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One of the great things about the way in which the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework is being developed is the fact that the team are publishing the source code as they go along. This makes it very simple to dig into the framework when something slightly surprising is happening and figure out exactly how it is supposed to work. A good example of this cropped up for us yesterday when looking at a form posting scenario using DateTimes. We were dealing with an Action Method that looked something like... [read more]

Just a little snippet of jQuery that i find useful for toggling selection of items in an asp.net CheckBoxList control. Set the CssClass of your CheckBoxList to recipientList Add a reference in your page/master to jQuery Add the following javascript into your page header.. function toggleChecks(b) { $( ".recipientList input[type=checkbox]" ).each( function () { if ( typeof this . checked != "undefined" ) { if (b == null ) this . checked = (! this . checked ); else this . check... [read more]

More than 1.5 year ago (!) I wrote an article about why change tracking of changes of an entity should really be inside an entity object . Change tracking is the concern of the O/R mapper and the entity object, not the developer using the entity object and the O/R mapper. Imagine using an entity object a .NET application and you are in charge of taking care of what changes happened inside the entity object when it was used by some routine so you can decide which routine to call: the InsertNewEnt... [read more]

Yesterday I read this great article about VS.NET's technical roadmap , posted by Rico Mariani . Rico is the Chief Architect of Visual Studio, and he explains what that title means as follows: I am the Chief Architect but I'm also *only* the Chief Architect, I don't make the final decisions about what goes in the product, not even combined with the other architects. Jointly we come up with the long term technology roadmap, it indicates key problems that need to be solved for the long-... [read more]

Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery .  Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free).  This is now available to download and use. Steps to Enable jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 To enable intellisense completion for jQuery within VS you'll want to follow three steps: Step 1: Install VS 2008 SP1 VS 2008 SP1... [read more]

Following in Oren's suit, I wanted to let everyone know that Øredev is one awesome conference, and I am having a real blast! If you know me, then you know I am usually really bad about blogging about conferences I attend. I already have a backlog that includes PDC, Kaizen and the p&p summit. Why this one? Well I am really feeling inspired, and thus it's become a moral imperative. A few things about this conference stand out for me. The graciousness of the hosts. On the night bef... [read more]

Every time I talk with customers in meetings or at conferences I’m struck by how many cool amazing new capabilities IIS7 has.  I can go on for literally hours talking about the new features and benefits, and showing demos.  And with each new IIS7 Extension , the list of new features just gets bigger and bigger.  A few months ago I realized we didn’t have the top list of features written up anywhere, and so we started the process of distilling down the list to the top 10.  We ... [read more]

For the purposes of my next post, I built a neat little edit in place behavior and I thought it deserved its own post. It does a pretty good job at showing how easy it is to build a clean behavior using ASP.NET Ajax. It’s always good to go back to the basics… In this post, I’ll show you how the behavior works, but more importantly how I built it. The behavior is pretty similar to the in-place editing behavior Nikhil built a while ago (but it works against the latest Ajax framework). It attaches ... [read more]

We might need to read the contents of some page (local or remote) by code. This is quite simple in .net. using System.Net; using System.IO; WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(" http://www.asp.net"); WebResponse res = req.GetResponse(); StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream()); string html = sr.ReadToEnd(); The string html will then hold the html contents of www.asp.net . We can also use relative uris in the same website: WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(new Uri(&qu... [read more]

Every time I talk with customers in meetings or at conferences I’m struck by how many cool amazing new capabilities IIS7 has.  I can go on for literally hours talking about the new features and benefits, and showing demos.  And with each new IIS7 Extension, the list of new features just gets bigger and bigger.  A few months ago I realized we didn’t have the top list of features written up anywhere, and so we started the process of distilling down the list to the top 10.  We a... [read more]

Copying a website (to another exact copy) Here is the command to copy a website(run from a cmd prompt – c:\inetpub\adminscripts): > cscript.exe adsutil.vbs copy <source> <destination> > cscript.exe adsutil.vbs copy w3svc/1 w3svc/556 The numbers mentioned there are nothing but the website identifiers. After copying, you might see the other (new) website stopped – just because the old one still runs on the same port and IP address combination. Taking an exact copy of website some... [read more]

The CollapsiblePanelExtender is a cool way to convert simple panels to collapsible ones. It usually has a target panel, a control which can make it collapse, another (or the same) control to make it expand etc. Clicking the said controls will trigger the collapse/open behaviour. We may need to sometimes control this behaviour from code - both client side javascript and server side code behind. Suppose we have a CollapsiblePanelExtender with the Id 'cpe1'. We wish to manipulate the state ... [read more]

