May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF

Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately.  Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little.  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

• Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control: Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5.

• Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls: Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario.

• Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET: A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images.

• Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on.

• ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners: Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns).  The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated.  Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this.

ASP.NET AJAX

• ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control: Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control.

• Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch: Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads.  Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier.

• Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class: Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class.

• Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta: Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls.

.NET

• 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ: Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it.

• Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL: Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries.  Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries.

• DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers.

• Ukadc.Diagnostics: Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc).

Visual Studio

• 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know: A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio.

• Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series.  I confess I didn't know this one.

Silverlight

• 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time".  Wow.

• AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes: Nikhil Kothari has a nice blog post that demonstrates how he built an auto-complete behavior control for Silverlight. 

• Scrolling through Large Resultsets with Silverlight 2 and LINQ to SQL: The Swiss MSDN team has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to scroll through large resultsets using the Silverlight DataGrid and LINQ to SQL.

• IValueConverter: The Swiss Army Knife of Bindings: David Anson has a useful blog post and sample that demonstrates how to use the IValueConverter feature in Silverlight and WPF to support richer bindings against complex objects.

• Silverlight 2 Pie Chart: Peter McGrattan has posted a nice control and article that demonstrates how to use a new Silverlight charting control he has written.

WPF

• WPF week on Channel9: Watch 6 great videos on Channel9.  Each one includes interviews and demos with members of the WPF team talking about some of the awesome work that went into WPF 3.5 SP1 (read my blog post here for a summary of some of it).

• WPF Testing and Application Quality Guide: Check out the 0.2 release of a free online book being developed by Microsoft that covers how to test WPF applications.  Definitely worth book-marking if you are doing WPF development.

• Moving Toward WPF Data Binding One Step at a Time: Josh Smith has a great article on CodeProject.com that explains WPF data binding and walksthrough how to use it.

• WPF 3.5 SP1 StringFormat: Lester has a nice post that describes how to use the new StringFormat feature in WPF 3.5 SP1.  This makes it much easier to handle formatting of databound values.

Hope this helps,

Scott