March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET

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

• Three New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available: Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials. These three new ones cover creating and managing roles, assigning roles to users, and implementing role based authorization.  You can also find more security articles by reading posts on my blog tagged with security.

• .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 APIs: Scott Hanselman's latest "weekly source code" review looks at .NET APIs that you can use to call popular web 2.0 services.

• Hangs and how to Solve Them (Part 1) and (Part 2): Tom has some useful posts that talk about deadlocks and request queuing in ASP.NET, and how to detect and debug what might be causing them.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Building ASP.NET AJAX Controls (Part 1), (Part 2), and (Part 3): Mike Ormond has started a nice blog post series that talks about how to build ASP.NET AJAX Controls.  Make sure to check out Part 2 - Components and Part 3 - Properties and Events as well.

• New ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos: Joe Stagner has published a number of new ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos.  Learn about the re-order control, retrieving values from server-side AJAX controls, two techniques for triggering updates to update panels, and using the cascading drop down control.

• Real-Time Progress Bar with ASP.NET AJAX: SingingEels shows a technique for displaying real-time progress notifications using AJAX as a long-lived activity runs on the server.

• Using JQuery to Consume ASP.NET AJAX JSON Web Services: Dave Ward has a nice post that describes how to use the JQuery AJAX library on the client to call an ASP.NET Web Service on the server that is JSON enabled (using ASP.NET AJAX on the server). 

ASP.NET MVC

• Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC: Kazi Manzur Rashid published an excellent Digg-clone sample built with ASP.NET MVC last February.  He recently updated the code to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 (full details here).  You can download the latest version of his source code here.

• ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET Request: Stephen Walther has a great post that details the exact steps that occur when an ASP.NET MVC request executes. 

• ASP.NET MVC Action Filters - Caching and Compression: Kazi Manzur Rashid has another great post that shows how to use the new ActionFilterAttribute support in ASP.NET MVC to implement output caching and compression attributes. Read this quickstart article to learn more about how Action Filters work, or watch Scott Hanselman's video that covers them.

• Defining Routes using Regular Expressions with ASP.NET MVC: Someone asked me the other day how to use regular expressions to define route rules with ASP.NET MVC.  Turns out Fredrik Kalseth already has a nice sample that shows how to-do this.

• Testing with the ASP.NET MVC Framework: Simone Chiaretta has a great article that discusses how to test controllers using ASP.NET MVC Preview 2.  Note: the next ASP.NET MVC preview release will include a number of refactorings that will simplify controller testing considerably (and avoid the need to mock anything for common scenarios).

• Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio 2008 Unit Tests: Stephen Walther has a really nice post that describe how the unit testing features now built-in VS 2008 Professional work (using an ASP.NET MVC project).  Also check out Stephen's excellent Introduction to Rhino Mocks blog post that describes how to use the open source Rhino Mocks framework with VS unit test projects.

Visual Studio

• VS 2008 Web Deployment Hot-Fix Roll-Up Now Available for non-English Languages: Last month we shipped a hot-fix release that fixes a number of bugs, adds a few features, and improves performance for web development scenarios in VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.  Last month's release only worked with the English-language VS 2008 products.  Yesterday we shipped an update that now works for all VS 2008 languages except Portuguese and Russian (which are still to come in the future). 

• Hotfix Available for VB Performance Issue in VS 2008: The Visual Basic team recently released a hotfix as well that addresses a performance issue with large files that contain XML documentation.  Read this post to learn more about how to download it if you are running into this issue.

• 10 Ways to Boost your Productivity with C# and VS 2008: John W Powell shares a few tips and tricks on how to improve your productivity with C# and VS 2008.

• Showing Hack, Undone, and Custom Tokens in the Task List: Sara Ford has some cool VS tips of the day posts that talk about what you can do with the task list.  Also read her How to Create and View Todos in the Task List, Assigning Priority to Items in the Task List, Create Shortcuts in the Task List, Create User Tasks in the Task List, and Keyboard Navigation of items in the Task List.

Silverlight

• Using the Silverlight DataGrid and Defining Columns for a Silverlight DataGrid: Scott Morrison has started a great series of posts that describe how to use the new Silverlight 2 DataGrid control (which he is the program manager for - so he definitely knows his stuff!).

• Using Silverlight 2's DataGrid with WCF + LINQ to SQL: This 15 minute video blog demonstrates how to build a LINQ to SQL object model on the server and publish it using WCF.  It then demonstrates how to build a Silverlight client that uses the new Silverlight DataGrid control, and which calls the WCF service to retrieve the LINQ to SQL data to populate it with.

• Simple Editing of Web Service Data in a DataGrid: Mike Taulty has a nice blog post that shows how to create a WCF service on the server, and then use it from a Silverlight 2 client to retrieve data, bind it to a DataGrid, allow users to update rows, add/delete rows, and then save it back to the server using Silverlight 2 Beta1.

• Sorting with Silverlight 2's DataGrid Control: The DataGrid control in Silverlight 2 Beta1 doesn't yet have built-in column sorting support (it is coming in Beta2).  That hasn't stopped Matt Berseth though!  In this post he shows how to implement sorting using a custom header column approach.  Also check out Matt's post here, which provides a DataGrid test page that shows off a number of the current DataGrid features.

• Open Source Silverlight Charts with VisiFire: Silverlight doesn't yet have built-in charting controls.  The good news is that the folks at Webyog just released a really cool set of open source Silverlight charting controls (complete with animation support) that enable you to easily build great looking charts.  Their model makes it super easy to use the chart components within existing HTML or AJAX applications.

.NET

• FormatWith and DateTime Extension Methods: James Newton-King and Fredrik Kalseth have some nice posts and samples that demonstrate how to use the new extension method feature in the VB and C# languages in VS 2008 to create some useful convenience libraries. 

• Dependency Injection Explained: James Kovacs has a nice MSDN article that explains how to build more loosely coupled applications and enabled dependency injection.  Also read Scott Hanselman's that list of .NET Dependency Injector Containers (IOC) post.  Matthew Podwysocki also covers the new Unity IOC in his posts here and here.

Hope this helps,

Scott