October 25th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight and IIS 7.0
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
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Sending Email in ASP.NET 2.0: Reply-To, Priority, and Read Receipts: Scott Mitchell has a useful article that describes how to use some of the more advanced email features available with .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0.
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Improving the Presentation of an Extra-Wide GridView: Matt Berseth has a nice article that demonstrates how to add some cool CSS and AJAX effects to an ASP.NET GridView control to improve its readability. Also checkout his follow up article for even more custom styles.
- Cleanup Inactive Anonymous Users: ASP.NET 2.0 has support for an optional feature called "anonymous users" - which enables you to optionally track and store profile data for non-authenticated users visiting your sites (read K. Scott Allen's article here for more details on how this works). Omar Al Zabir published this handy article that describes how to "clean up" this anonymous user data periodically to avoid storing it forever in your database.
ASP.NET AJAX
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Yahoo UI Style AJAX Progress Indicator: Matt Berseth has a nice article that describes how to implement a YUI style progress panel with ASP.NET AJAX.
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ASP.NET AJAX Extender for Multi-Column Widget Drag & Drop: Omar Al Zabir has a great blog post that describes how he has built an ASP.NET AJAX Extender that enables drag/drop support for portal UI like scenarios.
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Theming the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's Calendar Control: Matt Berseth has a nice article on how you can customize the appearance of the AJAX Calendar provided in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.
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Are you making these 3 common ASP.NET AJAX Mistakes: Dave Ward has a good article that spells out a few common mistakes people often make when using the <asp:updatepanel> control that ships with ASP.NET AJAX.
Visual Studio
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Speed up Visual Studio 2005: Here are a bunch of useful suggestions for how you can speed up your VS 2005 IDE environment. For other performance suggestions, please review my previous blog posts here and here.
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SQL Database Publishing Wizard Now in VS 2008: One of the post-Beta2 features that we are adding for the final VS 2008 release is the inclusion of a SQL database publishing wizard inside Visual Studio. This will be supported in both the free Visual Web Developer Express edition as well as the full Visual Studio, and provides an easy way to script out your database schema and data to .SQL files. You can then copy these files to a remote hoster to deploy a database. You can learn more about how this works from my earlier posts here and here which describes how to use a previous standalone tool with this functionality (all of this functionality is now built-in to VS 2008).
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Convert Selected Text to a Label: Fons Sonnemans has a nice article that demonstrates a cool macro that can be used to automatically convert literal text in your .aspx files to a <asp:label> control. A neat shortcut.
Silverlight
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Building Silverlight Application using .NET MIX UK Videos: The videos from the recent MIX UK conference are now live on the web and can be watched (for free) by anyone. If you are interested in Silverlight I recommend watching my Building Silverlight Application using .NET (Part 1 and 2) talks. You can download the slides + samples for my talks here.
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SilverlightVR 3D Using the Jeff Paries Animation Engine: This is a really, really cool sample and library that enables you to create an Silverlight application that enables an end-user to rotate and transform objects in 3D.
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Silverlight Kids Doodler Sample: David Anson has published a neat sample that demonstrates how to build a neat Paint program in Silverlight. Ideal for small children. :-)
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Great Silverlight Tutorials: Gerard Leblanc has a great blog, and publishes regular blog posts on Silverlight. Check out this list of some of some of his tutorials.
IIS 7.0
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Using LINQ with Microsoft.Web.Administration: Carlos from the IIS7 dev team has a really cool blog post that shows how you can use LINQ with .NET 3.5 to easily query and manipulate the new web server administration API introduced with IIS7. For more information on this new API, you can also read an old post of mine here.
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Screencast HowTo: IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI: Scott Hansleman has published a cool video screen-cast that demonstrates how to use the new IIS7 FastCGI module to serve up PHP.
Hope this helps,
Scott