Microsoft's ADO.NET Team readies Entity Framework and Tools 1.0 for release as a VS 2008 add-in with enterprise-level features that LINQ to SQL doesn't offer -- domain object modeling, flexible inheritance techniques, multiple database vendors, and do-it-yourself n-tier deployment. The ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF) will be Microsoft's first production-quality object/relational mapping (O/RM) platform that promises to be fully competitive...
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
February 28, 2008
Event Validation is a new feature in ASP.NET 2.0 which provides an additional level of checks on postback actions. It verifies whether a postback from a control on client-side is really from that control and not from a malicious person trying to break your application. Even if you forget to add security checks of your own, ASP.NET provides this functionality, because this feature is enabled by default. Sometimes, it is safe to turn this of, but...
February 28, 2008
The Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including: LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management. On and it free from Microsoft. Read More...
February 28, 2008
It seems like amount of posts on ASP.NET's Session State keeps growing. Here's the list: ASP.NET Session State Partitioning ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.NET state server (aspnet_state) Yesterday's post on Session State Partitioning used a round-robin method for partitioning session state over different state server machines. The solution I presented actually works, but can still lead to performance bottlenecks. Let's say you...
February 28, 2008
We all know unit testing. These small tests are always based on some values, which are passed throug a routine you want to test and then validated with a known result. But what if you want to run that same test for a couple of times, wih different data and different expected values each time? Data Driven Testing comes in handy. Visual Studio 2008 offers the possibility to use a database with parameter values and expected values as the data source...
February 28, 2008
Visual Studio developer, did you know you have a great performance analysis (profiling) tool at your fingertips? In Visual Studio 2008 this profiling tool has been placed in a separate menu item to increase visibility and usage. Allow me to show what this tool can do for you in this walktrough. The profiling tool is hidden under the Analyze menu in Visual Studio. After launching the Performance Wizard, you will see two options are available: sampling...
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
February 27, 2008
Spell checker works in Source view, it is able to extract text from markup elements and use Office 2003 spell checker to check the text. Spell checker is able to handle entities to some extent (they are considered whitespace for now). It is also able to spell check values of attributes that typically contain human readable text. You can customize spell checker behavior by editing an XML file. Since the add-on uses Office spelling engine, you must...
February 27, 2008
Spammers had broken the CAPTCHA for Windows Live (Hotmail), Yahoo and Gmail. The evidence was circumstantial in that I was seeing a lot more spam from these services. Over the past couple of weeks I have read a few articles confirming my suspicions. While spammers cannot solve 100% of these Human Interactive Proofs, they can still automate the process using a bot which is, in effect, breaking these security devices. In other...
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
February 26, 2008
Managed Fusion URL Rewriter is a powerful URL manipulation engine based on the Apache mod_rewrite extension. It is designed, from the ground up to bring all the features of Apache mod_rewrite to IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0. Managed Fusion Url Rewriter works with ASP.NET on Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0 and Mono XPS Server and is fully supported, for all languages, in IIS 7.0, including ASP.NET and PHP. Managed Fusion Url Rewriter gives...
February 26, 2008
In ASP.NET solutions using forms based security, there is a problem if the forms authentication ticket times out while the user is filling out a large web form. This is a simple solution to that problem using a custom HttpModule and a single .aspx page: A typical scenario is where: The solution is using forms authentication (using cookies, and with a timeout set to 30 minutes in web.config). The user starts filling out a large web form....
Thursday, February 21, 2008
February 21, 2008
I received some great ideas for new features and thought I'd incorporate them in a new version. Here's what's new: Tab/linebreak escape choices for C# Verbatim Literals (optional line spanning) for C# Paste As StringBuilder (with optional AppendFormat usage) Auto Formatting After Paste (optional) Ability to hide Paste As options on the context menu Add-In Commands for adding to custom menus and keyboard shortcutsDownload:VisualStudio.NET 2003...
February 21, 2008
GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.Read M...
February 21, 2008
If you've designed, developed or worked on websites recently, you have probably come across the topic of localization. In this article, I'll show you how to implement localization in your Visual Studio .NET projects. Download Source Code Most of us blanch at the idea of tailoring our pages to localize in multiple languages. The hard part of localization is, of course, the localizing. However, translating static labels and site content...
February 21, 2008
A tutorial for implementing a modal popup window on your web site which will display a Microsoft Virtual Earth map with pinpoints on the locations of everyone who is currently browsing your web site.Read more (Code Proje...
February 21, 2008
This tutorial examines the new Visual Studio 2008 Server Control and Server Control Extender. A compendium of tips, tricks and gotchas, it is a comprehensive tutorial that will provide readers with the skills necessary to start building advanced AJAX-enabled custom controls with Visual Studio. When you open up Visual Studio 2008 to create a project, you will notice that it has two new web templates designed specifically for building AJAX controls:...
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
February 20, 2008
Yesterday Google started hijacking 404 status codes through the Google Toolbar from unknowing Web sites to show pages with ads. TechCrunch even has a poll asking if you think the Google hijacking is a good thing or not. While Google publicly states they do not like Made For Adsense sites (MFAs) they have gone out of their way to force their own where unknowing Web site owners have missed a basic task in designing their site. While I think the stated...
February 20, 2008
Cross-Site Scripting attacks are very common on the Internet these days. The sad thing is these attacks can easily be thwarted with a little extra analysis and architecting before programming begins. Far too many Web Sites do not make the effort to stop common attacks and thus are wide open to attack. This can allow hackers to do just about anything from altering the content of your site or extracting private information from a database. Worse...
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
February 19, 2008
Sometime ago, I demonstrated how to develop a row-clickable DataGrid control. Now, as we have a few holiday days here, I adopted the same to GridView in ASP.NET 2.0. Basic idea is the same, clicking the row (e.g entire row, not specific column) in the control causes a postback and throws RowClicked event. This can be used to customize selections a user can make with the control. Read more (aspadvice.com/blogs/joteke) ...
Monday, February 18, 2008
February 18, 2008
After upgrading to Visual Studio 2008 RTM, you will have trouble updating Linq to SQL Classes which are read from one data context and then updated into another data context. You will get this exception during update: System.NotSupportedException: An attempt has been made to Attach or Add an entity that is not new, perhaps having been loaded from another DataContext. This is not supported. Here's a typical example taken from a Forum post:...
February 18, 2008
1. Generate new encryption keys When moving an application to production for the first time it is a good idea to generate new encryption keys. This includes the machine validation key and decryption key as well as any other custom keys your application may be using. There is an article on CodeProject that talks about generating machineKeys specifically that should be helpful with this. 2. Encrypt sensitive sections of your web.config This...
February 18, 2008
CodePlex - 7zSharp "7zSharp is a .NET 2.0 LGPL wrapper around the 7z LZMA SDK and executable written in C#, providing a library (DLL) wrapper and simplified API to encode and decode using the 7z library. Ability to encode: 7z (.7z), ZIP (.zip), GZIP (.gz), BZIP2 (.bz2) and TAR (.tar) Ability to decode: 7z (.7z), ZIP (.zip), GZIP (.gz), BZIP2 (.bz2) and TAR (.tar), RAR (.rar), CAB (.cab), ISO (.iso), ARJ (.arj), LZH (.lzh), CHM (.chm), Z (.Z),...
February 18, 2008
"XML Tools team has released the XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 - a quick and reliable performance analysis profiler tool that assists in the development and debugging of XSLT documents. The XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 allows developers to measure, evaluate, and target performance-related problems in XSLT code by creating detailed XSLT performance reports. The XSLT Profiler includes a wealth of useful hints for XSL and XSLT style sheet optimizations,...
February 18, 2008
"This release updates the Power Tools for the Database Edition to work with Visual Studio 2008 and provides several new features. The new features include two custom unit test conditions, a new Data Generation Wizard, and new MSBuild tasks to support running TSQL Static Code Analysis from the command line. The updated features include 5 refactoring types, a dependency viewer, additional data generators and editors, 2 MSBuild tasks for Schema and...
Sunday, February 17, 2008
February 17, 2008
·ADO.Net Data Services Part 1 - Building a Simple Web Data Service ·ADO.Net Entity Framework: eSqlBlast Tool for E-SQL Queries ·ADO.Net Data Services Part 2 - Using Service Operations with WebGet ·ADO.Net Entity Framework Tools: Stored Procedures ·ADO.Net Data Services Part 3 - Querying a Web Data Service and WebDataGen.exe ·ADO.Net Data Services Feedback: DataContextServiceProvider Required for LINQ to SQL support ...
February 17, 2008
Over the last few weeks I've been writing a series of blog posts that cover LINQ to SQL. LINQ to SQL is a built-in O/RM (object relational mapper) that ships in the .NET Framework 3.5 release, and which enables you to model relational databases using .NET classes. You can use LINQ expressions to query the database with them, as well as update/insert/delete data. Below are the first eight parts in this series: Part 1: Introduction to LINQ...
February 17, 2008
Why does URL mapping and rewriting matter? The most common scenarios where developers want greater flexibility with URLs are: 1) Handling cases where you want to restructure the pages within your web application, and you want to ensure that people who have bookmarked old URLs don't break when you move pages around. Url-rewriting enables you to transparently forward requests to the new page location without breaking browsers. 2) Improving the...
February 17, 2008
In this article, Masoud Tabatabaei discusses the concept of Cross Application Authentication using ASP.NET authentication model consisting of Membership Providers, web.config configuration, encryption, and decryption of configuration files. At the end of the article he also examines the application of the concept using ASP.NET login controls. Read more...(aspalliance.c...