May 31st Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio and .NET

Below is this week's list of useful .NET links for my weekly link-listing series. 

This morning I also updated my ASP.NET 2.0 Tips, Tricks and Gotchas Page to also include some more recent content posts I've done on my own blog this past spring.  This page list ~60 past blog posts I've done, organized by category (VS, UI, Data, Security, Deployment, Performance, etc). 

ASP.NET

• SubSonic Documentation and Project Site: SubSonic is a great, free, open source project for ASP.NET that provides a highly productive OR/M implementation that can dramatically improve productivity when building data driven sites.  Earlier today Rob Conery and the SubSonic team launched their new documentation and product home site - complete with videos, walkthroughs and samples.  Definitely worth checking out.

• Examining ASP.NET 2.0's Membership, Roles and Profile System: This is a great series by Scott Mitchell and www.4GuysFromRolla.com that covers using ASP.NET 2.0's membership and role management system with Forms Authentication.  For more ASP.NET security tutorials I also recommend scrolling through my security articles here.

• Rolling Your Own Website Administration Tool (Part 1) and Part2: These two recent 4GuysFromRolla articles cover how to build an online user and role management system on top of the ASP.NET Membership and Roles APIs.  You can use the approach and code in these articles to integrate an html admin tool to manage users within your site.

• Official ASP.NET Provider Support from Oracle: Oracle has recently released a beta providing updated support for connecting to Oracle databases using .NET.  Included within this release are pre-built ASP.NET providers for storing ASP.NET Membership, Roles, Profile, Session State, Web Parts, and SiteMap data within Oracle databases.  This download also adds support for ASP.NET database cache invalidation for Oracle databases when using the ASP.NET Output Caching and Cache API features. 

• Asynchronous Page in ASP.NET 2.0: Jeff Prosise has written up a great article for MSDN that covers using ASP.NET's Asynchronous Page support.  Async Pages was a new feature added in ASP.NET 2.0, and can significantly improve performance on your site when you are calling out to a remote web-service or network endpoint by allowing you to yield back your worker thread to ASP.NET while you block on the contents to return from the remote site.  Mads Kristensen recently posted a good tip when using this feature - which is to make sure you increase your connection limit to get the maximum benefit from it.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Introducing ASP.NET AJAX and Professional ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX published: These are the first two printed books released that specifically target the final ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release.  Both are written by great authors: Dino Esposito wrote the first one, and Matt Gibbs (the dev manager of ASP.NET) and Dan Wahlin co-wrote the second.

• DotNetNuke 4.5.2 Released: The DotNetNuke team earlier this week released an update of the very popular DotNetNuke portal and collaboration framework.  One of the major enhancements with the DotNetNuke 4.5 release is integrated support for ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.  Shaun Walker wrote a great blog post that talks more about DotNetNuke's ASP.NET AJAX support here.

• What ASP.NET Developers Should Know About JavaScript: K. Scott Allen wrote up a nice article about JavaScript that I think many .NET developers writing JavaScript will find useful.

• ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel Tips and Tricks: Jeff Prosise delivers another great MSDN article covering some useful tips and tricks when using the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control.

• Write a Simple Control to Refresh UpdatePanels from Client Side: Jeffrey Zhao wrote up a nice blog post that describes how to build an extender control that helps with handling refreshes of UpdatePanels on the client.  He also has a blog post on how to programmatically do this from JavaScript here.

Visual Studio

• New Free Version of Refactor! for ASP.NET: Developer Express has released a great (free) add-on to Visual Studio 2005 that adds support for 29 refactorings for common ASP.NET scenarios (add validation, extract contentplaceholder, extract style, export to user-control, etc).  Definitely worth checking out.

• Resharper 3.0 Beta: JetBrains has released a beta of their super popular add-in to Visual Studio.  Joe White published 31 Resharper Tutorials earlier this year that you might want to also check out.

• What does the red strikethrough in CSS property grid mean in VS Orcas: This is a nice article from the VS web tools team that talks about some of the cool designer support for CSS that is built-in to Visual Web Developer "Orcas" Express and Visual Studio "Orcas".

.NET

• MBUnit 2.4 RTM: Andrew Stopford and team have released version 2.4 of MBUnit - which is a great open source unit testing framework for .NET

• IronPython Cookbook: This online Wiki contains a ton of good content on how to get started with the IronPython for .NET (Microsoft's Python implementation)

Hope this helps,

Scott