Bytes by MSDN is doing a bunch of really interesting interviews with folks behind the technology.   In this interview I talked to Billy Hollis about Silverlight 4, RIA Services and VS2010. Tune in with Brad Abrams and Billy Hollis as they discuss the latest Silverlight 4 release and the exciting new features and functionalities now available. Video Downloads WMV (Zip) | WMV | iPod | MP4 | 3GP | Zune | PSP Audio Downloads AAC | WMA | MP2 | MP3 | MP4         Enjoy! Read More...

There are lots of reason you may need to customize the access to given fields within an entity.  For example, HIPPA compliance requires that some data not be exposed to only employees with a need to know.   It is often not sufficient to just NOT show the data in the Silverlight client, you need to not even send it over the wire.  This example works with Silverlight 4\RIA Services Beta and Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 I built a very simple RIA Services + Silverlight 4 example to show how this could be done.   First, let’s run the app, then we can look at how we built it. The first thing to notice is when we run it, no users are logged in, so we get no access to the data at all.  First, let’s log in as a Rocky, who...

In the first installment of this two-part series we explored how you can consume JSONP data sources using hardly any code thanks to the ASP.NET Ajax Library and the powerful networking stack that lies within.  This time around we’ll take a look at doing something useful with the data and render it using client templates, again, using the ASP.NET Ajax Library . At this stage we have received data from the Twitter endpoint and now we want to do something useful with the JSON.  As a reminder, here is the code required to get to this point: < script src ="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/beta/0911/start.debug.js" type ="text/javascript"></ script >            <...

This is the fourth post in my series on ASP.NET MVC 2 and its new features. ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released (Release Announcement) Html.RenderAction and Html.Action ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom Validation Localizing ASP.NET MVC Validation In my recent post on custom validation with ASP.NET MVC 2 , several people asked about how to localize validation messages. They didn’t want their error messages hard-coded as an attribute value. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to do this. Localizing error messages is not specific to ASP.NET MVC, but is a feature of Data Annotations and ASP.NET. And everything I cover here works for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (except for the part about client validation which is new to ASP.NET MVC 2). I covered this feature a back in March at...

Starting a new link listing series around interesting posts/content related to RIA Services. Hope you find these useful, and if you'd like to share something please send them along... [ Full post continued here... ] Read More...

This past week I’ve been traveling around Europe giving a bunch of presentations (approximately 5 hours in each country) – Norway on Tuesday, Sweden on Wednesday, Denmark on Thursday, and Belgium on Friday.  I’ll then be presenting at the BizSpark Camp in France this coming Tuesday. Things went well with the talks, and I had fun meeting lots of new people (more than 3,000 attended the talks!). Below is a picture of my talk in Belgium – where everyone showed up in a red shirt :-) Download Talks My talks were filmed in a few locations – and I’ll update this post with pointers to the videos once they are online to watch. Below are copies of my slides + demos bits: ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 Web Development: Slides + Demos + Blog Posts ASP.NET MVC...

Yesterday, I asked some questions about your usage of medium trust . Thank you all for the great answers and comments (but don’t read too much into that, I’m just playing with stuff). If you haven’t answered yet, feel free to do so . Now I have an additional question: What missing permission is preventing you from running in medium trust? Please answer in comments. And thanks again for the great feedback. Read More...

I would be very grateful if you could drop me a note in comments answering the following questions: Do you run all, some or none of your web sites in medium trust? Why do you choose to run in that trust level? Are your sites externally hosted and if so does your hoster constrain the trust level? Don’t read anything into this, I’d just like to see some different opinions on medium trust. Read More...

I spent close to three weeks on the road giving talks at Tech-Ed Europe (Berlin), PDC (Los Angeles), and the Los Angeles Code Camp (Los Angeles). I got to talk about two topics that I am very passionate about: ASP.NET MVC and Ajax. Thanks everyone for coming to all my talks! At PDC, I announced all of the new features of our ASP.NET Ajax Library. In particular, I made five big announcements: ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta Released – You can download the beta from Ajax.CodePlex.com ASP.NET Ajax Library includes the AJAX Control Toolkit – You can use the Ajax Control Toolkit with ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET Ajax Library being contributed to the CodePlex Foundation – ASP.NET Ajax is the founding project for the CodePlex Foundation (see CodePlex.org) ASP.NET...

Pain is often a great motivator for invention, unless you become dull to the pain. I think CSS is one of those cases where there’s a lot of pain that we as web developers often take in stride. Fortunately not everyone accepts that pain and efforts such as LESS are born. As the home page states: LESS extends CSS with: variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. Best of all, LESS uses existing CSS syntax. This means you can rename your current .css files .less and they’ll just work. LESS solves a lot of the pain of duplication when writing CSS. Originally written as a Ruby gem, Chris Jowen ported a version to .NET not surprisingly called .less . Here are some examples from the .less homepage: .Less implements LESS as an HttpHandler you add...