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...

I just noticed that Mike Swanson was blogging about CSS-Like Visual Styling for Windows Forms with Infragistics ’s NetAdvantage AppStylist .. Very cool to see our partners embrace the rising tide of better user experience. Has anyone created a great looking app with this tool? I’d love to see a screen shot, or better yet a clickonce link ;-) Read More...

Problem You are coding away on an ASP.NET page, and are trying to isolate a problem within the page. You have some existing html/controls/markup/in-line code that is being used on the page, and you want to temporarily comment it out while you fix the problem. Solution ASP.NET supports a little known feature called “server-side comments” that you can use to completely disable code/controls/html in a page. Server-side comments in ASP.NET are delimited using a <%-- --%> syntax. For example: <% -- Commented out HTML/CODE/Markup. Anything with this block will not be parsed/handled by ASP.NET. <asp:Calendar runat="server"></asp:Calendar> <%# Eval(“SomeProperty”) %> -- %> One common question people ask is what the difference...

By the Community, For the Community! I'm really excited to announce a new community program on the ASP.NET website called By the Community, for the Community. It's a system to help out everyone, and give some great community members a platform from which to show off their work. Every couple of weeks, we'll announce 3-6 new topics. You then get to vote on them, and choose the one that would be most helpful to you. At the end of the voting period, our MVP's will create a sample based on the most requested idea! We've got 6 great MVP's lined up to create samples, and they're really stoked about creating these and showing people how to get this stuff to work. This vote is open as of today, and will be open until next Friday (July 14th), and we'll...

A handful of folks have been hard at work at an exciting and innovative community program called For the community, By the community aimed at helping grow samples and examples for ASP.NET 2.0 to help developers of all skill levels. In simple terms, it is a system where the community will get to vote on a set of topics that they want covered, then some of our wonderful MVP's will create a sample based on the most requested idea. We have 6 great MVP's lined up to help (always looking for more people too!) and voting opens today and will close on 7/14 for the first set of samples which should be ready by 8/4. Pete LePage has a great post here All the other information you need is available on www.asp.net at http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex...

By the Community, For the Community! I'm really excited to announce a new community program on the ASP.NET website called By the Community, for the Community. It's a system to help out everyone, and give some great community members a platform from which to show off their work. Every couple of weeks, we'll announce 3-6 new topics. You then get to vote on them, and choose the one that would be most helpful to you. At the end of the voting period, our MVP's will create a sample based on the most requested idea! We've got 6 great MVP's lined up to create samples, and they're really stoked about creating these and showing people how to get this stuff to work. This vote is open as of today, and will be open until next Friday (July 14th), and we'll...