I apologize for the neologism. What I’m going to demonstrate in this post is a technique I prototyped a few months ago to make it very easy to embed an ASP.NET page’s content in another page, even if it’s using another server technology. This of course works cross-domain. The reason why you would do that is to enable people to embed badges with your contents on their own sites. Examples of such badges can be found in the margin of this blog: there’s the ad badge, a Twitter badge, a Facebook badge, an Xbox Live badge, a Zune badge, and there used to be a Flickr badge. There are even full commenting systems that you can include on your blog this way. All those are Flash or JavaScript, and in both cases there’s a short JavaScript stub that includes...

It’s that time of year again when a young man’s thoughts turn to Las Vegas! Yep, it’s another year and another Mix conference (March 15-17, 2010), but this time they’ve changed locations to Mandalay Bay. It looks like my prediction that the Mix conferences would end at Mix 09 did not pan out. ;) As I did last year , I’ll be giving two talks at Mix 10 this year, one of them with the irrepressible Scott Hanselman . What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2 Come see and hear about the latest innovations in ASP.NET MVC 2 and the tooling support in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. We'll introduce you to a range of productivity (and extensibility) enhancements such as template helpers, model validation, and the new “Areas” feature, which enhances the team development...

[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] I’ve been working on a series of blog posts the last few months that cover some of the new features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010. Earlier today someone pointed me at some nice “quick hit” videos that have been published that also provide quick first looks at some of the new features coming with ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010.  These videos aren’t an exhaustive list of everything new – but do provide a great way to quickly learn about many of the cool new things coming with the release.  ASP.NET 4 Videos You can learn more about some of the new ASP.NET 4 features by watching these 22 ASP.NET Quick Hit Videos . VS...

[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the fourteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s post covers some of the output caching extensibility improvements being made to ASP.NET 4.  These can be used by all ASP.NET 4 applications – including those built using both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Output Caching Today ASP.NET 1.0 introduced the concept of output caching, which enables developers to capture and store the generated output of pages, controls, controllers, and HTTP responses in an in-memory cache.  On subsequent web requests, ASP.NET can then serve content faster by...

NOTE: An alternative title to this post might be: " The Weekly Source Code 48: Making The Weekly Source Code 47 Suck Incrementally Less. " Last week I wrote a post about Dynamic Linq Query Generation in order to solve a kind of meta-programming problem. I had a site that used ASP.NET Dynamic Data and I wanted to do a LINQ query against some data. However, because I was creating a template that didn't know enough at compile time to write a proper LINQ query that could, well, compile, I needed to creating my LINQ dynamically. Be sure to hang in here with me, the awesome happens at the end. I was trying to generate effectively this at runtime Items.Select(row => row.Property).Distinct.OrderBy(colvalue => colvalue) And I succeeded...

Themes are a way to define properties of pages and controls, and can be used to provide consistent look across pages. There are several different levels of applying a theme to an individual control, a page, or an application. Control Level Define a named...

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Technical debates are discussed endlessly within the blog-o-sphere/twitter-verse, and they range across every developer community. Each language, framework, tool, and platform inevitably has at least a few going on at any particular point in time. Below are a few observations I’ve made over the years about technical debates in general, as well as some comments about some of the recent discussions I’ve seen recently about the topic of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC in particular. General Observations About Technical Debates Below are a few general observations independent of any specific technical debate: a) Developers...

Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked at a consulting company for a bit over 13 years. Prior to that, I started the IT department at a medical billing company and worked there for 4 years while completing my Computer Science degree. Seeing Scott’s post on past work he did years ago at SparkFun and 800.com got me to thinking about some of the interesting projects I’ve been on. I’ve been a developer, a designer, an architect, a project manager, an engagement manager covering multiple projects, and an analyst. I was happiest, though, when I could get my hands on the code and visual design :) One thing that was interesting about consulting vs being in internal IT, is your problem domain changed every two to nine months. I met new clients, had to...

Since I spent some time today working with control extenders and exactly where in the page lifecycle to do what, I thought I’d share the whole list. If (!IsPostBack) Begin PreInit End PreInit Begin Init End Init Begin InitComplete End InitComplete Begin PreLoad End PreLoad Begin Load End Load Begin LoadComplete End LoadComplete Begin PreRender End PreRender Begin PreRenderComplete End PreRenderComplete Begin SaveState End SaveState Begin SaveStateComplete End SaveStateComplete Begin Render End Render If(IsPostBack) Begin PreInit End PreInit Begin Init End Init Begin InitComplete End InitComplete Begin LoadState End LoadState Begin ProcessPostData End ProcessPostData Begin PreLoad End PreLoad Begin Load End Load Begin ProcessPostData (Again)...

I’ve shown before how to generate thumbnails from ASP.NET server code using the WPF media APIs instead of GDI+ (which is unsupported when used in server code). In the previous article , I’ve been generating the thumbnails as PNG files. The reason for that is that PNG is a lossless format and I wanted to isolate as few variables as possible that impacted output quality and performance. Adding JPEG artifacts and the variable of the quality setting would have just muddied the water. One commenter (Victor) pointed out that the PNG API in WPF does not compress the output though. That is clearly a problem for a web application. This is why I decided to write this follow-up post. The previous one is still useful for establishing that the decision to...