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.

Several people have pinged me asking for the download location of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview.  We were hoping to post it on the web Friday, but unfortunately found a late bug that we felt needed to be fixed.  The team is working this weekend to sign off on the new build.  We hope to be able to post it as soon as this is done - apologies for the delay.

ASP.NET

• Using the new ASP.NET ListView Control: Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the new ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. 

• Data Navigation with the ListView, DataPager, and SliderExtender Controls: Matt Berseth has another great follow-up post that describes how to use the new ListView and DataPager controls in .NET 3.5 together with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's SliderExtender to implement nice data paging support.

• Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS using the ListView Control: This is one of my own posts from earlier this summer that covers the ListView control.  It also details how to use the new CSS editing features in VS 2008 to stylize it.

• Taking an ASP.NET Application Offline: Scott Mitchell has a good article on 4GuysFromRolla that discusses a few approaches you can use to temporarily take down ASP.NET applications for updates/maintenance. 

ASP.NET AJAX

• Work Smarter: Microsoft AJAX's JavaScript Type Extensions: Dave Ward has a great post that describes some of the ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript client-library functionality.  In this article he discusses using Array.contains, Date.format and String.format.

• Sys.Debug in ASP.NET AJAX Framework: Roman Nikitin has a nice post that describes how to use the Sys.Debug feature of ASP.NET AJAX to easily instrument, debug and trace your AJAX applications. 

• Download Free ASP.NET AJAX In Action Chapter: I'm a big fan of the ASP.NET AJAX in Action book that was published earlier this summer (I also wrote the forward to the book).  You can download a free PDF copy of chapter 2 from it here and buy it on Amazon.com here.

• Cool Skin for the TabContainer Toolkit Control: Matt Berseth has a great post that details how to build a really attractive looking CSS skin for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's TabContainer control.

• Surrounding your Data Table and Dialog Controls with Styled Panels: Matt Berseth has another nice post that describes how to add styled borders to ASP.NET data grid controls using CSS and some of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit controls.

ASP.NET MVC

• TDD and Dependency Injection with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team writes about how to use TDD (test driven development) with the new ASP.NET MVC Framework.  He uses StructureMap and RhinoMocks to enable the Dependency Injection and Mocking support.

.NET

• Want to See the .NET Framework Source Code?: We are shortly going to post instructions on how anyone can browse and debug into the .NET Framework source code.  If you want to help try this out before the general public and test our servers that will be supporting it please send email to: fxrefsrc@microsoft,com and we'll give you instructions on how to use it now.

• Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008: Amanda Silver from the VB team has an awesome post that discusses some of the new hidden gems with Visual Basic in VS 2008.  I actually learned a few of them for the first time reading her article!  Highly recommended reading.

• Extending Base Type Functionality with Extension Methods: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to use the new Extension Methods feature of VB and C# to add custom helper methods to existing classes.

• LINQ to Active Directory is Here: Bart De Smet from my team has been working on a cool LINQ to Active Directory provider (previously called LINQ to LDAP) in his spare time.  You can learn how to use it in his series here, as well as read about how he built it (and learn a lot about how to build LINQ providers).

Visual Studio

• Ten Tips for a Happy Upgrade to Visual Studio 2008: Jon Galloway has a useful blog post that provides a complete list of recommended steps to take if you are upgrading a machine from VS 2008 Beta2 to the final RTM release.

• Organizing Big Solutions using Visual Studio Solution Folders: This tip of the day describes a useful technique that you can use in Visual Studio to easily organize large solutions that are full of many sub-projects.  Use this approach to easily find and filer your projects more effectively.

• Use DebuggerBrowsable attribute to clean up class view in a debugger: This tip of the day demonstrates how you can apply the DebuggerBrowsable attribute to clean up how fields and properties are displayed within Visual Studio when you are debugging your code.

Hope this helps,

Scott