Articles filed in category 'ASP.NET WebForms'

Ken Getz November December 06 finalize column.

Data-bound controls make ASP.NET programming much easier.They expose a bunch of properties and methods to link their properties to a valid data source and they know how to build their user interface to reflect the contents of the data source. Data-bound controls work by repeating a template for each data row and try to make an optimized use of system resources such as the viewstate. This article guides you to building a real-world, data-bound control that displays a pure HTML bar chart.

Rick Strahl discusses Windows Vista for developers.

ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, that provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. Most people are familiar only with the high level frameworks like WebForms and WebServices which sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. In this article I’ll describe the lower level aspects of ASP.NET and explain how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime and then through t...he ASP.NET HTTP pipeline to process requests.ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, that provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. Most people are familiar only with the high level frameworks like WebForms and WebServices which sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. In this article I’ll describe the lower level aspects of ASP.NET and explain how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime and then through the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline to process requests.See More

Data-bound controls play a key role in the development of ASP.NET applications. Data-driven controls allow you to associate their whole interface, or individual properties, with one or more columns of a .NET-compliant data source. In this article, I'll delve into the depths of an extremely versatile data-bound control that is a fixed resence in any real-world ASP.NET application - the DataGrid control. I'll focus on the key programming aspects of the control, including d...ata binding, column mapping, paging, and sorting.See More

Building complex Web controls with rich client-interfaces often requires the integration of some client-side JavaScript code with the control’s server-side code. While in some cases this does not have to become too complicated to achieve some pretty nifty results, it can often break the data synchronization between the control’s internal server code and the rendered client HTML code. This becomes a problem when the page posts back. In this article, I will build two very ...cool Web controls that are vulnerable to this problem and then show you how to fix it.See More

Part 3, The User Interface and the Rating Web ServiceWe are finally going to get our feet wet in Visual Studio .NET and start writing some real code! In this article, we're going to focus on two areas of the ACME application. First, we will talk about the user interface and how it's implemented in ASP.NET ? along with a few problems we overcame by utilizing the powerful object-oriented features of .NET. Next, we'll write a web service in Visual Basic .NET to rate polic...ies based on their class codes. To demonstrate that web services can be used in a variety of ways, we'll consume the web service in both .NET and Visual FoxPro 7.See More

IT professionals agree that input is a big source of trouble. Input ultimately determines how applications work and wrong or malicious input may cause serious damage. It is extremely important that developers have this fact firmly in mind and consequently apply adequate countermeasures. Starting from the perspective that all input is evil is a good approach. Reasoning in terms of a whitelist instead of a blacklist is another excellent strategy. Working with strongly type...d data is the third pillar of secure applications. This article discusses the role of input data and related attacks in the context of ASP.NET applications.See More

When I was asked to write a few pages on what's coming in the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (code named Whidbey), the biggest issue I had was how to limit this article to a few pages.I opted to list a few categories and drill down into each. I'm not going to cover everything, just some key items in each area. Please note that not all of these changes are implemented in the PDC build that attendees are receiving, and that some of these features are still in... the planning stages. That said, here are the categories that I'd like to discuss:See More

Doc Detective Article for Sept/Oct 2007

Rick Strahl discusses Visual Studio 2005.

Web applications today do a number of things. They could be a banking site, a content management system, or a news Web site. In spite of the diversity of Web applications available today, it almost always makes sense to break a Web page into smaller, reusable widgets

In my previous article, (“ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Infrastructure”, Nov/Dec 2006, CoDe Magazine) I talked about the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part framework. I made the case for the emergence of Web Part or widget-like solutions, and explained the support for Web Parts in the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. However, I stopped short with a teaser into connecting these Web Parts with each other and where this story fits in with SharePoint 2007.

ASP.NET provides developers with the ability to cache dynamically generated pages.This means that it is now possible to cache pages built on posted data and querystrings! For instance, an e-commerce site that generates the same catalog from the database over and over on nearly every user request can now simply cache the catalog pages. Caching saves precious database server CPU cycles and renders pages down to the client much faster. Of course, when the catalog data is up...dated, the cache can simply refresh itself. Furthermore, developers can define the length of time an item is to be cached, indicate cache dependencies, create cached versions per browser, and indicate where an item should be cached (client, server, proxy, etc.).See More

ASP.NET WebControls do more than just allow you to write reusable components. They can provide an entire approach to Web application development, allowing you to bring a new level of OOP to the UI and letting you program declaratively.Lately I've come to notice that no other programming term has more definitions than declarative programming. In this article, I will attempt to explain it in terms of how it applies to .NET development, specifically ASP.NET through the use ...of WebControls. I'll do this by illustrating some real-world examples that I have used in my own projects. In the end, I hope to leave you with an understanding of what declarative programming is, how you can use it when developing ASP.NET Web applications, and how, with the help of WebControls, to use it as an approach to ASP.NET development.See More

ASP.NET has been Microsoft’s hallmark product for more than a dozen years. In vNext, it’s getting more readily adaptable to the way users—especially mobile users—interact with their data, and Rick shows us how to take advantage of these radical changes.

Most of you are probably aware that the web.config file in an ASP.NET project controls the behavior of your Web site. If you make a change to one of the built-in settings in this file, ASP.NET automatically detects those changes and applies them immediately. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have your own settings in this file applied immediately as well? In this article you will learn how to do just that. You will also learn the difference between the Application object ...and creating your own Configuration class.See More

User controls represent an interesting and powerful level of page reusability in ASP.NET. You can build user controls by extracting and combining blocks of code from existing pages. You can also assemble ASP.NET controls together in a sort of embeddable form for use in Web pages. In this article, you'll get a crash-course on how to design, write and use ASP.NET user controls.

Rick Strahl discusses ATLAS, Microsoft's ASP.NET implementation of AJAX.

Rick Strahl talks about the new Atlas framework for ASP.NET.

.NET provides new tools to make deployment of fat client .NET applications easier.This article describes the basics of .NET Auto-Deployment technology and the security mechanism that prevents users from inadvertently running code distributed by hackers and virus writers.

Close your eyes and imagine a utopian world where client and/or department Web sites are easily deployed and the responsibility for content creation and modification is turned over to the administrators of the site. Imagine site administrators creating new content pages consisting of pre-built content types like announcements, contacts, discussions, events, FAQs, news feeds, feedback forms, and even custom-developed content types. Continue imagining them creating new men...u options and even adding new users and administering the security rights of users. Sound good? Now imagine all this available for free as an open-source Visual Studio .NET project. Sounding even better? Welcome to the DotNetNuke content management portal!See More

ASP.NET provides a couple of page-level state persistence mechanisms in ViewState and the new ControlState.While both mechanisms work, they both have some limitations in that they are not deterministic for the application developer-ViewState can be turned off and can be very bulky, and ControlState can only be set from within a control implementation. In this article I’ll show another, more flexible state mechanism using a PreservePropertyControl that allows automatic pe...rsistence and restoration of field values automatically without requiring ViewState.See More

Do you have a cool personalized application that you want to offer to over 400 million users? Do you want to light it up with Live controls or create a mashup with Live resources? Windows Live ID now offers a simple way for third parties to get Live ID authentication in your Web or rich client applications, letting you reach millions of Live ID users, integrate with Live Controls, and access Live services.

