As you know, the team has been very busy working on controls for the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta 1 release.  Working on a new platform, with new tools, doing things that have never been done before is more than enough to keep us busy. But we wanted to make sure we kept some focus on our AJAX Control Toolkit users.  As such, we pulled together some top-requested bug fixes as well as all the fixes we've recently gotten from our users , and have released the 20229 version of the Toolkit .  Thanks to all of our users that have been submitting patches - keep it up! More details available from Kirti and David about what went into this release. Read More...

So I am going to start a new topic revolving around some useful tips for ASP.NET developers. The first one is rather simple but very effective.  When you are creating your site, it is a good idea to add some tracing to your application for times...

ScottGu has outdone himself again with a demo series First Look at Silverlight 2 and First Look at using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2 . I'm pretty excited about Silverlight 2, and our group will support at least parts of it, so I feel that now is definitely high time for me to dig in to it and debug the core to get a solid grip on how things work in there. Democratizing the cloud When I presented at Oredev last year I got a chance to look at some silverlight presentations (1.0 at the time) and Matt Gibbs presentation on ASP.NET Futures which was pretty cool, but I also managed to hit one of the more obscure sessions, Eric Meijers Democratizing the cloud. Why do I bring this up in this this context? Well, the main thing i remembered...

My one-hundred-and-second podcast is up . In this episode, I sit down with Michael Pizzo, the Principal Architect of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. He gets technically down and dirty pretty fast and I get answers to all the hard questions like "Are LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities competing?" and "Which one should I use?" A very cool guy and a fun interview that finally set my head straight about the data stack. Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley ! Digg us at Digg Podcasts ! If you have trouble downloading, or your download is slow, do try the torrent with µtorrent or another BitTorrent Downloader. Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts...

Last week I did a First Look at Silverlight 2 post that talked about the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta1 release.  In the post I linked to some end-to-end tutorials I've written that walk through some of the fundamental programming concepts behind Silverlight and WPF, and demonstrate how to use them to build a "Digg Search Client" application using Silverlight: Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008 Part 2: Using Layout Management Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details Scenarios Part 7...

I know that folks have been reading about the Web Client Software Factory on Blaine's blog and on Glenn's blog. Blaine posted about what we planned to include, back in December with Next version of Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) . Glenn had the post at the end of January, Web Client 2.0 closer than you think , and Web Client 2.0, what's the hold up? So, what is in the latest version of the Web Client Software Factory? Here is a quick blurb from the front page of our docs, with my comments in Blue : The February 2008 release of the Web Client Software Factory is an update to the June 2007 release. The following are the major changes: Added user interface responsiveness guidance . The guidance includes documentation, Web controls...

The Visual Studio 2008 Launch fun continues!    There is a around the clock chat going on to give people around the world a chance to ask questions about VS2008.  I will be hosting a live chat today(2-28)  8-10pm PST.  If you'd like to sign on and ask any questions on Visual Studio 2008 or ASP.NET 3.5 I'd be happy to help if I can.  Virtual Launch Experience: Developer Chat (Visual Studio 2008)   See you there! Read More...

We're about halfway through with the labs so to change it up a little bit I'm going to give you a debugging challenge. I will post the step-by-step instructions and review in about a week, but for now I will only post a problem description. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to troubleshoot the problem with only that problem description. Post intermediate findings, questions, potential solutions etc. in the comments, and don't worry if you go down the wrong path a couple of times (that's just part of the debugging experience:)). Try not to peak at the code unless you have identified a problematic function during the troubleshooting process... Problem description: We get lot's of customer reports that randomly...

I am already having a great time at the Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Sql Server 2008 Launch event in LA… I am gave a very fun session on Visual Studio 2008 for Web Developers... It was fun to pull this together over the last few days (harddrive crash excluded).  There is SO much good stuff for web developers in VS2008...   From Linq , to CSS \HTML designers , to JavaScript debugging and intellesnse and of course the ASP.NET 3.5 support Ajax ( updatePanel , the Ajax control toolkit , JSON based web services, etc).  What is your favorite feature?  If you could not make it to LA, the good news is there are tons of local launch events .. check out the list Being in the LA convention center brings back...

Hope you have had a chance to go through the high CPU lab... Some people already commented with the solution in the lab instructions for this lab but here are my answers and commentary on the lab. Reproducing the issue: 1. Recycle IIS (IISReset) 2. Browse to http://localhost/BuggyBits/AllProducts.aspx this should take about 5 seconds or more depending on what machine you're on 3. Watch the CPU usage in taskmanager while browsing to this page Q: What is the CPU usage like for w3wp.exe during the processing of this request? A: Very high, approaching 100% Set up a performance counter log: 1. Check out Lab 3: Memory and set up a performance counter log per the instructions in there and start the log Prepare to gather a memory dump: 1. Open a...