Archives
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ASP.NET 2.0 Profile Feature
K. Scott Allen recently published a good post on the new ASP.NET 2.0 Profile system. The profile system provides an easy way to store and retrieve properties about users on your sites -- both logged-in and anonymous. It can save you time and effort in providing a richer personalized experience for people using your site.
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Making a List, Checking it Twice (Cool Ajax Sample App with ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas)
In case you haven’t checked out the new Atlas preview release yet (which given that it shipped a few days ago and almost everyone is on vacation this week is very likely), you might want to consider finding some time to-do so when you get a chance and are back online. It makes common Ajax-style scenarios a breeze to build, and really makes programming a lot of fun.
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ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter Architecture
November 2006 Update: I've posted two detailed tutorial walkthroughs that discuss the ASP.NET CSS Control Adapters and how to use them in much more detail. You can check them out here and here. I'd also recommend checking out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for more good tutorials to read.
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Upcoming Releases of Useful ASP.NET 2.0 Things
A few people have asked me about what else is coming down the road in terms of downloads and other releases for ASP.NET 2.0. Here is a non-exhaustive brain-dump of a few things coming out in the near future that we've been working on:
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VS 2003->VS 2005 Web Application Project Upgrade Tutorials Now Live
I blogged on Friday about the first preview build of the VS 2005 Web Application Project support being released.
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Free Microsoft Learning Online Course Available on ASP.NET 2.0
Brad from the Microsoft Learning team just pointed me at a cool offer. Basically it allows you to take a 3-hour ASP.NET 2.0 Training course for free if you register for it before January 4th (note: you then have up to 90 days after you register to take it).
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How to Solve Beta Install Related Package Load Failures with VS 2005
Right after VS 2005 shipped, a lot of people ran into "Package Load Errors" when trying to install and run the final release of the product. These are often the result of having some left-over VS 2005 Beta or CTP bits that weren't uninstalled completely on the same machine.
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Cross-Page Navigation Techniques in ASP.NET
Ting (one of the key guys on the ASP.NET Team) has posted an awesome blog post detailing all of the different techniques for doing Cross-Page navigation in ASP.NET, including: client-side redirects, server-side redirects, the new ASP.NET 2.0 cross-page posting feature, the new ASP.NET 2.0 multi-view control, and the new ASP.NET 2.0 Wizard Control. In his post he includes a sample for each.
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Tip to Handle Complex Data-binding Expressions in ASP.NET
Fritz Onion has posted a good tip on how to handle complex data-binding expressions (for both ASP.NET V1.1 and ASP.NET V2.0). This is a technique that I've used too, and it can help simplify your code quite a bit.
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First Preview Download of VS 2005 Web Application Project Model Now Available
May 8th Update: The final release of the VS 2005 Web Application Project is now live. You can learn more about it here
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Cool SQL Server and SQL Express Command-Line Utility
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Logging ASP.NET Application Shutdown Events
Someone on a listserv recently asked whether there was a way to figure out why and when ASP.NET restarts application domains. Specifically, he was looking for the exact cause of what was triggering them on his application in a production shared hosted environment (was it a web.config file change, a global.asax change, an app_code directory change, a directory delete change, max-num-compilations reached quota, \bin directory change, etc).
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Customizing Web Deployments with MSBuild
Douglas Rohm has written up a great article on customizing web builds using MSBuild and the Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment project. Among other cool things in the article, he walks-through the source code for how to automatically base build-numbers on the current date (he built a custom MSBuild task to-do this).
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Disk Based Output Caching Feature Now Available for ASP.NET 2.0
Dmitry continues to crank out cool ASP.NET utilities you can use. A little earlier today he posted a Disk-based Output Caching Module for ASP.NET 2.0 complete with full source code. There are two big advantage this module provides over the built-in in-memory output caching system:
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CSS Code Generator and some Cool ASP.NET UI Design Templates you can use
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.
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Using the Free CLR Profiler with the ASP.NET 2.0 WebDev Web-Server (aka Cassini)
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).
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"CSS Properties Window" Download Available for VS 2005
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.
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Grid and Flow Modes in VS 2005 and Visual Web Developer
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.
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Sending Email with System.Net.Mail
.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):
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How To Share Authentication Cookies across ASP.NET V1.1 and ASP.NET V2.0 Applications
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.
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How to Open a Website in Visual Studio 2005 from the Command-Line
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.
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Configuration Section Code Generator and XML Intellisense Schema Builder for Web.Config files
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.
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New Web Project Model Option Coming for VS 2005
May 8th Update: The final release of the VS 2005 Web Application Project is now live. You can learn more about it here.
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Building your own Data Source Controls in ASP.NET 2.0
ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a powerful new declarative data-source model. Among other things, it makes doing data access much easier in a stateless-web world -- and eliminates many of the hurdles developers have to jump through today to handle repeated data UI operations on the server. Included in the box is the new ObjectDataSource control, which you can use to databind to any .NET class -- no special databinding interfaces are required, and it enables pretty easy three-tier databinding scenarios.
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Google SiteMap Integration with ASP.NET 2.0
Google has a little-known feature that enables web site authors to tell the search engine about the structure of their site. ASP.NET 2.0 also now supports a way of representing the structure of a site in a map (we call it the site navigation system).
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Cache Manager
Steve Smith has written a cool application that helps you monitor and manage your cache values in ASP.NET. Read all about it and track its progress here.
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Auto-incrementing assembly build numbers for ASP.NET web apps with VS 2005
Brad Bartz has a really great write-up on how to build a custom MSBuild task that enables you to auto-increment the build version number generated in your deployed assemblies on each new build. Definitely worth checking out if you are using either the Visual Studio Web Deployment Project download, or are using MSBuild.
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VS 2005 Intellisense in web.config files
I’ve seen a few questions about intellisense support for ASP.NET web.config files with VS 2005, and thought I’d blog a quick post to answer a few of them.
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VS Macro to Build a Web.SiteMap file from your project system file layout
Scott Allen has been blogging up a ton of great ASP.NET 2.0 content the last few months. One of his posts from earlier this week is a great one -- it provides a VS 2005 macro that you can run to dynamically build a web.sitemap file based on the files in your project.