Jan 24th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, IIS

ASP.NET

• Extending the GridView to Include Sort Arrows: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to add a visual indicator to the GridView control to indicate the current sort order on columns.

• Using ASP.NET 3.5's ListView and DataPager Controls: Sorting Data: Scott Mitchell continues his ListView control series with a good article on enabling sorting scenarios with the new ListView control.

• Building a Grouping Grid with the ListView and LinqDataSource Controls: Matt Berseth has an awesome post that shows off using the new ListView control and LinqDataSource controls to build a hierarchical grouping grid.  A post to bookmark.

• Using the ListView, DataPager and LinqDataSource Controls: Matt Berseth has a good tutorial post that shows off using these new controls to join data from two database tables using LINQ.

• Some ASP.NET 3.5 ListView Control Examples: Mike Ormond has a nice post that provides a number of samples that show how to use the new ASP.NET ListView control.  For even more ListView articles, check out my last link-listing post which pointed to a bunch of them.

• Large File Uploads in ASP.NET: Jon Galloway has a nice post that provides some good details on handing large file uploads using ASP.NET.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Four ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript UI Methods You Should Learn: Dave Ward has another great post in his series about ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript Helper Methods.

• Five Tab Themes Created for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: Matt Berseth posts some really cool themes created for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's Tab control. Very slick!

• CNN Style Scrolling Ticker with the Marquee Toolkit Control: Matt Berseth posts another great one that shows how to implement a scrolling marquee UI using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Visual Studio

• Did You Know?: Lisa Feigenbaum from the VB team has posted a really cool series of blog posts that talk about some of the new VS 2008 editor and IDE features.  Read Part 1: Intellisense Everywhere, Part 2: IntelliSense is now Transparent, Part 3: Ctrl+Tab to Navigate Windows, Part 4: What You Can Do with Debugger DataTips, and Part 5: VB IntelliSense now filters as you type.

• Web Server Settings for ASP.NET Web Application Projects can now be stored per user as well as per project: The VS Web Tools Team has a nice post that describes how you can now store web server settings per-user instead of per-project.  This is very useful for multi-developer scenarios (where you don't want to check-in these values into source control).

• Using Ctrl-Break to Stop VS Building: Steven Harman points out a cool tip/trick, which is that you can use the Ctrl-Break key within Visual Studio to kill the current compilation build.  A useful tip if you've accidentally kicked off a long build or get tired waiting for it to finish.

• Visual Studio 2008 Trouble Shooting Guide: If you run into any issues installing VS 2008, make sure to check out this blog post.  It details a bunch of common causes of failures, and how to fix them.

.NET

• Marshaling between Managed and Unmanaged Code: Yi Zhang and Xiaoying Guo from my team in Shanghai have written a great MSDN article that describes how to use the marshaling interop features of the CLR to call native code.  One of the tools they highlight is an awesome P/Invoke Interop Assistant application they built that makes it much, much easier to generate p/invoke interop signatures when calling native methods.  A must-have tool for anyone doing native/managed interop!

• .NET Framework 3.5 Poster: Brad Abrams posts about the cool new .NET Framework 3.5 posters now available for download (now in multiple file formats).

IIS

• Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Technical Preview 1: Yesterday the IIS team posted the first preview of a new Microsoft Web Deployment tool.  This tool works with both IIS6 and IIS7 and enables automated deployment, synchronization, and migrating of applications on web servers.  If you are looking for a great way to automate the deployment of your ASP.NET applications then this tool is definitely one to check out.  To learn more, read the walkthroughs at the bottom of this page (in particular the "Introduction to MS Deploy" one).  This tool is awesome and should make automated deployment much easier.

Hope this helps,

Scott