One of the things that I rarely have the time to do is to create really nice looking web templates. Stuff that is just graphically pleasing, between work, school and having a social life, I just don't get time to do it. But reading one of the many blogs that I read in the morning, I came across this site called Open Source Web Designs. It's a great idea, and a fun way to share your artistic talents. Each template has it's own EULA, so you'll have to have a look to determine if it will work for you (and your business if that's the case), but the idea of having a good looking CSS designed page it awesome. I would love to see someone do something similar to this, but instead of simple HTML and CSS, to use Master Pages, HTML and CSS so that you...(read more)

The video of my Web Design World talk was just posted... Take a look... I'd love to hear your feedback, thoughts. http://www.ftponline.com/channels/web/reports/wdws... There is a free registration required to watch it... Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

Commerce Server 2007 is coming very shortly and as part of the new Commerce Server 2007 wave we have decided to forego charging for Developer Edition -- now you can easily trial and begin building your Commerce Server based applications by just downloading Developer Edition for free. It is a full featured version of Commerce Server 2007 Enterprise Edition that is restricted to dev/test only. Ryan Donovan explains more here Download Developer Edition todayby registering and downloading at: http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/evaluation/software.mspx Let us know what you think -- we are very excited about what CS07 has to offer for B2B/B2C scenarios as well as a new breed of connecte commerce based applications. Over the coming months we'll...(read more)

If it is good enough for the TheServerSide to repost, it is good enough for me to repost here ;-) Krzysztof Cwalina gives a good interview about the Framework Design Guidelines work we have been doing for a long time... He gives some good high level tips... Check it out Inside framework design with author Krzysztof Cwalina Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

Polita Paulus does a great demo on Blinq. Polita Paulus – BLINQ (hint, the demo starts at 7:15).... Keep in mind the *WHOLE* app she is showing is completely created by running a BLinq against the northwind database... no code! Oh, and Charles, is Channel9 really still on 1.1? we need to get you guys over on to 2.0!! Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

ProblemYou are building an Intranet expense report application for your organization, and want to enable role-based authentication and authorization capabilities within it. Specifically, you want to create logical roles called “approvers”, “auditors”, and “administrators” for the application, and grant/deny end-users access to functionality within the application based on whether they are in these roles.Because your application is an Intranet solution, you want to use Windows Authentication to login the users accessing the application (avoiding them having to manually login). However, because the roles you want to define are specific to your application, you do not want to define or store them within your...(read more)

Problem: You want to enable end-users visiting your web-site to dynamically customize the look and feel of it. Specifically, you want to enable them to choose different content layouts for the site, as well as different style experiences (colors, fonts, etc). When building this customization system, you want to make sure you avoid duplicating logic throughout the multiple pages. Instead, you want to be able to author the dynamic personalization logic once and have all pages inherit it.Solution:ASP.NET 2.0 makes dynamically customizing the UI experience of a web-site easy. Specifically, it provides a flexible mechanism for defining page layouts using a feature called “Master Pages”. It also provides a flexible mechanism for defining...(read more)

Earlier this spring the ASP.NET Team presented several great MSDN web-casts. The response to those was so great that we've scheduled a bunch of new ASP.NET 2.0 talks over the next two months. Below is a list of them, along with a registration URL that you can use to sign-up to watch them for free:DateTitleSpeakerRegistration URL25-JulASP.NET: An Overview of ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation IntegrationKashif AlamClick here3-AugASP.NET: Building Real-World Web Application UI with Master Pages, Themes and Site NavigationPete LePageClick here10-AugASP.NET: Creating Web Applications Using Visual Studio 2005 Team SystemJeff KingClick here17-AugASP.NET Atlas: A Developers Introduction to Microsoft AtlasJoe StagnerClick here22-AugBest Practices...(read more)

We've been working on getting another Toolkit release done. Unfortuantely, we discovered an issue in the June CTP of Atlas that caused some problems. You could ask "why didn't you catch this before the June CTP went out?" To which I would reply "that's a very good question." There's actually two answers (and two issues): one we didn't catch because we were missing a test case, but the other is more interesting. One of the things that is nice to do is to be able to bind to properties values. In a repeater, it would be nice to say: myExtender> myExtenderProperties TargetControlID="Label1" Value="%# Eval("ID") %>"/> /myExtender> But unfortunately that dosen't work because you can only databind to Controls....usually. So we tested the...(read more)

