I've been meaning to do that for a while. A few months ago, I had the pleasure to review the ASP.NET 2.0 part of Patrick Smacchia's excellent Practical .Net2 and C#2 . The book is really excellent and is the most complete I know on .NET 2.0. It covers with unparallelled accuracy everything about .NET 2.0. This book is an almost 900 page masterpiece and reference book that I highly recommend. Practical .Net2 and C#2 Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Read More...

Friends of Web Development N ews lette r – April 2006 New Releases We ‘showered’ the web with new tool and preview releases in April so let’s highlight some of them: “Atlas” April CTP This month, we released an update to the “Atlas” March CTP that was highlighted at the Mix conference. The “Atlas” April CTP fixes known bugs in the March CTP, including those reported by users on the “Atlas” forums and the MSDN Product Feedback Center . Like the March CTP, the “Atlas” April CTP also features a “Go-Live” license, allowing you to develop applications using Atlas and host them live. Also, don’t forget to enter your app into the “Mash it Up with ‘Atlas’” contest – you can use either the March or April CTP release for your entries. Learn more about...

Friends of Client Development Newsletter – April 2006 WinForms Website Updated If you’ve been to http://www.windowsforms.net lately, you’ll notice several changes and updates. We’ve embarked on a website update project to update the Information Architecture to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for and to add fresh, new content to the site. You’ll see several new articles written by community members highlighted on the main page as well as new whitepapers written by our team on the ‘Get Started’ page. Check it out today! And, if you’re an author of WinForms-related articles on other sites, be sure to submit your new article to our listings. Current Projects - Update Last month, we gave an overview of several projects we’re...

We've been busily working on the Toolkit refresh. I'm not making any promises but I think we can get it out by the middle of next week. Here's a short off-the-top-of-my-head list of what to expect: Incorporated feedback . We've addressed as much of the feedback from the community as we could. We didn't get everything fixed but we did a lot. In general, most of the components are more flexible and robust. Safari support . This has turned out to be a ton of work. It's one thing to make HTML work across browsers, making framework pieces do it is quite another. There's a set of things that Safari just doesn't plain support or that the Atlas guys are still trying to figure out how to map onto Safari's feature set.. So in those cases we weren't able...

As I was surfing around last night before heading out for Dine Out For Life , I came across this great website that has the official RSS Feed Icons. It's a ZIP file that contains not only the PNG files, but also JPG, GIF, PSD and several other formats, so you can customize them to your hearts content. If you're not familiar with them, they were originally created by the Mozilla group, and when it came time to pick icons for IE7, Microsoft jumped on the standards bandwagon (as seems to be the general principal for IE7 (yay!)), and they standardized on the same icon. Inside the ZIP file, is a short PDF about the history and use of these icons, it's worth checking out. Now, it's time for me to update all my websites to use the new standard icons...

Here's a quick tip for the Menu control. I'm pretty sure there were some good reasons why this wasn't the default but I just can't think of them at the moment. [EDIT: I just remembered one of them, this won't work perfectly with ItemSpacing...] If you want to make the entire cell clickable (and not just the text), try using a style "display:block; width:100%". You'll only want to apply this to the <A> inside the cells. Here's an example: <% @ Page Language ="C#" %> <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> < html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > < head...

Here's a quick tip for the Menu control. I'm pretty sure there were some good reasons why this wasn't the default but I just can't think of them at the moment. [EDIT: I just remembered one of them, this won't work perfectly with ItemSpacing...] If you want to make the entire cell clickable (and not just the text), try using a style "display:block; width:100%". You'll only want to apply this to the <A> inside the cells. Here's an example: <% @ Page Language ="C#" %> <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> < html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > < head runat ="server"> < title > Untitled Page </ title > < style...

UPDATE #2: These are about to go back online, version Beta 1.1 (last update 4/29/2006) -- thanks for your patience. If you downloaded the Beta 1 verison (4/27/2006) please be sure to get the new version and only use the bits from that. Enjoy and sorry for the inconvenience/teaser :) UPDATE: We are experiecing some issues with this on our end and we will be working through them over the weekend. Expect the site to be available again on Monday or Tuesday -- I'll Update the blog post. --- ScottGu mentioned this earlier in the month, but I’m happy to announce that this is now live at http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/. The CSS Friendly Adapters are a set of sample adapters, documentations, and a sample Web site that show how to take advantage of the...

I've done a couple online talks about the Toolkit. Here's the slides & demo that I did as part of the talk. Read More...

Hi, I'm Danny Chen, (2nd from the right, grey shirt, next to Pete). Like Pete, I'm also an SDET for Visual Web Developer. I've been at Microsoft for about 1 1/2 years. Prior to shipping Visual Studio 2005, I was on the QA team for ASP.NET. I really enjoy working with the extensibility features of Visual Studio and ASP.NET whether it's creating custom controls, extending the built in providers, or working with the add-in model of Visual Studio. You'll find quite a few examples of these on my blog linked below. I'm really looking forward to the next version of Visual Studio. We're coming up with some really cool features that I can't wait to use myself. Some of the new ideas that I've heard about that I'm hoping for are: a split view where you...