BusinessRx Community

Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts

ScottGu's Blog — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:51:51 GMT

Earlier this week the Visual Studio team released updated VS 2010 Keyboard Shortcut Posters . These posters are print-ready documents (that now support standard paper sizes), and provide nice “cheat sheet” tables that can help you quickly lookup (and eventually memorize) common keystroke commands within Visual Studio. This week’s updated posters incorporate a number of improvements: Letter-sized (8.5”x11”) print ready versions are now available A4-sized (210x297mm) print ready versions are...(read more)

Links to Scott Guthrie's Using LINQ to SQL Tutorials

Scott On Writing.NET — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:56:00 GMT

Back when Visual Studio 2008 came out, Scott Guthrie wrote an excellent series of blog posts on using LINQ to SQL . Unfortunately, the various installments are not easy to follow when starting from Part 1 and going onward, so I've decided to gather and organize the links here for myself and for anyone else interested in his tutorial. Using LINQ to SQL Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes Part 3: Querying our Database Part 4: Updating our Database Part 5: Binding...(read more)

Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Preview 1)

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:06:23 GMT

This morning we posted the “Preview 1” release of ASP.NET MVC 3. You can download it here . We’ve used an iterative development approach from the very beginning of the ASP.NET MVC project, and deliver regular preview drops throughout the development cycle. Our goal with early preview releases like the one today is to get feedback – both on what you like/dislike, and what you find missing/incomplete. This feedback is super valuable – and ultimately makes the final product much, much...(read more)

Entity Framework 4 “Code-First”: Custom Database Schema Mapping

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:36:01 GMT

Last week I blogged about the new Entity Framework 4 “code first” development option. The EF “code-first” option enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data. It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring...(read more)

VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Update (with some cool new features)

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 06:18:15 GMT

Last month I blogged about the VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Extensions – a free set of Visual Studio 2010 extensions that provide some really nice additional functionality. The initial Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools release included a bunch of really useful productivity enhancements – including a much faster “Add Reference” dialog, lots of code editor additions and enhancements, and some nice IDE improvements around document tab management. You can learn more about these features...(read more)

A Review of Desktop / Screen Sharing Software

Scott On Writing.NET — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:32:00 GMT

I work as an independent consultant and trainer. Most of my business involves me meeting with clients (in person or online), discussing their needs, and then building a new application or enhancing an existing one from my own desktop. However, a growing part of my business has been what I call "online consulting and training," which involves me using screen sharing software to remote into the client's computer. The client is seated at his computer and we are on the phone and during these meetings...(read more)

Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:35:12 GMT

.NET 4 ships with a much improved version of Entity Framework (EF) – a data access library that lives in the System.Data.Entity namespace. When Entity Framework was first introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1, developers provided a lot of feedback on things they thought were incomplete with that first release. The SQL team did a good job of listening to this feedback, and really focused the EF that ships with .NET 4 on addressing it. Some of the big improvements in EF4 include: POCO Support: You...(read more)

Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Beta Released

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:38:48 GMT

Earlier today we shipped the beta of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools. You can download them here . What is included in the Windows Phone Developer Tools The Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta includes: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – a new free, express edition of Visual Studio 2010 Express Blend for Windows Phone – a new free, edition of Blend focused on Windows Phone 7 development Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7 Integrated with the development...(read more)

HOWTO: Update Records in a Database Table With Data From Another Table (MS SQL Server)

Scott On Writing.NET — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:01:00 GMT

SQL's UPDATE statement makes it easy to update one or more records in a database table. The most common UPDATE statement pattern assigns static or parameterized values to one or more columns: UPDATE MyTable SET Column1 = Value1, Column2 = Value2, ... WHERE PrimaryKeyColumn = SomeValue But what if you need to update values in one database table from values in another database table? There are a couple ways this can be done. One way is to use a subquery: UPDATE MyTable SET Column1 = (SELECT SomeColumn...(read more)

July 9th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Silverlight, WPF, VS 2010

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:33:23 GMT

Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] ASP.NET Extending ASP.NET Output Caching : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to take advantage of ASP.NET 4’s extensible cache provider API to implement richer output caching mechanisms. ...(read more)

Introducing WebMatrix

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:39:13 GMT

Last week I published several blog posts that covered some new web development technologies we are releasing: IIS Developer Express : A lightweight web-server that is simple to setup, free, works with all versions of Windows, and is compatible with the full IIS 7.5. SQL Server Compact Edition : A lightweight file-based database that is simple to setup, free, can be embedded within your ASP.NET applications, supports low-cost hosting environments, and enables databases to be optionally migrated to...(read more)

Determining an ASP.NET Page's View State Footprint

Scott On Writing.NET — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:35:00 GMT

ASP.NET view state is the technique used by an ASP.NET Web page to persist changes to the state of a Web Form across postbacks. The view state of a page is, by default, placed in a hidden form field named __VIEWSTATE, and can easily get very large. Not only does the __VIEWSTATE form field cause slower downloads, but, whenever the user posts back the Web page, the contents of this hidden form field must be posted back in the HTTP request, thereby lengthening the request time, as well. Because view...(read more)

Introducing “Razor”

ScottGu's Blog — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 06:01:57 GMT

One of the things my team has been working on has been a new view engine option for ASP.NET. ASP.NET MVC has always supported the concept of “view engines” – which are the pluggable modules that implement different template syntax options. The “default” view engine for ASP.NET MVC today uses the same .aspx/.ascx/.master file templates as ASP.NET Web Forms. Other popular ASP.NET MVC view engines used today include Spark and NHaml . The new view-engine option we’ve been working on is optimized...(read more)

