This post introduces a prototype of a server control for implementing back button and bookmarkability in pages using UpdatePanel and partial rendering. Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

Another solid shortcut from O'Reilly by Wei-Meng Lee- -check it out Description ASP.NET "Atlas" is a new developer framework from Microsoft that simplifies the task of building more interactive web pages by drawing on the power of the Ajax technologies found in most modern browsers. Because of its tight integration with ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas will be of particular interest to Microsoft web developers. In this Short Cut, Microsoft MVP Wei-Meng Lee introduces you to Atlas by showing ten ways you can use the technology to improve the user experience of your existing ASP.NET 2.0 apps. There's no better way to get acquainted with Atlas than by diving into a project, so read on and let's get started. Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark...(read more)

Well, it is that time of year again here Microsoft – time for managers to write employee reviews (they are due 9/15 folks ;-)). While this is the subject of much Dilbert-style joking, I thought it would be useful for me to write down a few of my opinions, habits, and observations about actually writing a performance review… Other Softies have thoughts? Does any of this resonate with folks outside of Microsoft? Any horror stories from your past reviews? · Writing is thinking – Don’t just barrel though the writing of the review, as you write, spend some time thinking about the employee, what is the overall message they need to hear? “Kicking butt”, “fix this one thing”, “Get in shape”, etc. Be sure the review overall carries home that point. I...(read more)

Today we released a refresh of the CSS Control Adapters for ASP.NET 2.0. You can download it for free and immediately begin using it to enable pure CSS optimized markup for the following ASP.NET controls: Menu TreeView GridView (new) DetailsView FormsView DataList Login(new) ChangePassword (new) CreateUser (new) PasswordRecovery (new) LoginStatus (new) As I blogged about with the first release of the CSS Control Adapters, these control adapters use a new built-in extensibility mechanism in ASP.NET 2.0 called "control adapters". A control adapter allows you to plug-in into any ASP.NET server control and override, modify and/or tweak the rendering output logic of that control. What is cool about control adapters is that they do not require a page...(read more)

The success of the original Beta 1 of the CSS Adapters was amazing -- we got tons of solid feedback and both developers and designers have a had a lot of success taking advantage of the modified rendering of controls. We've been closely monitoring the forums and working hard to extend the functionality. I'm pleased to announce immediate availability of the CSS Adapaters Beta 2 which includes lots of new and improved features -- upgrade today. Here is a quick rundown on what is new and what we know is still not working perfectly. Let us know what you think, Russ Helfandhas been extraordinary in putting this together for us and he will be monitoring the forums for any new feedback/questions/issues. New in Beta 2.0 More adapters GridView Login...(read more)

Workflow is one of the new core capabilities (along with WPF aka Avalon and WCF aka Indigo) being added in the .NET Framework 3.0 release later this year. It provides an in-process workflow engine to process rules, a designer for VS 2005 to enable both developers and non-developers to define custom workflow processes graphically, and a new Workflow namespace to integrate these within code.The official site to learn more about Windows Workflow Foundation can be found here. Over the lasttwo weeks I've also seen a number of great new posts and web-castspublished that cover it in more detail. Belowis a list ofsome of them you might want to explore to learn more: Windows Workflow Foundation Basics: .NET Rocks! Audio-Cast: Carl Franklin talks with...(read more)

The XNA team released their first XNA Game Studio Express Beta release earlier today. You can learn more about it and download it for free here(below is a screenshot from a fun app build with it). This release works on top of the free Visual C# Express Edition, and provides the ability to build games using C# and .NET that target both Windows and the XBOX 360 (we did the work to port a .NET execution engine with PowerPC JIT support to the XBOX to enable this). The XNA Framework ships with the VS package and provides a managed code library for creating rich graphics, and incorporating 3D content into games. I'm looking forward to having some fun with this. :-) You can download it for free here. Enjoy, Scott Share this post: Email it! | bookmark...(read more)

One of my favourite things about working for this company is the interaction I get to have with all of you, the end users, the developers, the IT professionals, the knowledge workers and so forth. In fact, over the least two or three years, I've been working hard to make that more part of my daily life here as a tester on Visual Web Developer. But, being a tester, I have a primary task, and interacting with the community wasn't it. And trust me, I tried as hard as I could to make it my primary task. But, a few weeks ago, Brian Goldfarb, a Lead Product Manager for Developer Marketing sent me a link to a job he had open, the Product Manager for Internet Explorer. After reading through the job description, I knew it was something that I wanted...(read more)

One of the highlights for me of my recent trip to TechEd NZ and Australia was the opportunity I had to create and present a new "Building Data Driven ASP.NET Web Applications using LINQ" talk. LINQ is a super cool new technology, and is going to have an absolutely enormous impact on .NET developers and how they use data. I had a lot of fun doing the talk, and people seemed to really like it (someone told me just before I flew back that it was the most highly rated talk at TechEd this year). You can download the final slides + samples I presented here. The samples use a class library that I built during that talk that encapsulates my LINQ data model classesthat go against the Northwind database(please read this post to learn more about how to...(read more)

In my previous posts on doing data access using LINQ and ASP.NET, I used the built-in SQLMetal command-line utility to automatically generate the data model classes for my LINQ data classes. Recently I've been using the LINQ for SQL (aka DLINQ) designer to define my data models instead, and have been really impressed with how easily it enables me to build a re-usable class library that nicely encapsulates my data and business logic. The below walkthrough demonstrates how you can get started with it yourself. Simply install the LINQ May CTP download on top of VS 2005, and you can then follow along all of the steps below yourself. For the sample below I am using C#, but everything works equally well in VB as well. Step 1: Create a New LINQ Enabled...(read more)

