Silverlight

Silverlight Cream for July 03, 2009 -- #628

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:17:13 GMT

In this Issue: Andrej Tozon ( 2 ), Walt Ritscher , Chris Klug , Timmy Kokke ( 2 ), Koen Zwikstra , and Dan Wahlin . From SilverlightCream.com : Countdown to Silverlight 3 #6: System colors Andrej Tozon continues his Countdown discussing the ability to...( read more )...(read more)

RSS Management

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:38:49 GMT

Sponsored Links:

Diabetes Diet	Custom Wedding Bands		Green Interior Design
Executive Recruiter Consulting Toronto	Janitorial Services Fredericksburg	Static Electricity Control	Legal Information

** Follow Fwicki on Twitter

Silverlight Application ? Animal Testing Breaks Hearts

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:10:25 GMT

PETA and AIS just completed a great Silverlight 2 application for the Animal Testing Breaks Hearts campaign. Almost exactly two years ago, in time for the 7/7/7 Live Earth event, AIS created the first Silverlight managed code application ever to go live...( read more )...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC Talk in Reading UK July 3rd

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:11:20 GMT

I?m in the UK today and tomorrow (on my way back from a trip to India for two days earlier this week), and am giving two tech talks while in town.

The first is this evening at a London .NET User Group event. I?ll be presenting Silverlight 3. Unfortunately the event is already over-registered ? so if you haven?t registered yet you?ll need to catch it the next time I?m in town.

The second talk is tomorrow (Friday) from 1-4pm at the Microsoft facility in Reading and is on ASP.NET MVC. When we first announced it last week it also over-registered quickly. Thankfully my hosts were able to get a larger room this week, though, so another 120 spots became available.

You can register to attend the talk for free until 4pm today if you want to attend. Hurry, though, as there are only 43 seats left (down from 57 seats when I first started writing this blog post).

Hope to see some of you there,

Scott

Qixing?s Blend and SketchFlow Mini-Tutorials?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:55:51 GMT

Qixing Zheng just posted a series of short video tutorials on Blend 3 and SketchFlow. See them at: http://blogs.msdn.com/canux/archive/tags/Mini-tutorial/default.aspx Stay tuned, more on SketchFlow very soon…...( read more )...(read more)

Experimenting with User Interface Colors with Expression Design

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:31:44 GMT

Learn more about how to apply the right colors for your user interface. In this video you will experiment how to apply colors to a user interface. Learn more about color while exploring Expression Design. Experimenting with User Interface Colors with...( read more )...(read more)

Silverlight Cream for July 02, 2009 -- #627

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:56:48 GMT

In this Issue: Erik Mork ( 2 ), Michael Washington , Faisal ( 2 ), Andrej Tozon ( 2 ), and Jose Fajardo . I feel like I went through a time-warp or something because there is a flurry of SL out there right now. And a couple of folks are just flooding...( read more )...(read more)

June 7th Links: ASP.NET, AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:05:52 GMT

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.

You can also now follow me on twitter (@scottgu) where I also post links and small posts.

ASP.NET

Implementing Incremental Navigation with ASP.NET: A nice article from Andrew Wrigley that describes how to use ASP.NET?s Site Navigation system to create a navigation user interface.

Syndicating and Consuming RSS Feeds in ASP.NET: A nice article from Scott Mitchell that describes how to work with RSS using ASP.NET 3.5.

Using Expression Builders in ASP.NET: Scott Mitchell has another good article that describes a little-known extensibility feature in ASP.NET.

Apply ASP.NET Authentication/Authorization to Static Content: Scott Mitchell has another great article that describes how to apply ASP.NET?s Security features to static content (html/images/etc) using IIS7.

GridView Confirmation Box using jQuery: Mohammed Azam has a nice post that describes how to implement model confirmation UI using jQuery. This is particularly useful for scenarios like saving or deleting data.

AJAX

Building Interactive UI with AJAX ? A look at JSON Serialization: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that explores the JSON serialization format used by ASP.NET AJAX when calling web-services and server end-points from client-side script.

Building Interactive UI with AJAX: Retrieving Server-Side Data using Web Services: Another good article by Scott Mitchell that describes how to call web-services to retrieve data from client-side script.

Periodically Updating the Screen and Web Page Title with ASP.NET AJAX: Scott Mitchell demonstrates how to use ASP.NET AJAX to dynamically update client screens with new data.

ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX ? Client Templates: Damien White has a great post that describes the new client templating support in ASP.NET AJAX. This provides an easy and powerful way to dynamically create rich HTML UI on the client.

ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX ? JavaScript Observer Pattern: Damien White has yet another great article that describes the new client-side JavaScript observer pattern being introduced with ASP.NET AJAX.

ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX - Data Binding: Damien White continues his great ASP.NET AJAX series with this article that describes the new client-side data binding features in the new version of ASP.NET AJAX.

ASP.NET MVC

Tip: Turn on compile-time View Checking: A nice post from Adrian Grigore who demonstrates how to easily enable compile-time checking of your ASP.NET MVC view files.

xVal: A validation framework for ASP.NET MVC: Steve Sanderson writes about his cool xVal validation framework for ASP.NET MVC. This enables you to perform both client-side and server-side validation of model objects. I also highly recommend checking out his Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework book ? it is absolutely fantastic.

DataAnnotations and ASP.NET MVC: Brad Wilson (a dev on the ASP.NET MVC team) has a nice post that describes how to use DataAnnotations to annotate model objects, and then use a model binder to automatically validate them when accepting form posted input. DataAnnotation support will be built-in with the next version of ASP.NET MVC.

More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices: Maarten Balliauw has a nice blog post that summarizes some nice ASP.NET MVC best practices. Also check out his ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly book.

Visual Studio

Tip: How to update JavaScript Intellisense: A useful post that discusses the Ctrl-Shift-J keyboard command in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. This causes the JavaScript intellisense engine to update intellisense.

Tip: How to manage web site configuration through a web admin tool: Another useful post that discusses a feature that a lot of ASP.NET developers don?t know about, which is how you can manage your ASP.NET application settings within a web admin tool.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Why is ASP.NET encoding &?s in script URLs? A tale of looking at entirely the wrong place for a cause to a non-existing bug.

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:27:15 GMT

Several people have reported seeing errors in their logs that seem to be due to requests such as this: /ScriptResource.axd?d= [lots of junk] & t=ffffffffee24147c The important part here is the HTML-encoded ?&? sequence, which stands for ?&? of course. If this exact URL is sent to the server, the server won?t know what to do with the escape sequence (URLs are not supposed to be HTML-encoded on the wire) so the parameters won?t get separated as expected, potentially resulting in a server error. This bug in the toolkit is an example of that: http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=13134 Of course, when people see 500 errors popping up in their server logs, they immediately assume the application...(read more)

Two New Visual Web Developer Videos

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Learn about Validation and Login Controls in Joe Stagner's latest installments in his Visual Web Developer series.

The Misfit Geek Podcast with Joe Stagner is Now Live!

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:24:00 GMT

Microsoft?s Joe Stagner hits the airwaves with a brand new podcast. In his first segment he interviews Scott Hunter, a Senior Program Manager Lead on the ASP.NET team. Hear about the future of Web Forms, ASP.Net Futures, and more, directly from the team that drives much of ASP.NET.

Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:21:43 GMT

One of the cool new releases coming out this year is a small download manager - the Microsoft Web Platform Installer - that makes installing and configuring web server and web development stacks really easy. It is a free tool that you can download from the www.microsoft.com/web site (here is the direct link to the installer ? choose the 2.0 version). It works with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

The Web Platform Installer provides an easy way to quickly install and customize all the software you need to develop or deploy web sites and applications on a Windows machine. The tool automatically analyses what your system currently has installed, allows you to easily mark additional components to be added, and then automates installing them all at once when you click the install button (saving you from having to manually install each one yourself).

For example, you can click the ?Web Server? section above to customize the individual IIS web server modules installed on the box. This includes both the built-in IIS modules that ship with Windows (like the directory browsing module), as well as additional modules available as separate downloads. Below I?ve selected two additional modules ? the Application Request Routing and URL Rewrite modules ? to be installed:

The URL Rewrite module is a free Microsoft module that enables you to publish custom URLs from your sites and optimize them for search engine optimization (SEO). You can enforce SEO rules (consistent casing, embedded keywords, etc) and customize how your site looks from an external perspective however you want (the admin tool will even help guide you to write the regular expression rules):

The Application Request Routing is a free Microsoft module that supports forward-proxy style scenarios, and enables dynamic load-balancing of requests across multiple web-server machines (allowing you to scale out, move machines behind DMZ firewall scenarios, and bring machines in and out of a farm for maintenance without disruption).

In addition to URL Rewrite and Application Request Routing, there are dozens of other web server modules you can select that enable WebDAV, Secure FTP, automated deployment, remote database management through the IIS admin tool for hosted scenarios, media server streaming scenarios, and more. You can also install framework additions like ASP.NET MVC, .NET 3.5 SP1, SQL Express and associated SQL administration tools, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, and more.

Windows Web Application Gallery

The web platform installer also integrates with the new Windows Web Application Gallery now online: www.microsoft.com/web/gallery

This gallery allows you to easily install existing web applications onto your server. The gallery contains a variety of popular .NET open source applications (like DotNetNuke, ScrewTurn Wiki and Umbraco CMS) as well as PHP open source applications (including WordPress and Drupal). You can easily browse and install them using the Web Platform Installer as well (just click the ?Web Applications? tab and check the applications you want to install):

;

In addition to downloading the application, the web platform installer will create a new site/application root and configure the appropriate site settings and optionally install the database.

Summary

If you haven?t downloaded the Web Platform Installer yet I?d recommend taking a look at it. I think you?ll find it makes it much easier to configure and get a box up and running, and makes it much easier to find and install the various components of the Windows web server stack, as well as find and install applications to use on top of it. Overtime you?ll see us ship more and more functionality this way.

You can download and start using the Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta today. We?ll ship the final release of it this summer.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Yellowstone National Park Photo Trip

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:53:49 GMT

Photos from a photo trip to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons National Park... [ Full post continued here... ] Read More......(read more)

New Podcasts!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

We've now added podcasts from the Coding QA Podcast, as well as Hanselminutes and .Net Rocks! Listen to popular community members discuss and debate issues of interest to all ASP.NET developers.

Contribute to the ASP.NET Wiki

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Shared and expand your knowledge about the Report Viewer, GridViews, CheckBoxLists, and more in the ASP.NET Wiki. Earn Community Recognition points by contributing!

New Control Gallery Additions

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Manage your membership, add instant messaging, send email, and more with the newest additions to the ASP.NET Control Gallery.

Six New Web Hosting Tutorials!

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Scott Mitchell concludes his 16-part Web Hosting series. Learn the ins and outs of handling and logging runtime errors, as well as how to precompile your website and manage membership.

ViewModel with MVC/Navigation in Silverlight

Sat, 30 May 2009 16:13:46 GMT

I've been writing about ViewModel (aka MVVM) pattern ( here , here , here and more) and implementing it in Silverlight.FX for quite some time now, and it continues to be an exciting area for further thinking, and prototyping. This time around I want to cover how ViewModel and MVC fit together in an application at the same time. I have put together a set of navigation features into Silverlight.FX: a Page base class, a PageFrame control, and a Navigate trigger action. The PageFrame class by default maps URIs to Page types automatically, but at the same time supports plugging in an MVC PageLoader that maps URIs to Controllers and Actions, and maps ActionResults resulting from those actions into visuals or Pages. Specifically the controller...(read more)

