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• Nov 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF

  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 6 New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has just published 6 new videos on the www.asp.net site that cover how to use the cool new ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1. 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. Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile - Part 13: Scott Mitchell has another post in his great series of ASP.NET security articles.  This one covers how to create a login screen that allows admin users to log in as another user in the user database.  For more on ASP.NET security, also check out Joe Stagner's recent ASP.NET Security Videos. 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 Rich jQuery Intellisense with VS 2008: Last week we published a new jQuery intellisense file for VS 2008 that delivers super-rich and accurate javascript intellisense when using jQuery.  Jeff's article describes how to download and start using it today. ASP.NET and jQuery: Stephen Walther delivered an awesome talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free.  Click here to download his code samples and powerpoint presentation. jQuery Primer Part 1 and Part 2: Karl Seguin has two nice posts that provide a quick overview of some of the basics of how to use jQuery.  Also check out Rick Strahl's longer Introduction to jQuery article (which I've previously linked to) for a longer jQuery tutorial. ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Bertrand Le Roy delivered an awesome talk on the new ASP.NET AJAX features coming soon at the PDC conference last week.  You can now watch it online for free as well as download his slides and code-samples. Working with ADO.NET Data Services with ASP.NET AJAX: Jim Wang has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of the new ASP.NET AJAX features (client templating, ADO.NET data service support, etc) to build a data driven AJAX solution. ASP.NET MVC Bin Deployable ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a useful blog post that describes step-by-step how to enable \bin directory deployment of ASP.NET MVC.  This enables you to deploy ASP.NET MVC based applications on remote hosting servers that do not have ASP.NET MVC already installed (which means you don't need them to run any setup or do extra steps for your application to work). Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a great blog post that talks about how to implement substitution output caching with ASP.NET MVC.  I coined the name "donut caching" for this technique with a previous blog post I did on using substitution output caching with ASP.NET Web Forms.  Phil covers it for ASP.NET MVC. Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has another great post that covers how to segment a ASP.NET MVC application into multiple "areas" or "modules" - which can optionally be developed in separate projects and merged into one large master application.  Also check out Steve Sanderson's follow-up post with more ideas on this topic. 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. Silverlight Unit Test Framework and Source Released: Jeff Wilcox shares all the great details about the release of our new Silverlight Unit Testing framework (which includes source that can be modified/reused however you want). Updated WPF Performance Profiling Tool: The WPF team recently posted an update to their excellent WPF Performance Profiling Tool.  Definitely something to check out if you are doing WPF development. WPF & Silverlight LOB Form Layout - Searching for a Better Solution: Karl Shifflett has another great WPF blog post that covers a cool way to perform flexible form layout for LOB scenarios. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:34 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing, MVC

• 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 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, WPF

  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 Security Tutorial Series: Scott Mitchell (who wrote the excellent Data Access Tutorial Series for us last year), has recently begun a new free tutorial series focused on ASP.NET Security.  Today we published the first three article in the series on the www.asp.net site: ASP.NET Security Basics, Overview of Forms Authentication, and Forms Authentication Configuration and Advanced Topics.  For even more ASP.NET Security Information, please check out the security tutorials I've also done on my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page. 10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Secrets: Omar Al Zabir, the CTO and co-founder of www.pageflakes.com (a Web 2.0 portal site built with ASP.NET), has written another in his excellent series of articles on ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX.  This article discusses tips and tricks to maximize ASP.NET performance and scalability.  To learn even more about how to build great sites using ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, make sure to read Omar's excellent new Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book. .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. Build Yahoo UI Style Glowing Buttons with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit GlowButtonExtender Control: Matt Berseth continues his excellent series on using ASP.NET AJAX.  In this post he discusses how to create cool glowing button effects. Visual Studio Resolving Namespaces and Removing Unused Using Statements: David Hayden has a nice article that discusses a few Visual Studio code editing features that developers often overlook.  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. How Do I Wrap Text in the ComboBox? and How Do I Wrap Text in a ListView Header? Matthias Shapiro has two more great posts that show how to handle wrapping text within the ComboBox and ListView Header controls. Embedded ListView Columns (Columns within Columns): Matthias has another great post that talks about how handle embedded column scenarios using the WPF ListView control. How can I bind WPF elements to XLinq? Beatriz Costa has another great post that talks about how to enable databinding scenarios with LINQ to XML using .NET 3.5. 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 Posted Wednesday, February 06, 2008 3:41 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, WPF, Link Listing

