The forthcoming renovation of my personal Web site requires LINQ support and therefore I need ASP.NET 3.5. My hoster, ServerIntellect (highly recommended) announced that it had upgraded the web servers so I thought everything was in place. To confirm that ASP.NET 3.5 was working, I posted a quick test...

I don't recall getting this error so often in Visual Web Developer 2008 Beta 2 or the release candidate: Expression of type 'System.Data.Linq.Table(Of xxx)' is not queryable. Make sure you are not missing an assembly reference and/or namespace import for the LINQ provider.   It popped up several...

Although Visual Web Developer 2008 makes it convenient to connect to a remote site, doing so with the built-in FTP client is a pain in the butt. There's something wrong with the VS-embedded module that handles FTP transfers. Am I the only one seeing slow screen painting and refresh in this client app...

I'll be speaking on the topic "LINQ: Simplifying Data Handling in ASP.NET" at the Victoria .NET CodeCamp on January 26th. It's going to be a great (free!) day with expert presenters that include Beth Massi and Richard Campbell . Here's the abstract for my beginner-level talk: Language Integrated...

If you get an error such as "The specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address." when trying to initialize a System.Net.Mail.MailMessage object, look in the web.config file for errors in the mailSettings and smtp sections. For more detail on how I discovered the solution...

I needed to compare the web.config files generated by Visual Studio for ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 projects. (In my opinion, web.config files are totally out of hand in ASP.NET 3.5, but that's another blog post.) My search for a free Diff tool turned up SourceGear DiffMerge from the folks who make the...

I hope you'll forgive a bit of self-promotion. I haven't blogged much about my book ASP.NET 3.5 For Dummies because it's a beginner's book. Most readers here are ASP.NET experts who could (and do) write advanced books and articles on ASP.NET. That said, I finally have a bound, hardcopy edition on my...

At first blush, it may seem strange for me to review a "competing"  ASP.NET 3.5 book. However, Stephen Walther's ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed doesn't target the same audience as ASP.NET 3.5 For Dummies . Mine is unabashedly a beginner's book. ASP.NET Unleashed is a comprehensive title for intermediate...

Check it out! "The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is a preview of new functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET. The release includes ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET controls for Silverlight, ADO.NET Data Services, Entity Framework runtime, and new features for ASP.NET AJAX...

Wow! A load of goodies today! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0bae58e-9c0b-4090-a1db-f134d9f095fd&DisplayLang=en This package is an add-on to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2008 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 1. It provides a Silverlight project system...