Ajaxus place on the net

Since 10th of February we started poll which aimed to determine what is your favorite development IDE. So after month and a half we can say that Visual Studio 2008 is being adopted quite well as 39% of all 80 votes goes for him. Second place goes to VS 2005 as it was the first to be able to use framework 2.0. Its interesting to note that 9% of all(or 7 votes) goes to the old school VS 2003! Here is the final result:

Looking for your votes again so we can determine which is your favorite programming language!

Great article by Scott Guthrie in which he describes how we can create packaged ASP.NET Setup Programs with VS 2005:

Scenario

You have built an ASP.NET Web Application using Visual Studio 2005, and want to enable customers to automatically install and deploy it on servers via an easy setup program.

Specifically, you want to create a standard Windows setup program that will create and configure the application on IIS, copy all of the application’s files to the appropriate location on the server, and ensure that ASP.NET 2.0 is correctly mapped to run the application. You also want the setup program to prompt the customer for the database location that the new application should use, and have the setup program automatically update the web.config file with the database connectionstring settings the customer provided.

One solution to consider using is the built-in “Web Setup Project” support that is built-in to Visual Studio 2005. Web Setup Projects can be used to pipe the compilation outputs from VS 2005 Web Application Projects as well as Web Site Projects (when used with VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects), to create encapsulated Windows setup programs. The below walkthrough demonstrates step-by-step how to create and use one.
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Once again Scott is delivering essential links:

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)

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Sum up of not-to-miss articles and topics provided weekly by Scott:

One of the things I’m going to try and start doing is a weekly blog post of useful/interesting links on .NET related topics that I’ve found on the web. Below is this week’s version:

ASP.NET

• Downloading a File using ASP.NET with the “Save As” Dialog: Rick Strahl has a nice post on how to dynamically download a file to a browser with ASP.NET and force the browser to automatically prompt them to save it using the “Save As” dialog.

• Storing Binary Files Directly in the Database using ASP.NET 2.0: Scott Mitchell has a good article that shows how to upload and store images within a SQL database, and then serve them out dynamically from within a web application (very useful for photo albums). You could combine this article with Rick’s above to enable an optional “Save As” option that allows site visitors to save high-resolution versions of images or other file types.

• How to Make a GMail-like Loading Indicator with ASP.NET AJAX: Simone has a good post describing how to use the control to provide “loading…” notification behavior ala GMAIL using ASP.NET AJAX.

• Microsoft AJAX Events - Part 1: Subscribing: Bertrand Le Roy from the ASP.NET team has a nice write-up that describes how to wire-up non-DOM events using ASP.NET AJAX.

• ASP.NET Registration with Multiple Profile Providers: Andrew Rimmer has a nice walkthrough that describes how to use the SqlTableProfileProvider to store profile registration data in a schematized database table. For more on this topic, also check out my previous posts here, here and here.

Visual Studio

• Debugging SQL Server 2005 Stored Procedures in Visual Studio: Scott Mitchell published another great article on how to debug SPROCs using Visual Studio 2005. You can use this approach to set a breakpoint within a SPROC in your database, and then hit it like a normal debug breakpoint when debugging an ASP.NET application that calls it.

• Using Visual Studio Macros to Increase Productivity: Dan has a nice post describing some of the Macros he has created to manage large projects in Visual Studio. The Visual Studio macro recorder and editor are two features that not enough developers take advantage of (myself included). Whenever you find yourself repeating a task a number of times, I’d highly recommend creating a macro within VS to automate it for future uses.

Silverlight

• View Source Reflector Tool for .NET Silverlight Apps: Ernie Booth has created a great add-on for Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector Tool. Ernie’s tool allows you to point at a Silverlight application on the web, and then pull up “View Source” on the source code to see how it is built. Very useful when checking out how samples work.

• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Layout System and Controls Framework: One of the features missing in the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha that we shipped at MIX is support for layout management. This is a powerful feature of WPF, and makes it much easier to position and control UI on a page (I’ll post more about this in the future). Dave Relyea from the Silverlight UI team posted a cool sample on his blog that provides a sample implementation of layout management that works with the 1.1 Alpha and includes both Stack and Grid layout manager support. He also then shipped a number of cool custom controls including buttons, labels, textbox, and border controls. Very cool stuff.

• Silverlight Toolbar Example: A nice sample from Vivek that describes how to create an animated toolbar where the buttons expand when you hover over them. You might also want to check out the “Office UI Ribbon” sample on the www.silverlight.net sample gallery web-site that demonstrates how to build a really cool toolbar within the browser.

WPF

• Free Download of Chapter 1 of Chris Anderson’s Essential WPF Book: Chris was an architect on WPF and has recently published a great book on it. You can download Chapter 1 of the book and read it for free.

.NET General

• NDepend 2.2: Scott Dorman has written up a great post on NDepend - which is a .NET utility that enables you to perform code analysis on your .NET projects. This can be useful especially with large projects that you’ve inherited. NDepend also supports a SQL-like query language that enables you to define your own code rules/analytics to search a code base with.

• Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) ported to Mono: One of the announcements we made at MIX was that we are shipping a new “dynamic language runtime” framework library for .NET that makes it much easier to build dynamic languages on top of .NET (both the full .NET Framework and Silverlight). We are also shipping four dynamic language implementations of our own: IronPython, IronRuby, Javascript and Dynamic VB. We shipped the source code to the DLR and IronPython as a CodePlex project with a permissive license. This article on O’Reilly describes how someone has already taken the code and got it up and running on Mono. Miguel de Icaza was up in Redmond this week at a compiler dev lab we held and JasonZ and I got a chance to take him out to dinner last night. You can read about Miguel’s trip on his blog here.

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I came acros this nice article by Mahesh Chand, who explains how to get started with AJAX 1.0

“Recently, Microsoft released the commercial version of AJAX 1.0 as an extension of ASP.NET 2.0. That means you can develop AJAX enabled Web applications using ASP.NET 2.0.

After fruition of this article, you will have a better understanding of AJAX 1.0 extensions and learn how easy is to build AJAX enabled Web applications using ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.“
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On the Visual Basic Team blog there is interesting post about “New Data Tools Features in Visual Studio Orcas” following are four major ones:

1. Object Relational Designer
2. Hierarchical Update in Typed Dataset
3. N –Tier Support in Typed Dataset
4. Local Data Cache with SQL Compact Edition

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To debug JS in Vs 2005 make sure you haven’t checked “Disable script debugging” in Internet Expolorer Option menu.

Under the Debug menu, Windows, choose Script Explorer. This should show a window on the right side with a list of the running documents. It should show the aspx page any any .js files you have included. Open up any of the .JS files and set breakpoints in your code. Once the script is executed it should stop at your breakpoints and give you all the current watch funcationality that you have come to expect from VS.NET.

The next version of VB .Net adds Xml as a built in data type using the new LINQ to XML API. As a built in data type, VB 9.0 provides the ability to create XML using XML Literals and to query XML documents using XML properties. This webcast contains a demo by David Schach, the lead developer in this project, of creating a program to share pictures over the internet.
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The March CTP of Visual Studio marks the debut of a much-requested and long-awaited feature: improved JScript IntelliSense. We’ve been working on this for almost a year now and I’m pretty excited to finally be able to share it with the public. There are a variety of topics I’d like to deep dive into, but for today let’s just take a quick aerial tour of the new features.

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