• 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

• September 23rd Links: VS, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, WPF

  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 11 Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks to Make You a More Productive Developer: Chinh Do has put together an excellent post that covers a bunch of VS 2005 Tips and Tricks that you can use immediately to optimize your developer workflow.  I actually learned a few new ones reading it! Highly recommended. Multi-threaded Debugging in Visual Studio 2008: Scott Hanselman has a quick post that shows a screen-shot of the new multi-threaded debugging features in VS 2008. 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. Useful ASP.NET Extension Methods: JD posts some nice extension methods that he has built for ASP.NET that use the new extension method language support coming with the VB and C# compilers in .NET 3.5.  I've been putting together my own list of cool extension methods as well and will post some in the months ahead. ASP.NET AJAX New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Released: David Anson blogs about the update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that was released on Friday.  It contains a bunch of bug fixes and improvements.  The .NET 3.5 version of the control toolkit also now adds reference tags for the toolkit JavaScript files - which means you can now take advantage of VS 2008's JavaScript Intellisense support with them. Creating a YUI TabView Style Theme for the AJAX Control Toolkit's TabContainer Control: A nice post from Matt Berseth on how to build a Yahoo UI style look and feel for the TabContainer control within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. ASP.NET AJAX Exception Logging: Kazi Manzur Rashid blogs about his new AJAX Exception Logging CodePlex Project.  This project enables you to help catch client-side JavaScript errors and log them on the server. Animating the ModalPopupExtender: A cool post from Matt Berseth that walks through how to create a custom ModalPopupAnimationExtender control that adds animation support for ModalPopup scenarios. Inline Script Inside an ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel: Dave Reed shows how to create a custom control to enable inline script to be emitted (and executed) within an <asp:updatepanel> refresh. ASP.NET AJAX In Action Book: Alessandro, David and Rama Krishna's ASP.NET AJAX in Action book is now showing up on book shelves.  This is a great technical book that covers ASP.NET AJAX very well. 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 Getting Started with Expression Blend and WPF: This is a really outstanding set of free videos that you can watch to learn how to get started with WPF and Expression Blend.  If you want to follow along, you can download a free trial of Expression Blend.  Expression Blend and Expression Web are also now included as free products in the MSDN Premium subscription. Hope this helps, Scott Posted Monday, September 24, 2007 1:24 AM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, Community News, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing

• VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 Released

  I'm very pleased to announce that the Beta 2 release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2 is now available for download.  You can download the Visual Studio 2008 product here.  You can alternatively download the smaller VS 2008 Express Editions here.  VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express can be installed side-by-side with VS 2005.  .NET 3.5 Beta2 also includes a go-live license which allows you to build and deploy applications into production. Very Important: Please read my "Installation Notes" at the bottom of this blog post for a few post-installation steps you must make to ensure everything runs well.  One of these steps fixes a side-by-side issue we found with ASP.NET AJAX.  Quick Tour of Some of the New Features for Web Development Over the last few months I've written several blog posts that discuss some of the new improvements in this release.  Below is a quick summary list of several of them that I have already published.  This list is by no means exhaustive - there are a lot more things I haven't had a chance to blog about yet (stay tuned for more posts!): VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework.  You can learn more about how this works from my blog post here: VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support VS 2008 includes a significantly improved HTML web designer.  This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration.  Below are two articles I've written that discuss this more: VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support ASP.NET also has a new <asp:ListView> control that I'll be blogging about in the near future.  It delivers very flexible support for data UI scenarios, and allows full customization of the markup emitted.  It works nicely with the new CSS support in VS 2008. ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support .NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (and adds new features like UpdatePanel support with WebParts, WCF support for JSON, and a number of bug fixes and performance improvements).  VS 2008 also has great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications: VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging I will be doing a blog post in the next few days that talks more about some of the ASP.NET AJAX specific improvements, as well as how to upgrade existing ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications to use them. Language Improvements and LINQ The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages.  Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code.  These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET.  Below are some of the articles I've written that explore these new language features using C#: Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers Extension Methods Lambda Expressions Query Syntax Anonymous Types Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M (object relational mapper) in .NET 3.5.  It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model.  You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it.  LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures.  It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model.  Below are some of the articles I've written that explore how to use it: Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes Part 3: Querying our Database Part 4: Updating our Database Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control I'll be adding several more articles to my series above in the weeks ahead.  I think you'll find that LINQ to SQL makes it dramatically easier to build much cleaner data models, and write much cleaner data code. Lots of other improvements The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming.  For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support.  ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox.  WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data. Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon.  WCF and Workflow projects and designers are included in VS 2008.  Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS).  Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS.  AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU.  And there is much, much more... Important Installation Notes - PLEASE READ! There are two important things you should do immediately after installing VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2: 1) You should download and run this batch file.  This takes only a few seconds to run, and fixes an issue we found earlier this week with the version policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll - which is the assembly that contains ASP.NET AJAX.  If you don't run this batch file, then existing ASP.NET 2.0 projects built with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and VS 2005 will end up automatically picking up the new version of ASP.NET AJAX that ships in .NET 3.5 Beta2.  This will work and run fine - but cause you to inadvertently introduce a .NET 3.5 dependency in the applications you build with VS 2005.  Running the batch file will change the version binding policy of the new System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly and ensure that you only use the new .NET 3.5 ASP.NET AJAX version with projects that you are explicitly building for .NET 3.5. 2) If you have ever installed a previous version of "Orcas" or VS 2008 on your machine (either Beta1 or one of the CTP versions), you need to reset your VS 2008 settings after installing Beta2.  If you don't do this, you'll have an odd set of settings configured (some windows will be in the wrong place), and you'll potentially see some IDE performance slowness.  You can reset your settings by typing "DevEnv /resetsettings" on the command-line against the VS 2008 version of the IDE: Summary There are a lot of new improvements and enhancements that I hope you'll find really useful with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  Stay tuned to my blog over the next few weeks as I'll be posting more about some of the new features and how to get the most out of them. Thanks, Scott Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007 5:11 PM from ScottGu's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, LINQ, WPF

• May 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF and .NET

  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 Downloading a File using ASP.NET with the "Save As" Dialog: Rick Strahl has a nice post on how to dynamically download a file to a browser with ASP.NET and force the browser to automatically prompt them to save it using the "Save As" dialog. 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. How to Make a GMail-like Loading Indicator with ASP.NET AJAX: Simone has a good post describing how to use the <asp:updateprogress> control to provide "loading..." notification behavior ala GMAIL using ASP.NET AJAX. Microsoft AJAX Events - Part 1: Subscribing: Bertrand Le Roy from the ASP.NET team has a nice write-up that describes how to wire-up non-DOM events using ASP.NET AJAX. ASP.NET Registration with Multiple Profile Providers: Andrew Rimmer has a nice walkthrough that describes how to use the SqlTableProfileProvider to store profile registration data in a schematized database table.  For more on this topic, also check out my previous posts here, here and here. 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 View Source Reflector Tool for .NET Silverlight Apps: Ernie Booth has created a great add-on for Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector Tool.  Ernie's tool allows you to point at a Silverlight application on the web, and then pull up "View Source" on the source code to see how it is built.  Very useful when checking out how samples work.  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 Free Download of Chapter 1 of Chris Anderson's Essential WPF Book: Chris was an architect on WPF and has recently published a great book on it.  You can download Chapter 1 of the book and read it for free. .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 Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007 2:20 PM from ScottGu&#39;s Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: .NET, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Atlas, WPF, Silverlight, Link Listing