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

  Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately.  Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control: Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls: Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario. Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET: A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images. Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on. ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners: Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns).  The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated.  Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control: Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control. Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch: Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads.  Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier. Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class: Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class. Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta: Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls. .NET 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ: Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it. Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL: Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries.  Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries. DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers. Ukadc.Diagnostics: Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc). Visual Studio 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know: A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio. Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series.  I confess I didn't know this one. Silverlight 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time".  Wow. AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes: Nikhil Kothari has a nice blog post that demonstrates how he built an auto-complete behavior control for Silverlight.  Scrolling through Large Resultsets with Silverlight 2 and LINQ to SQL: The Swiss MSDN team has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to scroll through large resultsets using the Silverlight DataGrid and LINQ to SQL. IValueConverter: The Swiss Army Knife of Bindings: David Anson has a useful blog post and sample that demonstrates how to use the IValueConverter feature in Silverlight and WPF to support richer bindings against complex objects. Silverlight 2 Pie Chart: Peter McGrattan has posted a nice control and article that demonstrates how to use a new Silverlight charting control he has written. WPF WPF week on Channel9: Watch 6 great videos on Channel9.  Each one includes interviews and demos with members of the WPF team talking about some of the awesome work that went into WPF 3.5 SP1 (read my blog post here for a summary of some of it). WPF Testing and Application Quality Guide: Check out the 0.2 release of a free online book being developed by Microsoft that covers how to test WPF applications.  Definitely worth book-marking if you are doing WPF development. Moving Toward WPF Data Binding One Step at a Time: Josh Smith has a great article on CodeProject.com that explains WPF data binding and walksthrough how to use it. WPF 3.5 SP1 StringFormat: Lester has a nice post that describes how to use the new StringFormat feature in WPF 3.5 SP1.  This makes it much easier to handle formatting of databound values. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:02 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, LINQ, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing

• 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

• Jan 24th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, IIS

  I just arrived back from my trip from Asia, and decided to celebrate (since I'm jet-lagged and can't sleep) with a new post in my link-listing series.  You can check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Extending the GridView to Include Sort Arrows: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to add a visual indicator to the GridView control to indicate the current sort order on columns. Using ASP.NET 3.5's ListView and DataPager Controls: Sorting Data: Scott Mitchell continues his ListView control series with a good article on enabling sorting scenarios with the new ListView control. Building a Grouping Grid with the ListView and LinqDataSource Controls: Matt Berseth has an awesome post that shows off using the new ListView control and LinqDataSource controls to build a hierarchical grouping grid.  A post to bookmark. Using the ListView, DataPager and LinqDataSource Controls: Matt Berseth has a good tutorial post that shows off using these new controls to join data from two database tables using LINQ. Some ASP.NET 3.5 ListView Control Examples: Mike Ormond has a nice post that provides a number of samples that show how to use the new ASP.NET ListView control.  For even more ListView articles, check out my last link-listing post which pointed to a bunch of them. Large File Uploads in ASP.NET: Jon Galloway has a nice post that provides some good details on handing large file uploads using ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX Four ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript UI Methods You Should Learn: Dave Ward has another great post in his series about ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript Helper Methods. Five Tab Themes Created for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: Matt Berseth posts some really cool themes created for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's Tab control. Very slick! CNN Style Scrolling Ticker with the Marquee Toolkit Control: Matt Berseth posts another great one that shows how to implement a scrolling marquee UI using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Visual Studio Did You Know?: Lisa Feigenbaum from the VB team has posted a really cool series of blog posts that talk about some of the new VS 2008 editor and IDE features.  Read Part 1: Intellisense Everywhere, Part 2: IntelliSense is now Transparent, Part 3: Ctrl+Tab to Navigate Windows, Part 4: What You Can Do with Debugger DataTips, and Part 5: VB IntelliSense now filters as you type. Web Server Settings for ASP.NET Web Application Projects can now be stored per user as well as per project: The VS Web Tools Team has a nice post that describes how you can now store web server settings per-user instead of per-project.  This is very useful for multi-developer scenarios (where you don't want to check-in these values into source control). Using Ctrl-Break to Stop VS Building: Steven Harman points out a cool tip/trick, which is that you can use the Ctrl-Break key within Visual Studio to kill the current compilation build.  A useful tip if you've accidentally kicked off a long build or get tired waiting for it to finish. Visual Studio 2008 Trouble Shooting Guide: If you run into any issues installing VS 2008, make sure to check out this blog post.  It details a bunch of common causes of failures, and how to fix them. .NET Marshaling between Managed and Unmanaged Code: Yi Zhang and Xiaoying Guo from my team in Shanghai have written a great MSDN article that describes how to use the marshaling interop features of the CLR to call native code.  One of the tools they highlight is an awesome P/Invoke Interop Assistant application they built that makes it much, much easier to generate p/invoke interop signatures when calling native methods.  A must-have tool for anyone doing native/managed interop! .NET Framework 3.5 Poster: Brad Abrams posts about the cool new .NET Framework 3.5 posters now available for download (now in multiple file formats). IIS Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Technical Preview 1: Yesterday the IIS team posted the first preview of a new Microsoft Web Deployment tool.  This tool works with both IIS6 and IIS7 and enables automated deployment, synchronization, and migrating of applications on web servers.  If you are looking for a great way to automate the deployment of your ASP.NET applications then this tool is definitely one to check out.  To learn more, read the walkthroughs at the bottom of this page (in particular the "Introduction to MS Deploy" one).  This tool is awesome and should make automated deployment much easier. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Friday, January 25, 2008 2:08 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, LINQ, IIS7, Link Listing