December 16th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, VS, .NET, IIS7, WPF

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.

ASP.NET

• Creating an Outlook Navigation Bar using the ListView and Accordion Controls: Matt Berseth has a nice sample that describes how to implement an Outlook-like navigation menu using the new ASP.NET 3.5 ListView server control and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's Accordion control.

• What is New in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview: Brad Abrams blogs some samples that show off the new <asp:MediaPlayer> Silverlight control, as well as the built-in history management with the <asp:ScriptManager> control. 

ASP.NET AJAX

• ASP.NET AJAX SliderExtender Layout and Custom Appearance: Alessandro Gallo has a nice post that describes how to customize the layout and appearance of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's SliderExtender control.

• Debugging ASP.NET AJAX Applications with the Trace Console: Matt Berseth has a great article that describes how to use the Sys.Debug JavaScript class in ASP.NET AJAX and output the debug content into a custom trace window.

ASP.NET MVC

• IoC Container Support for Windsor, StructureMap and Spring.Net: Jeffrey Palermo blogs about the new MVCContrib open source project that is being built-up around the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  It now includes Inversion of Control Container support for the most popular .NET IoC tools.

• PagedList<T> Support: Rob Conery posts a sample implementation of a pageable List<T> implementation that I showed in my original ASP.NET MVC demo at the Alt.net conference.

Visual Studio

• Spell Checker for Visual Studio: My team recently shipped a cool new Visual Studio add-in that provides spell checking support.  In addition to supporting spell checking within HTML files, it also supports spell checking within JavaScript, VB, C# and ASP.NET comments.  Works with both VS 2005 and VS 2008.

• World of Warcraft for Visual Studio: A cool new add-on that enables support for building World of Warcraft game extensions using Visual Studio.  Definitely something to check out if you play World of Warcraft.

• VS 2008 Color Schemes: Thomas Restrepo has posted some nice Visual Studio color scheme templates you can use to customize your text editor settings.

Debugging .NET

• Getting Started with WinDBG Par1 and Part2: Johan Berglin has an excellent set of posts that detail how you can use the WinDBG debugger to drill into a running ASP.NET application and analyze it to see what it is doing.  Microsoft Product Support uses this tool when helping debug deployed applications in production.  It is extremely powerful and something you might want to learn.

• Automated .NET Hang Analysis: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET Product Support team has a great blog post that describes an automated hang analysis tool she has written that uses WinDBG to pinpoint the root cause of common hangs with .NET applications.  Her blog is an excellent one to subscribe to - and is full of great debugging tips and tricks.

IIS 7.0

• Behavior Changes for ASP.NET applications running in Integrated Mode on IIS 7.0: Mike Volodarsky from the IIS team has a great blog post that details behavior changes for ASP.NET applications when they run in "integrated mode" on IIS 7.  "Integrated mode" enables ASP.NET developers to take advantage of much tighter integration with IIS - and enables a host of additional scenarios (richer URL rewriting, integrated authentication/authorization, etc).  If one of the behavior changes listed in Mike's document impacts your application, you can optionally change the application to run in "Classic Mode" - which maintains the same ASP.NET behavior as with IIS6.

• Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming: Shahram Khosravi has recently written a great new book that describes how to take advantage of the new IIS7 "integrated mode" features with ASP.NET.  A great book to read if you are looking to take advantage of the new IIS7 features:

  

WPF

• Embedding WPF User Controls in Windows Forms: Matthias Pieroth has a nice post that shows how you can easily use WPF-based user controls in Windows Forms applications.

• WPF Lights in ViewPort3D and Rendering 3D-models with WPF and XAML: WPF has built-in support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics.  In these two articles Matthias shows some nice demonstrations of how to get started with it.

• Charles Petzold's 3D Programming for Windows and WPF 3D Team Blog: If you are interested in learning more about WPF and 3D, make sure to check out Charles Petzold's WPF 3D book, as well as subscribe to the WPF Team's 3D feature-team blog.  Both are invaluable resources.

Hope this helps,

Scott