August 30th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET

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

  • ASP.NET Charting with NPlot: Olav Lerflaten has a great article on 4GuysFromRolla.com that describes how to use the free NPlot chart engine for .NET to create professional scientific charts of data using ASP.NET.

  • Export GridView to Excel: Matt Berseth has another excellent post on how you can export data to Excel from within your ASP.NET application.

  • Fixing Firefox Slowness with localhost on Vista (or XP with IPv6): One annoying issue I've run into with Firefox is that sometimes - when doing localhost development - it can take several seconds to connect back to a local page.  It turns out this slowness is caused by a Firefox IPv6 issue with DNS resolution.  Dan Wahlin has a good pointer on how to fix this.

ASP.NET AJAX

  • ASP.NET AJAX Exception Logging: Kazi Manzur Rashid has a nice article that shows how to create an effective error logging system with ASP.NET AJAX to catch and record client JavaScript errors.

IIS 7.0

  • Developing IIS7 Modules and Handlers with the .NET Framework: Mike Volodarksy from the IIS7 team has an excellent step-by-step blog post that describes how you can now write HttpModules and HttpHandlers using managed code that participate in all requests to a web-server.  This enables you to easily do scenarios that previously required custom C++ ISAPIs to achieve.

LINQ

  • LINQPad: Joseph Albahari has an incredibly awesome LINQ query expression tool that you can use to quickly try out LINQ expressions.  Think of it as SQL Query Analyzer - but with LINQ expressions as the queries.  Definitely a useful free tool to add to your toolbox.

Visual Studio

  • The SQL Data Tools in VS 2008: Rick Strahl talks about some of the new database schema comparison, data comparison and SQL Refactoring features within Visual Studio 2008.

Silverlight

  • Recreating ITunes in Silverlight: Jose Fajardo has an absolutely fantastic blog with a ton of Silverlight content on it.  One of the projects he has been working on has been recreating Apple's ITunes Media Player using Silverlight.  Check out his multi-part blog series that discusses step-by-step how he built it.  Absolutely brilliant.

  • New Halo3 Video using Silverlight: The new Halo3 preview video was recently posted to the web - using Silverlight 1.0 to build a custom viewer and stream a HD version of it.  Click here for a lower resolution version if you are on a slow network.

  • Sudoku for Silverlight: David Anson has built a cool online sample using Silverlight that helps you play the popular Sudoku game.  Useful for both Sudoku addicts and developers wanting to learn Silverlight.  

  • Font Embedding and RSS data in Silverlight: Tim Heuer has a cool blog post that shows how you can create your own font-type and embed it within your Silverlight 1.0 application.  He then has his application retrieve dynamic content from an RSS feed and use the custom font to display it.  You can run the finished application online here (all of the text here is dynamic - not a screen-shot).

  • Silverlight Drag and Drop JavaScript Framework: Roberto Hernandez-Pou has a nice article and sample that describes how to implement a drag/drop mechanism for Silverlight 1.0 (using JavaScript).  This article is in both Spanish and English - scroll down if you are looking for the English version.

  • Pascal Support for Silverlight: RemObjects Software now has a project template for VS 2008 that enables you to write Silverlight 1.1 .NET applications using Pascal.  It is kinda wild to see a screenshot of FireFox on the Mac, running a Silverlight application, written with a Pascal code-behind file built with VS 2008. 

.NET

  • LLBLGen Pro V2.5 released: Last week Frans Bouma released the latest version of LLBLGen Pro, which is an excellent ORM implementation for .NET.  New features include richer auditing, authorization, and dependency injection support.

  • IronLisp: A new codeplex project has recently started that provides the beginnings of a LISP implementation for .NET which is built using the new DLR (dynamic language runtime) framework for .NET.  Earlier this month I was thinking to myself "I really need to spend some time using LISP or Scheme".  Now I can do it on .NET.  Sweet.

Hope this helps,

Scott

19 Comments

  • Lisp, is that possible on the DLR?

  • Hi Mike,

    >>>>> Lisp, is that possible on the DLR?

    Apparently so. :-) I haven't written any code with it yet - but it looks cool.

    Scott

  • Thanks for the iTunes link Scott. Damn you have a lot of readers, my stat's are going through the roof. p.s. you have no idea how much i've fallen in love with SilverLight and the Expression products. Send my regards and compliments to all teams involved!

  • Is there any working and free product/control for GoogleMaps?

  • thanks for links. Scott Hanselman blog on tools is really very good and has tools for nearly everything

  • Thanks for sharing these great links!

  • Scott,
    Just looked at the ASP.NET Charting with NPlot. Should we not use the reporting services rather than use COM DLL's

    Matt Berseth's blog the one to subscribe to. Very good very cool very simple way of implementing good user required features.

    LLBLGen: I looked at the code generators a few months ago. But I'm using service factory for my code gen. although a little painful but follows all the patterns and practices. Tough Love.

  • Scott this is a fine resource page.

    I have a client that I send all of Joe's How Do I Series.

    A fine remake of the website.

  • how does nplot charting compare with the free .net chart component (www.dotnetcharting.com)

  • Silverlight! Yeah!

    just getting started with this... I really hope it takes off big time!
    I am doing a tiny bit of work with flash and the IDE for editing actionscript is so lame... and I am so used to the aspx + codebehind model -- flash just feels so "unorganised"

    man I want to lose flash as soon as I can.

  • Thanks a lot! I can not imagine my .net life without your blog!

  • Pascal support for Silverlight!! Pascal... now takes me back. Very useful and entertaining post, thank you.

  • Hi Scott,
    I was going through "The SQL Data Tools in Orcas" posted by Rick Strahl , this is great that we now have built in Database Schema comparison feature in VS , i wonder how, this great feature is not a part of Sql Server Management Studio. Also, is there any way by which i can track changed sps from my local pc to server(database to be updated).

  • I don't know how you find the time to write all these posts. Thanks!

  • I actually posted this solution back in March.

  • I Recently published this "free" "Zero code" custom control that will export the gridview to excel. Simply drag and drop the control and start exporting. No coding needed.

  • I am running into an issue with creating a custom web control which incorporates the AJAX updatepanel, scriptmanager, and a control from the AJAX control toolkit(ModalPopupWindow). The other problem to this scenario is I have a master page with a script manager in it already, so any content page would add the custom web control to it so it should use the script manager on the master page right? Or do I need to explicity cast this when designing the custom control? The other scenario is adding the popup to become a composite control, like with textboxes, etc. Anyone have a solution to this/example I could look at? I'm still curious on what the Ajax Control Toolkit is capable of... anyone else been having problems with this?

  • http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu/archive/2006/11/16/adding-removing-updatepanels-dynamicaly-from-a-page.aspx

    Tried to build a control that extended the UpdatePanel... first event hit was the OnLoad... this a bug?

  • Hi Scott, sorry if this comment is not on the right article, but I'm having a problem that I cannot figure out. I am new to ASP.Net, but I have been programming in C# for a while. I was trying to develop a test web project using Membership and roles.
    I have IIS and SQL Server 2005 installed and running. However, when I create a new Web Project and try to set its users and roles, by clicking on "Website > ASP.Net Configuration", I always get the following error message: "An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again.". I thought the problem could be because it uses by default SQL Express, so I followed one of your posts from 2005 oon how to make it use a SQL Server 2005 as opposed to SQL Express. I followed all the steps, but I am still getting the problem.

    Here is part of my web.config file:





    Thanks in advance for any help,

    Ralph

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