Peter Kellner recently published parts 3 and 4 of his popular how-to series on building a custom remote security management application for ASP.NET 2.0's Membership and Roles feature. Part 3 covers Ajax enabling it with Atlas, and Part 4 covers adding personalization support with profiles. You can find the entire series on MSDN here: ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management, Part 1: Security and Configuration Overview ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management, Part 2: Implementation ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management, Part 3: AJAX Enhancements with Microsoft Atlas ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management, Part 4: Adding Personalization with Profiles to the ObjectDataSource For more ASP.NET 2.0 Security Resources, please also check out my ASP.NET 2.0 Security...

Guess what. I started getting this question every month, then every week, then every day… now I get it every hour J , through different means: e-mail, blogs, e-mail threads I get included, communities. So, I figured it would make sense to publish a clear statement and be a little bit more transparent. The first half of the year 2006 was really dedicated to the Smart Client offerings: Desktop and Mobile . You probably noticed that already. Now that we shipped both Software Factories, the team is focusing almost exclusively on the web space and a key deliverable we are currently planning is migration guidance for UIP. That is migration content for users currently using UIP on .NET 1.1 that want to move their application forward to ASP.NET 2.0...

I have loved this program since first proposed a few months ago , as it’s a great way for some of the experts in the community to provide content that the community is most interested in. It is a great partnership for everyone involved and a big thanks to Pete who picked up the implementation details and pushed the program live to the www.asp.net site two weeks ago. So what does it take to launch such a program? Actually quite a lot, and it was a long road to fruition: 1. First we built and deployed the voting module. If you remember earlier in the year we had the voting module on the front page asking questions such as a. “Which database do you use most commonly with your Web applications?” With the results being: 37% SQL Serer 2000, 20% SQL...

I have loved this program since first proposed a few months ago , as it’s a great way for some of the experts in the community to provide content that the community is most interested in. It is a great partnership for everyone involved and a big thanks to Pete who picked up the implementation details and pushed the program live to the www.asp.net site two weeks ago. So what does it take to launch such a program? Actually quite a lot, and it was a long road to fruition: 1. First we built and deployed the voting module. If you remember earlier in the year we had the voting module on the front page asking questions such as a. “Which database do you use most commonly with your Web applications?” With the results being: 37% SQL Serer 2000, 20% SQL...

Arturo and I had a great time at Web Design World in Seattle this past week... It was really good to see there is so much passion about getting developers and designers working well together. I am still not sure I am “seeing the world in CSS” yet, but I am working on it ;-) At any rate, here are the slides from my talk ... enjoy! Oh, and BTW, I am sure some of you were wondering how we got the 3-D dice look in the Xaml part of the demo... Of course we had some help from the great folks over at Electronic Rain ... They even posted a tutorial on how they did it Read More...

Matt Gibbs (the dev manager for Atlas) recently posted a great article on Atlas... A very good introduction.. have a read! http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/07/AtlasAtLast/ Read More...

Problem: You are building a web application, and are trying to figure out how to best model the particular database schema you need for the application. Solution: One great resource I found recently on the web that I recommend checking out is a really nice library of free database models . You can browse the library online here . The library includes hundreds of sample database schemas for tons of topics – ranging from “Airline Reservations” to “Organizations and People” to “Car Servicing” to “Pizza Delivery”. A sample schema for modeling “Clients and Fees” can be seen below: The next time you start creating a new database, I'd recommend checking out the library to garner...

Problem: You are building an Intranet web application for your organization, and you want to authenticate the users visiting your site. Specifically, you want to ensure that they are logged in using a valid Windows account on the network, and you want to be able to retrieve each incoming user's Windows account name and Windows group membership within your application code on the server. Discussion: Authentication is the process of identifying and validating the identity of a client accessing an application. Put more simply -- it is the process of identifying “who” the end-user is when they visit a website. Authentication is typically used in combination with Authorization -- which is the process of figuring out whether the authenticated...

This post should be under the category "you learn something new every day". First, some background. In my earlier years here at MS as a developer, one of the things I wrote was the VS Toolbox support for managed components. You know that gnarly "Choose Items..." dialog? Yeah, I did the ".NET Components" tab of that thing, all the code that surfs the assembly looking for components, as well as the code the manages the items that are on the toolbox and does the funky auto-populate stuff when you build projects. So I was surprised to learn that there's a very easy way to add your Toolkit items to the toolbox. I'm still fairly mistified that it works. But I digress. 1) Create a tab on your toolbox by right-click then "Add Tab", and name it something...

Problem You have a large ASP.NET page that you are working on within Visual Studio, and you want to quickly navigate back and forth between design-view and source-view without getting lost in the deeply nested HTML content, or have to spend a lot of time finding your place again in the document. Solution Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio 2005 provide a number of subtle, but useful, features that you can take advantage of to navigate quickly around an HTML page. To see them in action, open a page with a lot of HTML content (in the examples below I’m going to use the Default.aspx page from the built-in “Personal Starter Kit” sample). Switch the page into design-view and either select some content, or simply move the cursor to a location within...