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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 -
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. -
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 ASP.NET MVC 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. Hope this helps, Scott 
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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 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. Visual Studio ASP.NET -
Debugging Script: Dumping out ASP.NET Session Contents: 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 the current state within the ASP.NET in-process session store (# of sessions, what their current timeout is, and the memory size of the objects within each session). 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. Very useful if you are ever trying to figure out why your application is consuming a lot of memory, and suspect it might be session state related. -
Facebook.NET: Earlier this summer Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team posted a really cool framework for developing ASP.NET based Facebook applications. You can learn more about it from his blog post here, and download it from his CodePlex project here. Steve Trefethen last week posted a VS starter kit for Facebook.NET which makes it even easier to get started. ASP.NET AJAX Silverlight -
Halo 3 Game Guide: Halo 3 ships this week, and no doubt many people will find themselves afflicted with a sudden illness that requires them to stay home one day this week. To help get you ready, watch one of the High Definition Halo3 Videos here (for a lower resolution video click here), and browse the Halo3 Game Guide here. Both are built with Silverlight 1.0. WPF and Expression Blend 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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I've fallen behind on my weekly link-listing series - apologies for the delay. ASP.NET -
.NET DateTime and Number Format String Cheat Sheet: If you are like me, you might have trouble remembering all of the standard format strings you can pass to the String.Format() method and/or the Eval() databinding method in ASP.NET to generate the appropriate string output from a DateTime or Numeric datatype. This PDF cheatsheet is a useful one to download and save to quickly look these format strings up. John has some other really useful .NET PDF cheatsheets he has also created that you might like to download here. -
ASP.NET Photo Handler: Bertrand has posted a cool photo album HttpHandler for ASP.NET that allows you to easily drop images into a web directory and automatically generate a nice photo album of them (complete with EXIF information, stack sorting icons, etc). Might be very useful for people enjoying holidays this summer. Download the code here. - BlogEngine.NET: This is a new open source blog engine for ASP.NET that Mads Kristensen has helped start up, and which I've heard a lot of good things about. You can read about its features here, and download it here.
ASP.NET AJAX Visual Studio -
GhostDoc 2.1.1 Released: GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 (and now 2008) that automatically generates default XML documentation comments for code you write in C# or VB. It can automatically re-use existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or generate initial documentation by deducing comments from the name and type of the member signature. You can learn more about it and download it for free here. Silverlight - Silverlight Tutorials: Michael Schwarz has a great blog where he writes regularly about Silverlight. This tutorials link points to a bunch of great Silverlight content.
IIS 7 -
IIS 7.0 is now running all of Microsoft.com: One of the things we push at Microsoft is to "dogfood" our products on our high volume sites when they enter the beta cycle. As of a few weeks ago, all of the web servers running www.microsoft.com are now running on IIS7 and Windows 2008 Server Beta3. These servers host 500+ virtual roots and 350 ASP.NET applications, and handle 300,000 concurrent connections. IIS7 is going to be an awesome release. -
IIS 7.0 on Server Core: Bill Staples blogs about some of the new IIS7 enhancements that appear with the June CTP of Windows 2008 Server. One of the big features that is now supported is the ability to install IIS7 on "server core" - which is a low footprint installation of Windows 2008 Server that lays down just the minimal footprint needed to boot (meaning no GUI shell). This lowers the resources required on servers, and even more importantly means that servers don't need to be updated if a patch is released for a component not installed on the server (which lowers the downtime of servers). ASP.NET and the .NET Framework aren't supported yet in server core configurations - but will be in the future. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I'm out on vacation this week, so please excuse delays on email and comment feedback. 
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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.
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