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• Dec 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight/WPF

  I'm flying out later today on a pretty intense business trip (22,000 miles, 5 countries, 3 continents, 1 week, no sleep... :-), so my blog activity over the next week and a half will be pretty light.  To keep you busy till I return, 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 Geolocation/Geotargeting Reverse IP Lookup Code: Scott Hanselman has a cool sample that demonstrates how to perform IP address lookups on users visiting your site to determine where they are located on the globe (down to the latitude and longitude).  Pretty cool stuff. Tracking User Activity: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to track end-user activity when visiting an ASP.NET web site. iTunes Data Grid Skin: Matt Berseth continues his cool series showing off cool new skins you can apply to ASP.NET controls (especially the GridView and DetailsView controls).  This post shows off a pretty sweet iTunes like skin. Using ETW to Troubleshoot AppDomain Restarts and other Issues: Tess Ferrandez has another great post that demonstrates how to use the ETW tracing features built-into ASP.NET and Windows to trouble-shoot runtime issues. ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has 6 nice ASP.NET Dynamic Data "How Do I?" videos posted on www.asp.net that you can check out to learn about the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature in .NET 3.5 SP1. A "Many to Many" field template for Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has a great post that talks about how to enable Many To Many scenarios with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. Customizing ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Customizing a Template Field: Laurent Duveau has two nice posts in a series he is doing on using ASP.NET Dynamic Data and customizing the UI generated from it. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Routing: Rachel Appel has a nice post that talks about how to use the new ASP.NET routing features with ASP.NET Dynamic Data to enable customized URLs. Fun with T4 Templates and Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has a cool post on how to use the T4 templating engine built-into Visual Studio to automate ASP.NET Dynamic Data form generation. Using User Controls as Page Templates in Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has another nice post that talks about how to use user controls with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX - Observing Updates to Plain Old JavaScript Objects: Dave Reed has a great blog post about one of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX - support for observing updates on plain old javascript objects. Using the Power of Binding to Animate Changes: Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about the new ASP.NET AJAX binding features coming and how you can use them with jQuery to animate changes. Instantiating Components on template markup: Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about client-side AJAX templating approaches and some of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX. Putting more than one behavior on one element and Getting a Reference to a Behavior: Bertrand Le Roy has two nice articles that talk about how to use the client-side behaviors feature of ASP.NET AJAX. Check/Uncheck all Items in an ASP.NET Checkbox List using jQuery: A nice article by Suprotim Agarwal that shows how to write client-side jQuery code to enable check/uncheck for all items within a checkbox list. ASP.NET MVC How to Setup ASP.NET MVC on IIS6: Phil Haack has a great post that walks-through how to enable ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 servers (including how to enable it on a hosting server that you can't install anything on). Fluent Route Testing in ASP.NET MVC: Ben Scheirman has a nice post where he blogs about new helper methods he is creating that make it easier to unit test ASP.NET MVC routes using a fluent API. Autocomplete using jQuery, ASP.NET MVC and JSON: Faraz Tabibian has a nice blog sample that demonstrates how to implement an autocomplete textbox using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC. Hierarchical TreeView with ASP.NET MVC & jQuery: Mike Bosch has a cool sample that demonstrates how to add treeview UI to an ASP.NET MVC site using jQuery. Visual Studio MSTest Tip: Double-Click to Go to Failing Test: Simone Chiaretta has a cool tip that can speed up navigating to a test when it fails in the built-in VS 2008 unit test runner. How to Add a Linked Item to a Project: Sara Ford has a nice post that talks about how to add linked items to your VS projects. Go to Class Definition for CSS: Nice post from the VS web tools team that talks about the "Go To Class Definition" feature in VS 2008 for CSS. How to Set a fixed Port for the VS Development WebServer: Another nice post from the VS web tools team that discusses how to assign a fixed HTTP port to an ASP.NET project within Visual Studio. WPF / Silverlight XAML Power Toys - Instant Form Creation: Karl Shifflett has a great video that shows off his XAML Power Toys tool that integrates into Visual Studio and enables rapid forms creation for WPF and Silverlight. AutoCompleteBox Control - The Missing Guide: Jeff Wilcox has an awesome post that talks about the new Silverlight AutoCompleteBox control in the Silverlight Toolkit.  