New Embedded Database Support with ASP.NET

ScottGu's Blog — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:33:39 GMT

Earlier this week I blogged about IIS Express , and discussed some of the work we are doing to make ASP.NET development easier from a Web Server perspective. In today’s blog post I’m going to continue the simplicity theme, and discuss some of the work we are also doing to enable developers to quickly get going with database development. In particular, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just completed the engineering work that enables Microsoft’s free SQL Server Compact Edition (SQL CE) database...(read more)

Silverlight PivotViewer Now Available

ScottGu's Blog — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 03:58:30 GMT

Three months ago at MIX we announced and first demoed the Silverlight PivotViewer control. The Silverlight PivotViewer control enables you to visualize thousands of objects at once, and sort and browse data in a way that helps you see trends and quickly find what you’re looking for. It’s ability to compare information, and navigate it in a way that feels natural and fast, is really unrivaled in the market today. PivotViewer is one of those technologies that’s way better experienced than described. ...(read more)

Introducing IIS Express

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:02:00 GMT

Developers today build and test ASP.NET sites and applications using one of two web-servers: The ASP.NET Development Server that comes built-into Visual Studio The IIS Web Server that comes built-into Windows Both of the above options have their pros and cons, and many ASP.NET developers have told us: “I wish I could have the ease of use of the ASP.NET Development Server, but still have all the power and features of IIS”. Today I’m happy to announce a new, free option that we are enabling –...(read more)

Patch for Cut/Copy “Insufficient Memory” issue with VS 2010

ScottGu's Blog — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:03:58 GMT

We’ve received several reports of an occasional issue occurring with VS 2010 when developers try and do “Cut” or “Copy” text operations of text. In some cases VS incorrectly calculates that not enough memory is available (even though there is memory available) and displays the following error message: "Insufficient available memory to meet the expected demands of an operation at this time, possibly due to virtual address space fragmentation. Please try again later." There is now a...(read more)

I'll be speaking at the SoCal Code Camp this Weekend

Scott On Writing.NET — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:06:00 GMT

The SoCal Code Camp is coming to San Diego, California this weekend, June 26th and 27th. This free event boasts nearly 100 talks given by dozens of speakers from around the area covering a wide swath of interesting technology-related topics. This year the Code Camp is hosted at the beautiful UC-San Diego campus . I will be presenting two talks: Take Control of Your Website's URLs with ASP.NET Routing - Sunday, June 27th, 9:00 AM, Rm 101 Did you know that ASP.NET has a powerful URL routing framework...(read more)

Preview of MSDN Library Changes

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:38:58 GMT

The MSDN team has been working some potential changes to the online MSDN Library designed to help streamline the navigation experience and make it easier to find the .NET Framework information you need. To solicit feedback on the proposed changes while they are still in development, they’ve posted a preview version of some proposed changes to a new MSDN Library Preview site which you can check out. They’ve also created a survey that leads you through the ideas and asks for your opinions on...(read more)

jQuery Globalization Plugin from Microsoft

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:34:24 GMT

Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is starting to make code contributions to jQuery , and about some of the first code contributions we were working on: jQuery Templates and Data Linking support . Today, we released a prototype of a new jQuery Globalization Plugin that enables you to add globalization support to your JavaScript applications. This plugin includes globalization information for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian, Japanese, to Canadian English. ...(read more)

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool Extensions

ScottGu's Blog — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:29:04 GMT

Last month I blogged about the Extension Manager that is built-into VS 2010 – as well as about a cool VS 2010 PowerCommands extension that provides some extra features for Visual Studio. The Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager provides an easy way for developers to quickly find and install extensions and plugins that enhance the built-in functionality to VS 2010. New VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Release Earlier this week Jason Zander announced the availability of a new VS 2010 Productivity...(read more)

New Software Running ScottOnWriting.NET

Scott On Writing.NET — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:50:00 GMT

When I started this blog in July 2003 there weren't many available blog engines build atop ASP.NET. One of the more interesting ones at the time was Scott Watermasysk 's .Text blog engine (which eventually became part of Community Server . Over the past nearly seven years ScottOnWriting.NET has continued to be powered by .Text, even though the code base was discontinued circa 2004. There were two primary reasons I stuck with .Text for so long: I could find no easy way to migrate my existing content...(read more)

My VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4 Talks Online

ScottGu's Blog — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:05:44 GMT

The past 7 years I’ve done an annual all day event in Arizona – organized by the most excellent Scott Cate (who always does a phenomenal job organizing the event and making it a great one). Earlier this month I visited and presented 4+ hours of content covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2. The talks are demo-heavy and show off a ton of new features. NextSlide.com – a .NET shop local to Arizona who has a great product for sharing presentations – volunteered to record the talks and publish...(read more)

Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API

Scott On Writing.NET — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:39:00 GMT

The past couple of projects I've been working on have included the use of the Google Maps API and geocoding service in websites for various reasons. I decided to tie together some of the lessons learned, build an ASP.NET store locator demo, and write about it on 4Guys . Last week I published the first article in what I think will be a three-part series: Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps (Part 1) . Part 1 walks through creating a demo where a user can type in an address...(read more)

May 20th Links: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, .NET 4, VS 2010, Silverlight

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 21 May 2010 05:51:23 GMT

Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] ASP.NET MVC How to Localize an ASP.NET MVC Application : Michael Ceranski has a good blog post that describes how to localize ASP.NET MVC 2 applications. ASP.NET MVC with jTemplates Part 1 and Part 2 : Steve...(read more)