Theme for the ASP.NET AJAX Tab Container Control: Matt Berseth posts some cool new themes you can use with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's tab control. ASP.NET AJAX In-Depth: Object Inheritance : Stephen Walther, author of the recently published ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed book , posts an incredibly in-depth article about how object inheritance is handled with ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX In-Depth: Creating JavaScript Properties: Stephen Walther continues his series with an in-depth article discussing how JavaScript Properties are handled with ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX In-Depth: Application Events : Yes another Stephen Walther article discussing how application events are handled with ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX Localization Slides and Code: Joel Rumerman has a nice post with samples + slides about how the localization features in ASP.NET AJAX work. JScript Intellisense: working with Ext JS : The VS web tools team enabled JQuery intellisense last month with the VS 2008 Web Development hot fix . In this more recent post they talk about enabling intellisense support for Ext JS (another popular JavaScript framework). VS 2008 Intellisense support for Prototype is coming in the next few weeks. JavaScript Intellisense for the Virtual Earth Map Control: Marc Schweigert is driving a project to add great VS 2008 JavaScript intellisense support for the Virtual Earth Map Control. Check out his video and visit his codeplex project to learn more. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Preview 2: Last week at MIX the ASP.NET team shipped a second preview release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. This release has a number of improvements in it (see my earlier MVC roadmap post that covers some of them). Watch the Scott Hanselman videos on the http://www.asp.net/mvc page, as well as the quickstart samples to learn more. Thoughts on ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Beyond : Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team has a great post where he talks about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release, as well as some of the features and work that will show up in the next preview drop. One of the major focuses in Preview 3 will be improvements to the testing workflow of controllers. Cheesy Northwind Sample Code: Scott Hanselman has posted a sample application that shows building a simple data driven application using the ASP.NET MVC Framework and the Northwind sample database. Securing Your Controller Actions : Rob Conery shows how to use the new ASP.NET MVC ActionFilterAttribute feature to apply declarative secu | Go |
| My Presentations in Arizona this Tuesday ... Update: You can now download the slides + demos I used during my talks. Click here for the Silverlight Talk . Click here for the MVC Talk .
This week I'm visiting Scottsdale Arizona and will be presenting at a free user group event during the day. I'm presenting two sessions myself:
1) Developing Applications using Silverlight 2 : This will be a drill-down into the new Silverlight 2 Beta1 release, and how you can build applications with it using VS 2008 and Expression Blend. You'll leave this session with a good understanding of the basics of Silverlight programming and how to start building applications with it.
2) Developing Applications using ASP.NET MVC : This session will be a drill-down into the new ASP.NET Model-View-Controller framework option (which last week was updated . You'll leave this session with a good understanding of what it is, how it works, and how to start building ASP.NET web applications with it.
In addition to my sessions above, there will also be great sessions at the event from Microsoft employees on "Consuming Web Services with Microsoft Silverlight", "Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight", and "Serving Applications with Microsoft Silverlight Streaming".
You can sign up and attend the sessions for free. Click here for more details on the events, and click here to register online to attend.
Hope to see some of you there,
Scott | Go |
| First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2 ... Last week I did a First Look at Silverlight 2 post that talked about the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta1 release. In the post I linked to some end-to-end tutorials I've written that walk through some of the fundamental programming concepts behind Silverlight and WPF, and demonstrate how to use them to build a "Digg Search Client" application using Silverlight:
Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008
Part 2: Using Layout Management
Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid
Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel
Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data
Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details Scenarios
Part 7: Using Templates to Customize Control Look and Feel
Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Version of our Application using WPF
In this first set of Silverlight tutorials I didn't use a visual design tool to build the UI, and instead focused on showing the underlying XAML UI markup (which I think helps to explain the core programming concepts better). Now that we've finished covering the basics - let's explore some of the tools we can use to be even more productive.
Expression Blend Support for Silverlight
In addition to releasing the upcoming Beta1 of Silverlight 2, we are also going to ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support for targeting it. These tools will offer a ton of power for building RIA solutions, and are designed to enable developers and designers to easily work on projects together.
In today's post I'm going to introduce some of the features in the upcoming Expression Blend 2.5 March preview. After demonstrating some of the basics of how Blend works, we are going to use it to build a cross-platform, cross-browser Silverlight IM chat client:
The above screen-shot shows what the application looks like at runtime on a Mac. Below is a screen-shot of what it looks like at design-time within Expression Blend:
We'll use Expression Blend to graphically construct all of the UI for the application, as well as use it to cleanly data-bind the UI to .NET classes that represent our chat session and chat messages.
<Download Code> Click here to download a completed version of this sample. </Download Code>
All of the controls we'll use to build the chat application are built into Beta1 of Silverlight 2.
Disclaimer: I am not a designer (nor am I cool)
Let me say up front that I am a developer and not a designer. I'm also not very cool. While I understand the techniques to create UI, I sometimes choose bad colors and fonts when putting it together (only after I did all the screen-shots for this post did a co-worker helpfully point out that there is actually a site dedicated to banning some of the fonts and colors I used . Ouch).
For those of you with artistic skill out there - please be gentle with me and focus your attention on the features and techniques I demonstrate below, rather than on the font and color choices I use. :-)
Getting Started: Creating a new Silverlight 2 Project
Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008 share the same solution/project file format, which means that you can create a new Silverlight project in VS 2008 and then open it in Expression Blend, or you can create a new Silverlight project in Expression Blend and open it in VS. You can also have both Expression Blend and VS 2008 open and editing the same project as the same time.
Since in my previous Silverlight tutorial series I already showed how to create a new Silverlight project using VS 2008, let's use this post to show how to create a new Silverlight application using Expression Blend. To do this, simply choose File->New Project in Expression Blend, select the "Silverlight 2 Application" icon, and click ok:
This will create a new (VS-compatible) solution file and Silverlight application project:
Blend includes a full WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight 2 appli | Go |
| First Look at Silverlight 2 ... Last September we shipped Silverlight 1.0 for Mac and Windows , and announced our plans to deliver Silverlight on Linux. Silverlight 1.0 focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser, and supports a JavaScript/AJAX programming model.
We are shortly going to release the first public beta of Silverlight 2, which will be a major update of Silverlight that focuses on enabling Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. This is the first of several blog posts I'll be doing over the weeks and months ahead that talk in more depth about it.
Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development
Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby). We will ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer / designer workflow and integration when building Silverlight applications.
This upcoming Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 provides a rich set of features for RIA application development. These include:
WPF UI Framework : Silverlight 2 includes a rich WPF-based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier. In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning. The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications.
Rich Controls : Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. This upcoming Beta1 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). The built-in controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions.
Rich Networking Support : Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support. It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services. It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web). Beta1 also includes built-in sockets networking support.
Rich Base Class Library : Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code. It also includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support. The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.
Silverlight 2 does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer in order to run. The Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to enable all the above features (and more we'll be talking about shortly) on a vanilla Mac OSX or Windows machine.
The Beta1 release of Silverlight 2 is 4.3MB in size, and takes 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it. Once Silverlight 2 is installed you can browse the Web and automatically run rich Silverlight applications within your browser of choice (IE, FireFox, Safari, etc).
Silverlight 2 Tutorials: Building A Simple Digg Client
To help people come up to speed with Silverlight 2, I wrote a Silverlight application and put to | Go |
| .NET 3.5 Client Product Roadmap ... A few months ago I did a .NET Web Product Roadmap blog post where I outlined some of the product plans we have to build on top of the web development features we’ve shipped with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Over the next few months we will also be releasing a number of enhancements specific to client development as well. We have put a lot of effort into addressing some of the biggest areas of customer feedback, while also trying to really push the envelope on the capabilities developers have when building Windows applications. All of these improvements build on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, and will make .NET client development even better going forward. Below is a roadmap of some of the upcoming releases we have planned for the months ahead: Improved .NET Framework Setup for Client Applications One of the biggest asks we’ve had over the years from customers and ISVs building client applications is to make the setup and installation of the .NET Framework easier and faster. This summer we are going to ship a new setup framework for .NET that makes it easier to build optimized setup packages for client applications. This setup framework can be integrated with existing installation frameworks (for example: products like InstallShield), and enables a smaller and faster end-user setup experience of the .NET Framework. Windows Forms and WPF client applications will be able to use this setup framework to cleanly “bootstrap” getting the .NET Framework installed onto machines. The setup “bootstrap” utility will support automatically downloading the minimal set of .NET Framework packages needed to enable .NET 3.5 client applications on a machine. For example, if a user already has .NET 2.0 installed on their machine, setup will be smart enough to automatically download only the upgrade patches necessary to update .NET 2.0 to 3.5 (and not have to re-download the components already provided by .NET 2.0). This will significantly shrink the payload size of client setup programs, and speed up the installation experience. We’ll also be delivering improvements that enable a more integrated application install experience for both MSI and ClickOnce based solutions, and support a more consumer friendly user experience that is easy to build. Improved Working Set and Startup Improvements for .NET Client Applications One of the other common asks we receive is to enable .NET client applications to launch faster in “cold startup” scenarios. “Cold startup” scenarios occur when no other .NET client applications are running (or have recently run) on a machine, and require the OS to load lots of pages (code, static data, registry, etc) from disk. If you are loading a large .NET client application or library, or are using a slow disk, these cold startup scenarios can require many seconds for your application to start. This summer we are going to ship a servicing update to the CLR that makes some significant internal optimizations in how we optimize our data structures to cut down on disk IO and improve memory layout when loading and running applications. Among many other benefits, this work will significantly improve the working set and cold startup performance of .