Because it is rendered to TextArea the MaxLength property does not work. One way around this is to attach a regular expression validator to that control. What is important is to set the ValidationExpression to something like “^[\s\S]{0,255}$“. Where 255 is the maximum length allowed.
Hope this helps 
Here are four free chapters from the book “The Microsoft Expression Web Developer’s Guide to ASP.NET 3.5: Learn to create ASP.NET applications using Visual Web Developer 2008“. You can download it from here or buy it from here.
The list of the free chapters:
* Creating Web sites
* Creating and Managing CSS Styles
* Applying CSS to Web Forms
* Debugging ASP.NET Applications
If you plan upgrading your software from .NET Framework 2.0 to .NET Framework 3.5 you should consider reading this pdf.
Its not the ultimate and comprehensive guide but will give you the picture. The authors also included some code snippets to visualize what they have gone through.
Download from here.
Can’t miss that one because we all rely on this IDE! You can get it from here.
New Web Development Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1
The following is a list of new features in SP1 which relate to web development:
* Class Libraries and Web Application Projects in Express
* JScript Formatting
* More Support for External JScript Libraries
* Dynamic Data Templates
* SQL Server 2008 Support
* WCF Renaming Support
* IIS Module and Handler Templates
* Multiple Selection in Design View (new since SP1 Beta)
Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 contains several hundred bug fixes related to web development.
Recently I found that e-book which might be useful to some of you. Its sub title is: “Building better software” and is written by Karl Seguin.
Here is a link.
Yes, its coming! The boys and Redmond can’t wait to release all these service packs. I have Scott Guthrie’s blog post in front of me and read it carefully. As for now these two downloads are still in beta but will be released soon in final stage. So far you can download it from here.
There will be some improvements that really concern us. I will closely follow these few:
– ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
– ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
– ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support
– ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support
– Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences
– Improved ExtJS formatting support!
– Application Startup and Working Set Performance Improvements
As well as some Data improvements:
– SQL 2008 Support – VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are being updated to include support for the upcoming SQL 2008 release. Visual Studio 2008 data designers, projects and wizards now fully supporting connecting and working against SQL 2008 databases.
– ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named “Astoria”)
VB.NET update:
You can now add “XML to Schema” items to Visual Basic projects. On adding these project items a wizard will open that allows you to create a XSD schema set from a variety of XML sources. This schema set is then added to the project and it enables VB XML intellisense.
A XSD browser is also now included with VS 2008 SP1 and allows you to browse XSD schema sets. With the final SP1 release, developers will be able to right-click on XML element names (either in XML properties or XML literals) in the VB code editor and select “Go To XML Schema Definition” – this will open the XSD browser and display the schema set (and select the current element) for the VB project.
I just can’t miss that one! It comes from Matt Berseth’s blog where he describes how GridView, DetailsView and ModalPopup Controls can be nicely working together.
Here is a quick quote from his post:
“I am sure everyone is pretty familiar with Master/Details style of editing data, but just in case – here is how my page works. The grid shows 12 rows of customer data. The far right column in the grid contains a hyperlink that when clicked brings the detail view of the row into focus so the corresponding row can be edited. The detail view is a popup control and contains a Save and Close buttons. When close is clicked, the detail popup is dismissed and the user goes back to viewing the main grid. When they click Save, some simple validation checks are run (all are RequiredFieldValidators for this sample) and the new data values are persisted, and finally the detail popup is dismissed and the main grid is refreshed so that it displays the changes.”
You can find the rest here. Matt has done a wonderful job sharing also the source code.