A somewhat 'undocumented' Atlas technique for loading script sooner than window.onload and improving perceived page performance. Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

Joe Stagner has been busy at work publishing more Atlas videos on the www.asp.net website (click here for the full video listing). Here are a few pointers to some of the recent Atlas videos he has posted:- Add "Atlas" features to an existing ASP.NET web application: Learn how to easily add Atlas functionality to an existing ASP.NET application, and demonstrates how to add the Atlas assembly and configure it within a site (4 minutes, 33 seconds).- Implement Dynamic Partial-Page Updates using Atlas: Learn how to to use the Timer control in Atlas to dynamically refresh portions of an ASP.NET page (5 minutes, 31 seconds).- Using the Atlas Control Toolkit Cascading Dropdownlist Extender: Learn how to implement cascading drop-downlist UI...(read more)

WebDevTools is the owner of the DHTML Editing Control; a COM control which can be used in applications or web pages for WYSIWYG HTML editing and which is shipped as part of the Windows operating system. After a long run (nine years, since IE 4.5) this controlwill not beshipped as part of Windows Vista. There are two flavors of the control; a safe-for-scripting version used on web pages and an ordinary control used in applications. While the safe-for-scripting control and Windows Vista will never cross paths, we've released an installer for a version of the DHTML Editing Control for Application for Windows Vista, which is now available here. Be sure to check out the white paper listed in the Related Resources section; it contains a lot of information....(read more)

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft and have to admit I'm a big Xbox 360 fanboy so Iwill not be fully objective on this topic.Ever since Nintendo has annouced their new controller, I've had very big doubts about betting the console on such a concept. The controller in itself seems to be beautifully executed and more precise than any other previous attempt at a motion-sensing controller, but I fully agree with Peter Molyneux that for most players, the most confortable position to play is lying on the couch with the controller resting on the beer belly. Only the thumbs move, and they do so very little, which enables us to play for extended periods of time (not that we *should* play that long, but we do, and that eventually makes us buy more...(read more)

I have been doing some thinking recently about what sort of client application model would benefit customers the most. It seems very clear that parts of the web application model are super important (URL deployed, seamlesstransparent install and update, server centric deployment, etc) and we have to provide those in whatever model we build. But there are a few other attributes of web apps (like running the browser frame, navigation, etc) that are also true of web apps today (ASP.NET apps, Atlas apps, etc) but in many ways we have (or could build) the technology to apply all these attributes to out of browser apps as well. So the question I am struggling with is how to think about the end-user model of what runs in the browser or not. That is...(read more)

Many thanks to everyone in New Zealand who attended my "ASP.NET 2.0: Tips and Tricks" talk this morning. You can download the slides + samples from my talk here. The samples are number in numbered order and correspond to the slides: Enjoy! Scott P.S. I will also be posting the slides+samples from my LINQ talk a little later today (I first need to jump on a plane to Australia and am running out of timeg>). So stay tuned for those as well. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

The Internet Explorer team maintains a really good blog here: http://msdn.blogs.com/iethat I recommend subscribing to for useful information. They recently posted a good blog post detailing some of the CSS changes that have been made with IE 7.0 to enable it to handle CSS better. This is worth bookmarking if/when you are testing your site with IE7 going forward. Hope this helps, Scott Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

Many thanks to everyone in New Zealand who attended my "ASP.NET: End-to-End - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS7 (Parts 1 and 2)" talk this afternoon. You can download the slides from my talk here. You can then download the application I built here(note: this .zip file is actually the version I published after the US TechEd, but is the same code I wrote on stage today). There is a "ReadMe.txt" file in the root of the demos .zip file that walksthrough how to setup the demos. I've included two versions of the app -- one is in the "IIS7" directory and allows you to run the application using IIS7 on Windows Vista Beta2. The other is a slightly modified version of the sample that also works on IIS5,...(read more)

Whileprocrastinating from finishing up my TechEd talks in my hotel room here in NZ, I came across this really funny link of a Microsoft UK employee's "Ten Worst Presentation Moments" that had me laughing out loud. One of my own "interesting experiences" occurred about 9 years ago at a PDC conference. It was the first time I had ever presented as a Microsoft employee, and it was to ~2400 people. I was doing a joint-presentation with another presenter and the plan was that he'd present the first part of the talk for 60 minutes, and then I'd do the second part of it for another 30 minutes. When we got going he unfortunately got spooked, though,and starting speaking super, super, super fast. After watching this awhile I tried to help calm him down...(read more)

That's right! Matt Gibbs and Bertrand Le Royhave just published an O'Reilly Shortcut all about the UpdatePanel. It is one of the key improvements that "Atlas" brings to ASP.NET developers to make it super simple to AJAX enable your site. You can buy it for $9.99 here Let us know what you think, read the description below: This PDF will teach you how to build richer and more interactive AJAX-style web applications using ASP.NET "Atlas," Microsoft's framework that extends ASP.NET 2.0. "Atlas" provides server controls that make it easy to perform asynchronous partial page updates. The key to making ASP.NET applications more responsive to user input is the UpdatePanel control. In this tutorial, you'll learn from the experts: Bertrand Le Roy, UpdatePanel...(read more)