ScottGu's Blog

Paschal has a cool post on some CSS layout generators out on the web today.  I've been getting into CSS more lately for a site template I've been working on in my free time (which unfortunately hasn't been much lately), and one of the things I'm always looking for is good samples to steal/borrow.  These look like good resources to bookmark.

K. Scott Allen has made some great blog posts the last few months.  Yesterday he posted a new blog entry on how to use the free Microsoft CLR Profiler that is now available for download to analyze ASP.NET 2.0 applications running in the built-in VS web-server (aka Cassini). 

One of the process things we've been doing on our team lately has been to provide an opportunity for team members to spend time building and shipping personal projects that enhance the core shipping products.  On the updated www.asp.net site that we launched last month, we created a "Sandbox" tab that provides an outlet for team members to make these projects available to the public.  Over time you'll start to see more and more projects appear there that you can take advantage of with web development.

One of the changes made between VS 2003 and VS 2005 was to change the default page layout mode in the WYSIWYG designer from "Grid" to "Flow" mode.  Mike Pope has a good post that talks about how to enable and still use 2D grid-layout mode if you prefer that.  One nice addition is the ability to optionally use absolute/grid layout on just individual controls instead of having to-do it for the entire page.

.NET 2.0 includes much richer Email API support within the System.Net.Mail code namespace.  I've seen a few questions from folks wondering about how to get started with it.  Here is a simple snippet of how to send an email message from “sender@foo.bar.com” to multiple email recipients (note that the To a CC properties are collections and so can handle multiple address targets):

ASP.NET V1.0 introduced a powerful forms-authentication model that provides the infrastructure plumbing necessary to issue authentication tickets to incoming browsers as http cookies, and then automatically decrypt them on each request so that you can identify who the incoming browser user is.

Brad Bartz posted a cool macro sample that shows how to open-up a web-site in VS from the command-line (without requiring a .sln or .proj file).  You can read about how to-do it here.

Dmitry (the Dev Manager for ASP.NET) has been working in his spare time on building a cool disk-based output caching module for ASP.NET 2.0 (he is planning to post it on the web once it is done).  One of the things he discovered in building it was how repetitive it was to have to hand-generate configuration section handlers for web.config files, as well as the intellisense schema files to provide intellisense support for them in VS 2005.