While sleepless the other night, I was channel surfing and ran across a rerun of the 1968 science fiction classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.”If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s definitely a must see. HAL, one of the main characters of the movie, is a slightly psychotic speech-enabled super computer. HAL is responsible for steering the Discovery spacecraft on its ill-fated Jupiter mission. As I watched the movie I was completely amazed at HAL’s abilities. HAL handled press ...interviews, played a wicked game of chess, has varied opinions on art, controls life support, and can read lips. Not to completely destroy the movie if you haven’t seen it, but I have to say that I am grateful that most of the movie’s predictions aren’t true. However, like the HAL of 1968, speech-enabled applications have become a core requirement for both corporate and commercial developers. In this article, I’ll help you explore the Microsoft Speech Platform that comprises the Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK) and Microsoft Speech Server 2004. I’ll also show you how you can use these technologies with Visual Studio 2003 to both build and deploy speech-enabled applications.See More

Wiki Web sites (Wikis) are great collaboration tools that you can easily create with ASP.NET. This article describes some of the advantages that Wiki Web sites provide and how you can use ASP.NET and SQL Server to create your own Wiki. You'll learn how to write powerful parsers using the .NET regular expressions class and you'll discover how to add sophisticated search functionality to your Web sites by using SQL Server's Full-Text Search service.

Enable advanced skinning in your Web applications using an MVC pattern.MVC, or Model-View-Controller, is a design architecture that promotes separation among parts of an application, with particular focus on the presentation tier. The concept of MVC is inherent in the ASP.NET architecture and I'll show you how to take advantage of that in order to provide skinning or themes capability to your Web sites.

It’s crucial to understand how your ASP.NET code compiles in order to debug your Web applications effectively. ASP.NET 2.0 has changed the way compilation and deployment works, and in this article I’ll dig in and show you how compilation works now and what has changed from ASP.NET 1.x.

Creating messages in your Web application should be quick, easy, and most importantly, consistent.They should look like they belong with the rest of the application even if an error occurs. How often have you created a new page to display simple text or a notification message to your users? Wouldn’t it be better if you could reuse an existing template and simply pass in a few parameters to tell it to render an application-specific message? In this article I will show you... how to create a reusable Message Display class that reduces displaying messages generically in your application to a single line of code.See More

Building mobile apps is a wave you need to catch! Paul shows you that you won’t be left behind just because you use Web Forms.

Having a custom control display properly is a challenge in itself.Getting your custom control to behave the way you want it to is only half the work. Once you get to the visual side of things you have to create the logic that generates the actual HTML shown in the browser. If you want the control to display properly, this can be a tedious task, especially if you want it to render properly in different browsers.

Skinned controls make a user interface very flexible.With skinned controls, the functionality and the presentation of a server control are effectively separated, making it very easy to change the presentation of the control. If used properly, you can use skinned controls to change the look of an entire Web site by just selecting a separate set of skins.

“Web application development has come a long way in a fairly short period of time.” A quote like that surely won’t send anyone into shock anytime soon because it’s accepted as fact. From basic, static HTML pages to totally data-driven and data-centric Web applications, the demands on a Web developer are much more complex and demanding than they were just a few years ago. The advent of social networking sites like MySpace, which is written in ASP.NET 2.0, interactive mapp...ing sites, and sites streaming full motion video has required the Web developer to adapt and change with the times. One of the best tools to use to build these types of Web applications is Microsoft’s ASP.NET 2.0. In this article I am going to delve into some of the more interesting features of ASP.NET 2.0 and show you how you can begin using ASP.NET 2.0 on your next Web project.See More

ASP.NET Whidbey adds a huge number of productivity features and enhancements.Although it's still early in the development process, Paul and Ken dig in and start playing with some of the new features, passing along what they've found.

Wijmo contains over 30 widgets built on jQuery and jQuery UI that can help you build a better Web.

When ASP.NET was released in 2002, it gave Web developers a whole new design paradigm to work with; one that varied greatly from the classic Active Server Pages that many Web developers worked with in the past. At the heart of this new way of developing Web applications are components known as Web controls. Though most Web developers use them while developing ASP.NET applications, many Web developers have not yet dived into the world of creating custom Web controls, even... after all this time, and all .NET developers will soon face another release of .NET. In this article, I will attempt to give you a head-to-toe understanding of how Web controls work, and how to create them for yourself.See More

In the first part of this article (CoDe Magazine, September/October 2005) you learned how to create an inherited Web control, as well as a fairly functional rendered Web control. In part two of this article you’ll learn three professional touches for your custom Web control. First, you’ll learn how to make all parts of your custom control resize correctly. Next, you’ll learn how to capture an event when the button is clicked or when text in the textbox changes. Finally, ...you’ll learn how to add basic styling. See More

In ASP.NET, the value change related event will be triggered at server side per server control when the value of such a server control (form field) is changed upon postback. In most cases, a group of form fields are correlated with each other and typically correspond to member data in a business object. Thus developers need to check if such a group of form fields has changed as a whole. Unfortunately, the .NET Framework (1.x, 2.0) doesn’t offer an effective solution. Thi...s article will present an elegant technique to solve this problem and it can even go further so that you can know which field has changed.See More

This article will demonstrate how you can design and build flexibility into your ASP.NET pages by adding controls dynamically at runtime.You'll learn to add simple controls to a page, progress to adding a user control into a Placeholder control, and then advance to using multiple Placeholder controls to build a template page that is flexible and easy to use.

The task of creating dynamic ASP.NET Web Forms whose behavior is based upon user interaction and depends upon the purpose and intended goal of the Web Form.Web Forms that require only controls and functionality provided by the built-in ASP.NET Web server controls are easy to create. But creating Web Forms that require or are designed with extended controls and functionality can be a challenge.

Error handling?everyone's favorite topic right?Even the best designed applications need to handle and properly manage errors the errors you can plan for and those you cannot.In this article, you'll learn error handling techniques in ASP.NET. Topics will range from handling common errors with the Try...Catch syntax to logging unhandled errors into the Windows Event Log.

ASP.NET is a terrific platform for Web applications.That does not mean that tricky coding is always one or two clicks away within a dockable and resizable Visual Studio .NET dialog box. Tricky solutions require tricky coding, just the kind of features that a wizard-driven environment and a general-purpose framework can't provide. In this article, we'll tackle five ASP.NET features that require wicked and creative code.

Free. Marketing professionals have known for years the positive results that this word produces. They use the word free to lure you in so that they can sell you something else. Luckily for you, that will not be the case in this article. All of the goodies, resources, tools, and utilities I mention are all free. They won't cost you a dime.In this article, I will share with you the results of my search for zero-cost resources for the ASP.NET developer. Space restrictions l...imit the depth to which I can discuss each item that I've found, but my descriptions should be enough for you decide if you would like to research the material further.See More

RIck Strahl discusses IIS 7.0

ASP.NET represents a significant leap forward from traditional Active Server Pages (ASP) development. In this article, I'll show you what it takes to begin building ASP.NET Websites with Visual Studio .NET. This article will provide you with the knowledge you need to jumpstart your foray into the world of ASP.NET development.

Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio enables developers to incorporate a set of Windows Live services into their Web sites using Visual Studio and ASP.NET.Using the Contacts ASP.NET Server Control, your users can easily share their contacts between Windows Live and your Web site. With the SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer ASP.NET Server Control, you can show videos on your Web site from your Silverlight Streaming account with just drag-and-drop. The IDLoginStatus... and IDLoginView ASP.NET Server Controls provide Windows Live ID authentication at your Web site for your users. Microsoft released its second community technology preview (CTP) in December, 2007. You can download this CTP from http://dev.live.com/tools.See More

Wow, another year has gone by, and as you read this, you are probably returning to the office after a few more or less relaxing holiday time spent with friends and family and a New Year's celebration. Interesting things have happened in our industry in the last 12 months, but I predict that the next 12 months will be quite a bit more interesting! Seldom before have I been as excited about new technologies and developments as I am now.