S2kU7DjCq20N8WI just ignore this, gonna delete it soon Read More... Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...(read more)

Just a few topics today. :) Things here in Redmond have been pretty crazy the last few weeks, but crazy in a great way. IE7 Have you tried IE7 yet? If not, I gotta say, it's pretty damn good. In fact, I'm writing this post within IE7 Beta3, and it's been great to me so far. I haven't come across any sites yet that are displaying badly, so I'm going to consider that a good sign. Sure, it's adding some features that other browers have had for a while, but after 5 years, this is a great start, and I'm excited to see where things go next. I'm a huge believer in tabs, and the new layout is pretty slick. And for us web developers/designers, there are a lot of good things. For example, the problem with the XML prolog and having the DOCTYPE bug, it's...(read more)

I’ve received several questions recently asking various questions about the foreign language sub-sites that we launched on www.asp.net, specifically the French and Spanish sub-sites. So let me go through the questions one-by-one. Question: Why is there a language X sub-site but not language Y? Answer: I initially picked seven languages I thought were good potential candidates for foreign language content on the site. Those languages were chosen by looking at web traffic, 3rd party community sites for web developers, and to some degree on my ability to be able to parse the content (I can read a little German, French and Spanish, so it’s easier for me personally to review content for those languages than say for Japanese which I can’t read, write...(read more)

We are piloting a pretty cool idea for the webcast team -- it is a one-time only offer and it would be great for you to sign-up and give us feedback, below are the details from the team -- signup at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5186443! ---- The MSDN Webcast and Virtual Lab teams are joining forces and offering a special featured ASP.NET 2.0 “Hands-On” Live Meeting webcast! Be one of the first to join this Live Meeting as we walk through the benefits of using ASP.NET 2.0. You’ll learn how to create richer websites with fewer lines of code. Unique from standard webcasts, you will be provided a Virtual Lab to perform the tasks yourself as the presenter discusses each topic. Such tasks include creating a new web site and laying out a master...(read more)

Well, it is not really, but I it does remind me of staying up past my bedtime.... What Live from Redmond is really about is a set of videos directly from the product teams here in Microsoft main campus in Redmond, WA... I hope you will take time to attend a few of these and let me hear your feedback... what do you like, what do you want to hear more of, which speaker should get a big fat raise, etc. List of client talks: Date Title Speaker Registration URL 16-Aug Smart Client: Offline Data Synchronization and Caching for Smart Clients Steve Lasker Click here 23-Aug Windows Forms: An Overview of Windows Forms in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Saurabh Pant Click here 30-Aug Visual Studio: Developing Local and Mobile Data Solutions with SQL Server...(read more)

That’s right - the “Live From Redmond” webcast series is back by popular demand with 19 new live meetings. I blogged about the first series of presentations in April and the survey results from attendees were very positive (average score of 4.9 out of 5 for continuing the series) so we decided to do another set, focused on client developers, web developers, mobile developers and Commerce Server. For client developers, there are five upcoming webcasts (see left pane of the Windows Forms website here for the more detailed list): Date Title Speaker Registration URL 16-Aug Smart Client: Offline Data Synchronization and Caching for Smart Clients Steve Lasker Click here 23-Aug Windows Forms: An Overview of Windows Forms in Microsoft Visual Studio...(read more)

Over the last few days I’ve spent some spare time playing around with LINQ and LINQ for SQL (aka DLINQ) – both of which are incredibly cool technologies. Specifically, I’ve been experimenting with building a photo management application that provides “tagging” support. If you aren’t familiar with photo tagging, you might want to check out FlickR – which implements a tagging mechanism that enables users to easily annotate pictures with textual words that provide a way to easily organize and sort them.For my photo-browser I wanted to implement a “tag cloud” on every page of the site that lists the most popular tags in use on the left-hand side, andenablesusers to be able to click a tag within...(read more)