Very useful reading. Silverlight Charting and BabySmash: Scott Hanselman has a cool post where he talks about how he integrated the new Silverlight Chart control with his BabySmash sample from his awesome talk at the PDC. Silverlight Validator & Input Toolkit: A really nice new CodePlex project that enables validation controls for Silverlight - making form input scenarios a lot easier. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:43 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Community News, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• October 8th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and .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 ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring: ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a new "health monitoring" feature that enables you to automatically monitor and track how an ASP.NET application is doing in a production environment.  Scott Mitchell has written an excellent three-part article series that discusses: 1) the basics of health monitoring, 2) how you can automatically receive email notification of errors, and 3) how you can create and raise your own custom health events. Creating a Yahoo UI DataTable Styled GridView: Matt Berseth has a cool article that describes how you can style the ASP.NET 2.0 GridView control to have a really nice visual appearance. How Do I Video: Create a Custom Membership Provider: A new "how do I?" video on the www.asp.net site that covers how to create a custom membership provider.  For more about how to build ASP.NET providers, make sure to also check out this previous blog post of mine. How Do I Video: Create a Custom Profile Provider: A new "how do I?" video on the www.asp.net site that covers how to create a new custom profile provider.  For more about how to build ASP.NET providers, make sure to also check out this previous blog post of mine. BlogEngine.NET 1.2 Released: Mads Kristensen and team have published an updated version of the great BlogEngine.NET open source blogging system.  You can read more about it on Mads' announcement blog post here. ASP.NET AJAX ModalPopup with Multiple Cancel Buttons: Matt Berseth has a nice article that describes how to support both a cancel button as well as a close "X" button in the top right corner of a ASP.NET AJAX Modal Popup Dialog. ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit TabContainer Themes: Matt Berseth continues his great articles on the ASP.NET AJAX TabContainer Control with several more cool visual themes that you can use. Using CSS Image Sprites with the XP Themed TabContainer Control: Matt Berseth shows a cool technique you can use with CSS to create image sprites (where you save multiple images into a single .png file and then use offsets to show different image segments in different places on a page).  Silverlight Silverlight Unleashed Book Ships this Week: Adam Nathan's excellent Silverlight Unleashed book ships later this week (October 11th).  Adam wrote the best-selling WPF Unleashed book that has been one of the top selling programming books on Amazon this year, and he is also the core architect of the Microsoft PopFly service (which is built using Silverlight). I'm really looking forward to getting a printed copy of the new book! Awesome Quiksilver Video Experience: This is a really cool Silverlight site that shows off building a great video experience using Silverlight.  Very nice! Vectorform Labs Silverlight Examples: Vectorform has recently published some really nice Silverlight samples (with full source code) that are definitely worth checking out. Farseer Physics Engine: This free CodePlex project provides a nice 2D physics engine for Silverlight 1.1.  You can check out some online demos of it here. Deploying Silverlight in the Enterprise: David Tesar and Tim Sneath point to a good document that enterprise IT administrators can use to learn more about how to automatically deploy Silverlight in locked-down enterprise environments. .NET C# Coding Standard Guidelines: Juval Lowry from IDesign has published this excellent C# coding standards guideline document.  Extremely useful if you are looking for a concise checklist of good suggestions to keep your codebase clean. DevTeach Vancouver: The excellent DevTeach conference in Vancouver is coming up in November.  This is a great conference with a ton of session content. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Tuesday, October 09, 2007 2:14 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Community News, Silverlight, Link Listing

• September 16th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7, Visual Studio, Silverlight

  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 Creating a User Polling System with ASP.NET 2.0: Scott Mitchell has written a nice three-part tutorial series for www.4guysfromrolla.com that demonstrates how to implement a poll user control for ASP.NET that you can use to poll users on your site for their opinions on questions, and then display a graphical output of the poll results.  Here are part 2 and part 3 of the series. 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. Improve Column Sort Presentation for an ASP.NET GridView: Matt Berseth has a cool article on how to customize the column header format of an <asp:gridview> control to enable a really nice column sorting experience. Creating a GridView with Resizable Column Headers: Matt Berseth demonstrates a proof of concept on how to add support to an <asp:gridview> control to enable users to resize the column widths of the data being displayed.  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 ListView - CSS Friendly: Kazi Manzur Rashid posts some cool samples showing off how to use the new <asp:listview> control with some nice CSS table designs.  Also check out my <asp:listview> Part 1: Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS UI post to learn more about how you can use the new VS 2008 CSS Editing features with the <asp:listview> control. ASP.NET AJAX Enable Client Side Actions Before and After Postback with ASP.NET AJAX: Rob Meade has a nice article that describes how you can execute client-side JavaScript before and after the <asp:updatepanel> control calls back to the server to handle an AJAX post-back. Creating JavaScript objects from ASP.NET Objects: David Betz has a nice blog post that describes a clean way to encapsulate client-side JavaScript helpers for ASP.NET server controls. How Do I: Create an ASP.NET AJAX Extender from Scratch: Chris Pels has a nice 15 minute video on www.asp.net that demonstrates how to create an ASP.NET AJAX extender control for a standard ASP.NET server control. How Do I: Building Custom Server Controls that work with or without ASP.NET AJAX: Chris Pels has a nice 19 minute video on www.asp.net that describes how to build an ASP.NET server control that can automatically integrate ASP.NET AJAX if it is installed, but fall back gracefully in the event that it isn't on the server machine. 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 Ten Reasons why IIS 7.0 Rocks: The Microsoft.com team has been running the entire www.microsoft.com site on IIS7 and Windows Server 2008 the last few months.  This blog post from them lists their top 10 favorite improvements in IIS7. 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. Online JavaScript Silverlight Design Tutorials: Jeff's web-site has a bunch of cool tutorials for Silverlight 1.0 that show off how to achieve nice design effects with 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 Posted Sunday, September 16, 2007 8:40 PM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, Community News, Silverlight, Link Listing

• August 30th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7, 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 Recreating the Google Analytics Table as an ASP.NET GridView: Matt Berseth has a great post on how you can templatize the <asp:gridview> control to provide really nice UI paging options.  ASP.NET Charting with NPlot: Olav Lerflaten has a great article on 4GuysFromRolla.com that describes how to use the free NPlot chart engine for .NET to create professional scientific charts of data using ASP.NET. Export GridView to Excel: Matt Berseth has another excellent post on how you can export data to Excel from within your ASP.NET application. How to use PayPal Payment System in ASP.NET: Alexandr Golovanov has a great article that details how to implement a paypal payment system within your ASP.NET applications. Using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to Store Date/Time Values: Scott Mitchell has a useful article that describes how to use the UTC format to store date/time values within a SQL database so that it is transportable across timezones.  This is important to think about if your business operates in multiple geographic locations (or if your hosted web-server is located in a different time zone). Fixing Firefox Slowness with localhost on Vista (or XP with IPv6): One annoying issue I've run into with Firefox is that sometimes - when doing localhost development - it can take several seconds to connect back to a local page.  It turns out this slowness is caused by a Firefox IPv6 issue with DNS resolution.  Dan Wahlin has a good pointer on how to fix this. Microsoft Patterns & Practices Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications: The final release of the Microsoft PAG group's Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications has been posted.  You can learn more about this release from J.D. Meier's blog post here. ASP.NET AJAX Using the AJAX Timer Control as an UpdatePanel Trigger: Matt Berseth has a nice post on how to use the ASP.NET AJAX Timer Control to trigger AJAX updates of a page.  