August 9th ASP.NET Link-Listing

Below are some nice articles and links I’ve found on the web over the last week that I enjoyed, and recommend setting aside some time to consider reading:

ASP.NET Topics

Sending Email in ASP.NET 2.0: This is a great article from Scott Mitchell that demonstrates how to use the new System.Net.Mail APIs in .NET 2.0 to send email from an ASP.NET application.

Sending Email in ASP.NET 2.0: HTML-Formatted Emails, Attachments, and Gracefully Handling SMTP Exceptions: This is a great follow-up article on email from Scott Mitchell that discusses some more advanced email scenarios using System.Net.Mail.

UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite V2.0 Released: Albert Weinert sent me mail on Friday pointing me at the new release of the UrlRewriting engine that he and Thomas Bandt wrote for ASP.NET.  It is available as a free download and includes samples + full source code.

Working with GridView Without Using Data Source Controls: There are lots of good articles out there on how to use the new ASP.NET 2.0 GridView control with the ASP.NET 2.0 data source control model.  In this article Bipin Joshi covers how to program against the GridView directly without using DataSource controls (and instead write code directly to handle binding, paging, sorting, etc).

Using FlickR with .NET: This article by Sam Judson discusses how to consume and use the FlickR photo-service APIs within a .NET application.  This allows you to build your own photo browsing applications, as well as upload content programmatically against Yahoo’s FlickR service.

Accessing Embedded Resources through a URL using WebResource.axd: ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a really useful feature called “WebResource.axd”.  This enables you to avoid having to manually deploy script and image resources files in well-known directories (no more /aspnet_client/ virtual directories).  In this article Scott Mitchell discusses how it works, and how you can use this feature yourself to embed file resources within your own controls and components.

ASP.NET Case Study: Lost Session Variables and AppDomain Recycles: Tess continues her awesome set of detailed ASP.NET debugging posts to delve into the mysteries of how ASP.NET App-domains work and when they recycle (and why).

VS 2005 Topics

Custom Grouping of Related Files in VS 2005 ASP.NET Projects: Visual Studio provides built-in support for nesting certain file-types under others within the solution explorer (for example: the code-behind file for an .aspx page is shown as a sub-item in the solution explorer).  In this blog post James Hebben shows a neat registry trick that allows you to nest any file under another one inside VS 2005.  He illustrates this with a useful sample where you could nest content-specific .js files underneath pages or controls.

MSBuild in Visual Studio 2005: This 13-part article series describes how the new MSBuild build system works in Visual Studio 2005.  Note that MSBuild can be used with both VS 2005 Web Application Projects and with VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects.

Cool Future Stuff

Windows Workflow Foundation Hello World App: Sahil Malik has posted a few cool articles that demonstrate how to use the new Workflow features that are shipping this fall with .NET 3.0.  Workflow allows you to build composable sequences of operations together in a really flexible way (and allows you to avoid hard-coding in logic).  This hello-world sample (and the previous post it links to) provides a quick way to learn more about the new technology.

Hope this helps,

Scott

5 Comments

  • When I read that article about Custom Grouping of Files the other day I couldn't think of a need for it, until today.

    I have a big web app with nested Master Pages. Each Master Page has a CSS which adds on specific bits of styling.

    Now I've renamed all my CSS files xxx.master.css and they group perfectly under the .master file.

  • I think the email articles will go down very well as I'm sure many here can testify that its one of the most common asp.net questions "how do you use System.Net.Mail??"

  • Scott - Thanks for all the great resources! You blog is on my daily rss feeds read list. I can remember reading a blog or article you wrote a while back refering to the use of either using vb or C# when creating article or doing WebCasts. I recall your saying that it is easier for C# users to read and understand vb that the other way round, and that their are still at this point more vb users than c#. Therefore, why at this time do I see everything coming out C#. Most webcasts, articles, tutorials (toolkit), and now the beerhouse example are all C#. As a Vb.net user, (I cannot say dev, because just really a Home enthusiast), but I believe a big portion of the intended market. Most experienced users would not need these starter kits. To have them in C# is counter productive. Although I have learned to read C# code pretty well, most projects are in vb.net, and I get frustrated writing in C# with certain syntax challenges to the vb.net user. I wish I had learned c# first now, I would probably hate vb.net, but that is not the case.
    Thanks for letting me rant!
    T

  • Hi Scott40,

    I've personally been posting almost all of my posts in VB the last few months (except for LINQ -- where I have been using C#). I hear you on the frustration of having to read code in a language you aren't familiar with. Hopefully my posts can help a little with this.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Thanks Scott, It's a great resources.:)

Comments have been disabled for this content.