Archives
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Lots of Cool Tools to Checkout for ASP.NET 2.0, .NET 2.0, and VS 2005
A lot of new .NET 2.0 enabled developer frameworks/tools are coming out this week. A few of the ones I'd recommend setting aside sometime to checkout:
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VS 2005 Add-ins and Extensibility
One of the powerful features of Visual Studio is the extensibility model it provides that enable advanced developers to extend and enhance the built-in product. Using this you can build wizards, menus, integrate with the text-editor, etc, etc. The current build of the VS 2005 Web Application Project (which introduces an entirely new web project system) is actually built entirely using these public APIs.
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CompositeControl Base Class in ASP.NET 2.0 (a new alternative to UserControls)
I stumbled across an interesting blog post on Ian Blackburn's blog tonight. On it he shows a simple sample of how to use the new CompositeControl base class that is provided with ASP.NET 2.0. CompositeControl dramatically simplifies the work needed to create a re-usable ASP.NET custom control.
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ListControl.AppendDataBoundItems Property in ASP.NET 2.0
Bilal Haidar recently did a nice blog post that called out a small but useful new feature on the ListControl base class (which is the base control for a variety of input controls) in ASP.NET 2.0. Specifically it is a property called "AppendDataBoundItems", and it controls whether the items within an existing list are replaced or appended-to when the control is databound (with ASP.NET 1.1 the items were always replaced).
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Cool ASP.NET Syntax Highlighter
Wilco Bauwer has been cranking out a bunch of really cool ASP.NET utilities on his web-site. On Friday he updated a cool syntax highligher handler he has written for ASP.NET. This enables automatic source code highlighting and formatting for samples and blog posts. Click here for a demo.
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Free ASP.NET 2.0 + SQL Express 30 Day Hosting Offer
In case you weren't aware of it, you can build and upload an ASP.NET 2.0 web-site using SQL server for free using this service: http://vwdhosting.net/ In addition to ASP.NET 2.0 support, it also provides built-in support for uploading SQL Express databases (which you can download as an optional component with the free Visual Web Developer).
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PageMethods Support for ASP.NET 2.0
Fabrice has been working on a number of really cool extensions to ASP.NET 2.0.
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Code Snippets in Visual Web Developer and VS 2005
One of the nice new features of Visual Web Developer (which is free) and VS 2005 is the new "Code Snippet Support" that has been added. This handy feature allows you to quickly find and use code-libraries of common patterns (examples: get/set property definitions, data access code, file IO, exception handling blocks, etc).
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Nice Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 WebParts
Jesse Liberty recently published a nice tutorial on building dynamic portal-like UI with drag/drop end-user customization using the new ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts functionality. You can read it here.
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Customizing TreeNodes with the new ASP.NET 2.0 TreeView
Danny Chen has a great post that talks about how to customize the new ASP.NET 2.0 TreeView. One technique he shows is how to sub-class the TreeNode class and insert your own TreeNode type into the tree (complete with template support).
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Community Server 2.0 Beta3 Available for Download (and now runs on ASP.NET 2.0)
Community Server is a cool ASP.NET application that provides a blog system, forums system, photo album, rss reader/aggregator system and more. It also provides an admin tool interface for managing the application -- so no coding required in order to setup and manage a site using it. There is a nice video on their home-page site that shows off how to use it.
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Adding Custom Properties to XML Site Maps in ASP.NET 2.0
I published a step by step tutorial on using Master Pages and Site Navigation last week. One of the questions that someone posted in the comments was whether there was an ability with Site Navigation to add custom properties or settings on a per-node basis. For example: a custom icon property (eg: imageUrl) for each item in the Site Map that could then be later rendered by the new asp.net 2.0 menu control on a page:
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Creating Custom Parameter Types for DataSource Controls in ASP.NET 2.0
I've posted in the past about how to create your own custom datasource controls using ASP.NET 2.0. One of the other cool new ASP.NET 2.0 extensibility points is the ability to create your own custom datasource parameter objects. These can then be used with any datasource control (including built-in ones like ObjectDataSource or SqlDataSource -- or any other custom ones). That way, you could write code like this (where I have a sortable, pagable GridView binding against a business object or DAL like this):
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Google Maps Control for ASP.NET 2.0
I found this article recently which I thought was pretty cool. It describes how to build and use an ASP.NET Server Control that makes Google Map integration easy within ASP.NET applications:
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ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Drag/Drop Browser Support in FireFox w/ Atlas
Mike and Andres on my team have been doing some really cool work with integrating the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part functionality with Atlas.
