ScottGu's Blog

I just saw on John's blog that there is an upcoming web-cast by the folks who built and launched http://www.toronto.com in October of last year (pre RTM) describing the architecture of the site and their experiences.

I've helped two people with a problem related to this recently on the ASP.NET Forums, so I thought it might make sense to put out a quick blog post explaining it to others.  Specifically, they were building a secure website using forms-authentication.  They added the below authorization rule within their web.config file:

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:

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.

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. 

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).

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.

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).