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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

• 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

• Nov 17th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, VS 2008, .NET 3.5, IIS7, 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 GridViewControlExtender - Row MouseOver and Click Styles, Header Cell MouseOver Styles, and 5 Themes Based on Google's Personalized HomePage: Matt Berseth has three cool posts that show off techniques you can use to customize the look and feel of the ASP.NET GridView control. ASP.NET AJAX Exploring one of Microsoft AJAX's often overlooked features: AddHandler: Dave Ward starts a new series covering some of ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript features, and begins the series by exploring the $AddHandler method, which allows you to attach a client side Javascript event handler to any DOM element on a a page. Yahoo UI Style "Tip of the Day" Dialog using the ASP.NET AJAX PopupControl, DynamicPopulate and DragPanel Extender Controls: Matt Berseth has a nice article that describes how to implement a "Tip of the Day" popup control using ASP.NET AJAX. VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense: A Reference for the "Reference" Tag: The VS Web Tools Team published this useful reference that details how to use the // <reference> directive within JavaScript pages to reference other JavaScript files, web services, and JavaScript snippets embedded in assemblies.  You can learn more about VS 2008's JavaScript intellisense support from my previous VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense post. "Don't Ask Me Again" Delete Confirm Using a ModalPopup and ASP.NET's Profile Properties: Matt Berseth has a cool tutorial that demonstrates how to to use ASP.NET AJAX to prompt a ModalPopup to end users - and then save the results within the ASP.NET Profile system. JQuery TabContainer Theme with Tab Transition Animations: Matt Berseth has a nice post that describes how you can add more animation to your site - this time building an ASP.NET AJAX extender that provides JQuery-like animation effects.  ASP.NET MVC Build an RSS Feed with the new ASP.NET MVC Framework: Brad Abrams demonstrates a simple example of how to build a RSS blog feed using the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Use Spring.NET to enable Dependency Injection on a ASP.NET MVC Controller: Fredrik Normen walks through a simple sample that demonstrates how to enable dependency injection of a data repository object to a Controller with the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  Specifically, he shows using Spring.NET and the IControllerFactory interface provided with ASP.NET MVC. Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Visual Basic 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster and Visual C# 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster: The final release of Visual Studio 2008 will be available for download very shortly (keep an eye on my blog for details).  To help get ready you can download and print off these two posters for free.  They detail the default keybindings for the VB and C# profiles.  .NET 3.5 Reference Poster: Here is an updated .NET Framework Common Namespaces and Types Poster that you can also print out for free.  It details some of the new namespaces and important types in .NET 3.5. Sound Events for Visual Studio: Apparently you you assign sounds to fire when Visual Studio events happen (for example: a build error).  I can't think of a really good use for this other than to annoy co-workers.  Potentially something fun you can enable on their machine when they go to lunch. 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 Silverlight 1.1 Hebrew and Arabic Language Support: Silverlight today doesn't yet support right-to-left text layout.  Justin-Josef Angel has put together an absolutely awesome CodePlex project that enables this support.  Download the code from CodePlex today, and read his detailed tutorial on it here. .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 Posted Saturday, November 17, 2007 3:47 PM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC