ScottGu's Blog

June 22nd 2006 Update: We've now published a whole series of new data tutorials based on this origional post.  You can read all about it here.

Cristian Civera recently forwarded me a pointer to a really cool client-utility that he has built that provides support for analyzing ASP.NET content markup and view-state usage within a page.  The below screenshot gives a good idea of some of the things you can do with it:

June 22nd 2006 Update: We've now published a whole series of new data tutorials based on this origional post.  You can read all about it here.

One of the cool new features in VS 2005 is a debugging extensibility feature called "Debugger Visualizers".  Basically this provides a way for developers to build and use UI extensions within the VS debugger that provide richer data visualization and analysis of types and variables within a running program.

Jeff Prosise has a written a great sample and article for the February edition of MSDN magazine that walksthrough the new SQL Server based provider he built for the ASP.NET 2.0 Site Navigation System.  This enables you to store your site map structure in a database instead of using the default XML Provider that comes default.  Enabling it within an ASP.NET 2.0 site is as simple as configuring the provider in your web.config file -- no code needs to change in order to take advantage of it (and you can databind any page control to it using the new SiteMapDataSource control).

Hao and Stefan just shipped a cool new Profile Provider download on the ASP.NET Sandbox Site.  It provides two new profile provider implementations (with complete source code) that you can use.  One enables you to map profile properties directly to a SQL table in a database -- enabling you to perform richer queries on the back-end for your personalization data.  The second implementation enables you to map profile properties to stored procedures in a database -- enabling you to perform whatever custom data logic you want to persist your user personalization data. 

Peter Kellner has a good article on the new ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Roles Features, and then put together a very useful sample that demonstrates how to implement a set of admin data-pages on top of the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Role Management system to allow you to remotely administer your users and roles.  His sample is available to download in source format -- so you can integrate it within your applications to provide a remote management experience for users/roles that works well in a hosting environment.

One of the cool new features in the configuration system with ASP.NET 2.0 is the ability to encrypt any of the values stored within them (note: this works with any configuration section -- including ones you build yourself).  This is obviously important when storing sensitive information like connection strings -- and now enables you to avoid having to roll your own solution.