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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 ASP.NET AJAX .NET -
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 Silverlight WPF Hope this helps, Scott 
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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 AJAX ASP.NET MVC 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). Silverlight -
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. .NET Hope this helps, Scott 
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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 AJAX -
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. 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. .NET -
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 
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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 - .NET Debugging Demos Lab: Tess Ferrandez, who is an ASP.NET escalation engineer for Microsoft support and who also posts incredible articles on the art of debugging production ASP.NET applications, has started a new tutorial series that provides a sample "buggy" application and a series of questions/problems you can work through to learn how to debug problem applications in production environments.
- 4 Alternative View Engines for ASP.NET MVC: The open source MvcContrib project has been adding lots of cool goodness on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Jeffrey Palermo posts about 4 alternative view rendering engines now in the project that you can use if you don't want to use the default .aspx based view engine. BTW - I'll be doing a new post on ASP.NET MVC within the next week talking about some of the cool new features coming soon with the next refresh.
ASP.NET AJAX - Boost ASP.NET Performance with Deferred Content Loading: Dave Ward continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX. This article talks about how you can improve the perceived load-time of a page by using an AJAX callback to retrieve HTML content once the page loads on the client. This approach is similar to the one I wrote about in my tip/trick post here.
Visual Studio - Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison: Several people have sent me email in the past asking for a page that describes the differences between the various Visual Studio 2008 editions (Standard, Professional, Visual Studio Team System, etc). This link is useful to bookmark if you want to learn more about this.
- Did you know...You can Shift+ESC to close a tool window: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know..." VS 2008 tips and tricks series. I confess I didn't know this one. One productivity tip I always recommend is to really learn the keyboard shortcuts of your development tool environment well - since using them over time can yield significant productivity savings. Click here to download a VB 2008 key bindings poster, or click here to download the C# 2008 key bindings poster equivalent. Print them out and put them under your pillow to absorb them while you sleep.
.NET - The Power of Yield: Joshua Flanagan has a nice article on one of the coolest, yet underused, feature of C# in .NET 2.0 - which is the yield keyword. This is a very powerful feature that enables you to efficiently work with IEnumerable scenarios and enable deferred iteration (LINQ leverages this heavily with .NET 3.5). To master C# even more, I also highly recommend the new C# 3.0 In a Nutshell book (I posted a 5 star review of it on Amazon).
WPF - Making VS 2008 Open in XAML Mode By Default: Matthias Shapiro has a nice post that shows how you can configure VS 2008 to by default load WPF files in XAML mode instead of design-mode. A very useful shortcut if your natural inclination is to work directly with XAML markup.
- How can I debug WPF bindings? Beatriz Costa from the Microsoft WPF team has a great post that talks about tips/tricks you can use to better identify "what went wrong" when a databinding expression fails with WPF.
- Programming WPF and Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed: If you would like to learn WPF (especially now that there is project and designer support for it in VS 2008), I recommend these two books by Chris Sells and Adam Nathan. Both are excellent resources to use to learn from.
Hope this helps, Scott 
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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 AJAX -
ASP.NET AJAX History How Do I Video: To learn more about the new ASP.NET AJAX history support, watch this great 15 minute video from Bertrand Le Roy of the ASP.NET team. He demonstrates how to AJAX enable an <asp:wizard> control, and then add history marker points to it. ASP.NET MVC -
Accessing Server Controls from CodeBehind with ASP.NET MVC Views: David Hayden has a good post that discusses a workaround for a bug with the current ASP.NET MVC CTP view templates - which prevents you from coding against server controls in view template code behind classes. You can right-click on the MVC view files and select "Convert to Web Application" to fix it. Alternatively, you can download updated MVC Templates that Troy Goode recently posted here. This issue will be fixed with the next MVC update. Visual Studio IIS 7.0 Hope this helps, Scott 
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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 AJAX ASP.NET MVC Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 IIS 7.0 -
Running 32-bit and 64-bit ASP.NET versions at the same time in different worker processes: With IIS6 you either had to run all web worker processes in 32-bit mode, or all of them in 64-bit mode. There was no easy way to mix and match depending on the application (you couldn't have one 32-bit ASP.NET application that needed to use a C++ component on the same machine as another 64-bit ASP.NET application in a separate application pool). With IIS 7.0 this is now supported and easy to enable. Rakki Muthukumar from Microsoft support describes how to configure this. WPF and Silverlight -
.NET 3.5 Add-In Model: Jack Gudenkauf is a developer on my team who has driven the design of the new System.AddIn namespace in .NET 3.5. This namespace makes it easier to build add-in extensibility to your client applications. Among other things, this enables you to isolate addins and WPF controls across application domain and process boundaries (here is a sample of one). Watch Jack's Channel9 video to learn more. -
Data Binding in WPF: A nice MSDN Magazine article from John Papa that describes some of the basics of how WPF's binding model works. Josh Twist also has some good WPF databinding companion articles that complement this here and here. To learn WPF in more detail, I highly recommend Adam Nathan's excellent WPF Unleashed book (still 5 stars after 45 reviews on Amazon.com). The next public release of Silverlight 1.1 will support the same powerful databinding model that is in the full WPF, and will make building data aware applications much easier. Hope this helps, Scott 
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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 - Cleanup Inactive Anonymous Users: ASP.NET 2.0 has support for an optional feature called "anonymous users" - which enables you to optionally track and store profile data for non-authenticated users visiting your sites (read K. Scott Allen's article here for more details on how this works). Omar Al Zabir published this handy article that describes how to "clean up" this anonymous user data periodically to avoid storing it forever in your database.
