Entries Tagged 'Link Listing' ↓

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

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

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

• Using ASP.NET 3.5's ListView and DataPager Controls - Displaying Data with the ListView: Scott Mitchell from www.4guysfromrolla.com (and also the author of the excellent ASP.NET Data Tutorials) is starting a new series that covers using the new ASP.NET ListView control.  This is the first in the series and discuses how to display data.

• Using ASP.NET 3.5's ListView and DataPager Controls - Grouping Data with the ListView: This is the second article in Scott Mitchell's series.  In this article he discusses how to use the grouping feature of the ListView to separate rendered items into different grouping containers.

• Using the ListView Control in ASP.NET 3.5: Mustafa Basgun has also written some great articles that drill into the new ListView control further.  Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and his Locking ListView's Header and Footer Columns with CSS to learn more about it.

• BlogEngine.NET 1.3 Released: Mads Kristensen blogs about the new release of BlogEngine.NET.  This excellent ASP.NET open source blog engine keeps getting richer and richer.

• Gallery Server Pro - ASP.NET Open Source Media Application: Roger Martin writes about the features and architecture of his new Gallery Server Pro project.  It is an open source ASP.NET application that provides a rich way to share and manage photos, videos, and audio files over the web.

• Web Hosters Offering ASP.NET 3.5: Brad Abrams has a nice post that lists some great web hosting providers that are already offering ASP.NET and .NET 3.5 offerings.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Creating a Google Suggest Style Filter with the ASP.NET AJAX AutoComplete Control: Matt Berseth has another fantastic post that covers how to use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's AutoComplete control to get auto filtering support within a textbox.

• A Slider DataPager with Dynamic Tooltips: Matt Berseth posts yet another great post on how to enable a sweet AJAX tooltip navigation UI using ASP.NET AJAX.

• Using the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions History Support: Dino Esposito has a nice article that demonstrates how you can use the new "EnableHistory" feature on the <asp:scriptmanager> control to add named history points to the browser.  This enables browser forward/back button integration with ASP.NET AJAX applications.  Also read David Barkol's post about this feature here.

• ASP.NET AJAX History How Do I Video: To learn more about the new ASP.NET AJAX history support, watch this great 15 minute video from Bertrand Le Roy of the ASP.NET team.  He demonstrates how to AJAX enable an <asp:wizard> control, and then add history marker points to it.

• Script# Update: Nikhil Kothari recently posted an update to his awesome Script# framework, which allows you to compile C# into JavaScript.  Included within this update are project and file templates for VS 2008.  You can learn more about Script# here.

ASP.NET MVC

• Using ASP.NET MVC from Visual Web Developer Express 2008: Jason Whitehorn has published a nice project template that enables you to use the ASP.NET MVC framework with a web-site project in Visual Web Developer Express 2008.  We'll be adding both class library and web application project support to Visual Web Developer Express 2008 SP1 later this year - which will enable you to optionally use the MVC web application project templates with the free VWD Express as well.

• Accessing Server Controls from CodeBehind with ASP.NET MVC Views: David Hayden has a good post that discusses a workaround for a bug with the current ASP.NET MVC CTP view templates - which prevents you from coding against server controls in view template code behind classes.  You can right-click on the MVC view files and select "Convert to Web Application" to fix it.  Alternatively, you can download updated MVC Templates that Troy Goode recently posted here.  This issue will be fixed with the next MVC update.

Visual Studio

• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit: Microsoft recently shipped a free training kit that you can download that contains tons of excellent material that will help you learn the new features of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  Mike Ormond has a nice blog post that discusses it here.

• Spell Checker Update 2.1: The web tools team has a bug fix and feature addition update to the free spell checking download you can use with VS 2005 and VS 2008.  You can also learn more about the spell checker features here.

• Tip/Trick: Start-Up Options and Instances of the ASP.NET Web Server in a Multi-Project Solution: The web tools team has a nice post that talks about ways you can customize the application startup options when you have multiple web projects within a single VS solution.

IIS 7.0

• Enhance your ASP.NET Applications with the Integrated IIS7 Pipeline: Mike Volodarsky from the IIS7 team has published a great MSDN article that talks about the awesome extensibility and customization options available for ASP.NET developers with IIS7.  You can learn even more about how to take advantage of these features from Shahram Khosravi's new Professional IIS7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming book.

• IIS Manager Module to Scan for Assemblies Built in Debug Mode: Vijay from the IIS team has a nice post that shows off how he used the IIS7 admin tool extensibility to build a module that automatically scans deployed applications looking for assemblies that have been accidentally deployed in debug mode.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.

ASP.NET

• Creating an Outlook Navigation Bar using the ListView and Accordion Controls: Matt Berseth has a nice sample that describes how to implement an Outlook-like navigation menu using the new ASP.NET 3.5 ListView server control and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's Accordion control.

• What is New in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview: Brad Abrams blogs some samples that show off the new <asp:MediaPlayer> Silverlight control, as well as the built-in history management with the <asp:ScriptManager> control. 

ASP.NET AJAX

• ASP.NET AJAX SliderExtender Layout and Custom Appearance: Alessandro Gallo has a nice post that describes how to customize the layout and appearance of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's SliderExtender control.

• Debugging ASP.NET AJAX Applications with the Trace Console: Matt Berseth has a great article that describes how to use the Sys.Debug JavaScript class in ASP.NET AJAX and output the debug content into a custom trace window.

ASP.NET MVC

• IoC Container Support for Windsor, StructureMap and Spring.Net: Jeffrey Palermo blogs about the new MVCContrib open source project that is being built-up around the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  It now includes Inversion of Control Container support for the most popular .NET IoC tools.

• PagedList<T> Support: Rob Conery posts a sample implementation of a pageable List<T> implementation that I showed in my original ASP.NET MVC demo at the Alt.net conference.

Visual Studio

• Spell Checker for Visual Studio: My team recently shipped a cool new Visual Studio add-in that provides spell checking support.  In addition to supporting spell checking within HTML files, it also supports spell checking within JavaScript, VB, C# and ASP.NET comments.  Works with both VS 2005 and VS 2008.

• World of Warcraft for Visual Studio: A cool new add-on that enables support for building World of Warcraft game extensions using Visual Studio.  Definitely something to check out if you play World of Warcraft.

• VS 2008 Color Schemes: Thomas Restrepo has posted some nice Visual Studio color scheme templates you can use to customize your text editor settings.

Debugging .NET

• Getting Started with WinDBG Par1 and Part2: Johan Berglin has an excellent set of posts that detail how you can use the WinDBG debugger to drill into a running ASP.NET application and analyze it to see what it is doing.  Microsoft Product Support uses this tool when helping debug deployed applications in production.  It is extremely powerful and something you might want to learn.

• Automated .NET Hang Analysis: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET Product Support team has a great blog post that describes an automated hang analysis tool she has written that uses WinDBG to pinpoint the root cause of common hangs with .NET applications.  Her blog is an excellent one to subscribe to - and is full of great debugging tips and tricks.

IIS 7.0

• Behavior Changes for ASP.NET applications running in Integrated Mode on IIS 7.0: Mike Volodarsky from the IIS team has a great blog post that details behavior changes for ASP.NET applications when they run in "integrated mode" on IIS 7.  "Integrated mode" enables ASP.NET developers to take advantage of much tighter integration with IIS - and enables a host of additional scenarios (richer URL rewriting, integrated authentication/authorization, etc).  If one of the behavior changes listed in Mike's document impacts your application, you can optionally change the application to run in "Classic Mode" - which maintains the same ASP.NET behavior as with IIS6.

• Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming: Shahram Khosravi has recently written a great new book that describes how to take advantage of the new IIS7 "integrated mode" features with ASP.NET.  A great book to read if you are looking to take advantage of the new IIS7 features:

  

WPF

• Embedding WPF User Controls in Windows Forms: Matthias Pieroth has a nice post that shows how you can easily use WPF-based user controls in Windows Forms applications.

• WPF Lights in ViewPort3D and Rendering 3D-models with WPF and XAML: WPF has built-in support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics.  In these two articles Matthias shows some nice demonstrations of how to get started with it.

• Charles Petzold's 3D Programming for Windows and WPF 3D Team Blog: If you are interested in learning more about WPF and 3D, make sure to check out Charles Petzold's WPF 3D book, as well as subscribe to the WPF Team's 3D feature-team blog.  Both are invaluable resources.

Hope this helps,

Scott

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.

Several people have pinged me asking for the download location of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview.  We were hoping to post it on the web Friday, but unfortunately found a late bug that we felt needed to be fixed.  The team is working this weekend to sign off on the new build.  We hope to be able to post it as soon as this is done - apologies for the delay.

ASP.NET

• Using the new ASP.NET ListView Control: Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the new ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. 

• Data Navigation with the ListView, DataPager, and SliderExtender Controls: Matt Berseth has another great follow-up post that describes how to use the new ListView and DataPager controls in .NET 3.5 together with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's SliderExtender to implement nice data paging support.

• Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS using the ListView Control: This is one of my own posts from earlier this summer that covers the ListView control.  It also details how to use the new CSS editing features in VS 2008 to stylize it.

• Taking an ASP.NET Application Offline: Scott Mitchell has a good article on 4GuysFromRolla that discusses a few approaches you can use to temporarily take down ASP.NET applications for updates/maintenance. 

ASP.NET AJAX

• Work Smarter: Microsoft AJAX's JavaScript Type Extensions: Dave Ward has a great post that describes some of the ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript client-library functionality.  In this article he discusses using Array.contains, Date.format and String.format.

• Sys.Debug in ASP.NET AJAX Framework: Roman Nikitin has a nice post that describes how to use the Sys.Debug feature of ASP.NET AJAX to easily instrument, debug and trace your AJAX applications. 

• Download Free ASP.NET AJAX In Action Chapter: I'm a big fan of the ASP.NET AJAX in Action book that was published earlier this summer (I also wrote the forward to the book).  You can download a free PDF copy of chapter 2 from it here and buy it on Amazon.com here.

• Cool Skin for the TabContainer Toolkit Control: Matt Berseth has a great post that details how to build a really attractive looking CSS skin for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's TabContainer control.

• Surrounding your Data Table and Dialog Controls with Styled Panels: Matt Berseth has another nice post that describes how to add styled borders to ASP.NET data grid controls using CSS and some of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit controls.

ASP.NET MVC

• TDD and Dependency Injection with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team writes about how to use TDD (test driven development) with the new ASP.NET MVC Framework.  He uses StructureMap and RhinoMocks to enable the Dependency Injection and Mocking support.

.NET

• Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008: Amanda Silver from the VB team has an awesome post that discusses some of the new hidden gems with Visual Basic in VS 2008.  I actually learned a few of them for the first time reading her article!  Highly recommended reading.

• Extending Base Type Functionality with Extension Methods: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to use the new Extension Methods feature of VB and C# to add custom helper methods to existing classes.

• LINQ to Active Directory is Here: Bart De Smet from my team has been working on a cool LINQ to Active Directory provider (previously called LINQ to LDAP) in his spare time.  You can learn how to use it in his series here, as well as read about how he built it (and learn a lot about how to build LINQ providers).

Visual Studio

• Ten Tips for a Happy Upgrade to Visual Studio 2008: Jon Galloway has a useful blog post that provides a complete list of recommended steps to take if you are upgrading a machine from VS 2008 Beta2 to the final RTM release.

• Organizing Big Solutions using Visual Studio Solution Folders: This tip of the day describes a useful technique that you can use in Visual Studio to easily organize large solutions that are full of many sub-projects.  Use this approach to easily find and filer your projects more effectively.

• Use DebuggerBrowsable attribute to clean up class view in a debugger: This tip of the day demonstrates how you can apply the DebuggerBrowsable attribute to clean up how fields and properties are displayed within Visual Studio when you are debugging your code.

Hope this helps,

Scott