Copying a website (to another exact copy) Here is the command to copy a website(run from a cmd prompt – c:\inetpub\adminscripts): > cscript.exe adsutil.vbs copy <source> <destination> > cscript.exe adsutil.vbs copy w3svc/1 w3svc/556 The numbers mentioned there are nothing but the website identifiers. After copying, you might see the other (new) website stopped – just because the old one still runs on the same port and IP address combination. Taking an exact copy of ... [read more]

During a debugging session today Søren and I got to talk about how the Page_Load method on a page is called. The method is called after the Load event and is declared like this: 1: protected void Page_Load( object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: 4: }   Taking a look at the Page class in Reflector shows the it inherits from the TemplateControl class. All the following code is extracted using Reflector. If we take a look at the TemplateControl class we can see that following constants are d... [read more]

Today I came across and interesting WCF problem. A dev in our team added a new method to a WCF service and tried to update the service reference from the client app but got this error: The error message is very helpful because you can figure out from it that something is now larger then a default value, that something being the SOAP message sent by the metadata exchange binding. Oh that’s easy to fix, just put bigger values in the config file right? Wrong because the mexBinding doesn’t provide a... [read more]

ELMAH is a free, open-source library created by Atif Aziz for logging errors that occur in an ASP.NET application. I've written about ELMAH many times before ; its one of the first things I setup when creating a new ASP.NET application. A new version - ELMAH 1.0 BETA 3 - was recently released. With just a few minutes of setup and configuration you can have ELMAH automatically log unhandled exceptions to a number of different data stores - SQL Server, Oracle, a Microsoft Access database, an X... [read more]

Have you heard of our Engage: Employment module for DotNetNuke ? I'm talking about our module for posting job listings on your website and allowing folks to apply for them. We have today released a new version of the module to fix a number of bugs that have been discovered, while completely revamping the administrative experience. Where before it took about a million clicks to get the module setup and to get a good understanding of how it was setup and what had already been setup, now you... [read more]

Ok, so Microsoft's Team Foundation Server has been available for several years. We've stuck with a couple of open source source control / project management apps. John keeps moving things around and trying new stuff. I've just stuck with the evil SourceSafe because it was simple and it worked and as long it was just me working on something, I've survived. No more, I need to move out into the world. I have been working to setup TFS 2008 on Windows 2008 Server with Sql Server 2008,... [read more]

Hi guys...I've been gone nearly a month now. I've finished the last of my classes of my last year of my BSc degree (final exams are in January) and we were having all sorts of grad parties. Add to that finishing off a freelance project and my new role as one of the moderators of http://forums.asp.net , blogging had to take a back seat. Anyway, I'm back :) I recently formatted my dev machine with a fresh install of everything. I always keep my documents and all projects in a drive oth... [read more]

In the first part of this article I'll talk about how you can enable the jQuery JavaScript library in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages. The second part of this article will focus on using jQuery in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages. When I was at PDC’08 , I attended a session about the jQuery JavaScript library ( watch online ). A few weeks before that Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft would support, and even ship jQuery together with Visual Studio, along with Microsoft’s own AJAX implemen... [read more]

Once upon a time, in the chilly windowless basement of a Fortune 100 company, a young programmer joined our small development team. He brought with him a programmers editor called Brief. Within weeks every developer in the entire company was using this powerful editor. The three compelling features were the ability to select copy and paste columns of text, multiple windows with cut and paste between them and…drum roll please…macros. With macros, enormously tedious tasks can be performed easily i... [read more]

I was doing some load testing the other year and noticed one of the counters was going off the charts - ASP.Net exceptions.  I couldn't understand why my application, which was behaving fine in every other way, was throwing exceptions. It turned out that I have been doing a Response.Redirect from the OnInit of a Page that was inheriting from a custom Page class which had a try/catch. The exception was a ThreadAbortException.  I quickly added a catch clause to grab the ThreadAbortEx... [read more]

I was trying to include my ASP.NET MVC project in a TFS team build today but the build failed so I've investigated this issue and thought it will be helpful to share it with the community. To get the MVC project build successfully with the team build make sure of the following: - Your build server has the WebApplication targets file located in <Program Files> \MSBuild\Microsoft\Visual Studio\v9.0\WebApplications , if not . copy this file from your development machine to the same path i... [read more]

Bye Fake Steve, er, Real Dan. Dan Lyons had a wonderful run as Fake Steve Jobs. He never made it work as "Real Dan Lyons," so it's no great loss that he's closing down his blog after his new Newsweek bosses apparently didn't like some of his recent language. From his email to the AP on the shutdown, "The bottom line is I don't want to jeopardize a job I like (and which feeds my hungry 3-year-old twins) over some blog that's just a funny little thing I'm doi... [read more]

David has an excellent post about a pretty cool ASP.NET feature that you almost certainly don’t know about. I had no idea for sure. Check it out. http://blogs.msdn.com/davidebb/archive/2008/11/19/a-hidden-gem-for-control-builder-writers.aspx Read More......(read more)