July 4th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight and IIS7

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I've fallen behind on my weekly link-listing series - apologies for the delay.

ASP.NET

• ASP.NET RSSToolkit 2.0 Released: One of the cool projects for ASP.NET 2.0 that was released last year was this free RSS Toolkit - which makes consuming and exposing RSS feeds in ASP.NET super easy (you can even databind any ASP.NET control against them).  The team working on the CodePlex project has recently released V2 of the RSSToolkit.  You can learn all about it and download it here.

• Building a Custom Database Driven Site Map Provider: Scott Mitchell has written a great article on how to implement your own site map provider for ASP.NET that is populated from a database (instead of statically from an XML file).  You can learn more about the ASP.NET 2.0 SiteMap system from this older blog post of mine here.

• .NET DateTime and Number Format String Cheat Sheet: If you are like me, you might have trouble remembering all of the standard format strings you can pass to the String.Format() method and/or the Eval() databinding method in ASP.NET to generate the appropriate string output from a DateTime or Numeric datatype.  This PDF cheatsheet is a useful one to download and save to quickly look these format strings up.  John has some other really useful .NET PDF cheatsheets he has also created that you might like to download here.

• Profile Support for ASP.NET Web Application Projects: VS 2005 Web Application Projects can't directly access the strongly-typed ASP.NET "Profile" object that web site projects support.  This VS add-in supports the ability to generate a strongly typed profile class to accomplish this.  You can read this great series of posts to learn more about how to use the ASP.NET 2.0 Profile system.  I have it on my list of tips/tricks posts to-do to cover using this VS add-on as well.

• ASP.NET Photo Handler: Bertrand has posted a cool photo album HttpHandler for ASP.NET that allows you to easily drop images into a web directory and automatically generate a nice photo album of them (complete with EXIF information, stack sorting icons, etc).  Might be very useful for people enjoying holidays this summer.  Download the code here.

• SubSonic: Auto-Generate a DAL for Class Library, Windows Applications and Web Application Projects: Rob Conery recently posted a blog entry that talks about how to use the great SubSonic project in non-website Visual Studio project types to easily generate your data access layers.

• BlogEngine.NET: This is a new open source blog engine for ASP.NET that Mads Kristensen has helped start up, and which I've heard a lot of good things about.  You can read about its features here, and download it here.

ASP.NET AJAX

• ScriptDoc 1.0 Available: Bertrand Le Roy has published a cool ScriptDoc utility that extracts documentation from JavaScript files and packages it into XML that can be consumed by documentation building tools.  A very useful tool as you start to build up your own JavaScript libraries.

• ASP.NET AJAX Client Control Development: Kazi Manzur Rashid from PageFlakes.com has written a great set of posts that cover building your own client-side AJAX controls using ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript libraries.  Here is a post on how to build an ASP.NET AJAX Grid and Pager, and here is a post on how ASP.NET AJAX Control Development works.

• Using the ASP.NET AJAX PageRequestManager to Provide Visual Feedback: Dan Wahlin - author of the fantastic new Professional ASP.NET AJAX book - has written a nice blog post that covers a technique you can use to obtain fine grain visual feedback control (above and beyond what the UpdateProgress control provides you) when doing AJAX callbacks to the server.

Visual Studio

• GhostDoc 2.1.1 Released: GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 (and now 2008) that automatically generates default XML documentation comments for code you write in C# or VB.  It can automatically re-use existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or generate initial documentation by deducing comments from the name and type of the member signature. You can learn more about it and download it for free here.

Silverlight

• Silverlight Tutorials: Michael Schwarz has a great blog where he writes regularly about Silverlight.  This tutorials link points to a bunch of great Silverlight content.

• Integrating Web Services and Silverlight Including Debugging: Peter Kellner has written some great blog posts covering Silverlight (as well as gotchas he has learned from).  Check out this post to learn how to handle debugging web services when using Silverlight, as well as his post on Displaying Images with the Silverlight Downloader in the 1.1 Alpha.

• Some keyboard input tricks for Silverlight 1.1: Jon Galloway has a nice post on handling keyboard input using the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha release.  Also check out his tip on Calling an ASMX webservice from Silverlight post.

IIS 7

• IIS 7.0 is now running all of Microsoft.com: One of the things we push at Microsoft is to "dogfood" our products on our high volume sites when they enter the beta cycle.  As of a few weeks ago, all of the web servers running www.microsoft.com are now running on IIS7 and Windows 2008 Server Beta3.  These servers host 500+ virtual roots and 350 ASP.NET applications, and handle 300,000 concurrent connections.  IIS7 is going to be an awesome release.

• IIS 7.0 on Server Core: Bill Staples blogs about some of the new IIS7 enhancements that appear with the June CTP of Windows 2008 Server.  One of the big features that is now supported is the ability to install IIS7 on "server core" - which is a low footprint installation of Windows 2008 Server that lays down just the minimal footprint needed to boot (meaning no GUI shell).  This lowers the resources required on servers, and even more importantly means that servers don't need to be updated if a patch is released for a component not installed on the server (which lowers the downtime of servers).  ASP.NET and the .NET Framework aren't supported yet in server core configurations - but will be in the future.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. I'm out on vacation this week, so please excuse delays on email and comment feedback.

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