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May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF

Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. 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

Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control: Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5.

Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls: Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario.

Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET: A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images.

Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on.

ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners: Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns). The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated. Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this.

ASP.NET AJAX

ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control: Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control.

Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch: Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads. Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier.

Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class: Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class.

Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta: Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls.

.NET

7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ: Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it.

Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL: Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries. Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries.

DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers.

Ukadc.Diagnostics: Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc).

Visual Studio

11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know: A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio.

Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series. I confess I didn't know this one.

Silverlight

50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time". Wow.

AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes: Nikhil Kothari has a nice blog post that demonstrates how he built an auto-complete behavior control for Silverlight.

Scrolling through Large Resultsets with Silverlight 2 and LINQ to SQL: The Swiss MSDN team has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to scroll through large resultsets using the Silverlight DataGrid and LINQ to SQL.

IValueConverter: The Swiss Army Knife of Bindings: David Anson has a useful blog post and sample that demonstrates how to use the IValueConverter feature in Silverlight and WPF to support richer bindings against complex objects.

Silverlight 2 Pie Chart: Peter McGrattan has posted a nice control and article that demonstrates how to use a new Silverlight charting control he has written.

WPF

WPF week on Channel9: Watch 6 great videos on Channel9. Each one includes interviews and demos with members of the WPF team talking about some of the awesome work that went into WPF 3.5 SP1 (read my blog post here for a summary of some of it).

WPF Testing and Application Quality Guide: Check out the 0.2 release of a free online book being developed by Microsoft that covers how to test WPF applications. Definitely worth book-marking if you are doing WPF development.

Moving Toward WPF Data Binding One Step at a Time: Josh Smith has a great article on CodeProject.com that explains WPF data binding and walksthrough how to use it.

WPF 3.5 SP1 StringFormat: Lester has a nice post that describes how to use the new StringFormat feature in WPF 3.5 SP1. This makes it much easier to handle formatting of databound values.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:02 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments

Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, LINQ, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing

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 security rules to a controller. Also check out David Hayden's post here for more security attribute examples.

Url Routing Debugger: Phil Haack posts a cool Url Routing Debugger he has built that demonstrates an easy way to test URL route conditions using the ASP.NET MVC framework.

ASP.NET MVC Test Project Integration with NUnit and Rhino Mocks: Joe Cartano from the VS Web Tools team walks-through using some NUnit and Rhino Mocks project templates that he has created. These plug-into the new VS 2008 tools support for ASP.NET MVC, and enable you to easily get a test project started when you create a new ASP.NET MVC application.

ASP.NET MVC Test Project Integration with MBUnit: Andrew Stopford posts about new templates created to enable VS 2008 tools integration with MBUnit when creating a new ASP.NET MVC application.

.NET

Graffiti: The folks at Telligent have recently released a sweet new CMS system for ASP.NET that is trivial to setup, and which provides a bunch of great content editing support. Definitely worth looking at if you are in the market for an great way to publish or manage content on the web.

Link To Everything: A List of LINQ Providers: Charlie Calvert links to a long list of LINQ providers. Definitely a useful page to bookmark.

Beta of LINQ to LLBLGen Pro Released: Frans Bouma announces the first public beta release of LINQ to LLBLGen Pro (a very popular commercial ORM for .NET). Frans has a very in-depth 14 post series that discusses how he built the LINQ support for it (a nice technical read).

Hope this helps,

Scott

Posted Friday, March 14, 2008 3:06 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments

Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Atlas, LINQ, Link Listing, MVC

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 for download. It is pretty cool to see LINQ providers starting to pop up all over the place. Several great books that cover LINQ in detail have also recently been published. I'm a fan of both the Pro LINQ and LINQ in Action books.

Using the Expression Tree Visualizer: Charlie Calvert has a nice post that talks about one of the very useful debugging tools in the LINQ samples package provided with VS 2008. It enables you to easily visualize expression tree variables within the debugger - which can be incredibly useful when you are trying to write your own custom LINQ provider (like the ones above). To learn more about Expression Trees and some of the underlying concepts that make LINQ possible, also check out Charlie's earlier post on them here.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008 2:01 PM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments

Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, LINQ, Link Listing

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 Released

I'm very pleased to announce that the Beta 2 release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2 is now available for download. You can download the Visual Studio 2008 product here. You can alternatively download the smaller VS 2008 Express Editions here.

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express can be installed side-by-side with VS 2005. .NET 3.5 Beta2 also includes a go-live license which allows you to build and deploy applications into production.

Very Important: Please read my "Installation Notes" at the bottom of this blog post for a few post-installation steps you must make to ensure everything runs well. One of these steps fixes a side-by-side issue we found with ASP.NET AJAX.

Quick Tour of Some of the New Features for Web Development

Over the last few months I've written several blog posts that discuss some of the new improvements in this release. Below is a quick summary list of several of them that I have already published. This list is by no means exhaustive - there are a lot more things I haven't had a chance to blog about yet (stay tuned for more posts!):

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. You can learn more about how this works from my blog post here:

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support

VS 2008 includes a significantly improved HTML web designer. This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration. Below are two articles I've written that discuss this more:

ASP.NET also has a new <asp:ListView> control that I'll be blogging about in the near future. It delivers very flexible support for data UI scenarios, and allows full customization of the markup emitted. It works nicely with the new CSS support in VS 2008.

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support

.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (and adds new features like UpdatePanel support with WebParts, WCF support for JSON, and a number of bug fixes and performance improvements). VS 2008 also has great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications:

I will be doing a blog post in the next few days that talks more about some of the ASP.NET AJAX specific improvements, as well as how to upgrade existing ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications to use them.

Language Improvements and LINQ

The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages. Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code. These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET.

Below are some of the articles I've written that explore these new language features using C#:

Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL

LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M (object relational mapper) in .NET 3.5. It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model. You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it. LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures. It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model. Below are some of the articles I've written that explore how to use it:

I'll be adding several more articles to my series above in the weeks ahead. I think you'll find that LINQ to SQL makes it dramatically easier to build much cleaner data models, and write much cleaner data code.

Lots of other improvements

The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming. For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support. ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox. WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data. Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon. WCF and Workflow projects and designers are included in VS 2008. Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS). Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS. AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU. And there is much, much more...

Important Installation Notes - PLEASE READ!

There are two important things you should do immediately after installing VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2:

1) You should download and run this batch file. This takes only a few seconds to run, and fixes an issue we found earlier this week with the version policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll - which is the assembly that contains ASP.NET AJAX. If you don't run this batch file, then existing ASP.NET 2.0 projects built with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and VS 2005 will end up automatically picking up the new version of ASP.NET AJAX that ships in .NET 3.5 Beta2. This will work and run fine - but cause you to inadvertently introduce a .NET 3.5 dependency in the applications you build with VS 2005. Running the batch file will change the version binding policy of the new System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly and ensure that you only use the new .NET 3.5 ASP.NET AJAX version with projects that you are explicitly building for .NET 3.5.

2) If you have ever installed a previous version of "Orcas" or VS 2008 on your machine (either Beta1 or one of the CTP versions), you need to reset your VS 2008 settings after installing Beta2. If you don't do this, you'll have an odd set of settings configured (some windows will be in the wrong place), and you'll potentially see some IDE performance slowness. You can reset your settings by typing "DevEnv /resetsettings" on the command-line against the VS 2008 version of the IDE:

Summary

There are a lot of new improvements and enhancements that I hope you'll find really useful with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. Stay tuned to my blog over the next few weeks as I'll be posting more about some of the new features and how to get the most out of them.

Thanks,

Scott

Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007 5:11 PM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments

Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, LINQ, WPF

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