Nov 17th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, VS 2008, .NET 3.5, IIS7, Silverlight

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.

ASP.NET

• GridViewControlExtender - Row MouseOver and Click Styles, Header Cell MouseOver Styles, and 5 Themes Based on Google's Personalized HomePage: Matt Berseth has three cool posts that show off techniques you can use to customize the look and feel of the ASP.NET GridView control.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Exploring one of Microsoft AJAX's often overlooked features: AddHandler: Dave Ward starts a new series covering some of ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript features, and begins the series by exploring the $AddHandler method, which allows you to attach a client side Javascript event handler to any DOM element on a a page.

• Yahoo UI Style "Tip of the Day" Dialog using the ASP.NET AJAX PopupControl, DynamicPopulate and DragPanel Extender Controls: Matt Berseth has a nice article that describes how to implement a "Tip of the Day" popup control using ASP.NET AJAX.

• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense: A Reference for the "Reference" Tag: The VS Web Tools Team published this useful reference that details how to use the // <reference> directive within JavaScript pages to reference other JavaScript files, web services, and JavaScript snippets embedded in assemblies.  You can learn more about VS 2008's JavaScript intellisense support from my previous VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense post.

• "Don't Ask Me Again" Delete Confirm Using a ModalPopup and ASP.NET's Profile Properties: Matt Berseth has a cool tutorial that demonstrates how to to use ASP.NET AJAX to prompt a ModalPopup to end users - and then save the results within the ASP.NET Profile system.

• JQuery TabContainer Theme with Tab Transition Animations: Matt Berseth has a nice post that describes how you can add more animation to your site - this time building an ASP.NET AJAX extender that provides JQuery-like animation effects. 

ASP.NET MVC

• Build an RSS Feed with the new ASP.NET MVC Framework: Brad Abrams demonstrates a simple example of how to build a RSS blog feed using the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

• Use Spring.NET to enable Dependency Injection on a ASP.NET MVC Controller: Fredrik Normen walks through a simple sample that demonstrates how to enable dependency injection of a data repository object to a Controller with the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  Specifically, he shows using Spring.NET and the IControllerFactory interface provided with ASP.NET MVC.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5

• Visual Basic 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster and Visual C# 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster: The final release of Visual Studio 2008 will be available for download very shortly (keep an eye on my blog for details).  To help get ready you can download and print off these two posters for free.  They detail the default keybindings for the VB and C# profiles. 

• .NET 3.5 Reference Poster: Here is an updated .NET Framework Common Namespaces and Types Poster that you can also print out for free.  It details some of the new namespaces and important types in .NET 3.5.

• Sound Events for Visual Studio: Apparently you you assign sounds to fire when Visual Studio events happen (for example: a build error).  I can't think of a really good use for this other than to annoy co-workers.  Potentially something fun you can enable on their machine when they go to lunch.

IIS 7.0

• Running 32-bit and 64-bit ASP.NET versions at the same time in different worker processes: With IIS6 you either had to run all web worker processes in 32-bit mode, or all of them in 64-bit mode.  There was no easy way to mix and match depending on the application (you couldn't have one 32-bit ASP.NET application that needed to use a C++ component on the same machine as another 64-bit ASP.NET application in a separate application pool).  With IIS 7.0 this is now supported and easy to enable.  Rakki Muthukumar from Microsoft support describes how to configure this.

WPF and Silverlight

• Silverlight 1.1 Hebrew and Arabic Language Support: Silverlight today doesn't yet support right-to-left text layout.  Justin-Josef Angel has put together an absolutely awesome CodePlex project that enables this support.  Download the code from CodePlex today, and read his detailed tutorial on it here.

• .NET 3.5 Add-In Model: Jack Gudenkauf is a developer on my team who has driven the design of the new System.AddIn namespace in .NET 3.5.  This namespace makes it easier to build add-in extensibility to your client applications.  Among other things, this enables you to isolate addins and WPF controls across application domain and process boundaries (here is a sample of one).  Watch Jack's Channel9 video to learn more.

• Data Binding in WPF: A nice MSDN Magazine article from John Papa that describes some of the basics of how WPF's binding model works. Josh Twist also has some good WPF databinding companion articles that complement this here and here.  To learn WPF in more detail, I highly recommend Adam Nathan's excellent WPF Unleashed book (still 5 stars after 45 reviews on Amazon.com).  The next public release of Silverlight 1.1 will support the same powerful databinding model that is in the full WPF, and will make building data aware applications much easier.

Hope this helps,

Scott