As you might already know we have two different project types for web development  in Visual Studio 1.) Web Application Projects (WAPs) 2.) Web Site Projects (WSPs)… Often time developers hear that if you want to put a random class file in your web project you should put it in App_Code folder.  While this is true for Web Site Projects (WSPs), it is not so much true for Web Application Projects (WAPs) and in this post I will try to explain the inner workings on why that is the case… Firstly App_Code folder is a special ASP.NET RUNTIME folder…  Any files in this folder are compiled by ASP.NET when your site is actually running on the server...  This essentially allows you to drop random class/code files in this folder to be...

Recently David Poll posted a very cool technique for navigating to dynamically loaded pages and on demand downloading of pages in a Silverlight 3 application .  It was very cool but the explicit wire up of each page can be a pain in large applications.  So having just posted about MEF on Silverlight , I thought this was a great fit.  The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is all about discovering and wiring up components and Silverlight 3 Navigation has some very interesting components.    But before I could get it done, our Test Manager, Dinesh Chandnani beat me to it.  He wrote this very cool example app that I extended just a bit. Download the all the source code and check out an live sample … The model...

SQL Server Express is a development time database and it is not recommended to use it on your production server.  The rationale for providing SQL Express edition was to ensure that development can be done without having to install a licensed copy of SQL Server on your development machine… Additionally most of the hosters do not support SQL Server Express on their shared web servers and enterprises are typically running on full SQL Server in their Staging/Production environment. When you are developing a Web Project using Visual Studio then your SQL Express MDF file is put inside App_Data folder.  VS also ensures that App_Data folder is set up with the correct read/write access so that your application can then write to the Database...

This post is based on an early preview of ASP.NET MVC 2 and may be obsoleted by a future version of the product. Preview 1 of ASP.NET MVC 2 introduces the concept of Areas. Areas provide a means of dividing a large web application into multiple projects, each of which can be developed in relative isolation. The goal of this feature is to help manage complexity when developing a large site by factoring the site into multiple projects, which get combined back into the main site before deployment. Despite the multiple projects, it’s all logically one web application. One piece of feedback I’ve already heard from several people is that they don’t want to manage multiple projects and simply want areas within single project as a means of organizing...

I am having a blast with the series where I am updating my simple Mix 09 Business Application demo. In this part, I wanted to consider the scenario that I hope is a common one. The developer writes their Silverlight app using the RIA Services pattern and the application becomes wildly successful. So successful in fact there is a demand to put a services head on top of the same application logic to facilitate writing a bunch of other clients. This is the sort of pattern we see happening with applications like Twitter and Sharepoint. You can see the full series here . The demo requires (all 100% free and always free): VS2008 SP1 Silverlight 3 RTM .NET RIA Services July '09 Preview Also, download the full demo files and check out the running...

The ASP.NET team just released the first public preview of ASP.NET MVC Version 2.  You can download it here . Today’s preview works with .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008, and can be installed side-by-side on the same machine as ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (meaning they don’t conflict and your existing ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects will not be impacted if you install it).  If you have both ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0 installed you’ll see two ASP.NET MVC project templates within Visual Studio 2008’s “New Project” dialog: The release notes that come with the ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview release detail how to upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects to use V2 if you’d like to migrate them forward to take advantage of the new features. New Features ASP.NET MVC...

I was up in Redmond this week and stopped by to visit my Video Portal in Phil's Office . I wanted to see where I virtually sit. While I was there, Phil gave me/us/you a tour of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 . Be sure to read ScottGu's post on ASP.NET MVC 2 . The best point: Today’s preview works with .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008, and can be installed side-by-side on the same machine as ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (meaning they don’t conflict and your existing ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects will not be impacted if you install it). Quoting from the ASP.NET MVC Roadmap , the theme for ASP.NET MVC 2 is " Improved Productivity and Enterprise Ready. " ASP.NET MVC 2 Features Preview 1 - Early August Templated Helpers - allow you to automatically associate edit...

Four and a half months after my team released ASP.NET MVC 1.0 , I am very happy to announce that the release of our first Preview of version 2 of ASP.NET MVC is now available for download . Go download it immediately and enjoy its coolness. :) Don’t be afraid to install it as it will sit nicely side-by-side with ASP.NET 1.0. The release notes provide more details on what’s in this release and I’ve also updated the Roadmap on CodePlex , which describes the work we want to do in Preview 2 and beyond. After shipping ASP.NET MVC 1.0, the team and I spent time pitching in on ASP.NET 4 which was a nice diversion for me personally as I got a chance to work on something different for a while and it let ideas for ASP.NET MVC 2 percolate. But now I’m...

I had a great time at the LinkedIn Users’ Group meeting … the only down side is that I missed the really bad pizza’s that most User’s Groups offer ;-)  Here is the demo (and demo steps) I did…  Download . I’ll post the recording when it gets uploaded as well. A couple of follow-ups: There was a question about creating your own DomainService for a custom DAL… I’d recommend checking out my DataSet and WCF examples as well as the full source code for the LinqToSqlDomainService .  Someone asked about offline: Check out Nikhil’s Mix talk.. he covers offline there and printing!  I think he will be updating those demos to current bits next week. For the question about custom auth support… check out my recent blog post on how I create...

Well, I guess it’s not so super-secret anymore now but these last few months, I’ve been transitioning from ASP.NET Ajax to a new project that aims at helping ASP.NET communities build Open Source applications on ASP.NET. It’s a lot of fun and the good news is that you can join in. We are hiring a senior developer: https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=1&jid=4567&jlang=EN Please mention me (Bertrand Le Roy, bleroy at Microsoft) as the referral if you apply. ;) Read More...