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• Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF

  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 Posted Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:34 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight

  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 Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch: Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more.  A great end to end read. A Guide to Learning the ASP.NET MVC Beta: Stephen Walther has a great set of links with some good videos and tutorials you can follow to learn more about the recent ASP.NET MVC beta release. ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module: Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC.  7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET: Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET. Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation: Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control. Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework: Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client. Visual Studio Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know: Stephen Walther has a fantastic article with 11 cool tips and tricks that you should make sure you know and use with Visual Studio. VS 2008 Snippet Designer: A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets.  Very handy for automating common tasks. Silverlight and WPF XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight: Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download.  This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development.  Very, very cool stuff. WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex: .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF - which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface.  This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use. Silverlight 2 UI Templates: Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2. Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers: Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 12:46 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing

• October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS

  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 Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0: Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book, has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0.  Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1.  You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here. Exploring Caching in ASP.NET: Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET.  If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature. Routing with WebForms: Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages.  A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy: Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1): Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps: Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today.  Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication: Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation.  This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials: Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development: Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Friday, October 10, 2008 4:53 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Atlas, Community News, Link Listing

• October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data

  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 Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service.  This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application: Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data.  You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate: Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control.  4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft: Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts: Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series).  This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership: Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5: Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5.  It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer: Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example: Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers: Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog: Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls: Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Thursday, October 02, 2008 4:23 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Link Listing, MVC

• 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

• April 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight

  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 Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET's membership, roles, and profile support.  In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET's Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update: The ASP.NET team last week released an update of the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature.  This update adds several new features including cleaner URL support using the same URL routing feature that ASP.NET MVC uses, as well as better confirmation, foreign-key, and template support.  ASP.NET Testing with Ivonna: Travis Illig blogs about a new testing framework named Ivonna that enables unit testing of ASP.NET web forms. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX UI Templates: Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team has a cool post that shows off a prototype he has been working on that enables clean client-side AJAX templating of UI.  ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit TabContainer Theme Gallery: Matt Berseth has another of his excellent posts - this one shows off a bunch of cool themes you can use to style the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Reducing Page Load Times with UpdatePanels and Timers: Paul Glavich posts of a cool trick you can use with tab controls to asynchronously load their content in the background in order to improve perceived page load time. Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? Dave Ward has a useful article that talks about the page methods feature in ASP.NET AJAX, and explains why they are static methods. JQuery Intellisense in VS 2008: Brad Vincent posts about using the VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix we released in February to get a nice JavaScript intellisense experience in Visual Studio 2008 when using the JQuery AJAX library. ASP.NET MVC Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing: Fredrik Kalseth has a cool article that talks about the concepts behind inversion of control (IOC) and how you can use this with ASP.NET MVC to better isolate dependencies and enable better unit testing of your code. Stephen Walther's ASP.NET MVC Talk: Stephen Walther delivered a many-hour ASP.NET MVC post conference talk at ASP.NET Connections last week.  You can download his slides + demos for free.  Also check out his previous posts on Unit Tests with Visual Studio 2008 and TDD with Rhino Mocks. MVC Contrib Project Update: Eric Hexter blogs about some of the latest updates to the open source MvcContrib project to work with the latest ASP.NET MVC interim source release. Testing Action Results with ASP.NET MVC: Jeremy Skinner blogs about some cool extension method helpers he has added to MvcContrib to enable pretty sweet testing of Controller actions. MVC Membership Starter Kit - 1.2 Release: Troy Goode has posted an update to his excellent MVC Membership Starter Kit.  This version works with the interim ASP.NET MVC source release. Silverlight Defining Silverlight DataGrid Columns at Runtime: Scott Morrison from the Silverlight team has a cool blog post that talks about how to define Silverlight DataGrid Columns via code at runtime.  Visit my Silverlight links page for more DataGrid posts. Silverlight HTTP Networking Stack (Part 1), (Part 2), (Part 3): Karen Corby from the Silverlight team has a great three part blog series that talks about the new Silverlight 2 networking stack and how cross domain security works with it. Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with Sockets (Part 1) and (Part 2): Dan Wahlin demonstrates how to implement a "GameStream" socket server and connect to it from a Silverlight client using Silverlight 2's built-in network sockets support.  Silverlight - the Song: Spike Xavier and Dan Wahlin have posted another of their unique and special songs. :-) Hope this helps, Scott Posted Tuesday, April 29, 2008 1:35 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight

  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 More ASP.NET Security Tutorials: The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials.  His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts. Building a VS 2008 Styled Grid with the ListView and DataPager Controls: Matt Berseth has a great article that talks about techniques you can use with the new ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to create a nicely styled Grid UI - while preserving total control over the HTML and CSS used.  Also read his follow-up post here that talks about how to achieve the same UI with the GridView control. 50 Useful CSS Tips and Tricks: A useful page that provides a nice listing of various CSS tips, tricks and tools you can use for common web scenarios. Using a DataPager with the GridView Control - Implementing IPageableItemContainer: Matt Berseth has a cool article that shows how to use the new IPageableItemContainer interface to implement paging support with the new ASP.NET 3.5 DataPager control. ASP.NET AJAX Accessible UpdatePanel: Bertrand Le Roy from the ASP.NET team has an article that describes how to make the ASP.NET AJAX's UpdatePanel control accessible for screen-readers. ASP.NET AJAX Meets Virtual Earth: Alessandro Gallo, author of the excellent ASP.NET AJAX in Action book, has a nice series of articles that talks about using ASP.NET AJAX with Virtual Earth to implement mapping on your site. Faster Page Loading by Moving ASP.NET AJAX Scripts after visible content: Omar Al Zabir (the co-founder of www.PageFlakes.com) has a great article that describes a nice technique you can use to improve the perceived loading performance of an ASP.NET AJAX page.  I also highly recommend reading Omar's great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book to learn some of his other suggestions and techniques. 3 Tips for Working with ASP.NET AJAX's TabContainer Control: Matt Berseth continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX with some tips on working with the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Building ASP.NET AJAX Components: Mike Ormond has written an excellent 8-part series that covers building re-usable ASP.NET AJAX components that work on both the client and server. ASP.NET MVC An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC using VB: Bill Burrows from www.MyVBprof.com has put together a great set of online videos that introduce ASP.NET MVC using Visual Basic.  Also make sure to check out his video series on LINQ to XML using VB and LINQ to SQL using VB. ASP.NET MVC: Membership Starter Kit: Troy Goode has a built an awesome membership starter kit for ASP.NET MVC that provides registration and login pages for users to authenticate on your site, as well as a set of administration functionality that allows admins to create/manage users and roles.  Download it here. ASP.NET MVC: Action Filter for Handling Errors: Troy Goode has another good post that provides some ASP.NET MVC action filters for catching and handling runtime errors. How to Enable Pretty URLs with ASP.NET MVC and IIS6: James Geurts posts a useful article that describes how to enable extension-less URLs with ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 (note: you do not need to configure anything special with ASP.NET MVC on IIS7 to enable extension-less URL support). Visual Studio PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008: A free set of useful extensions for VS 2008 that add a bunch of cool features to the IDE. Coding Productivity: Macros, Shortcuts and Snippets: Kirill Osenkov has a nice blog post that shows of how to use Visual Studio's macro feature to custom record useful time-savers. Silverlight Dave Campbell's Excellent Silverlight Link Series: Dave Campbell posts a regular series of links to new Silverlight articles and content on the web.  I highly recommend subscribing to his blog if you want to stay current with all the latest Silverlight articles and posts. Silverlight 2 Map / DataGrid Tutorial: Jason Zander has a great two-part Silverlight tutorial that demonstrates how to build a nice data-driven application that integrates a map control with a datagrid to filter and analyze data. CRUD operations with Silverlight 2, WCF and LINQ to SQL: Ronnie Saurenmann from the Swiss MSDN team has a nice video that shows off some basics of how to support inserts, updates and deletes using Silverlight 2 connected via WCF to a LINQ to SQL backend. Writing a Templated Silverlight 2 Control: Shawn Burke has a great tutorial post that walksthrough how to build a templated Silverlight control that implements an expand/collapse control. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Friday, April 11, 2008 3:04 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .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 Three New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available: Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials. These three new ones cover creating and managing roles, assigning roles to users, and implementing role based authorization.  You can also find more security articles by reading posts on my blog tagged with security. .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 APIs: Scott Hanselman's latest "weekly source code" review looks at .NET APIs that you can use to call popular web 2.0 services. Hangs and how to Solve Them (Part 1) and (Part 2): Tom has some useful posts that talk about deadlocks and request queuing in ASP.NET, and how to detect and debug what might be causing them. ASP.NET AJAX Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Part 1), (Part 2), and (Part 3): Mike Ormond has started a nice blog post series that talks about how to build ASP.NET AJAX Controls.  Make sure to check out Part 2 - Components and Part 3 - Properties and Events as well. New ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos: Joe Stagner has published a number of new ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos.  Learn about the re-order control, retrieving values from server-side AJAX controls, two techniques for triggering updates to update panels, and using the cascading drop down control. Real-Time Progress Bar with ASP.NET AJAX: SingingEels shows a technique for displaying real-time progress notifications using AJAX as a long-lived activity runs on the server. Using JQuery to Consume ASP.NET AJAX JSON Web Services: Dave Ward has a nice post that describes how to use the JQuery AJAX library on the client to call an ASP.NET Web Service on the server that is JSON enabled (using ASP.NET AJAX on the server).  