May 30th Links: ASP.NET, AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio

Sat, 30 May 2009 22:39:50 GMT

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. You can also now follow me on twitter ( @realscottgu ) where I also post links and small posts. ASP.NET Using ASP.NET 3.5?s ListView and DataPager Controls to Delete Data : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent tutorial series on the ASP.NET ListView control. In this article he discusses how to handle deleting data with it. ASP.NET ListView: Displaying Hierarchical Data : Adam Pooler writes about how to use the ASP.NET ListView control to display hierarchical data within a web page. ELMAH: Error Logging Module and Handlers for ASP.NET...(read more)

May 30th Links: ASP.NET, AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio

Sat, 30 May 2009 22:39:00 GMT

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.

You can also now follow me on twitter (@scottgu) where I also post links and small posts.

ASP.NET

Using ASP.NET 3.5?s ListView and DataPager Controls to Delete Data: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent tutorial series on the ASP.NET ListView control. In this article he discusses how to handle deleting data with it.

ASP.NET ListView: Displaying Hierarchical Data: Adam Pooler writes about how to use the ASP.NET ListView control to display hierarchical data within a web page.

ELMAH: Error Logging Module and Handlers for ASP.NET: ELMAH is a really cool open source error logging module for ASP.NET that can help you figure out what is going wrong with a site in production (and it enables you to diagnose things remotely in a browser). This post from Scott Hanselman nicely summarizes some of the things you can do with it. Visit the ELMAH home page to learn more and download it. Using ELMAH with ASP.NET MVC describes how to use it within ASP.NET MVC applications.

Examining ASP.NET 2.0?s Membership, Roles and Profile API Part 14: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET?s security features with an article that discusses how to create a page that permits users to update their security question and answer settings to reset passwords.

ASP.NET Tip/Trick: Use a Base Page Class for All Application Pages: A nice article that discusses a good best practice with ASP.NET applications ? which is to create a helper base class that encapsulates common functionality that you can use across pages within your applications.

AJAX

New Release of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: A new release of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is now available for download (this article by Bertrand Le Roy has more details). This new release contains bug fixes as well as three new controls: HtmlEditor, ComboBox and ColorPicker. Watch the new Videos and new Tutorials to learn more about the controls on the www.asp.net/ajax web-site.

Setting the Default Input Focus and Default Button with jQuery: Chris Love has an nice post on how to improve the user experience of a page by setting the default focus and default button of a web form control using jQuery.

Automatically Minify and Combine JavaScript in Visual Studio: Dave Ward has a great article that describes how you can add a build command to Visual Studio that enables you to automatically compress and combine client-side JavaScript files. This makes your pages load faster on the client and improves the perceived performance of your sites.

Using Complex Types to Make Calling Services less?Complex: Dave Ward has a great post that discusses strategies on how to pass complex types to the server from client-side JavaScript.

Client-side Data Binding in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0: Fritz Onion has a great article about the new client-side templating features of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 (which you can download and use today in .NET 3.5 projects). This enables powerful client data-binding scenarios against JSON based data. Also check out Politian?s Blog to find some great tutorials on how to use it.

ASP.NET MVC

jQuery Auto-Complete Text Box with ASP.NET MVC: Ben Scheirman has a really nice tutorial (taken from his upcoming ASP.NET MVC in Action book) that describes how to implement an auto-complete textbox using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC.

Using the jQuery Grid with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a nice post that describes how to use the jQuery Grid plugin with ASP.NET MVC to build an AJAX-enabled DataGrid.

ASP.NET MVC Forms Authentication with Active Directory: Mike has a nice post that shows how to setup an ASP.NET MVC application with Forms Authentication that uses Active Directory as the username/password credential store instead of a database. Also check out his post on ASP.NET MVC Forms Authentication with SQL Membership to learn more about how to setup forms authentication using a SQL Server database (instead of the default SQL Express one).

