ScottGu's Blog

Feb 2006 Update: Please also check out this new blog posting I did on Site Navigation.

I've seen a few people ask if it is possible to change what browser is launched and used when running web apps in VS 2005 and Visual Web Developer (for example: to use FireFox instead of IE).  The good news is that there is an easy way to configure this.  To-do this:

This is a great MSDN whitepaper about ASP.NET 2.0 Security Best Practices.  I’d definitely recommend setting aside some time to read it.  At the bottom of the whitepaper there are then links to another 28 additional ASP.NET HowTo security whitepapers.  Most of the articles were rated a perfect 9 out of 9 from people who have read them – always a good sign of great content.

Several people have asked why the built-in URL Mapper in ASP.NET 2.0 doesn't support regular expressions.  There were actually a few reasons for this -- one of the big ones being that just about the time we were about to consider adding it my team started also working on IIS7.  We realized that a full-featured version would want/need to take advantage of some of the new features in IIS7 as well as the support all content types (in particular -- images and directories).  So we postponed making it feature rich until a future version.

Last week I blogged about the new Commerce Starter Kit.  David Hayden has already built a new Inventory Provider for it.  Pretty cool!

One of the cool advanced features of the new Master Pages feature in ASP.NET 2.0 is the ability to nest them.  For example, you could define a top-level master-page called “MainMaster.master” that defines a common logo header and footer, and defines a content-placeholder for the page called “content”.  You could then define two sub-masters beneath it – one that provides a two-column layout model for the content (“TwoColumnMaster.master”), and one that provides a three-column layout model (“ThreeColumnMaster.master”).  These two nested-master pages could then use the MainMaster.master file as the root master, and only adjust the layout within its content section (each would fill in the "content" placeholder and in turn add their own content-placeholders for sub-pages within it).  The benefit of this approach is that if a designer ever changed the logo or top-level design of the site, they only have to update one file (MainMaster.master) and then have every page on the site automatically pick it up regardless of what master file they were based on.

I blogged about it earlier this week: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/06/429723.aspx

I came across a really cool link today: http://blog.bretts.net/PermaLink,guid,87d735a0-1592-4711-860f-8a1d29c9630f.aspx on how you can use some of the new visualizer architecture with ASP.NET control development: