Yesterday (tuesday) started out fine. Got up, kissed my wife good-bye and left to work all happy and all that jazz.
I get to work and see that my computer was restarted for patch Tuesday... Little did I know that the little ninjas inside my computer didn't want me to play. It seems that something messed up my security within Vista. Even though I was an Administrator (In the Administrators Group) I was unable to use any Administrative tools with Visual Studio... including "Opening a web page"!!!
After spending countless hours (I counted 10) working on this issue, I decided Wednesday Morning (Today) to re-do my computer. (Format, delete, re-install vista etc.).
It was approved my management and voila, it's all working now. I'm thankful that MS finally got the OS SEtup right. Took me 3 hours to install Vista, .NET, SQL 2005, and all my goodies.
I'm not sure why my settings were all messed up. I couldn't open any webpage within Visual Studio, nor could I create a new website. The ASP.NET forums post I have is here incase anyone wants to see if it was ever resolved.
I’ve decided to throw together a list of useful sites, links, posts etc. These sites are a great reference point and a great resource to use when looking at new design ideas, architecture, development methodologies etc.
ASP.NET Sites & Articles
Scott Guthrie’s Blog – Scott Guthrie runs the teams that build IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX, CLR, Windows Forms, Commerce Server, Visual Web Developer, and Visual Studio tools for WPF. His blog is update regularly and has great articles that pertain to ASP.NET
ASP.NET – The home of ASP.NET. Here you can find articles, forums (see blow), downloads, resources and recent blog updates from various MSDN Bloggers.
ASP.NET Forums – The main resource for all ASP.NET developers. This site has many experts on it helping in any way possible. This is one of the greatest resources available for developers.
ASP.NET Learn Videos – this site boasts dozens of video’s designed for all ASP.NET Developers.
Code Project - The code project is a Visual Studio site that deals with everything from Articles, Forums, Product Showcases, sample projects and experiments.
dotNetSlackers.com – dotnetSlakers is a blogging site used by .NET developers.
ASP Alliance – Active Software Professionals. This is a great site to view ASP.NET Tutorials and articles. Many ASP.NET professionals post here making it an awesome reference point.
ASP.NET 2.0 MSDN Articles – A Great place to look for MSDN articles for ASP.NET 2.0
ASP.NET Architecture And Development Methodologies
Designing Data Tier Components and Passing Data Through Tiers – This is a great article written by Microsoft Corporation showing how to expose data to Microsoft .NET applications and how to implement an effective strategy for passing data between the tiers in a distributed application (this is a long article, 65 pages).
Extending the ASP.NET 2.0 Resource-Provider Model -
Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 unleashed a number of wonderful improvements for localizing Web applications. Even with all these wonderful benefits, soon after localizing a site, you might begin to wonder about extensibility. This article will help you apply extensibility features of ASP.NET to handle enterprise localization scenarios and improve your localization-development process.
Design Ideas and articles.
Building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites Using Web Standards – A great article by Stephen Walther showing how to build web sites in ASP.NET 2.0 that adhere to web standards – something many ASP.NET developers forget to do.
CSS Zen Garden – this site was put together from Dave Shea (Home-grown Kamloopsian). The CSS Zen Garden demonstrates what can be done through CSS. All designs on the CSS Zen Garden deal with 1 static HTML page; however they are all driven by separate CSS. It clearly shows that with proper CSS design, web designers can do amazing things.
Little Boxes – This site is a simple site that shows how to do column layouts with CSS. It is a great reference site to use when you’re stuck on a layout issue.
ASP.NET Design Templates – This site contains samples of ASP.NET templates. You can use these templates to get a better idea on what ASP.NET can do, or use them to help you create a layout for your website.
Client Scripting.
Client scripting is a very broad subject. Scripting can include: JavaScript, AJAX, VBscript etc. Here are a few sites and articles that have been a good reference for me in the past.
W3Schools HTML Dom – A simple tutorial on the HTML Document Object Model (DOM).
W3Schools JavaScript - Basic tutorials on JavaScript.
ASP.NET AJAX Online Tutorials – Great tutorials on everything ASP.NET AJAX.
Vendors that sell great ASP.NET 3rd party controls
There are many vendors out there that sell ASP.NET controls. Some of them are really flakey, and some of them are not worth even looking at. Below are a few sites that have proven time and time again to create great web controls, and assemblies to be used in ASP.NET.
Telerik – Leading vendor of User Interface controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Active forums and a great knowledge base.
Infragistics – A .NET leader in control development (UI).
Aspose – A .NET and Java component publisher. Aspose makes the best (that I have seen) controls for working with Word and Excel files without having to load up any Microsoft Office applications on the web server. Many times when a developer needs to work with a word document – say to save it as an HTML file – they will use the Office.Word object to work with the file. Doing so will actually load up MS Word on your web server. When dealing with thousands to 10’s of thousands of users – this is a very bad thing.
webSuperGoo – PDF Generation is what I like best about this company. Their abcPDF software is the best I’ve seen for features, usability and support.