Today, more and more websites need to identify who their users are. However, in most cases this involves providing authentication, which requires storing the users handle and password. An alternative to this is to allow a third party to authenticate the user and provide your website with the identity. This absolves you from needless worries of securing the authentication information. An emerging standard for identification is OpenID (http://www.openid.net). OpenID is a s...hared identity service, allowing users to log into many Internet sites using a single digital identity. This article will explore how to extend the ASP.NET provider model to accept a user’s OpenID.See More

ASP.NET has considerably raised the bar for Web development with very rich developer functionality built into a flexible and highly extensible object model.If you have a background of hand-coding ASP or other scripting or CGI-style technology, .NET's redundant code reduction and development process simplification seems almost too good to be true. But data binding for controls leaves a lot to be desired in terms of ease-of-use and reading the data back into the data sourc...e. This article examines what's wrong with simple data binding and provides a set of subclasses, making data binding a lot quicker and requiring much less manual code.See More

One of the more interesting and challenging places to use Ink is in Web applications. Did I say Web applications?Yes, in fact, I did. But how can this technology, which is dependent on the physical relationship between the stylus, the digitizer, and the operating system, work over the Internet?

In the past year, new technologies from Microsoft have changed how we can add ink to Web sites and the change is definitely for the better!

Google now offers the functionality of its search engine through a Web service.Over the past couple years, Google has become the most popular search engine used on the Web. Building upon its popularity, Google has developed additional search accessories and interfaces for both personal and commercial use. The most powerful interface offered by Google is exposure of its database and search capabilities through the use of a Web service.

In this article I'll explore what JavaScript/DHTML is capable of and explain when you should use it and why.JavaScript is a powerful yet often underused feature of most browser-based applications. Commonly JavaScript is relegated to simple form validations, but this is not the only capability of JavaScript. In this article I'll cover a powerful set of features you can incorporate in your applications today.

From the consumer products associated with the MSN Butterfly, the Windows Live Platform has steadily grown and evolved.In this article you will discover some of the history behind the Windows Live Platform and explore where it is heading now and might be destined to go in the future. This article will explore the opportunities for you as a developer in this brave (nearly) new world.

Have you ever wanted to implement search capabilities on your own Web site but didn’t want to implement the logic and deal with issues such as storage and indexing? The Live Search team now offers two different ways to utilize Search on your site: using the Live Search Box or using the Windows Live Search API.

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a free streaming and application hosting service for delivering rich interactive applications (RIAs) over the Web.In this article I’ll show you how to get started with Silverlight and how to upload your applications and rich media to the Silverlight Streaming Service.

Windows Live Messenger is one of the central offerings nestled among a suite of products and services under Microsoft’s Windows Live brand.For years online chat has been progressively and swiftly revolutionizing how you communicate with your friends, family, coworkers, and businesses you deal with. It is the foundation of the original chat room concept and the heart of instant messaging applications. Online chat-also called instant messaging or just “IM”-connects people ...for one-to-one or group chat, for social networking purposes, or for business directives, such as enabling access to technical support, customer services, or sales. Now, Windows Live Messenger supports a rich set of features for Web applications through the Windows Live Messenger IM Control, the Windows Live Messenger Presence API, and the Windows Live Messenger Library. The collective features of these products go beyond the simplicity of a chat application, making it possible to embrace this new era of social networking by leveraging your built-in Windows Live network within any Web application.See More

As we compete in the global economy, companies are increasingly developing applications for the world audience. Part of the challenges in globalizing is in understanding the language and culture of the local audience. An application written for the American market may not be useable in the Asian market. Hence, special considerations must be factored in when designing your application for the world market; in essence-you need to localize your application.As we compete in ...the global economy, companies are increasingly developing applications for the world audience.Part of the challenges in globalizing is in understanding the language and culture of the local audience. An application written for the American market may not be useable in the Asian market. Hence, special considerations must be factored in when designing your application for the world market; in essence?you need to localize your application.See More

Both Internet and intranet applications often require a custom store for user accounts and roles. ASP.NET 2.0 provides an out-of-the-box provider model as well as a SQL Sever database just for that propose. Unfortunately, the only way to administer the credentials databases is via Visual Studio 2005, and only for local Web applications. This article presents a full-blown custom security management application that administrators can use. The application wraps the ASP.NET... 2.0 providers with a Web service and even adds missing features. This article presents the design approaches, challenges, and techniques involved in developing such an application. The article also walks you through some powerful yet useful techniques such as interface-based Web services, reflection-based Web service compatibility, advanced C# 2.0, Web services security, and Web services transactions.See More

Working with big applications requires extending the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API to handle more detailed member records.In this article, I’ll present one of the available techniques used to extend the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API to solve some of the limitations of that API.

