My teammate Stephen Walther launched the ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery a few weeks back. This stemmed from an idea ScottGu had to let the community change the default templates that ship with ASP.NET MVC . I was supposed to work on this but headed to Africa for the holidays so Stephen helped me out and took over the project and did a better job than I would have! You can vote on the designs that you like and that you don't like. You also can contribute new designs of your own. After you download a design from the gallery, you can use the design by following these steps: 1) Copy the files from DesignTemplateCS or DesignTemplateVB folder into your project (use DesignTemplateCS for C# projects and DesignTemplateVB for VB.NET projects) 2) Do a...(read more)

OpenAccess ORM Express Telerik OpenAccess is an Enterprise-grade ORM that does the data access plumbing in desktop and web applications. Supporting both forward and reverse mapping, the tool offers transparent persistence for your DAL and business objects. OpenAccess ORM provides tight Visual Studio integration and allows you to seamlessly create database independent code. OpenAccess ORM Express Edition provides the same functionality as the commercial version , but supports only the free databases (MS SQL Server Express, Oracle Express, MySQL and Firebird). List of features [ Click HERE ] ... Check tomorrow for another freebie for developers !!! Read More......(read more)

Recently I found myself in a situation where I wanted to format a string using a named format string, rather than a positional one. Ignore for the moment the issue on whether this is a good idea or not, just trust me that I’ll be responsible with it. The existing String.Format method, for example, formats values according to position. string s = string .Format( "{0} first, {1} second" , 3.14, DateTime.Now); But what I wanted was to be able to use the name of properties/fields, rather than position like so: var someObj = new {pi = 3.14, date = DateTime.Now}; string s = NamedFormat( "{pi} first, {date} second" , someObj); Looking around the internet, I quickly found three implementations mentioned in this StackOverflow question...(read more)

Either through WMSvc or through your own script, whenever you try to establish a connection with a remote server, which doesn’t provide a trusted certificate you need to provide a delegate for this certificate validation check to validate untrusted...(read more)

Latest on Tips and Tricks Blog. Tip #40: Did you know…How to scope master pages? Tip #39: Did you know… How to cancel a remote web operation in Visual Studio 2008? Tip #38: Did you know...How to use Failed Request Tracing to trace Rewrite Rules? Tip #37: Did you know…How to organize usings? Tip #36: Did you know...How to manage pilot or beta program for your site using Application Request Routing in IIS7.0? Tip #35: Did you know…How to add Intellisense from script libraries for JS files? Tip #34: Did you know...How to stop hot-linking from your site using URL Rewrite in IIS 7.0? Tip #33: Did you know…How to create Nested Master Pages using VS 2008? Tip #32: Did you know...How to easily create your own project templates...(read more)

A little bit about Designing for the Social Web - an interesting, insightful and fun read on what to keep in mind when designing social experiences on the web. Read More......(read more)

Master page is a template page that can be used to create a consistent layout for your application. First you create a master page to define the look & feel of the application and then you create the content pages that contains the content. You can...(read more)

A small set of links reviewing 2008, and looking forward to 2009, from tech to news to photos, annotated with some personal comments... Read More......(read more)

At the end of the year, it’s very common for bloggers to take a look back at their own blog and list their favorite 10 blog posts. I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that. But before I do, I thought it would be great to list the top 10 blog posts by others I read in 2008. The only problem is, I have very bad short-term memory and I can’t seem to remember which ones I read that had a real impact on my thinking. I’ll have to try and keep better track in 2009. So based on a cursory Google search and look through my Google Reader app, here are some of my favorite blog posts of 2008 by you all, I couldn’t even list 10. Please do comment with your own favorite blog posts, mine or otherwise of 2008. Favorite Posts I Read...(read more)

There was an update to the .NET 3.5 SP1 release a couple of days ago and I have not seen a lot of mention to it so thought I would write a blog post and talk about how this update affects ASP.NET. First off you can search for KB959209 in the Microsoft knowledge base for details on this update. Here is the direct URL to the article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959209 . This update corrects the following issues that may affect an ASP.NET developer that has .NET 3.5 SP1 installed: - Dynamic Data used with Entity Framework generates an error when navigating one to one relationships - BrowserCaps generates an error if Front Page Server extensions are installed. - Using a derived UpdateProgress control may encounter an exception. - An exception...(read more)

My Buddy WBM has release a new eBook ! Check it out ! New Features in ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 Wallace B. McClure ISBN: 978-0-470-45734-4 Wrox Blox PDF 38 pages December 2008 Important information about this Wrox Blox PDF download Read More......(read more)

  At PDC 2008 in LA and TechEd EMEA 2008 in Barcelona we announced key new features for Visual Studio 2010 for Web Developers...  Apart from our focus on MVC, Dynamic Data, Silverlight and other key ASP.NET runtime functionality, this was the first time we announced the key investments pillars for Web Developers in VS 2010 ...  Over the next year or so we will be writing in details about these new features, but to start off  I thought it would be great to share various videos which are available to view online today ... Visual Studio 2010 - Web Development Overview In this talk we provided the glimpse of the major investment areas in VS 2010.  The talk is divided into following key areas Design View - Improved CSS 2...(read more)

In VS2005, when you connected to an FTP or FrontPage server, the IDE would not let you intervene to cancel the operation.  In VS2008, during most any operation that has you connecting to a remote source via FTP or FrontPage Server Extensions, you...(read more)

Dmitry , who’s the PUM for ASP.NET, recently wrote a blog post about an interesting approach he took using VB.NET XML Literals as a view engine for ASP.NET MVC. Now before you VB haters dismiss this blog post and leave, bear with me for just a second. Dmitry and I had a conversation one day and he noted that there are a lot of similarities between our view engine hierarchy and and normal class hierarchies. For example, a master page is not unlike a base class. Content placeholders within a master page are similar to abstract methods. Content placeholders with default content are like virtual methods. And so on… So he thought it would be interesting to have a class be a view rather than a template file, and put together this VB demo. One thing...(read more)

Wally McClure, MVP extraordinaire and ASP Insider, just published a short book about the new features in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 . It is a short and to the point read that should get you started in no time. I wouldn’t have shown web service access as the main advantage of jQuery myself (the selector and animation support adds more value for ASP.NET Ajax developers) but that’s a minor thing, and there are plenty of other resources to learn about jQuery . Topics in Wally’s book include: Ajax History Script Combining (including ScriptReferenceProfiler) jQuery Routing Entity Framework Dynamic Data ADO.NET Data Services http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/New-Features-in-ASP-NET-3-5-Service-Pack-1.productCd-0470457341.html Read More......(read more)