May 30th Links: ASP.NET, AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio

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

You can also now follow me on twitter (@scottgu) where I also post links and small posts.

ASP.NET

• Using ASP.NET 3.5’s ListView and DataPager Controls to Delete Data: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent tutorial series on the ASP.NET ListView control. In this article he discusses how to handle deleting data with it.

• ASP.NET ListView: Displaying Hierarchical Data: Adam Pooler writes about how to use the ASP.NET ListView control to display hierarchical data within a web page.

• ELMAH: Error Logging Module and Handlers for ASP.NET: ELMAH is a really cool open source error logging module for ASP.NET that can help you figure out what is going wrong with a site in production (and it enables you to diagnose things remotely in a browser).  This post from Scott Hanselman nicely summarizes some of the things you can do with it.  Visit the ELMAH home page to learn more and download it.  Using ELMAH with ASP.NET MVC describes how to use it within ASP.NET MVC applications.

• Examining ASP.NET 2.0’s Membership, Roles and Profile API Part 14: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET’s security features with an article that discusses how to create a page that permits users to update their security question and answer settings to reset passwords.

• ASP.NET Tip/Trick: Use a Base Page Class for All Application Pages: A nice article that discusses a good best practice with ASP.NET applications – which is to create a helper base class that encapsulates common functionality that you can use across pages within your applications.

AJAX

• New Release of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: A new release of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is now available for download (this article by Bertrand Le Roy has more details).  This new release contains bug fixes as well as three new controls: HtmlEditor, ComboBox and ColorPicker.  Watch the new Videos and new Tutorials to learn more about the controls on the www.asp.net/ajax web-site.

• Setting the Default Input Focus and Default Button with jQuery: Chris Love has an nice post on how to improve the user experience of a page by setting the default focus and default button of a web form control using jQuery.

• Automatically Minify and Combine JavaScript in Visual Studio: Dave Ward has a great article that describes how you can add a build command to Visual Studio that enables you to automatically compress and combine client-side JavaScript files.  This makes your pages load faster on the client and improves the perceived performance of your sites.

• Using Complex Types to Make Calling Services less…Complex: Dave Ward has a great post that discusses strategies on how to pass complex types to the server from client-side JavaScript.

• Client-side Data Binding in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0: Fritz Onion has a great article about the new client-side templating features of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 (which you can download and use today in .NET 3.5 projects).  This enables powerful client data-binding scenarios against JSON based data.  Also check out Politian’s Blog to find some great tutorials on how to use it.

ASP.NET MVC

• jQuery Auto-Complete Text Box with ASP.NET MVC: Ben Scheirman has a really nice tutorial (taken from his upcoming ASP.NET MVC in Action book) that describes how to implement an auto-complete textbox using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC.

• Using the jQuery Grid with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack has a nice post that describes how to use the jQuery Grid plugin with ASP.NET MVC to build an AJAX-enabled DataGrid.

• ASP.NET MVC Forms Authentication with Active Directory: Mike has a nice post that shows how to setup an ASP.NET MVC application with Forms Authentication that uses Active Directory as the username/password credential store instead of a database.  Also check out his post on ASP.NET MVC Forms Authentication with SQL Membership to learn more about how to setup forms authentication using a SQL Server database (instead of the default SQL Express one).

• Visual Studio NUnit Templates for ASP.NET MVC: The VS Web Tools team has released updated NUnit templates that work with ASP.NET MVC 1.0.  This enables you to automatically create a test project that uses NUnit instead of MSTest when you do a File->New Project and select the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Project item.

• 13 ASP.NET MVC Extensibility Points You Have to Know: Simone Chiaretta has a post that nicely summarizes 13 extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC and how you can use them to customize your applications.  Also check out the free chapter of his new ASP.NET MVC book.

• Custom Route Constraints in ASP.NET MVC: Keyvan Nayyeriu has a nice post that discusses how to create a custom route constraint in ASP.NET MVC (one of the extensibility points in Simone’s list above).  You can use these to control whether a route rule is used or not, and they can enable some pretty rich routing scenarios.  Note that in addition to creating route constraint classes, ASP.NET MVC also supports using Regular Expressions and HTTP Method filters to constrain routes as well. Keyvan is the co-author with Simone of the Beginning ASP.NET MVC Book (free chapter available).

Visual Studio

• Tip: How to insert quotes automatically while typing attributes in the Visual Studio HTML editor: A useful tip that demonstrates how to configure Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer express to automatically add quotes around attributes when in the HTML source editor.

Hope this helps,

Scott