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Cool ASP.NET 2.0 Site: Squeet.com
Scott Cate blogged a review about a cool new RSS email subscription site he has been using called Squeet.com:
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UrlRewritingModule w/ Regular Expression Support for ASP.NET 2.0
Here is a really cool URL rewriting module for ASP.NET 2.0. You can configure it using regular expressions in your web.config file like so:
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Free ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 Training Offer
Keith just pointed me to a free promotional training offer on ASP.NET 2.0, VS 2005 and SQL 2005. You can register to receive a 3 hour free training video on ASP.NET 2.0 (using either VB or C#) through this site.
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Data Tutorial #2: Building our Master Page and Site Navigation Structure
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.
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Cool ViewStateAnalyzer ASP.NET 2.0 Utility
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:
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Building a DAL using Strongly Typed TableAdapters and DataTables in VS 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0
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.
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Cool VS 2005 Debugging Visualizers for ASP.NET 2.0 Development
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.
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New ASP.NET 2.0 SQL Site Map Provider
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).
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ASP.NET 2.0 SQL Table Profile Provider Released Today
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.
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ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Role Management Remote Admin Tool
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.
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Encrypting Web.Config Values in ASP.NET 2.0
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.
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Cool ProfileView Control
Joshua Flanagan has recently published his latest update to a new ProfileView control he has built that enables you to view/edit ASP.NET 2.0 Profile settings within a web-page. It is a pretty cool control definitely worth checking out if you are using the new profile system.
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Row-Clickable GridView
Teemu posted a cool sample of how to subclass the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 GridView to provide a row-clickable GridView control (where you can click on a row to switch into edit mode on it). I haven't tried yet, but you should be able to combine this with the new <atlas:updatepanel> control to enable a single-click Ajax experience for data editing.
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Efficient Data Paging with the ASP.NET 2.0 DataList Control and ObjectDataSource
Last weekend I posted about how to implement super efficient data-paging using the new ROW_NUMBER() within SQL 2005 (which is supported with the free SQL Express edition and up) and the new ASP.NET 2.0 GridView/ObjectDataSource controls.
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Programmatically configuring ACE/ACL Permissions using .NET 2.0
Rick Strahl has posted a good example on his blog about how to programmatically configure ACLs and permissions for things like files and directories using the new .NET 2.0 filesystemaccess APIs. Worth taking a look if you are looking to automate the setup of ACL permissions as part of a setup script/program.
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System.Net.Mail WebSite (http://www.systemnetmail.com/)
Dave Wanta has created an awesome site dedicated to all things relating to System.Net.Mail -- the new email API that ships with .NET 2.0.
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GridView: Adding Confirmation before Deleting Items (using the OnClientClick property)
I stumbled upon this blog post earlier today that I thought was pretty cool. It describes a pretty easy way to add confirmation pop-ups for delete command (or update or edit or any other command) using a GridView control, or before any other post-back event in ASP.NET. It takes advantage of the new "OnClientClick" property that button controls now have in ASP.NET 2.0 -- and which allow you to author client-side event handlers that can fire prior to post-back (you return true or false from these javascript handlers to indicate whether you want the post-back to continue).
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Optimizing C# Refactoring Performance with Web Projects in VS 2005
One complaint I've heard a lot is the performance of the new C# refactoring feature with web pages in VS 2005. VS 2005 added support for enabling refactoring everywhere (for example: even within <% %> blocks defined inline with a .aspx page), which is nice from a feature-completeness perspective. The problem, though, is that by checking every file and possible context, it can end up slowing down performance considerably. The more pages you have in a project, the slower and slower refactoring gets (to the point of being unusable).
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Paging through lots of data efficiently (and in an Ajax way) with ASP.NET 2.0
David Hayden blogged about a cool new ROW_NUMBER() function that SQL 2005 provides that got me excited and inspired to write a little code last night.