Visual Studio NUnit Templates for ASP.NET MVC: The VS Web Tools team has released updated NUnit templates that work with ASP.NET MVC 1.0. This enables you to automatically create a test project that uses NUnit instead of MSTest when you do a File->New Project and select the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Project item.

13 ASP.NET MVC Extensibility Points You Have to Know: Simone Chiaretta has a post that nicely summarizes 13 extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC and how you can use them to customize your applications. Also check out the free chapter of his new ASP.NET MVC book.

Custom Route Constraints in ASP.NET MVC: Keyvan Nayyeriu has a nice post that discusses how to create a custom route constraint in ASP.NET MVC (one of the extensibility points in Simone?s list above). You can use these to control whether a route rule is used or not, and they can enable some pretty rich routing scenarios. Note that in addition to creating route constraint classes, ASP.NET MVC also supports using Regular Expressions and HTTP Method filters to constrain routes as well. Keyvan is the co-author with Simone of the Beginning ASP.NET MVC Book (free chapter available).

Visual Studio

Tip: How to insert quotes automatically while typing attributes in the Visual Studio HTML editor: A useful tip that demonstrates how to configure Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer express to automatically add quotes around attributes when in the HTML source editor.

Hope this helps,

Scott

LIDNUG: Free Online Virtual Chat with Me Today

Wed, 27 May 2009 08:47:07 GMT

LIDNUG (Linked .NET Users Group) is hosting an online chat with me today (Wednesday) from 11:30am to 1pm PST (Pacific Standard Time). Anyone is free to join and the agenda topic will be open ? so bring your questions!

Click here to learn more about how to register and attend it.

Hope to chat with you more then,

Scott

May 30th Update: If you missed the chat you can watch it online: http://www.lidnug.org/

Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers in 2009

Wed, 27 May 2009 15:25:46 GMT

A couple of years ago Simone Chiaretta did a survey of .NET Developers usage of Ajax .. I just saw that he is refreshing that survey to see what has changed in the industry. Are people still actively moving to Ajax? Are they using MVC or WebForms with their Ajax? Which ones of the *many* ajax frameworks out there are they using? Feel free to write-in Silverlight if that is your current preference for this style of application. Very interesting data? and while clearly not a scientific survey, it is an interesting data point as Simone has agreed to publish all the data he gets. Here is what he has so far . So please take a few minutes and fill out the survey and pass it on to your colleagues...(read more)

Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers

Fri, 22 May 2009 19:13:20 GMT

If you haven?t already and you are a .NET developer, please take a couple minutes and answer this survey, whether you use Ajax or not. There are a number of Ajax surveys around, but Simone?s is the only one that focuses on .NET developers. The survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB22973CYKW2H Simone?s post: http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2009/05/21/ajax-usage-among-.net-developers-in-2009.aspx Read More......(read more)

Free ASP.NET MVC ?NerdDinner? Tutorial Now in HTML

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:44:06 GMT

Last month I blogged about a free end-to-end ASP.NET MVC tutorial called ?NerdDinner? that I wrote for the Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book from Wrox Press. The book is now released and shipping on Amazon.

The NerdDinner tutorial walks through how to build a small, but complete, application using ASP.NET MVC, and introduces some of the core concepts behind it. You can download a PDF version of the tutorial here.

NerdDinner Tutorial Now Also Available in HTML

A few minutes ago I finished publishing an HTML version of the NerdDinner tutorial as well. You can read it online for free here.

I split the tutorial up across 12 segments to make it more manageable to read. I also increased the sizes of the screenshots, and used a really nifty syntax highlighter that Scott Hanselman helped set me up with. I actually find the end result a lot easier to read than the PDF version.

Below are links to the different NerdDinner tutorial segments:

Hope this helps,

Scott