BusinessRx Community

Last week was our big PDC conference, and I've been busy catching up back at work this week.  I'm hoping to publish a bunch of new posts soon (including some on the PDC announcements we made).  Until then, here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.

ASP.NET

• 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1.

• Download Hotfix: False C# Compilation Errors for ASP.NET Code Behind Files with VS 2008 SP1: The C# team added support for live semantic errors with background compilation in VS 2008 SP1.  There were a few cases where this caused false errors to be shown with ASP.NET Web site projects.  You can fix these either by disabling live semantic errors (tools->options allows you to disable this), or by downloading a recent hotfix patch which is now public.  Omar Khan has a useful blog post with more details on it.

• Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13: Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles.  This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database.  For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos.

• ASP.NET Patterns Developers Should Know: Alex Homer from the Patterns and Practices (PAG) team at Microsoft has a nice article that introduces a number of common design patterns (MVC and MVP, Repository, Singleton, etc) and how you can apply them within ASP.NET applications.  If you are interested in learning more about pattern based development I also highly recommend reading the Head First Design Patterns book (which has more than 250 positive reviews on Amazon).

ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery

• Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008: Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery.  Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today.

• ASP.NET and jQuery: Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free.  Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation.

• jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2: Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery.  Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial.

• ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples.

• Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX: Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution.

ASP.NET MVC

• Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC.  This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work).

• Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC.  I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms.  Phil covers it for ASP.NET MVC.

• Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has another great post that covers how to segment a ASP.NET MVC application into multiple "areas" or "modules" - which can optionally be developed in separate projects and merged into one large master application.  Also check out Steve Sanderson's follow-up post with more ideas on this topic.

Silverlight and WPF

• Silverlight Toolkit Released: Last week at PDC we shipped the first release of the Silverlight Toolkit.  This is a free download that works with Silverlight 2, and delivers a whole slew of awesome controls and features (including new charting controls, new layout managers, treeview, viewbox, and more).  A must-have download for every Silverlight  developer.

• Silverlight Unit Test Framework and Source Released: Jeff Wilcox shares all the great details about the release of our new Silverlight Unit Testing framework (which includes source that can be modified/reused however you want).

• Updated WPF Performance Profiling Tool: The WPF team recently posted an update to their excellent WPF Performance Profiling Tool.  Definitely something to check out if you are doing WPF development.

• WPF & Silverlight LOB Form Layout - Searching for a Better Solution: Karl Shifflett has another great WPF blog post that covers a cool way to perform flexible form layout for LOB scenarios.

Hope this helps,

Scott