Top ASP.NET Items

ASP.NET hosts six community created SPA templates now

2013-05-06T22:25:16Z

Since announcement of 4 community created Single Page Application templates when releasing ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 in February 2013, the community has done some updates to the templates and released 2 more templates: Backbone template and Breeze/Angular template. You can view the details and download the templates at http://www.asp.net/single-page-application/overview/introduction/other-libraries . To use these templates, please make sure you installed Visual Studio 2012 Update 2...(read more)

Please update to the latest version of Web Essentials 2012 after installing VS2012 Update 2

2013-05-01T22:42:39Z

After releasing ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2, which is also included in Visual Studio 2012 update 2, we’ve received a few customer feedback about their VS shows an error dialog saying: An exception has been encountered. This may be caused by an extension. You can get more information by examining the file 'C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ActivityLog.xml'. When looking at ActivityLog.xml, the following error message may show up: System.ComponentModel.Composition...(read more)

Announcing the Release of WebMatrix 3

2013-05-01T19:53:06Z

I’m excited to announce the release of WebMatrix 3. WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010 , and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js. Today’s release includes a ton of great new features. You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video: Some of the highlights of today’s release include deep Windows Azure integration, source control tooling for Git...(read more)

Seeking Feedback on Alternative Formats for ASP.NET MVC and Deployment Content Maps

2013-04-30T18:02:35Z

The ASP.NET content maps are lists of resources that we have reviewed and recommend. The content maps have been popular in their present form, but we’re looking at ways to improve them, such as by publishing more lists but with a narrower focus to each one, by providing more information for each link, and by formatting them differently. Here are links to the existing content maps and three pages that show new approaches we’re considering: ASP.NET Deployment Content Map ASP.NET MVC 4 Content...(read more)

Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET

2013-04-30T17:37:03Z

This morning we released the v2.0 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK with some really great new features and enhancements. These new capabilities include: Web Sites : Visual Studio Tooling updates for Publishing, Management, and for Diagnostics Cloud Services: Support for new high memory VM sizes, Faster Cloud Service publishing & Visual Studio Tooling for configuring and viewing diagnostics data Storage : Storage Client 2.0 is now...(read more)

Windows Azure: Improvements to Virtual Networks, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and a new Ruby SDK

2013-04-26T18:51:15Z

This morning we released some great enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Virtual Networks : New Point-to-Site Connectivity (very cool!), Software VPN Device and Dynamic DNS Support Virtual Machines: Remote PowerShell and Linux SSH provisioning enhancements Cloud Services : Enable Remote Desktop Support Dynamically on Web/Worker Roles Ruby SDK : A new Windows Azure SDK support for Ruby All of these improvements are now available to start using immediately (note: some services...(read more)

XDT (XML Document Transform) released on codeplex.com

2013-04-23T00:50:48Z

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a simple and straight forward method of transforming web.config during publishing/packaging. This support is called XML Document Transform, aka XDT. It allows you to transform any XML file, not just web.config. To learn more about XDT check out the docs . Since we've released XDT there has been interest in re-using the transformation engine in other scenarios. To enable some of those scenarios we released XDT on NuGet . After that we started working on integrating...(read more)

Windows AzureConf this Tuesday

2013-04-22T04:59:11Z

This Tuesday, April 23, we’ll be hosting Windows AzureConf – a free online event for and by the Windows Azure community. It will be streamed online from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM PST via Channel 9 , and you can watch it all for free. I’ll be kicking off the event with a Windows Azure keynote in the morning (a great way to learn more about Windows Azure if you haven’t used it yet!). Following my talk the rest of the day will be full of excellent presentations from members of the Windows Azure community...(read more)

ASP.NET Web API: CORS support and Attribute Based Routing Improvements

2013-04-19T18:37:38Z

We’ve seen a huge adoption of ASP.NET Web API since its initial release. In February we shipped the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update – which added a number of additional enhancements to both Web API and the other components of ASP.NET. The ASP.NET Team has been hard at work on developing the next set of features (lots of cool stuff coming). One of the great things about this work has been how the team has used the open source development process – which we announced we were adopting...(read more)

Windows Azure: General Availability of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

2013-04-16T13:01:44Z

This morning we announced the general availability release of our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) support for Windows Azure – including our new Virtual Machine and Virtual Network capabilities. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production apps. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using it today. In addition to supporting all of the features...(read more)

Testing Orchard drivers

2013-04-15T19:51:31Z

If you’ve ever tried to test Orchard part drivers, you may have been blocked by the fact that the methods on drivers are protected. That, fortunately, doesn’t mean they are untestable. Those methods are still accessible through explicit interface implementations. In particular, drivers implement IContentPartDriver, which is defined as follows. public interface IContentPartDriver : IDependency { DriverResult BuildDisplay(BuildDisplayContext context); DriverResult BuildEditor(BuildEditorContext context...(read more)

A C# helper to read and write XML from and to objects

2013-04-15T00:04:02Z

I really like jQuery’s pattern of attribute getters and setters. They are fluent and work really well with HTML and XML DOMs. If you specify a value in addition to the name, it’s setting, otherwise it’s getting. In C#, we have an OK API for XML, XElement, but it’s not as easy to use as jQuery’s attr methods. It is also missing the flexibility of Javascript with regards to parameter types. To recreate the simplicity of attr in C#, I built a set of extension methods for the most common simple types...(read more)

Windows Azure Global Bootcamp on April 27th – sign up now

2013-04-13T01:55:53Z

On April 27, something very cool is happening. A bunch of Windows Azure MVP's and community activists are organizing a Global Windows Azure Bootcamp . This is a completely free, one-day training event for Windows Azure, all organized by the community, and presented in person all over the World. I’m not sure if this is the largest community event ever - it is very cool to see how many places this event is happening. Below is the location map as it stands today – and new locations are being...(read more)

Getting your Raspberry Pi to output the right resolution

2013-04-11T05:14:36Z

I was setting up a new Raspberry Pi under Raspian on a Samsung monitor the other day. If you don’t do anything, Raspian and the Pi will attempt to detect the modes supported by your monitor and will make a choice of what seems best to it. And sometimes it gets that very wrong. In those cases, you’ll need to find what the right mode is and to set it up. It took me quite a few attempts before I succeeded, mostly misled by misinformed forum and blog posts. The right post, the one that has all the correct...(read more)

Windows Azure: Active Directory Release, New Backup Service + Web Site Monitoring and Log Improvements

2013-04-08T16:07:41Z

Today we released some great enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Active Directory : General Availability release of Windows Azure AD – it is now ready for production use! Backup Service : New Service that enables secure offsite backups of Windows Servers in the cloud Web Sites : Monitoring and Diagnostic Enhancements All of these improvements are now available to start using immediately (note: some services are still in preview). Below are more details on them: Active Directory...(read more)