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 applications and will dramatically improve end-user experiences with .NET-based client applications. Depending on the size of the application, we expect .NET applications to realize a cold startup performance improvement of between 25-40%. Applications do not need to change any code, nor be recompiled, in order to take advantage of these improvements so the benefits are automatic. WPF Performance Improvements This summer we are also planning to release a servicing update to WPF that includes a bunch of performance optimizations that improve its text, graphics, media and data stack. These include: - Moving the DropShadow and Blur bitmap effects, which are currently software rendered, to be hardware acc | Go |
| Feb 17th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications : Kyle has a nice post that summarizes a number of good best practices to follow when deploying your ASP.NET applications into production. Paging Through Data with the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView and DataPager Controls : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on the new ASP.NET 3.5 data control features. In this latest article he shows how to page using the ListView and DataPager controls. ASP.NET AJAX How to install and use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit in VS : Nannette Thacker has a nice post that details step-by-step how to install and use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit controls within Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer. JavaScript Stack Traces in ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Error Publishing using ASP.NET AJAX : Joel Rumerman has put together two nice posts that detail some god ways to capture JavaScript stack trace information, as well as to report JavaScript errors using ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX History Tutorials : Jonathan Carter has published a good series of tutorials that demonstrate how to use the new ASP.NET AJAX History support that we'll be shipping later this year (it is currently available in the ASP.NET Extensions CTP download). This enables you to add forward/back button navigation support within AJAX applications. Using JQuery with VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense : One of the improvements we shipped in our recent VS 2008 Hotfix Roll-Up last week was to address issues with JavaScript intellisense support for JQuery (another popular AJAX framework). Brennan Stehling, James Hart, and Lance Fisher have done blog posts recently that discuss how to enable even richer JQuery intellisense inside VS 2008 using intellisense-friendly JQuery libraries that are referenced while coding (and then swapped out for the real library at runtime). You can read their blog posts about how this works here and here and here . ASP.NET MVC Tip: Submitting an AJAX Form with JQuery : While on the subject of JQuery, I thought I'd link to a post in Mike Bosch's ASP.NET MVC series that shows how you can integrate JQuery in the browser on the client with the ASP.NET MVC framework on the server. Visual Studio Visual Studio Programmer Themes Gallery: Visual Studio enables you to customize the color settings of the text editor and IDE, as well as to export and import the settings (use the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu to do this). Scott Hanselman has a great post that provides previews of a bunch of cool pre-built themes that people have published that you can download and use for free. Did you know: the Solution Explorer Supports Type-Ahead Selection : Sara Ford has another nice post in her series on Visual Studio tips and tricks. This post talks about a shortcut you can use to quickly select files in the solution explorer. Code Profiler Analysis in VS 2008 : Maarten Balliauw has a nice post that describes how to use the code profiling features in the Developer edition of Visual Studio Team System to analyze code performance. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition Power Tools : Greg Duncan posts about the new power tools download that has been released by Microsoft and which delivers a bunch of cool new database development features for the Database editions of Visual Studio Team System. Japanese Release of VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects : Late last month I announced the release of the VS 2008 Web Deployment Project support. This past week the team also released a localized Japanese version of it. Note: you can read a Japanese translated version of my blog here (thanks Chica!). .NET LINQ to JSON , LINQ to SharePoint , LINQ to Active Directory , LINQ to TerraServer , LINQ to FlickR : Just a few of the new LINQ providers now available | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Framework Road-Map Update ... This past December we released the first preview of a new ASP.NET MVC Framework as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Release . I also wrote a number of blog posts that provide more detail on what the ASP.NET MVC framework is and how you can optionally use it: Introducing the ASP.NET MVC Framework ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 1) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 2: Url Routing) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 3: Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 4: Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios) We've had great feedback on the framework since then, and had a ton of downloads and excitement around it. One of the common questions people have asked me recently is "when will a new build be released and what will be in it?". The below post provides a few updates on what the ASP.NET MVC feature team has been working on, and some of the new features that will be available soon. I'm going to do a separate blog post in the future that will cover the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data and ASP.NET AJAX feature work that is progressing along nicely as well. All of these features (ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and the new ASP.NET AJAX improvements) will ship later this year and work with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. Upcoming ASP.NET MVC MIX Preview Release We are planning to release the next public preview of ASP.NET MVC at