The “copyleft” provisions of the GPL ( GNU General Public License ) require that any changes or additions to a GPL licensed work must itself be licensed under terms that adhere to the GPL. Critics of these “copyleft” provisions have derogatively labeled the GPL as a “viral” license. Such criticism points out that any code that seeks to incorporate GPL licensed code must itself adhere to the terms of the GPL, thus potentially “infecting” other code with its restrictions. This has caused many developers of proprietary systems to be concerned about any usage of GPL code within their products for fear of turning their closed source codebase into a GPL licensed open source codebase. But now there’s a new viral license to be feared. This new license...

This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup.  Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the...

Dusan published this interesting post a couple of weeks ago about a novel JavaScript chaining pattern: http://dbj.org/dbj/?p=514 It’s similar to many existing patterns, but the syntax is extraordinarily terse and it provides a new form of friction-free, plugin-less extensibility mechanism. Here’s a JavaScript example from Dusan’s post: CallStream( "#container" ) (find, "div" ) (attr, "A" , 1) (css, "color" , "#fff" ) (logger); The interesting thing here is that the functions that are being passed as the first argument are arbitrary, they don’t need to be declared as plug-ins. Compare that with a rough jQuery equivalent that could look something like this: $.fn.logger = function () { /* ... *...

There have been a few places where you can see this command run, but I wanted to talk about it here officially.  This command is used to display all of the exceptions that are currently in the managed heap.  One interesting thing is that this function actually looks at what class the object derives from and if it derives from System.Exception, then it will show up in the list.  So you can have your own custom exceptions shown here regardless of what naming mechanism you use for your class. There is some helpful information about the output from this command here: ASP.NET Debugging - ASP.NET Tips- DumpAllExceptions , namely that if you run it twice, you may see different callstacks from the various exceptions. Here is the documentation...

We’re looking for someone who is passionate about web technologies and the developer experience.  If you’ve been an avid Visual Studio developer building great web applications and longed for an even more compelling experience in Visual Studio, Now is your chance.  Visual Studio already offers the one of the most comprehensive authoring experiences for the web today supporting web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript and server technologies such as ASP.Net, MVC, SQL Server and IIS.  We’re looking for someone with the passion and energy to help us raise the bar even further in our next generation of tooling for the web. You can learn more and apply for this position at: Program Manager II - Web Development Tools If you’re curious...

Minor update for the Spell checker add-in for VS 2008 SP1. It is now available at Visual Studio Gallery . Direct link: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/2f3d691d-8838-4d84-ad64-44a02db37e30 What's new in version 2.3: Updated native code loading mechanism to improve robustness Fixed bug when applying suggestion would also delete punctuation immediately following the word. You can find extended information on the add-in and possible customization in earlier post . For VS 2010 version look here . Thanks Mikhail Arkhipov Read More...

In my previous blog entry , I explored two ways of inserting a database record using jQuery. We added a new Movie to the Movie database table by using a generic handler and by using a WCF service. In this blog entry, I want to take a brief look at how you can insert a database record using OData. Introduction to OData The Open Data Protocol (OData) was developed by Microsoft to be an open standard for communicating data across the Internet. Because the protocol is compatible with standards such as REST and JSON, the protocol is particularly well suited for Ajax. OData has undergone several name changes. It was previously referred to as Astoria and ADO.NET Data Services. OData is used by Sharepoint Server 2010, Azure Storage Services, Excel 2010...

Tom just blogged about a new debugger extension called PSSCor2, which is a superset to the SOS.dll extension that ships with the .net framework. PSSCor2.dll has been around for quite some time at Microsoft, and pretty much everyone debugging .net code with windbg within Microsoft is using this since it contains all the goodness of sos.dll plus a lot of special methods for asp.net and other technologies running on top of the .net framework.  The news now is that after a lot of hard work by Tom and Jon Langdon in the CLR team, it is finally released publicly, YAY!!! You can download it here and Tom promised to write some posts about the new commands so you might want to follow that… I will likely do the same later on as well… Just to name...

I wanted to be the first to inform everyone that there is a major update to the debugger extension story for .NET.  Psscor2 has been released!  This is a superset of the SOS.dll that ships with the framework. This extension has a lot of advantages over SOS if you are trying to troubleshoot problems, especially if they are caused by ASP.NET.  All of the functionality that has been talked about on this blog for the SOS that comes with the debugger is now available for .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5. This one extension will troubleshoot all of those versions. I will be getting into the new commands and talking more about this in the coming weeks.  But I wanted to let everyone know and have you all go download the extension...

ASP.NET/HTML Spell Checker 2.3 for Visual Studio 2010 has been posted on Visual Studio Gallery (also accessible from Visual Studio Start page in 'Extending Visual Studio' section). Direct link: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/0db4814c-255e-4cc6-a2c2-a428de7f8949 What's new in version 2.3: VS 2010 version installs from gallery as Visual Studio Extension package (VSIX) In VS 2010 suggestion list is invoked via right button click (instead of double click as in earlier versions). Fixed bug: Fixing misspelled word it may also remove punctuation that immedialy follows it. For additional information please refer to readme.htm included in the download - you can find it in the extension directory, typically C:\Users\USER_NAME...