April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight

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

ASP.NET

• More ASP.NET Security Tutorials: The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials.  His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts.

• Building a VS 2008 Styled Grid with the ListView and DataPager Controls: Matt Berseth has a great article that talks about techniques you can use with the new ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to create a nicely styled Grid UI - while preserving total control over the HTML and CSS used.  Also read his follow-up post here that talks about how to achieve the same UI with the GridView control.

• 50 Useful CSS Tips and Tricks: A useful page that provides a nice listing of various CSS tips, tricks and tools you can use for common web scenarios.

• Using a DataPager with the GridView Control - Implementing IPageableItemContainer: Matt Berseth has a cool article that shows how to use the new IPageableItemContainer interface to implement paging support with the new ASP.NET 3.5 DataPager control.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Accessible UpdatePanel: Bertrand Le Roy from the ASP.NET team has an article that describes how to make the ASP.NET AJAX's UpdatePanel control accessible for screen-readers.

• ASP.NET AJAX Meets Virtual Earth: Alessandro Gallo, author of the excellent ASP.NET AJAX in Action book, has a nice series of articles that talks about using ASP.NET AJAX with Virtual Earth to implement mapping on your site.

• Faster Page Loading by Moving ASP.NET AJAX Scripts after visible content: Omar Al Zabir (the co-founder of www.PageFlakes.com) has a great article that describes a nice technique you can use to improve the perceived loading performance of an ASP.NET AJAX page.  I also highly recommend reading Omar's great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book to learn some of his other suggestions and techniques.

• 3 Tips for Working with ASP.NET AJAX's TabContainer Control: Matt Berseth continues his great articles on ASP.NET AJAX with some tips on working with the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

• Building ASP.NET AJAX Components: Mike Ormond has written an excellent 8-part series that covers building re-usable ASP.NET AJAX components that work on both the client and server.

ASP.NET MVC

• An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC using VB: Bill Burrows from www.MyVBprof.com has put together a great set of online videos that introduce ASP.NET MVC using Visual Basic.  Also make sure to check out his video series on LINQ to XML using VB and LINQ to SQL using VB.

• ASP.NET MVC: Membership Starter Kit: Troy Goode has a built an awesome membership starter kit for ASP.NET MVC that provides registration and login pages for users to authenticate on your site, as well as a set of administration functionality that allows admins to create/manage users and roles.  Download it here.

• ASP.NET MVC: Action Filter for Handling Errors: Troy Goode has another good post that provides some ASP.NET MVC action filters for catching and handling runtime errors.

• How to Enable Pretty URLs with ASP.NET MVC and IIS6: James Geurts posts a useful article that describes how to enable extension-less URLs with ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 (note: you do not need to configure anything special with ASP.NET MVC on IIS7 to enable extension-less URL support).

Visual Studio

• PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008: A free set of useful extensions for VS 2008 that add a bunch of cool features to the IDE.

• Coding Productivity: Macros, Shortcuts and Snippets: Kirill Osenkov has a nice blog post that shows of how to use Visual Studio's macro feature to custom record useful time-savers.

Silverlight

• Dave Campbell's Excellent Silverlight Link Series: Dave Campbell posts a regular series of links to new Silverlight articles and content on the web.  I highly recommend subscribing to his blog if you want to stay current with all the latest Silverlight articles and posts.

• Silverlight 2 Map / DataGrid Tutorial: Jason Zander has a great two-part Silverlight tutorial that demonstrates how to build a nice data-driven application that integrates a map control with a datagrid to filter and analyze data.

• CRUD operations with Silverlight 2, WCF and LINQ to SQL: Ronnie Saurenmann from the Swiss MSDN team has a nice video that shows off some basics of how to support inserts, updates and deletes using Silverlight 2 connected via WCF to a LINQ to SQL backend.

• Writing a Templated Silverlight 2 Control: Shawn Burke has a great tutorial post that walksthrough how to build a templated Silverlight control that implements an expand/collapse control.

Hope this helps,

Scott