the MIX 08 conference in a few weeks. This build will be available for anyone on the web to download (you do not need to attend MIX to get it). We have incorporated a lot of early adopter feedback into this release. Below are some of the improvements that will appear with this next preview release: 1) The ASP.NET MVC Framework can be deployed in the \bin directory of an app and work in partial trust The first ASP.NET MVC preview release required a setup program to be run on machines in order for the System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly to be registered in the machine's GAC (global assembly cache). Starting with this upcoming preview release we will enable applications to instead directly reference the System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly from the application's \bin directory. This means that no setup programs need to be run on a sever to use the ASP.NET MVC Framework - you can instead just copy your application onto a remote ASP.NET server and have it run (no registration or extra configuration steps required). We are also doing work to enable the ASP.NET MVC framework to run in "partial/medium trust" hosting scenarios. This will enable you to use it with low-cost shared hosting accounts - without requiring the hosting provider to-do anything to enable it (just FTP your application up and and it will be good to run - they don't need to install anything). 2) Significantly enhanced routing features and infrastructure One of the most powerful features of the ASP.NET MVC framework is its URL routing engine (I covered some of these features here ). This upcoming ASP.NET MVC preview release contains even more URL routing features and enhancements. You can now use named routes (enabling explicit referencing of route rules), use flexible routing wildcard rules (enabling custom CMS based urls), and derive and declare custom route rules (enabling scenarios like REST resources mappings, etc). We have also factored out the URL routing infrastructure from the rest of the MVC framework with this preview, which enables us to use it for other non-MVC features in ASP.NET (including ASP.NET Dynamic Data and ASP.NET Web Forms). 3) Improved VS 2008 Tool Support The first ASP.NET MVC preview had only minimal VS 2008 support (basically just simple project template support). This upcoming ASP.NET MVC preview release will ship with improved VS 2008 integration. This includes better project item templates, automatic project default settings, etc. We are also adding a built-in "Test Framework" wizard that will automatically run when you create a new ASP.NET MVC Project via the File->New Pr | Go |
| VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available ... One of the things we are trying to do with VS 2008 is to more frequently release public patches that roll-up bug-fixes of commonly reported problems. Today we are shipping a hot-fix roll-up that addresses several issues that we've seen reported with VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 web scenarios. Hot Fix Details You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download). Below is a list of the issues it fixes: HTML Source view performance Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties. “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects. Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents. Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup. The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections. Design view performance Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations. HTML editing Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled. Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page. JavaScript editing When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds. JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing. JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used. Web Site build performance Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects. Installation Notes For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here . In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error). To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item. Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’. If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove". Summary Obviously it goes without saying that we would have liked to have shipped without any bugs. Hopefully this hot-fix enables you to quickly solve them if you are encountering them. Thank you to those who helped us identify the causes of these issues, as well as to the group of customers who have helped us verify the above fixes the last few weeks. Note: If you do encounter issues with VS 2008 features for web development in the future, I recommend always asking for help in the VS 2008 Forum on www.asp.net . The VS Web Tools team actively monitors this forum and can provide help. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| Feb 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, WPF ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET ASP.NET Security Tutorial Series : Scott Mitchell (who wrote the excellent Data Access Tutorial Series for us last year), has recently begun a new free tutorial series focused on ASP.NET Security. Today we published the first three article in the series on the www.asp.net site: ASP.NET Security Basics , Overview of Forms Authentication , and Forms Authentication Configuration and Advanced Topics . For even more ASP.NET Security Information, please check out the security tutorials I've also done on my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page . 10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Secrets : Omar Al Zabir, the CTO and co-founder of www.pageflakes.com (a Web 2.0 portal site built with ASP.NET), has written another in his excellent series of articles on ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX. This article discusses tips and tricks to maximize ASP.NET performance and scalability. To learn even more about how to build great sites using ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, make sure to read Omar's excellent new Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book. .NET Debugging Demos Lab : Tess Ferrandez, who is an ASP.NET escalation engineer for Microsoft support and who also posts incredible articles on the art of debugging production ASP.NET applications, has started a new tutorial series that provides a sample "buggy" application and a series of questions/problems you can work through to learn how to debug problem applications in production environments. 