BusinessRx Community

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.

Visual Studio

• 11 Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks to Make You a More Productive Developer: Chinh Do has put together an excellent post that covers a bunch of VS 2005 Tips and Tricks that you can use immediately to optimize your developer workflow.  I actually learned a few new ones reading it! Highly recommended.

• Multi-threaded Debugging in Visual Studio 2008: Scott Hanselman has a quick post that shows a screen-shot of the new multi-threaded debugging features in VS 2008.

ASP.NET

• Debugging Script: Dumping out ASP.NET Session Contents: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET support team has an excellent post that details how to use the windbg debugger to dump out real-time information about the current state within the ASP.NET in-process session store (# of sessions, what their current timeout is, and the memory size of the objects within each session).  She has a great script you can just run "as-is" in this article, as well as an in-depth discussion about how it works.  Very useful if you are ever trying to figure out why your application is consuming a lot of memory, and suspect it might be session state related.

• Facebook.NET: Earlier this summer Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team posted a really cool framework for developing ASP.NET based Facebook applications.  You can learn more about it from his blog post here, and download it from his CodePlex project here.  Steve Trefethen last week posted a VS starter kit for Facebook.NET which makes it even easier to get started.

• Useful ASP.NET Extension Methods: JD posts some nice extension methods that he has built for ASP.NET that use the new extension method language support coming with the VB and C# compilers in .NET 3.5.  I've been putting together my own list of cool extension methods as well and will post some in the months ahead.

ASP.NET AJAX

• New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Released: David Anson blogs about the update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that was released on Friday.  It contains a bunch of bug fixes and improvements.  The .NET 3.5 version of the control toolkit also now adds reference tags for the toolkit JavaScript files - which means you can now take advantage of VS 2008's JavaScript Intellisense support with them.

• Creating a YUI TabView Style Theme for the AJAX Control Toolkit's TabContainer Control: A nice post from Matt Berseth on how to build a Yahoo UI style look and feel for the TabContainer control within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

• ASP.NET AJAX Exception Logging: Kazi Manzur Rashid blogs about his new AJAX Exception Logging CodePlex Project.  This project enables you to help catch client-side JavaScript errors and log them on the server.

• Animating the ModalPopupExtender: A cool post from Matt Berseth that walks through how to create a custom ModalPopupAnimationExtender control that adds animation support for ModalPopup scenarios.

• Inline Script Inside an ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel: Dave Reed shows how to create a custom control to enable inline script to be emitted (and executed) within an <asp:updatepanel> refresh.

• ASP.NET AJAX In Action Book: Alessandro, David and Rama Krishna's ASP.NET AJAX in Action book is now showing up on book shelves.  This is a great technical book that covers ASP.NET AJAX very well.

Silverlight

• Halo 3 Game Guide: Halo 3 ships this week, and no doubt many people will find themselves afflicted with a sudden illness that requires them to stay home one day this week.  To help get you ready, watch one of the High Definition Halo3 Videos here (for a lower resolution video click here), and browse the Halo3 Game Guide here.  Both are built with Silverlight 1.0. 

WPF and Expression Blend

• Getting Started with Expression Blend and WPF: This is a really outstanding set of free videos that you can watch to learn how to get started with WPF and Expression Blend.  If you want to follow along, you can download a free trial of Expression Blend.  Expression Blend and Expression Web are also now included as free products in the MSDN Premium subscription.

Hope this helps,

Scott