One of the most important security principles for software development is least privilege.Simply put, least privilege means that an application, process, or user should have the least access to resources required to accomplish a task and no more. By following this principle, even if your application is attacked or a user goes on the payroll of your nastiest competitor, you’ll have limited the potential damage. Bottom line: implementing partial trust in ASP.NET is the sin...gle biggest thing you can do to make your applications secure.See More

So you finally have a product to sell, and a site to sell it on. But wait; how do you prevent unauthorized users from downloading your products? Forms Authentication provides only part of the solution. In this article, I’ll show how to prevent specific users from accessing specific files on your site; even by browsing directly to them.

ASP.NET Web Matrix project makes ASP.NET development easy.With ready-to-go pages, code builders, a visual design environment, and other useful features, Web Matrix is a very complete Web development tool that gets you going within minutes. Because it is freeware from Microsoft and the download is only 1.2 MB, there is nothing stopping you from experimenting with it.

Jonathan Goodyear (the Angry Coder) discusses MVPs and ASP.NET.

The sun is shining and I am sitting at a large, umbrella-covered picnic table overlooking a shimmering pond, my state right now is pretty relaxed. I have been fortunate enough to have spent the last few days at a cabin in the northern part of Maine. The birds are chirping, kids are playing, and there's not a Moose in sight. The only state management I'm concerned with right now is my own state of mind, and right now I am feeling pretty good. State management, whether you... are dealing with your own state of mind or if you are working with ASP.NET, is a very fundamental and important task.In this article I am going to cover the important and sometimes confusing topic of state management. I will explore the state management fundamentals, covering both client-side and server-side state management options.See More

Bilal takes us on a tour of Telerik’s Kendo UI and its great number of widgets that facilitate your Web or mobile app development process. There’s no need for multiple libraries anymore!

Rick Strahl discusses AJAX technology.

Regardless of your .NET language of choice, managing data is a vital skill for most applications. Developers frequently must work with data at different levels, with different tools, and in different forms. This article is the first in a two-part series on some of the more common data challenges that developers face. In Part 1 of this article, I’ll cover some capabilities in ADO.NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, and T-SQL 2005. Part 2 will feature some additional T-SQL 2005 coverage..., as well as ways to use .NET 2.0 generics.See More

In the conclusion of this two-part series on managing data, I will focus on .NET generics, the ASP.NET 2.0 ObjectDataSource, and some more T-SQL 2005 capabilities. Regardless of whether you work in C# or VB.NET, or whether you spend more time on the front-end or back-end of an application, the ability to manage data will directly impact your contributions to a project. The new .NET generics classes provide you with near-quantum leap in efficiency by allowing you to write... simpler code that accomplishes more. ASP.NET 2.0’s ObjectDataSource class helps you to easily integrate middle-tier data-aware classes to data-bound controls on a Web page. Finally, as you saw in Part 1 of this series (and will see again here in Part 2), T-SQL 2005 provides new language capabilities to help database developers be more productive.See More

This installment of the Baker’s Dozen presents an introduction to remoting and remoting interfaces.