4 Alternative View Engines for ASP.NET MVC : The open source MvcContrib project has been adding lots of cool goodness on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Jeffrey Palermo posts about 4 alternative view rendering engines now in the project that you can use if you don't want to use the default .aspx based view engine. BTW - I'll be doing a new post on ASP.NET MVC within the next week talking about some of the cool new features coming soon with the next refresh. ASP.NET AJAX Boost ASP.NET Performance with Deferred Content Loading : Dave Ward continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX. This article talks about how you can improve the perceived load-time of a page by using an AJAX callback to retrieve HTML content once the page loads on the client. This approach is similar to the one I wrote about in my tip/trick post here . Build Yahoo UI Style Glowing Buttons with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit GlowButtonExtender Control: Matt Berseth continues his excellent series on using ASP.NET AJAX. In this post he discusses how to create cool glowing button effects. Visual Studio Resolving Namespaces and Removing Unused Using Statements : David Hayden has a nice article that discusses a few Visual Studio code editing features that developers often overlook. Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison : Several people have sent me email in the past asking for a page that describes the differences between the various Visual Studio 2008 editions (Standard, Professional, Visual Studio Team System, etc). This link is useful to bookmark if you want to learn more about this. Did you know...You can Shift+ESC to close a tool window: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know..." VS 2008 tips and tricks series. I confess I didn't know this one. One productivity tip I always recommend is to really learn the keyboard shortcuts of your development tool environment well - since using them over time can yield significant productivity savings. Click here to download a VB 2008 key bindings poster, or click here to download the C# 2008 key bindings poster equivalent. Print them out and put them under your pillow to absorb them while you sleep. .NET The Power of Yield : Joshua Flanagan has a nice article on one of the coolest, yet underused, feature of C# in .NET 2.0 | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Sorting a GridView bound to Custom Data Object ... This article presents a technique for sorting a GridView populated from a list of custom data objects. It relies on the ViewState and does not require additional calls to the database. | Go |
| GridView Tips and Tricks using ASP.NET 2.0 ... The article discusses ten tips and tricks that you can use while using the GridView control. | Go |
| Getting Started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework ... We have made a long journey from classic ASP to ASP.NET. But the journey is far from over. ASP.NET framework introduced code behind model which eliminated the spaghetti code written in classic ASP. Although the code behind model made the life of an ASP.NET developer comfortable but it was far from being perfect. The biggest drawback was not able to test the code written in the code behind. The model was also dependent on the ViewState and Postback which introduced many other issues related to web programming. Recently, Microsoft released the CTP version of the ASP.NET MVC framework that solves some of these issues. In this article we are going to take a look at the different aspects of the MVC framework by creating a small application. | Go |
| Accessing data using Language Integrated Query (LINQ) in ASP.NET WebPages – Part 2 ... Part 2, sequel and the last of the article Accessing data using Language Integrated Query(LINQ) in ASP.NET WebPages - Part 1 explains how to create entity classes to represent SQL Server database and tables using Object Relational Designer and display data in a web page using LinqDataSource control. | Go |
| Working with ADO.NET Schema APIs ... In majority of data driven applications developers deal with SQL queries that select, insert, update or delete data from the database. However, at times you need to retrieve schema information from the database. Suppose you are building applications that performs data import and export between two or more databases. As a good solution you would want to retrieve table schema at runtime rather than hard coding it. Luckily, ADO.NET provides a set of classes that allow you to query database schema. In this article I will illustrate how these classes work. | Go |
| Client Application Services: Getting Started ... Client Application Services simplifies the access to ASP.NET Application Services and thus helps in managing the user information, authentication, and authorization at a common place for both Web and Windows-based applications. | Go |
| Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ - Part 3 ... In the third part of this series, Keyvan talks about the data model in his simple blogging engine. He shows some concepts related to the LINQ side of the data model to retrieve data for the blogging engine in controllers and pass them to views with the help of screenshots and source code. | Go |
| Unit Testing ASP.NET Pages Using WatiN ... Unit testing is an integral part of the application design. Unit testing is applied at different levels of the application. In this article we will focus on the User Interface level unit testing. We will use WatiN to test our ASP.NET application. | Go |
| Supporting Complex Types in Property Window ... Whenever you set any property of a control in the property window, the property window needs to save this property value in the .aspx file. This process is known as code serialization. For properties that are of simple types (such as integer and string) this code serialization happens automatically. However, when property data types are user defined complex types then you need to do that work yourself. This is done via what is called as Type Converters. This article is going to examine what type converters are and how to create one for your custom control. | Go |
| Adding Multiple Rows in the GridView Control ... A while back an article was published on www.gridviewguy.com which explained how to add a single row at the bottom of the GridView control. You can read the article using this link. Many readers were interested in the idea of adding multiple rows to the GridView. This article explains how to add multiple rows to the GridView control. | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| AsynchronousProcessing ... An easier way to asynchronously process web page requests | Go |
| Index XML Documents with VTD-XML ... Introduce a simple, efficient, human-readable XML index called VTD+XML | Go |
| Scrolling Data Pagination Using Ajax(extjs), Json(jayrock) and Linq. ... Combine scrollbar events, json rpc calls and linq to create a fluid, fast and "no click" paginated data grid. | Go |
| DataContext And Transactions ... How to set your Linq to Sql DataContext Transaction Levels using a base class | Go |
| Schemaless C#-XML data binding with VTD-XML ... Agile, efficient XML data binding without schema | Go |
