September 23rd Links: VS, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, WPF

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.

Visual Studio

ASP.NET

  • Debugging Script: Dumping out ASP.NET Session Contents: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET support team has an excellent post that details how to use the windbg debugger to dump out real-time information about the current state within the ASP.NET in-process session store (# of sessions, what their current timeout is, and the memory size of the objects within each session).  She has a great script you can just run "as-is" in this article, as well as an in-depth discussion about how it works.  Very useful if you are ever trying to figure out why your application is consuming a lot of memory, and suspect it might be session state related.

  • Facebook.NET: Earlier this summer Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team posted a really cool framework for developing ASP.NET based Facebook applications.  You can learn more about it from his blog post here, and download it from his CodePlex project here.  Steve Trefethen last week posted a VS starter kit for Facebook.NET which makes it even easier to get started.

ASP.NET AJAX

  • New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Released: David Anson blogs about the update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that was released on Friday.  It contains a bunch of bug fixes and improvements.  The .NET 3.5 version of the control toolkit also now adds reference tags for the toolkit JavaScript files - which means you can now take advantage of VS 2008's JavaScript Intellisense support with them.

  • Animating the ModalPopupExtender: A cool post from Matt Berseth that walks through how to create a custom ModalPopupAnimationExtender control that adds animation support for ModalPopup scenarios.

  • ASP.NET AJAX In Action Book: Alessandro, David and Rama Krishna's ASP.NET AJAX in Action book is now showing up on book shelves.  This is a great technical book that covers ASP.NET AJAX very well.

Silverlight

  • Halo 3 Game Guide: Halo 3 ships this week, and no doubt many people will find themselves afflicted with a sudden illness that requires them to stay home one day this week.  To help get you ready, watch one of the High Definition Halo3 Videos here (for a lower resolution video click here), and browse the Halo3 Game Guide here.  Both are built with Silverlight 1.0. 

WPF and Expression Blend

Hope this helps,

Scott

18 Comments

  • Thanks Scott,

    Made us addicted to your blog. Don't stop.


  • I had a look at the new release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, and while it's great to see they are fixing issues, it's just not a lot to get excited about. I thought the 3.5 release would also upgrade the ASP.NET Ajax client side libraries and bring us things like client side data binding, Ajax enabled TreeView, sortable GridView etc. Is this not a priority for Microsoft?

  • Thanks Scott
    When your guys will release .Net framework3.5 final version?

  • Thanks for posting these great resources!!

  • Hi Scott;

    >>This is a really outstanding set of free videos that you can watch to learn how to get started with WPF and Expression Blend.<<

    This guy (Lee Brimelow) who did the videos, he learned WPF and Blend very quickly and started writting many articles and pushing WPF. He even did a few things at MIX07. Then suddenly, everything got quiet. And I just read from one of his blogs, that Adobe offered him a job for pushing flash:

    "I have accepted the position of Platform Evangelist at Adobe. You can read the full details about the move here. I plan on leaving this blog up as an archive because it contains a lot of code samples that people may find helpful. But the reality is that I won’t be doing any WPF development (obviously) in my new position so I probably won’t have anything to post here. I will however be keeping up on all the latest technologies including those being developed by Microsoft."

    It's too bad loosing him on SL side. He is very good at teaching!

  • Big lump of blog traffic yesterday. Analyzed sources. Wow, linked by Scott. :) Nice set of links, again. Keep 'em coming!

  • Question about the AJAX Control Toolkit, I have come across tons of bugs with the framework. Is there a specific site posting listing all known issues. I'm sure many other developers would appreciate what really works and what known bugs there are.

    Other than that, the Expression Blend videos were really helpful. Blend is surprisingly easy to learn and very powerful integrated with VS.

  • Thanks for the link Scott!

  • Hi Mike,

    >>>>> I had a look at the new release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, and while it's great to see they are fixing issues, it's just not a lot to get excited about. I thought the 3.5 release would also upgrade the ASP.NET Ajax client side libraries and bring us things like client side data binding, Ajax enabled TreeView, sortable GridView etc. Is this not a priority for Microsoft?

    This month's release was primarily focused on bug fixes. The toolkit team is also moving to a new test framework (which we'll publish soon) that external contributors can also use to add tests and run regressions before submitting patches/contributions. This is going to make adding new features much easier in the future. Future releases will definitely be including more functionality (expect some more news on that in a few weeks).

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Hi Joseph,

    >>>> Question about the AJAX Control Toolkit, I have come across tons of bugs with the framework.

    The best place to report issues are on the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit forums: http://forums.asp.net. If you don't get an answer for whatever reason after a few days, feel free to shoot me an email (scottgu@microsoft.com) and I can put you in touch with the team directly.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Hi Dan,

    >>>>> Great list of links Scott, thanks! I've posted a page with Silverlight 1.0 examples with source code at: www.vectorform.com/silverlight

    Nice Silverlight samples!

    I will try and put them on my list for future link listing posts.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Thanks for the link to my tips article, Scott. Glad there were a few things useful to you :).

    I have been reading up a lot on Silverlight lately as well. Looks like a winner to me. I can't wait to start creating some Silverlight prototypes. Chinh

  • For the Asp.Net Ajax In Action, I would point to the Manning Publishing web site as when you buy it from them, you can get a pdf version for a fairly low price or you can just buy the pdf version. If you buy from any place other than the Manning web site, you can't get the discounts for the pdf version.

  • >>> Future releases will definitely be including more functionality (expect some more news on that in a few weeks).

    Cool! I can't wait. I also hope to hear more about the MVC framework.

  • Thanks for the links. very useful

  • Hi Scott,
    Nice Links.
    Can you please give us an idea that when will be the Vs2008 RC1 will be releasing.Also does it have Silverlight 1.0 integrated in it.[so that there should be no need of installing add/in]

  • Hi scott,

    I am impressed with your work and demos on Asp.net 3.5 Futures.
    I wonder about the persistence mapping of the data. How will it be achieved? How would the user get informed about the change in a stateleass Page.

    Can the VS 2008 IDE interaction be generated using the Code behind for all the Server controls in the Page Load/Init event or would one need the IDE at all! (VS2008 Beta 2 on Intel Core 2 Duo 7300/2GB is very very slow).

  • Hi Scott,

    thanks for your outstanding posts on LINQ to SQL and binding in ASP.NET. Now, in WPF, it doesn't seem as straightforward to databind to the SQLMetal generated classes. For example, an Order with associated OrderLines would be represented by an Order class with a OrderLines property of type EntitySet. Now, EntitySet doesn't support INotifyCollectionChanged, so if I have a ListView binding to the OrderLines of the current Order, the binding engine isn't notified of added/deleted orderlines.

    There is not a lot about this in the Linq Project General Forum, and maybe the focus is on ASP.NET and Winforms. Any guidance or advice for WPF developers ?

    Regards,
    Niels.

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