Lookup and navigation screens initially seem like no-brainers, when compared to other parts of an application-yet by the time a developer has met all the user requirements and requests, he/she has expended much more time than expected. This issue of The Baker’s Dozen will build a lookup Web page using ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and C# 2.0. The lookup and results page will contain optional lookup criteria and custom paging of the result set. The solution will utilize n...ew language features in SQL 2005 for providing ranking numbers to correlate with custom paging, and new capabilities in .NET generics to pump the results of a stored procedure into a custom collection. Just like Mr. Mayagi taught Daniel the martial arts by doing exercises, the example in this article will demonstrate some common design patterns, such as factory creation patterns, using .NET generics. The article also subtly presents a general methodology for building database Web pages.See More

If you have been involved in a new software development project during the last five years ? and if you read this article, chances are you have ? then you have probably been faced with the question "Web application or Windows® UI?" And in the vast majority of cases, the answer to this question was probably "Web application." For modern, enterprise-wide systems there were simply many reasons and issues that made it hard to implement the desired feature set in a convention...al Windows application and deploy it in a reasonable manner. At this point, the advantages and disadvantages of each application type are well understood, and decisions are easy to make. Or are they?See More

Recently, Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2012.2 ASP.NET and Web Tools Refresh and the Visual Studio Update #2. In this article, I will highlight a few of the new and improved features that you will want to consider using right away. Before you can take advantage of these features, you will need to download and install these updates:

You’ll still write a good deal of code in ASP.NET 2.0.Don’t completely trust those who say that ASP.NET 2.0 cuts 70% of the amount of code you’re called to write. You’ll end up writing more or less the same quantity of code, but you’ll write code of different quality. You’ll have more components and less boilerplate code to tie together pages and controls. Features like the provider model, data source controls, and master pages make coding easier and equally effective. B...ut since there’s no magic behind, you have to learn the implications of each feature you employ. In the end, ASP.NET 2.0 comes with code behind, not magic behind.See More

Web Forms aren’t going anywhere. Paul shows us how to use HTML 5 and jQuery to keep ASP.NET Web Forms working smoothly.

Markus Egger discusses user interface technologies developers should familiarize themselves with.

GDI+ is a technology that developers generally associate with Windows Forms applications because they use it to draw anything on the screen from custom controls to diagrams.However, you can also use GDI+ in ASP.NET Web applications whenever you want to serve up dynamic images. You can use GDI+ to create dynamic banners, photo albums, graphs, diagrams, and more.

In the last issue, I investigated GDI+ and how to use it for image manipulation in Web applications.This time around, I will look at the generation of brand new images using the same GDI+ technology and features.

This time around I’ll expand on these concepts and show you how you can use jQuery in combination with ASP.NET as an AJAX backend to retrieve data. I’ll also discuss how you can create ASP.NET controls and otherwise interact with jQuery content from ASP.NET pages in Web Forms.

People often think of HTML as the sole domain for Web applications.But HTML's versatile display attributes are also very useful for handling data display of all sorts in desktop applications. The Visual Studio .NET start page is a good example. Coupled with a scripting/template mechanism you can build highly extendable applications that would be very difficult to build using standard Windows controls. In this article, Rick introduces how to host the ASP.NET runtime in de...sktop applications and utilize this technology in a completely client-side application using the Web Browser control.See More

ASP.NET 2.0 comes with several new security controls (located under the Login tab in the Toolbox; see Figure 1) that greatly simplify the life of a Web developer. Using the new security controls, you can now perform tasks such as user logins, registration, password changes, and more, with no more effort than dragging and dropping controls onto your Web form. In this article, I will show you how you can use these new controls to perform user authentication.

There are six controls included with ASP.NET that simplify data validation.Prior to ASP.NET, data validation was performed through scripts using either JavaScript or VBScript. Hence, many times validation was not performed in a uniform manner, complex validation was difficult to implement, and Web servers were vulnerable to validation scripts being modified by malicious users.