| Google Maps in HTML, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP etc. with ease ... The Article will guide you with complete knowledge of how to add a google map in your webpage with knowledge of JAVASCRIPT, Use of Geocoder, Use of InfoWindow, Use of Marker, Tabbed Markers, Maximising marker, Creating context menu in your map | Go |
| Silverlight Super TextBox (ComboBox, Masked TextBox and More) ... Supplementing the Silverlight 2.0b1 Controls | Go |
| VTD-XML: XML Processing for the Future (Part II) ... Reveal XML processing issue #1 and explain why document-centric XML Processing is the future | Go |
| Jigsaw Puzzle Game using Ajax Drag and Drop (ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Futures November CTP) ... Jigsaw Puzzle Game using Ajax Drag and Drop (ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Futures November CTP) | Go |
| JavaScript Virtual Keyboard ... This article presents a Virtual Keyboard - an important addendum to the library of usability tools. | Go |
| Implementing ASP.NET XML providers - Part 1 (Persistance) ... In this series I'll go through the steps of my implementation of ASP.NET XmlProviders. | Go |
| Implementing ASP.NET XML providers - Part 2 (Membership Store) ... In this series I'll go through the steps of my implementation of ASP.NET XmlProviders. | Go |
| Data Grid Row Value ... Get DataGrid Row Value without PostBack or AJAX | Go |
| Load and display page contents asynchronously with full postback support ... An AJAX UpdatePanel with less communication overhead and better performance. | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Adding Filter Action to FileUpload Control of ASP.NET 2.0 ... In this article, Soyuj explains the logic to implement the ASP.NET 2.0 FileUpload Control for adding the ability to filter files. After a brief introduction, he discusses both the client and server side approaches with the help of source code. At the end of the article Soyuj also provides a few useful references to learn more about the discussed topic. 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 |
| Making nested ASP.NET applications work ! ... Have you ever tried to set up a web site and use 2 popular ASP.NET applications ? Did you get THIS ? I did. I set up BlogEngine.net in c:\inetpub\wwwroot - it worked fine ! Then I set up ScrewTurnWiki in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wiki. Now, ScrewTurnWiki is really simple to install and it's always worked for me before but this install failed (though as you'll see the problem is ASP.MET and the applications.) The error messages that I was getting when trying to load the wiki were about not being... 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 with Visual Basic video series ... Bill Burrows has created a series
of videos on MVC based on Scott
Guthrie's MVC tutorialposts (which are all in C#) but using VB instead.
I was surprised to find a pointerto my
MVC post as a "rare example" of MVC with VB (and it's only one little post so
I found that to be sad) so it's great to have a leg up for VB developers who find
it hard to try to learn someting that is VERY new and convert the C# syntax in their
brain at the same time.
Here's the list of topics covered
An Overview of the... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Implementing a Session Timeout Page in ASP.NET ... In this article, Steve walks through the steps required to implement a Session Logged Out page that users are automatically sent to in their browser when their ASP.NET session expires. He examines each step with the help of detailed explanation supported by relevant source code. 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 |
| Telerik Delivers Next Generation ASP.NET UI Components ... To build truly next generation websites, you need UI components that give you the power and flexibility to harness the speed of Ajax and rich experience of client-side programming- all without requiring you to write any JavaScript. This White Paper will show you how everything you need to successfully create ASP.NET apps that pass todays Web 2.0 standards are just a free download away from being at your fingertips. 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 |
| Role Based Forms Authentication in ASP.NET 2.0 ... Using Role based forms authentication, we can restrict users of the site to accessing certain resource if they are not part of a particular role. In this article, Satheesh demonstrates how to build sites with this type of authentication. He provides a short overview of various Login Controls and Providers and then discusses a scenario with detailed explanation of various aspects of the sample application with screenshots and source code. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Graffiti CMS First Impressions. ... I love CMS applications! I've played with more than a hundred free and commercial CMSs written in VB, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, you name it ! It's taken me a while to put Graffiti through it's paces, but I did so last weekend. Here is a quick list of my first impressions. PROS Install is a SNAP. The BlogML import facility imported my hundreds of posts flawlessly. The administrative user interface is intuitive. It's FAST The FREE version is not crippled (just limited... 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 |
| Back to coding ... After all those months where my main community related activity was writing articles, this weekend I decided to go back into coding: Subtext is approaching a new release soon, with tons of new features, so back on the project to make it happens I started having a look at CodeCampServer and already submitted a tiny little patch Processing: my wife and I are working at a video for an exhibition at the end of April... let's see if I we come out with some cool generative art Community Credit... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Graffiti CMS First Impressions. ... I love CMS applications! I've played with more than a hundred free and commercial CMSs written in VB, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, you name it ! It's taken me a while to put Graffiti through it's paces, but I did so last weekend. Here is a quick list of my first impressions. PROS Install is a SNAP. The BlogML import facility imported my hundreds of posts flawlessly. The administrative user interface is intuitive. It's FAST The FREE version is not crippled (just limited... 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 New RadControls Installer ... We have been using the same old installer for a very long time. The reason for that is very simple - because it worked. However, with the release of the new RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax suite we felt that it is time for a change.The people who tried our new futures build for Q1 2008 already know what I am talking about - thePrometheus controls come with a totally redesigned installation experience.
