September 16th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7, Visual Studio, Silverlight

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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 a User Polling System with ASP.NET 2.0: Scott Mitchell has written a nice three-part tutorial series for www.4guysfromrolla.com that demonstrates how to implement a poll user control for ASP.NET that you can use to poll users on your site for their opinions on questions, and then display a graphical output of the poll results.  Here are part 2 and part 3 of the series.

• Debugging Script: Dumping out Current and Recent ASP.NET Requests: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET support team has an excellent post that details how to use the windbg debugger to dump out real-time information about what requests ASP.NET is currently processing on the server (super useful when investigating failures).  She has a great script you can just run "as-is" in this article, as well as an in-depth discussion about how it works.

• Improve Column Sort Presentation for an ASP.NET GridView: Matt Berseth has a cool article on how to customize the column header format of an <asp:gridview> control to enable a really nice column sorting experience.

• Creating a GridView with Resizable Column Headers: Matt Berseth demonstrates a proof of concept on how to add support to an <asp:gridview> control to enable users to resize the column widths of the data being displayed. 

• Freezing GridView Column Headers with CSS and a Control Adapter: Matt Berseth has a cool article on how you can use CSS to implement a "frozen columns headers" feature with the standard <asp:gridview> control.  Note that this type of scenario is much easier with the new <asp:listview> control in .NET 3.5, which enables you to customize all of the html markup emitted.

• ASP.NET ListView - CSS Friendly: Kazi Manzur Rashid posts some cool samples showing off how to use the new <asp:listview> control with some nice CSS table designs.  Also check out my <asp:listview> Part 1: Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS UI post to learn more about how you can use the new VS 2008 CSS Editing features with the <asp:listview> control.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Enable Client Side Actions Before and After Postback with ASP.NET AJAX: Rob Meade has a nice article that describes how you can execute client-side JavaScript before and after the <asp:updatepanel> control calls back to the server to handle an AJAX post-back.

• Creating JavaScript objects from ASP.NET Objects: David Betz has a nice blog post that describes a clean way to encapsulate client-side JavaScript helpers for ASP.NET server controls.

• How Do I: Create an ASP.NET AJAX Extender from Scratch: Chris Pels has a nice 15 minute video on www.asp.net that demonstrates how to create an ASP.NET AJAX extender control for a standard ASP.NET server control.

• How Do I: Building Custom Server Controls that work with or without ASP.NET AJAX: Chris Pels has a nice 19 minute video on www.asp.net that describes how to build an ASP.NET server control that can automatically integrate ASP.NET AJAX if it is installed, but fall back gracefully in the event that it isn't on the server machine.

• Update for the iPhone: Matt Gibbs blogs about a fix you can apply to ASP.NET AJAX to address a change in the iPhone 1.01 patch that impacts how regular expressions are parsed in the iPhone Safari browser.  Matt's fix enables you to continue targeting iPhone users with your ASP.NET AJAX applications.

Visual Studio

• XML to Schema Inference Wizard for Visual Studio 2008: Scott Hanselman has a great blog post about a new item template wizard that makes it really easy to automatically infer an XML schema from a XML file or XML snippet.  He then shows how you can use the cool new LINQ to XML features in VB9 to get automatic LINQ to XML intellisense inside VS 2008 with it.

IIS 7.0

• Ten Reasons why IIS 7.0 Rocks: The Microsoft.com team has been running the entire www.microsoft.com site on IIS7 and Windows Server 2008 the last few months.  This blog post from them lists their top 10 favorite improvements in IIS7.

Silverlight

• Ink Recognition and Silverlight: Loren has a really cool sample built with Silverlight that demonstrates how you can use the ink pen recognition support within Silverlight to enable tablet or mouse based Google searches using a Silverlight application.  A very cool mashup.

• Silverlight Spy Tool: Silverlight Spy is a small WinForms application capable of inspecting Silverlight 1.0 applications.  You can use it to navigate a XAML object explorer of a running Silverlight application, trace out messages from it, and enable easier debugging of it.

• HtmlTextBlock control for Silverlight: David Anson has published a really cool control for Silverlight 1.1 that provides an easy way to take HTML input and display it using the text/graphics stack within Silverlight.

• Online JavaScript Silverlight Design Tutorials: Jeff's web-site has a bunch of cool tutorials for Silverlight 1.0 that show off how to achieve nice design effects with Silverlight.

• Silverlight Dev Camp Chicago: Kevin Marshall is organizing an upcoming Silverlight DevCamp event in Chicago on September 28th-29th.  You can attend completely for free.

Hope this helps,

Scott

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