I read somewhere that nearly 80% of all data has some location-related aspect to it. Common business questions in data include: Where do we ship these orders? Where are flood plains located and what rainfall amount are problematic for them? Where are vendors and/or customers located? What delivery route should we use? Can we track using GPS? Where are voting districts located? Where are the best hospitals located? Where are the sales regions that produce the most revenu...e? And so on. It is highly likely that a significant portion of the data you work with has a location-related aspect to it. Visually presenting this information could lead to better management decisions or possibly uncovering trends that were not evident before. A good application can present this information using a location-oriented approach. That is where Microsoft Virtual Earth fits in.See More

Now in its sixth major release, Virtual Earth offers an entire world of opportunities for innovative Web-based mapping.Microsoft’s premier Web-based mapping solution has undergone upgrades to it user interface, compatibility, and functionality making it an ideal time to get started with the platform or upgrade your existing application. Let’s explore what’s new and what has changed in this latest release.

Ready to build a Web experience your users will love? Windows Live Services are the building blocks of your new site. Get started right now with the Windows Live Quick Applications.

Rick Strahl discusses Web Application Projects

I’m sure by now you’ve read more than your share of books and articles describing new ASP.NET 2.0 features. Master pages, themes, providers, etc., are all great, but have you read anything regarding custom Web control development and what has changed in 2.0? Well that’s what I’m here to tell you. If you’ve become involved in control development, either through my articles or on your own, I’ll describe some very cool enhancements that you can put to work right away in you...r controls using ASP.NET 2.0.See More

In my travels I’ve had a chance to spread the good word of Web control development to many around the country; and I’ve also had a chance to meet many programmers who have been writing controls for a while.While it’s awesome to get a chance to talk code with people who enjoy the same areas of .NET that I do, I notice that there is plenty in the Web control arena that they are not familiar with. Control templates are probably the quintessential example of this. I urge you... to read this article and learn about what is probably the most important feature of custom Web control development that contributes to writing extensible controls.See More

Building compelling applications and Web sites just got easier.Microsoft is opening up Windows Live Services to developers everywhere. This edition of CoDe Focus shows you how to use Windows Live Services to draw users to your Web site, get them hooked, and keep them engaged.

Dino explores the new ASP.NET features and takes a close look at the ways it might benefit you to upgrade (or not).

Knowing the flaws in Web server controls and how to work around them before you use them can save you hours of time.

Rick Strahl discusses ASP.NET Web Forms

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 in November 2007. I have good news and, depending on your perspective, I have either bad news or good news. If you were hoping ASP.NET 3.5 would be released with a variety of new controls, features, and architectural changes then I have bad news for you. If you’re still trying to master all the controls, features, best practices, project structures, deployment options, and architectural changes introduced when ASP.NET we...nt from version 1.1 to 2.0, I have good news for you. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of new things you will want to take advantage of in ASP.NET 3.5, but the changes from ASP.NET 2.0 to ASP.NET 3.5 are more additive and incremental than monumental.See More

Microsoft released the .NET Runtime 4.0 and with it comes a brand spanking new version of ASP.NET - version 4.0 - which provides an incremental set of improvements to an already powerful platform. .NET 4.0 is a full release of the .NET Framework, unlike version 3.5, which was merely a set of library updates on top of the .NET Framework version 2.0. Because of this full framework revision, there has been a welcome bit of consolidation of assemblies and configuration setti...ngs. The full runtime version change to 4.0 also means that you have to explicitly pick version 4.0 of the runtime when you create a new Application Pool in IIS, unlike .NET 3.5, which actually requires version 2.0 of the runtime. See More

Microsoft has added an abundance of new features and functionality to ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. This article provides an overview of many of those new features and enhancements ranging from improved editors for HTML, CSS and JavaScript all the way through to publishing your work to the web.

Daniel takes you on a tour of the new features in the new release of ASP.NET. He thinks you’ll find it exciting, especially regarding its SignalR capabilities.

The smart way to share data between computers and other people is to place it in an online Internet store, which the other parties can access, but you want to make sure only the right people can access your data. This article will help you understand how the Windows Live delegated authentication system is used to access certain Windows Live data stores and the technologies Microsoft is building to make this work easier for you.