ASP.NET AJAX Visual Studio -
SQL Database Publishing Wizard Now in VS 2008: One of the post-Beta2 features that we are adding for the final VS 2008 release is the inclusion of a SQL database publishing wizard inside Visual Studio. This will be supported in both the free Visual Web Developer Express edition as well as the full Visual Studio, and provides an easy way to script out your database schema and data to .SQL files. You can then copy these files to a remote hoster to deploy a database. You can learn more about how this works from my earlier posts here and here which describes how to use a previous standalone tool with this functionality (all of this functionality is now built-in to VS 2008). Silverlight IIS 7.0 -
Using LINQ with Microsoft.Web.Administration: Carlos from the IIS7 dev team has a really cool blog post that shows how you can use LINQ with .NET 3.5 to easily query and manipulate the new web server administration API introduced with IIS7. For more information on this new API, you can also read an old post of mine here. Hope this helps, Scott 
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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 - Debugging Script: Dumping out Current and Recent ASP.NET Requests: 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 what requests ASP.NET is currently processing on the server (super useful when investigating failures). 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.
- Freezing GridView Column Headers with CSS and a Control Adapter: Matt Berseth has a cool article on how you can use CSS to implement a "frozen columns headers" feature with the standard <asp:gridview> control. Note that this type of scenario is much easier with the new <asp:listview> control in .NET 3.5, which enables you to customize all of the html markup emitted.
ASP.NET AJAX - Update for the iPhone: Matt Gibbs blogs about a fix you can apply to ASP.NET AJAX to address a change in the iPhone 1.01 patch that impacts how regular expressions are parsed in the iPhone Safari browser. Matt's fix enables you to continue targeting iPhone users with your ASP.NET AJAX applications.
Visual Studio - XML to Schema Inference Wizard for Visual Studio 2008: Scott Hanselman has a great blog post about a new item template wizard that makes it really easy to automatically infer an XML schema from a XML file or XML snippet. He then shows how you can use the cool new LINQ to XML features in VB9 to get automatic LINQ to XML intellisense inside VS 2008 with it.
IIS 7.0 Silverlight - Ink Recognition and Silverlight: Loren has a really cool sample built with Silverlight that demonstrates how you can use the ink pen recognition support within Silverlight to enable tablet or mouse based Google searches using a Silverlight application. A very cool mashup.
- Silverlight Spy Tool: Silverlight Spy is a small WinForms application capable of inspecting Silverlight 1.0 applications. You can use it to navigate a XAML object explorer of a running Silverlight application, trace out messages from it, and enable easier debugging of it.
- HtmlTextBlock control for Silverlight: David Anson has published a really cool control for Silverlight 1.1 that provides an easy way to take HTML input and display it using the text/graphics stack within Silverlight.
- Silverlight Dev Camp Chicago: Kevin Marshall is organizing an upcoming Silverlight DevCamp event in Chicago on September 28th-29th. You can attend completely for free.
Hope this helps, Scott 
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One of the things I'm going to try and start doing is a weekly blog post of useful/interesting links on .NET related topics that I've found on the web. Below is this week's version: ASP.NET - Storing Binary Files Directly in the Database using ASP.NET 2.0: Scott Mitchell has a good article that shows how to upload and store images within a SQL database, and then serve them out dynamically from within a web application (very useful for photo albums). You could combine this article with Rick's above to enable an optional "Save As" option that allows site visitors to save high-resolution versions of images or other file types.
Visual Studio - Debugging SQL Server 2005 Stored Procedures in Visual Studio: Scott Mitchell published another great article on how to debug SPROCs using Visual Studio 2005. You can use this approach to set a breakpoint within a SPROC in your database, and then hit it like a normal debug breakpoint when debugging an ASP.NET application that calls it.
- Using Visual Studio Macros to Increase Productivity: Dan has a nice post describing some of the Macros he has created to manage large projects in Visual Studio. The Visual Studio macro recorder and editor are two features that not enough developers take advantage of (myself included). Whenever you find yourself repeating a task a number of times, I'd highly recommend creating a macro within VS to automate it for future uses.
Silverlight - Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Layout System and Controls Framework: One of the features missing in the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha that we shipped at MIX is support for layout management. This is a powerful feature of WPF, and makes it much easier to position and control UI on a page (I'll post more about this in the future). Dave Relyea from the Silverlight UI team posted a cool sample on his blog that provides a sample implementation of layout management that works with the 1.1 Alpha and includes both Stack and Grid layout manager support. He also then shipped a number of cool custom controls including buttons, labels, textbox, and border controls. Very cool stuff.
- Silverlight Toolbar Example: A nice sample from Vivek that describes how to create an animated toolbar where the buttons expand when you hover over them. You might also want to check out the "Office UI Ribbon" sample on the www.silverlight.net sample gallery web-site that demonstrates how to build a really cool toolbar within the browser.
WPF .NET General - NDepend 2.2: Scott Dorman has written up a great post on NDepend - which is a .NET utility that enables you to perform code analysis on your .NET projects. This can be useful especially with large projects that you've inherited. NDepend also supports a SQL-like query language that enables you to define your own code rules/analytics to search a code base with.
- Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) ported to Mono: One of the announcements we made at MIX was that we are shipping a new "dynamic language runtime" framework library for .NET that makes it much easier to build dynamic languages on top of .NET (both the full .NET Framework and Silverlight). We are also shipping four dynamic language implementations of our own: IronPython, IronRuby, Javascript and Dynamic VB. We shipped the source code to the DLR and IronPython as a CodePlex project with a permissive license. This article on O'Reilly describes how someone has already taken the code and got it up and running on Mono. Miguel de Icaza was up in Redmond this week at a compiler dev lab we held and JasonZ and I got a chance to take him out to dinner last night. You can read about Miguel's trip on his blog here.
Hope this helps, Scott 
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