There were two main issues we wanted to address - install/uninstall speed and the look & feel of the installation wizard. I am happy to say that we achieved success on both accounts. The installer went from this (click to open in a new window):
to this (click to open in a new window):
The new installation wizard gives you even more options when you want to do a custom install - you can choose whether or not to install the examples, Visual Studio integration, or the documentation. A lot has been changed under the hood as well - the install/uninstall process now takes only a couple of minutes (several times faster than the old installer).
Try the new RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax build tell us what you think. There are still a few weeks left until the official release and your feedback will be appreciated.
More information about the futures build as well as download instructions are available in our fourms -http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/thread/b311D-bcmkaa.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 |
| Understanding Page Class in ASP.NET 2.0 ... In this article, Sanjit describes the objects, events, properties, and methods of the Page class. He begins with a short overview and then explores the various objects such as Session, Application, Cache, Request, Response, Server, and User with a brief description of each method found in the related object along with relevant source code. 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 |
| Team Foundation Server and Fiddler don`t play nice together ... We were having a few issues using the TFS when a coworker found this link to explain it. Makes sense, Fiddler is filtering the request from Visual Studio to TFS. I wanted to make sure people using Team Foundation Server and fiddler to debug are warned. Cheers AlPosted from http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual... 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 |
| Tweak web.config To Set Compilation Debug False ... ASP.NET applications should never run with <compilation debug="true"> in production. It can have drastic performance implications (of the negative kind). Obviously, in a perfect world, developers would always remember to verify this setting whenever they upload changes to production, but unfortunately many organizations utilize fallible humans in their deployment process, and this is something that is easily missed. As part of an automated build process, this problem can be eliminated fairly easily. Most sections within web.config can be extracted to separate files (using the configSource="{path}" attribute), and separate files can be pulled in for TEST, STAGE, and PRODUCTION environments. However, the bulk of the <system.web> section will likely need to be the same between all three of these environments, so maintaining separate versions of this configuration element would violate DRY and would be prone to problems. The solution in this case is to keep these settings in the main web.config file, and tweak them as part of the deployment process within the automated build. If you're using Web Deployment Projects , they can help in this case. If you're not, keep reading. The easiest way to accomplish the modification of the web.config file is with an EXE that can be called from MSBuild, NAnt, CCNET, or whatever build automation software you're using. If you're only using one of these, it might make sense to create a custom MSBuild or NAnt task just for this purpose, but having the EXE is a bit more general purpose as it can then be called from any of these, or even from a batch file. I decided to name the EXE TweakConfig, and while it includes some code for checking parameters and such, its main function boils down to this (thanks Dan Wahlin for the original version of this code): private static void ModifyDebugValue(string path, bool debugState)
{
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(path);
XmlElement compile = doc.DocumentElement.SelectSingleNode("system.web/compilation" ) as XmlElement;
if (compile != null )
{
compile.SetAttribute("debug" , debugState.ToString().ToLower());
}
doc.Save(path);
}
For example: c:\>tweakconfig.exe web.config debug=false
would set the <compilation debug="true|false"> section to false .
We built this into a continuous integration solution for a client last week, and it's working great. I've been helping a few different companies with their continuous integration server setup (with CruiseControl.NET), and wrote a white paper a couple of months ago for Microsoft on the topic (with TFS 2008), so this is an area I'm spending a fair bit of time on lately. If you'd like help getting up to speed with automated builds and continuous integration for your company, feel free to contact me .
I've made the source project and the EXE available. If you find any bugs or enhance it, please email me and I'll update my files.
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! 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 |
| Another ASP.NET Ask the Experts Session Coming May 1st, 2008 ... Come by and ask the ASP.NET experts!... 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 |
| Implementing a Session Timeout Page in ASP.NET ... In this article, Steven Smith walks through the steps required to implement a Session Logged Out page that users are automatically sent to in their browser when their ASP.NET session expires. He examines each step with the help of detailed explanation supported by relevant source code. Read more......(read more ) | Go |
| Clientside ProgressIndicator ... Try demo attached. | Go |
| Our First ASP.NET 3.5 Site Goes Live!! ... Hello All, Finally our first ASP.NET 3.5 website went live today, there are 2 more to come but this one is the only one live atm: http://www.zushoe.com.au/ This has been challenging and fun as we have used all the latest tools and technologies in this project, some include: - Visual Studio 2008 - ASP.NET 3.5 - LINQ to SQL - ASP.NET AJAX There are really cool features in this site too, for example the paging in the catalogue is done with ajax but using custom link controls I have allowed SEO to still work. It has full AJAX history support too. There are custom developed ASP.NET AJAX controls and extensive caching, plus much more. All in all this project was great to work on, being able to use .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 saved us a lot of time, and using LINQ to SQL cut down creating the DAL quite a bit. Of course with all new techs we have had challenges along the way, but still developed it alot quicker using VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. That is all for now, might try post on our challenges sometime soon. Thanks Stefan | Go |
| Tips for IE8 ... So after using IE8 for a while now, there are a few things that are useful for people to keep in mind. First, there are a lot of changes in IE8. I am really excited about some of them, such as WebSlices. They give you the ability to Read More......(read more ) | Go |
| April 2008 Meeting of Israel Visual Basic User Group (IVBUG) ... Note the special date of April’s meeting and the special registration requirements.
This month’s meeting will be a joint meeting for IVBUG, IVCUG, and .NET Architects User Groups, so that we can all take advantage of a special guest speaker – Matthew Winkler from Microosft Corp (Remond). Matt is a Workflow Foundation expert and will be sharing his expertise with these 2 sessions: WF+WCF Integration WCF and WF are like two siblings separated at birth. They are two powerful technologies, but until .NET 3.5, did not know about one another. We’ll talk about how and why these two technologies have come together, how to take advantage of both from your code, and walk through some basic patterns that highlight how these two technologies fit together. Creating Custom Composite Activities One of the benefits of WF is that it allows for the creation of new patterns of control flow, you don’t just have to use state machine and sequence. Working with customers, I’ve seen a lot of people do some pretty weird things to fit their process into a sequence. We’ll walk through the mechanisms required to build new types of control flows, and then implement a few. Do to the expected great demand and limited seating, you MUST register in advance for this event at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032374675&Culture=he-IL See you there !!The April meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Grouphttp://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug : April 9, 2008Location : Microsoft Israel 2 Hapnina St , Ra'anana (09) 7625-100 Floor 0 , Dekel Room It is the new building across from Amdocs. Turn right at the first traffic circle, there is a new area for Microsoft parking on the left. 17:30 - 18:00 Assembly18:00 - 19:00 “ WF+WCF Integration ” Matthew Winkler, Microsoft Corp. 19:00 - 19:15 Break 19:15 - 20:15 “ Creating Custom Composite Activities Matthew Winkler, Microsoft Corp. | Go |
| One More Time - Awarded Microsoft MVP for Another Year ... Well, spring is in the air, which for me means, among other things the renewal time for my Microsoft MVP award. I am proud to say that once again this year I have proven to be worthy of the award - thanks Microsoft !
Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend the MVP Summit in Redmond later this month :-( But at least I had the chance to talk with some of the VB PMs at the VSLive Conference this week. | Go |
| Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 ... My article on this topic just went live on MSDN at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc440724.aspx
Since both VS 2005 and VS 2008 were released before SQL Server 2008, most of the designers and tools don't work with SQL 2008. To address this, MS has released CTP updates and will be releasing final versions of these updates in the future. This article discusses the various issues and summarizes what featues will be made available in the various releases and where to download he current CTP updates. | Go |
| LINQ to SQL: Returning Complex Objects ... In my previous post about using LINQ to SQL in multi layered apps , I mentioned that this query was not optimal because I would need to build the POCOs from the objects returned by LINQ. This would mean that objects would be created twice.
var q = from o in ctx.Orders where o.CustomerID == id select new { Detail = o.Order_Details, CustomerID = o.CustomerID, OrderDate = o.OrderDate, OrderID = o.OrderID, ShippedDate = o.ShippedDate, ShipCity = o.ShipCity };
Not ideal so I asked if anyone had an idea on how to do that. Stefan Sedich suggested this query:
var q = from o in ctx.Orderswhere o.CustomerID == idselect new TransportObjects.Northwind.Order {
Detail = o.Order_Details.Select(item => new TransportObjects.Northwind.OrderDetail { ProductID = item.ProductID }).ToArray(),
CustomerID = o.CustomerID, OrderDate = o.OrderDate, OrderID = o.OrderID, ShippedDate = o.ShippedDate, ShipCity = o.ShipCity};
Cool! The query returns the Order complex object with the Detail property filled from orders Details.
Thanks a lot Stefan! | Go |
| Using Version Class ... When dealing with version numbers we often need to convert them to string and vice versa. There is lot of code where versions are handled manually in code. I don't know why. But I know for sure there is class called Version and I'm sure this class will help us a lot. Let's see a little example. The following code:
Version ver = new Version( "1.4" ) ;Console.WriteLine ( "Major: " + ver.Major .ToString ( ) ) ;Console.WriteLine ( "Minor: " + ver.Minor .ToString ( ) ) ;Console.WriteLine ( "String: " + ver.ToString ( ) ) ;Console.ReadLine ( ) ;
outputs something like this:
Major: 1Minor: 4String: 1.4
As we can see, this class makes using versions very easy. There is one nasty limitation - Version class is sealed. If there is need for non-sealed class then you should write it by yourself. | Go |
| What do you want from AJAX? ... Here's your chance to shape the future of AJAX by telling the OpenAjax alliance what you want AJAX to do.
Check out all the details here.
http://dotnetslackers.com/Ajax/re-96522_OpenAjax_Call_to_Action_to_Ajax_Developers_for_Browser_Wishlist.aspx | Go |