Seamless Inline Text Editing with ASP.NET AJAX: Dave Ward has a nice post on how to enable inline editing of content on a page using ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET AJAX Exception Logging: Kazi Manzur Rashid has a nice article that shows how to create an effective error logging system with ASP.NET AJAX to catch and record client JavaScript errors. The Ever-Useful $get and $find ASP.NET AJAX Shortcut Functions: Matt Berseth has another nice post on using the $get and $find JavaScript shortcut functions built-into ASP.NET AJAX. How Do I: Trigger an UpdatePanel refresh from a DropDownList Control: Joe Stagner covers how to use the SelectedIndexChanged event on drop-downlist controls to trigger AJAX refreshes of an ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel. How Do I: Localize an ASP.NET AJAX Application: Chris Pels provides an overview of the localization capabilities in ASP.NET, and then looks at how to use these with ASP.NET AJAX. How Do I: Implement the Persistent Communications Pattern using Web Services: Joe Stagner discusses ways to implement the persistent communications pattern for ASP.NET AJAX. IIS 7.0 Developing IIS7 Modules and Handlers with the .NET Framework: Mike Volodarksy from the IIS7 team has an excellent step-by-step blog post that describes how you can now write HttpModules and HttpHandlers using managed code that participate in all requests to a web-server.  This enables you to easily do scenarios that previously required custom C++ ISAPIs to achieve. LINQ LINQPad: Joseph Albahari has an incredibly awesome LINQ query expression tool that you can use to quickly try out LINQ expressions.  Think of it as SQL Query Analyzer - but with LINQ expressions as the queries.  Definitely a useful free tool to add to your toolbox. Visual Studio The SQL Data Tools in VS 2008: Rick Strahl talks about some of the new database schema comparison, data comparison and SQL Refactoring features within Visual Studio 2008. Open Folder in Windows Explorer in Visual Studio: Rick Strahl blogs about a small but cool feature addition to VS 2008 that enables you to easily open a Windows explorer view of a folder inside a VS 2008 project.  Also make sure to check out Bobby DeRosa's "Explore in Windows" Add-In for Visual Studio 2005 that you can download to enable this with VS 2005 today. Multithreaded Debugging Features in VS 2008: John Robbins has a nice blog post that describes some of the new multi-threading debugger features in VS 2008. Silverlight Recreating ITunes in Silverlight: Jose Fajardo has an absolutely fantastic blog with a ton of Silverlight content on it.  One of the projects he has been working on has been recreating Apple's ITunes Media Player using Silverlight.  Check out his multi-part blog series that discusses step-by-step how he built it.  Absolutely brilliant. New Halo3 Video using Silverlight: The new Halo3 preview video was recently posted to the web - using Silverlight 1.0 to build a custom viewer and stream a HD version of it.  Click here for a lower resolution version if you are on a slow network. Sudoku for Silverlight: David Anson has built a cool online sample using Silverlight that helps you play the popular Sudoku game.  Useful for both Sudoku addicts and developers wanting to learn Silverlight.   Font Embedding and RSS data in Silverlight: Tim Heuer has a cool blog post that shows how you can create your own font-type and embed it within your Silverlight 1.0 application.  He then has his application retrieve dynamic content from an RSS feed and use the custom font to display it.  You can run the finished application online here (all of the text here is dynamic - not a screen-shot). Silverlight Drag and Drop JavaScript Framework: Roberto Hernandez-Pou has a nice article and sample that describes how to implement a drag/drop mechanism for Silverlight 1.0 (using JavaScript).  This article is in both Spanish and English - scroll down if you are looking for the English version. Pascal Support for Silverlight: RemObjects Software now has a project template for VS 2008 that enables you to write Silverlight 1.1 .NET applications using Pascal.  It is kinda wild to see a screenshot of FireFox on the Mac, running a Silverlight application, written with a Pascal code-behind file built with VS 2008.  .NET Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows: This blog post is definitely one to bookmark.  It contains literally hundreds of great pointers to cool productivity savers for .NET developers.  BTW - Scott Hanselman officially joins my team within Microsoft next week.  Woohoo! LLBLGen Pro V2.5 released: Last week Frans Bouma released the latest version of LLBLGen Pro, which is an excellent ORM implementation for .NET.  New features include richer auditing, authorization, and dependency injection support. IronLisp: A new codeplex project has recently started that provides the beginnings of a LISP implementation for .NET which is built using the new DLR (dynamic language runtime) framework for .NET.  Earlier this month I was thinking to myself "I really need to spend some time using LISP or Scheme".  Now I can do it on .NET.  Sweet. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Thursday, August 30, 2007 3:40 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Community News, Silverlight, Link Listing