ASP.NET MVC Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC: Kazi Manzur Rashid published an excellent Digg-clone sample built with ASP.NET MVC last February.  He recently updated the code to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 (full details here).  You can download the latest version of his source code here. ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET Request: Stephen Walther has a great post that details the exact steps that occur when an ASP.NET MVC request executes.  ASP.NET MVC Action Filters - Caching and Compression: Kazi Manzur Rashid has another great post that shows how to use the new ActionFilterAttribute support in ASP.NET MVC to implement output caching and compression attributes. Read this quickstart article to learn more about how Action Filters work, or watch Scott Hanselman's video that covers them. Defining Routes using Regular Expressions with ASP.NET MVC: Someone asked me the other day how to use regular expressions to define route rules with ASP.NET MVC.  Turns out Fredrik Kalseth already has a nice sample that shows how to-do this. Testing with the ASP.NET MVC Framework: Simone Chiaretta has a great article that discusses how to test controllers using ASP.NET MVC Preview 2.  Note: the next ASP.NET MVC preview release will include a number of refactorings that will simplify controller testing considerably (and avoid the need to mock anything for common scenarios). Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio 2008 Unit Tests: Stephen Walther has a really nice post that describe how the unit testing features now built-in VS 2008 Professional work (using an ASP.NET MVC project).  Also check out Stephen's excellent Introduction to Rhino Mocks blog post that describes how to use the open source Rhino Mocks framework with VS unit test projects. Visual Studio VS 2008 Web Deployment Hot-Fix Roll-Up Now Available for non-English Languages: Last month we shipped a hot-fix release that fixes a number of bugs, adds a few features, and improves performance for web development scenarios in VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.  Last month's release only worked with the English-language VS 2008 products.  Yesterday we shipped an update that now works for all VS 2008 languages except Portuguese and Russian (which are still to come in the future).  Hotfix Available for VB Performance Issue in VS 2008: The Visual Basic team recently released a hotfix as well that addresses a performance issue with large files that contain XML documentation.  Read this post to learn more about how to download it if you are running into this issue. 10 Ways to Boost your Productivity with C# and VS 2008: John W Powell shares a few tips and tricks on how to improve your productivity with C# and VS 2008. Showing Hack, Undone, and Custom Tokens in the Task List: Sara Ford has some cool VS tips of the day posts that talk about what you can do with the task list.  Also read her How to Create and View Todos in the Task List, Assigning Priority to Items in the Task List, Create Shortcuts in the Task List, Create User Tasks in the Task List, and Keyboard Navigation of items in the Task List. Silverlight Using the Silverlight DataGrid and Defining Columns for a Silverlight DataGrid: Scott Morrison has started a great series of posts that describe how to use the new Silverlight 2 DataGrid control (which he is the program manager for - so he definitely knows his stuff!). Using Silverlight 2's DataGrid with WCF + LINQ to SQL: This 15 minute video blog demonstrates how to build a LINQ to SQL object model on the server and publish it using WCF.  It then demonstrates how to build a Silverlight client that uses the new Silverlight DataGrid control, and which calls the WCF service to retrieve the LINQ to SQL data to populate it with. Simple Editing of Web Service Data in a DataGrid: Mike Taulty has a nice blog post that shows how to create a WCF service on the server, and then use it from a Silverlight 2 client to retrieve data, bind it to a DataGrid, allow users to update rows, add/delete rows, and then save it back to the server using Silverlight 2 Beta1. Sorting with Silverlight 2's DataGrid Control: The DataGrid control in Silverlight 2 Beta1 doesn't yet have built-in column sorting support (it is coming in Beta2).  That hasn't stopped Matt Berseth though!  In this post he shows how to implement sorting using a custom header column approach.  Also check out Matt's post here, which provides a DataGrid test page that shows off a number of the current DataGrid features. Open Source Silverlight Charts with VisiFire: Silverlight doesn't yet have built-in charting controls.  The good news is that the folks at Webyog just released a really cool set of open source Silverlight charting controls (complete with animation support) that enable you to easily build great looking charts.  Their model makes it super easy to use the chart components within existing HTML or AJAX applications. .NET FormatWith and DateTime Extension Methods: James Newton-King and Fredrik Kalseth have some nice posts and samples that demonstrate how to use the new extension method feature in the VB and C# languages in VS 2008 to create some useful convenience libraries.  Dependency Injection Explained: James Kovacs has a nice MSDN article that explains how to build more loosely coupled applications and enabled dependency injection.  Also read Scott Hanselman's that list of .NET Dependency Injector Containers (IOC) post.  Matthew Podwysocki also covers the new Unity IOC in his posts here and here. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Friday, March 28, 2008 4:08 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• 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

• Feb 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, WPF

  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 ASP.NET Security Tutorial Series: Scott Mitchell (who wrote the excellent Data Access Tutorial Series for us last year), has recently begun a new free tutorial series focused on ASP.NET Security.  Today we published the first three article in the series on the www.asp.net site: