Articles filed in category 'Web Development (general)'

Dino talks about the best possible layout for your project in MVC 5, and gives some great tips for helping you keep it all organized and effi cient.

Did you know that you can create a simple one-line menu system using two C# classes and a little bit of Razor code in an MVC page to create a hierarchical menu structure for drop-down menus? Paul shows you how.

In this article, Rick plays with the beta version of ASP.NET vNext. You’ll get to see what’s (probably) coming so you can start making plans.

SignalR is the latest in a long string of new technologies pouring out from the ASP.NET team recently, when Microsoft rolled out version 1.0 of SignalR when Visual Studio Update 2 was announced. In a nutshell, SignalR is technology for .NET that allows you to build real time, connected Web applications. Connected in the sense that you can build Web applications that can send and receive and broadcast data in real time. The canonical example of a 'connected' application ...is a chat application where a client can broadcast messages to all other connected clients. While that's pretty cool in and of itself, that only begins to scratch the surface of what's possible with SignalR as you can communicate in a wide variety of ways between client and server and between all clients to push data around.See More

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

Rick discusses WCF

At Mix 2007 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) to much fanfare. Silverlight is very intriguing in concept, as it further travels the path previously laid out by WPF (Silverlight’s big brother), and it aims to bring the worlds of Windows and Web development, as well as the worlds of software development and graphical design, much closer together. As more and more details emerge (and the first released version is now available), it beco...mes clear that Silverlight is not just an intriguing concept, but it is for real! Markus discusses Silverlight concepts in this article.See More

Shawn introduces you to Vue.js, a framework that can keep complex build systems from clogging up your app. It’s a SPA library that helps you separate the data from the markup, but it’s also much more.

Connect the user to your Web application with Accelerators!Accelerators provide an easier and faster way for users to access your Web application while seamlessly plugging in to your existing infrastructure.

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

Separation of presentation and data has long been considered a best practice in the development of Web applications.Driven by the need for low friction deployment and a richer user experience, the types and architectures of Web applications are evolving dramatically. With the introduction and growth of AJAX-based applications and Rich Interactive Applications (RIA) using technologies such as Microsoft® Silverlight™, separation of presentation and data is no longer just a... best practice, it is required.See More

Microsoft recently released the ASP.NET MVC 4.0 beta and along with it, the brand spanking new ASP.NET Web API. Web API is an exciting new addition to the ASP.NET stack that provides a new, well-designed HTTP framework for creating REST and AJAX APIs (API is Microsoft’s new jargon for a service, in case you’re wondering). Although Web API currently ships and installs with ASP.NET MVC 4, you can use Web API functionality in any ASP.NET project, including WebForms, WebPage...s and MVC or none of the above. You can also self-host Web API in your own applications.See More

jQuery is a small JavaScript library that makes development of HTML-based client JavaScript drastically easier. With client logic getting ever more complex and browsers still diverging in features and implementation of features, jQuery and other client libraries provide much needed normalization when working with JavaScript and the HTML DOM.

Sahil continues his series on Angular 2 and this time, looks at that essential element, the form.

Bilal takes a look at making sure that your Angular app, large or small, can deal with state management and data access using the ngrx/store module.

Have you ever wondered how to use your browser (and those of your customers) as rich clients without plug-ins or ActiveX objects? Shawn Wildermuth tells you how.

Sahil shows us a few nifty aspects of AngularJS 2 that help experienced and novice developers alike. AngularJS 2 is still in beta, but he says that you’ll love it even so.

In this article, Rick discusses the new features of IIS 7.

July/August 09 Doc Detective Column

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.

Rick Strahl discusses the newly released ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (MS AJAX)

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

In the first installment of this series, I explored a few of the new features in ASP.NET MVC 4, including the new default project templates, mobile templates, and display modes. Since that article, ASP.NET MVC 4 has been released to beta. For brevity’s sake, when I refer to MVC the design pattern, I’m referring to the ASP.NET implementation of the pattern. In this installment, I’m going to focus on one of MVC’s most useful features: integrated JavaScript and CSS bundling and minification.

Microsoft released ASP.NET MCV 3 just over a year ago. If history is a good indicator of timing, we can expect the next ASP.NET MVC release in the not too distant future. As of this writing’s date, Microsoft has not announced a firm release date. You don’t, however, have to wait to get your hands on the bits. You can download the developer preview here: http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc4. ASP.NET MVC 4 also runs inside of Visual Studio 10 and the Visual Studio 11 Developer Prev...iew. MVC 4 can be hosted alongside MVC 3. You can find all the details concerning installation in the aforementioned link. As with all developer preview/pre-release software, features sets are subject to change, which may range from minor tweaks to major changes. Please keep that in mind as you evaluate any developer preview as to how you can incorporate it into your development efforts.See More

Both ASP.NET MVC and the ADO.NET Entity Framework are both very popular topics right now in the developer community.Having spoken at various user group meeting and code camps it is very obvious to me what topics a lot of developers are interested in. I see that sessions about ASP.NET MVC or the Entity Framework are always packed with developers eager for more information. The focus of this article is the Entity Framework, but in the context of an ASP.NET MVC application.... As such, I am assuming at least basic understanding of ASP.NET MVC but little-to-none with Entity Framework.See More

Getting friendly with HTML in ASP.NET MVC just got a whole lot easier.In this article, I’ll delve into the Spark View Engine, an alternate view engine for the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Spark’s main goal is to allow HTML to dominate the flow of view development while allowing code to fit in seamlessly.

Rick Strahl discusses the new ASP.NET Orcas beta release.

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

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

If you need to build a SPA that works across a variety of devices and platforms, you need to check out Aurelia. Jim and Jeremy take a fascinating look at what you can do with the open-source UI JavaScript framework called Aurelia that doesn’t behave like a framework.

Sahil shows us how DevOps (formerly called VSTS) can connect disparate functionality using two of his favorite tools: Docker and Angular.

So, you’re considering using PHP for a project, but aren’t sure where to start, or maybe even why you should use it? Perhaps you’ve heard all the horror stories about PHP being spaghetti code, bad for your health or that it’ll run slow as molasses. Don’t believe them! It’s not as bad as you think, and with the right approach, can be quite fun (and productive). Honest! Don’t believe me? Read on...

Rick Strahl discusses building rich internet applications

Bootstrap 2.x was a great product, but you’ll build more attractive, more inviting, and more accessible websites with the next Bootstrap. Jim and Scott tell us what’s new.

LINQ to XML, which makes query a first class construct in C# and Visual Basic, is the new XML API in the .NET Framework 3.5. With the introduction of Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Microsoft is introducing LINQ implementations that work over objects, data, and XML. LINQ to XML improves on System.Xml in the .NET Framework 2.0 by being both simpler to use and more efficient. Microsoft developed this new API because the W3C-based DOM API does not integrate well into the LINQ programming model.

You may have already heard about SignalR and that the new version makes it easier to build fast Web apps and provide great user experiences. Anthony explores this tool and shows you how to take advantage of it.

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

Rick follows up on his server-side Angular back end for ASP.NET Core with this interesting look at the matching front end.

Imagine that you need some specific information in your application, such as a shipping rate. You now go to a special "service" search engine and look up the type of service you need over the Web.Now, imagine that you can get this information easily from the service and simply plug it directly into your application. Sound too good to be true? Believe it or not, the technologies to make this possible are available today. Web Services provide this functionality by bringing... to application development the same interlinked mechanisms that have made the Web so popular for Web browsing. By sharing data over the Web in standard formats, "Web Services" is becoming the new industry buzzword. Microsoft is talking about Web Services as the second life of the Internet. Web Services will tie together applications, just as the Web Browser and URL links have tied together Web pages. "The Web At Your Service" is the new mantra. In this article, Rick discusses SOAP and Web Services, then creates a sample Web Service and integrates it into an application.See More

A Single Page Application (SPA) is a different way of building HTML 5 applications from traditional Web page development. Instead of spreading the functionality of your Web applications across a collection of separate Web pages with hyperlinks between them, you instead define a single root page that the user lands on and never leaves as long as they are working with your application. You define client-side logic that switches out the data and chunks of content within tha...t page to allow the user to navigate from logical screen to logical screen without ever leaving the page. This means that the user never sees a full page refresh while using your application. They see portions of the screen change based on their interaction, and those changes can be done in a more fluid way with transitions to enhance the user experience. You can also support using the application while offline by storing data client-side, based on some of the newer APIs of HTML 5. Taking this approach makes an SPA feel very much like a desktop application to the end user.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.

In last issue's article about CodeIgniter, Menachem took a first look at this tool and how to build simple applications with it. In this installment, Menachem looks further into CodeIgniter and show how easily it can be used to build large-scale applications with the features that any good application should have.

Node.js by itself is a blank canvas. However, the Express.js web framework for Node.js provides programmers with a clear, concise development platform to build high performance Web APIs.

In most business applications, you create a common look and feel, data entry pages, and a method for navigating through the application. As you begin to work with HTML5, you will want to build these features and take advantage of the features of HTML5 that can make your applications stand out from the crowd. In this article, you will be presented with several common business Web pages that give you an idea of the power of HTML5 and CSS 3.

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.

I’d guess that everyone reading this magazine has heard of Silverlight™. I’ll also guess that not everyone has jumped at the opportunity to “play” with something that had been in beta. The good news is that Silverlight 1.0 is now released! I’ve spent a lot of time with Silverlight since Microsoft made the Community Technology Preview version available as WPF/E. The delta between a Web site without Silverlight and a Web site that allows you to experience the wonderfulness... of Silverlight is huge. Before you finish reading this article, I hope you’ll realize how very easy it is to bridge that gap. See More

Silverlight Unleashed - Embedding the Silverlight Control Manually - Letting Silverlight.js Handle the Dirty Work - Understanding Your Hosting Options - Interacting with the Silverlight Control Programmatically

After four years of trying out every iteration of Web server application deployment that Microsoft created for .NET, ClickOnce has finally allowed me to succeed in deploying one particularly complex smart client application. But I still had to tear a few more hairs out before I got it working and came to love ClickOnce. I’m writing this article to share some of the not-so-obvious ways (including a hack or two) to use ClickOnce for application deployment.

The CODE Framework is an open-source application framework by the makers of CODE Magazine. It is entirely free of charge. It covers a wide range of features that can be applied altogether or individually in an À la carte fashion. All of these features revolve around a single concept: Building advanced business applications in a productive and maintainable fashion while maintaining great application architecture. In this article, we are focusing on a subset of the CODE Fr...amework, specifically the components used to build WPF applications using the MVVM and MVC patterns.See More

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.

In another of his articles on Angular, Paul dives into global configurations and shows you how to access your Angular applications from any component or service class.

In this day and age, Web applications have become the norm. We've even come to the point where many development projects involve Web applications that must be installed on multiple servers.But even if you don't build vertical Web applications, it's useful to have a configuration utility that can recreate a configuration via code. This might be for backup purposes, or for high volume environments like load balancing, where multiple servers need to be configured.

Web Slices are a new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 feature that allow you to subscribe to parts of a Web page and view updates directly from the Internet Explorer Favorites bar.Web Slices let users bring their favorite parts of the Web with them wherever they browse. This article will explain how Web Slices work, why they are cool, and how you can start creating Web Slices of your own.

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

Some time ago, a client called me and asked me to tell him when someone had logged in and out of the network. It was a reasonable request but it presented a challenge for which I had to develop a quick solution.

If you haven't heard, accessibility is one of the most important aspects of a Web site experience.By using the accessibility features in Silverlight™ 2, you can provide the best experience for all users. Building a rich Internet experience can be a daunting task when you have to balance a cool visual design with usability.

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

Paul begins a new series on working within HTML and the Web API with this close-up look at JavaScript and jQuery. You’ll learn some of the juicy details, but you’ll also get a good overview of what these technologies can do for you.

In this second installment of his new series on working within HTML and the Web API, Paul looks at the four standard HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. By creating a product information page with mock data, you’ll get a good idea of the power of these tools.

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

You’ve probably heard about Facebook’s new JavaScript library, React. Milton shows you how it works and encourages you to consider using it on your next project.

Change is always a central issue for software development.In this regard Microsoft AJAX Web application is never an exception. You may find your application packed with a plethora of UpdatePanels and event handlers. Besides, you may be confused that ASP.NET AJAX offers more than one technique to do one thing but you cannot use them consistently. As a result, it becomes hard to make changes in your application.

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

Great tools play a critical role in developer productivity, and while many web development tools exist, they likely don’t meet your needs in all tasks. For example, you may want to quickly debug JavaScript, investigate a behavior specific to Internet Explorer, or iterate rapidly to prototype a new design or try solutions to a problem.

Plugins for Windows Live Writer are simple to create and can provide many extra features.This article will show you how to start writing plugins for Windows Live Writer, including how to get started, how to debug, and how to package the final plugin.

MooTools is an object-oriented JavaScript framework aimed at experienced web developers who need to write effective code quickly, effectively, and in a cross-browser manner. Dino walks you through how to use it and why you just might want to.

Have you ever wondered if your forms were capturing the information you or your clients need? Q designs forms with HTML that are clean and simple, and he’s happy to show you how.

DotNetNuke 2.0 is the latest version of the increasingly popular, open-source, content management portal. It was originally released as an open source project on Dec 24, 2002. In the past fifteen months it has grown to over 50,000 lines of managed code. One thing is for sure, you won't be alone using it! The DotNetNuke support forum is one of the most active and dynamic forums on the www.asp.net Web site. There are currently over 45,000 registered users on the official D...otNetNuke Web site and membership continues to grow at an exponential rate.In this article, Jim will cover some of the new features in DNN 2.0 as well as discuss upgrading portals from prior DNN versions. He also explores the new data access methodology and walks you through the steps involved in developing custom DNN 2.0 modules.See More

Craig builds a simple application that reveals the states, dependencies, and methods of navigation that you’ll need in order to fully understand the Angular UI Router framework.

At this point, you’re clear that your app has to work on all platforms, especially on smartphones. Paul gets tables to adjust their sizes based on which platform is being used to view it.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a collection of architectural principles combined to integrate new and existing applications both within the enterprise and in business to business or partner integration scenarios. This article (Part 1) will provide a conceptual overview of BizTalk Server 2006 and how it serves to address the problem domain common in the EAI space. In Part 2, I’ll introduce a business case for implementing an online ordering and fulfillment sy...stem and provide a step-by-step example of how to implement a solution that addresses the problem domain.See More

The Entity Framework team at Microsoft has been making several improvements since the launch of v4 with Visual Studio. The biggest of these is the capability to use a Code First or Code Only development model. Previously, if you wanted to work with the Entity Framework, you had to use either a Database First or Model First development model.

The TV commercials took me and many others by surprise. A stream-of-conscienceless-style ad that had our brains struggling to catch up with the next topic that the next person blurted out. Funny enough, the bouncing from topic to topic by the actors in the commercial seem to be a familiar metaphor to anyone that has traversed search results at one time or another. And at the end, a familiar logo appears: Microsoft, followed by a not-so-familiar one: Bing.

Paul continues his series on Bootstrap by creating a custom product selection system that keeps a running total of a user’s purchases.

Paul teaches us how to use Bootstrap’s accordion features to make easily mobile-adaptable navigation panels.

When it comes to creating complex structured layouts in HTML, Flexbox, Rick tells us, is more capable than HTML tables were.

Shawn shows you how to use Vue.js to separate views and models and make Web development formatting a lot simpler.

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

CRUD’s a part of everyday life for a lot of devs. If you’re one of them, you’ll be interested in this first installation of Paul’s new series on using Angular.

Building on his article in the last issue, Paul adds HTML, Angular code, and Web API methods so that the user can add, edit, and delete product data.

In the third and final segment of his series on using CRUD in Angular, Paul adds additional server-side validation to the generated Entity Framework classes. He also shows us the client-side validation and validates data in Angular.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a secure, reliable, and scalable messaging platform for the .NET Framework 3.0.With WCF, SOAP messages can be transmitted over a variety of supported protocols including IPC (named pipes), TCP, HTTP and MSMQ. Like any distributed messaging platform, you must establish security policies for protecting messages and for authenticating and authorizing calls. This article will discuss how WCF accomplishes this.

Building an API-based app doesn’t have to be daunting. Rick shows you how to use Angular 2.0 to build a small app that breaks out business logic, uses a repository class to consolidate data access code, and deals with complex relationships and data updates.

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

New releases ASP.NET Core and .NET Core have come up with some interesting high-level architecture that you’ll want to read about. You’ll definitely want to play with these tools after Rick shows you some cool new tricks.

There’s a new language called Go, and you’ll want to check out Ted’s exploration of it. Go ahead. You know you want to.

Learn how to use the IHttpActionResult methods in the .NET Controller class to deal with exceptions when Paul explores the messages that no one likes to receive.

Web Applications tend to be stateless, and running long requests can be problematic for Web backends. Long-running requests can tie up valuable Web server connections and resources. In this article, Rick describes one approach that can be used to handle lengthy requests. A polling mechanism and an Event manager class can be used to pass messages between a Web application and a processing server running the actual long task.

As developers are just getting used to ASP.NET MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft has already planned and released a preview of the next version of ASP.NET. What started out as “just another option” for ASP.NET developers has become the programming style of choice for developers writing .NET applications for the web.

Ben Coe gives us tips on planning an engineering project when you’re starting with a blank slate. He starts with hosting options, addresses scaling, and looks at tools like Heroku, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), and the Twelve-Factor App Manifesto.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services can be hosted with Internet Information Services (IIS); with the new Windows Activation Service (WAS) installed with IIS 7.0; or with any managed application process including console, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), or managed Windows service applications.Selecting the right hosting environment for your services is a choice driven largely by deployment requirements related to transport protocol and operating platform.

Joe helps you understand the emerging front-end framework technology that’s showing up everywhere these days.

We all know that applications have evolved, and not just towards Web deployment, .NET Framework development, and mash-up functionality.

Once upon a time. HTML forms were invented to provide a link between the various functions in an application. Then other tools pushed them aside. But the time has come for HTML forms to rise from the cinders and take their rightful place in Web development. George shows you how and why.

The value of URLs for a website cannot be understated. The scheme of URLs can help give clues to visitors and machines alike regarding the structure of your website and well-crafted locations help facilitate search engine indexing, bookmarking and sharing. The role of URLs in Ajax applications becomes even more important as content is often changing on the page while the URL remains untouched.

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!

Miguel looks at organizing styles and integrating technologies to make one spiffy new kind of app with multi-SPA layers, and you don’t have to throw away your Microsoft experience to do it.

E-commerce applications require user-friendly mechanisms for payment.Although e-commerce sites usually use full credit card processing gateways, offering PayPal for payment provides an option for those who don't want to send credit card information across the Internet. If you run a Web shop that uses direct credit card processing and you want to integrate PayPal, you'll find that using PayPal as a processing service is not as straightforward as using a payment gateway. I...n this article, I'll describe how you can minimize the external PayPal interaction and work the PayPal payment into your order processing workflow to provide a seamless interface using ASP.NET and C#.See More

You’ve made your website pretty spiffy, but the one thing it’s missing is the one thing that makes social media platforms so hard to compete with. Add sound and video to your content by making it YouTube-capable. Jason shows you how!

Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 has a lot of cool new features that make Web page browsing more accessible.I’m going to cover Caret Browsing, Zoom Version 2, High DPI, Accessibility Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) support and User Interface Automation (UI Automation) support. Caret Browsing is particularly helpful for low-mobility users. Zoom 2 and High DPI support targets low-vision users, and the new ARIA and UI Automation support targets screen-reader users. Low-mobi...lity users prefer to use the keyboard or devices that interact with a virtual keyboard. Some low-vision users require specialized assistive software to interact with computers while others can do well with features and tools shipped with the operating system.See More

Peter introduces you to GraphQL so your REST API client list can grow and change without a lot of pain. You can use strongly typed schema, eliminated over- and under-fetching, and you can get analytics about how clients are really using your API.

Compatibility View allows access to content designed for older Web browsers. When a website says that it supports modern Web standards, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 respects that and displays the site using its most standards compliant mechanism. In the majority of cases, this works out just fine. However, every once in a while, a page that says “display me using modern standards” really means “display me like Internet Explorer 7 used to display modern standards pages”. Th...is is where Compatibility View comes in.See More

The newest member of the jQuery family of projects is jQuery Mobile. A good way to describe what jQuery Mobile is to think of it as jQuery UI for mobile devices. If you have wanted to write mobile-optimized UIs over your applications, jQuery Mobile is a library that you will want to add to your bag of tricks. Like jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile is themeable. This article makes two assumptions. First, you are familiar with jQuery and second, you are familiar with jQuery UI. If ...you are not familiar with jQuery or jQuery UI, I suggest that you take a moment to familiarize yourself with those libraries. Fortunately, the websites for these projects (jquery.com and jQueryUI.com respectively) are replete with comprehensive documentation and code examples. jQuery Mobile is no different. The official website for jQuery Mobile is jquerymobile.com. As of this writing, jQuery Mobile 1.0 Beta 3 has been released. Its beta status notwithstanding, jQuery Mobile is ready for primetime and has been incorporated into many applications already. In this article, I will cover what you need to get started with some simple examples that illustrate how to create one page and multi-page apps. In addition, I’ll touch upon the theming capabilities in jQuery Mobile.See More

Chris shows you that you can’t depend on SPAs to do all the dirty work anymore. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) not only have more capabilities, but they make your users’ experience much snappier.

If you need to navigate around your Single-Page Application (SPA), you’ll want to know about routing in Angular. Paul shows you how.

An effective use of CSS is an easy way to maintain and consolidate the visual aspects of Web development. Cascading Style Sheets are a Web standard that have been in existence for a number of years. Most modern browsers support CSS, so their use in your .NET applications should pose no cross-browser compatibility issues. However, like most things in the Web world, various browsers may behave differently depending on the CSS you feed it.

The article "Introduction to Cloud Firestore" by Wei-Meng Lee introduces developers to the Cloud Firestore service from Google. The author explains how Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that allows developers to store data on the cloud and keep clients synchronized through real-time listeners. Lee provides step-by-step instructions on setting up Cloud Firestore in a React Native application, as well as demonstrating how to add, retrieve, update, and delete doc...uments in the database. The article serves as a beginner's guide to getting started with Cloud Firestore and highlights its benefits for building responsive apps that can work online and offline.See More

As the bedrock to the web, HTML has evolved in many ways from its birth in 1991. While the markup language has had its share of ups and downs, the advent of what’s being called “HTML5” is a welcome and much anticipated addition of new semantic capabilities and valuable APIs.

Is dealing with databases on a browser your idea of a bad nightmare? Craig implements an in-browser document database called IndexedDB to create, read, update, and delete large sets of records, just like a database on a server.

Ruby on Rails is an open source web development stack with a large developer base. Last year, Ruby on Rails reached a critical milestone with the release of Ruby on Rails version 3.0. For more information about Ruby on Rails I recommend checking out www.rubyonrails.org. You can find installation information, documentation and links to other resources on this site. This article will demonstrate how to get up and running with Ruby on Rails with help from the RailsInstaller.

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.

Ted takes you on a little spelunk into Java, replete with some history for context.

Numbers and arithmetic can be a challenge in any language, and John shows you how to deal with them in JavaScript.

John elaborates on a useful preventative in JavaScript.

John starts his new series on JavaScript with a list of interesting problems and solutions.

Rick Strahl discuss scripting with jQuery.

Sahil explores the three cardinal rules of working on any JavaScript project and introduces some cool new tools.

The Razor syntax is much more than just a clean way to write ASP.NET MVC Views and WebMatrix web pages. In fact, with a working knowledge of the Razor API, you can leverage Razor templates in any application. The Razor API exposes a powerful library for parsing, compiling, and executing templates created using the Razor syntax.

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

Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool provides an easy way to simulate large numbers of users against your Web application.This tool makes it possible to make intelligent decisions about hardware and software load incurred by your application and how much traffic a given machine or group of machines can handle. In this article Rick shows how the tool works and how to properly interpret the performance data it generates.

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

Users already have many usernames and passwords for different popular online services, and with OpenID and OAuth, you can leverage those. Why burden users with yet another set of credentials for your site if they can use their Google or Facebook account, or any other OpenID or OAuth account? In this article, I will show you how to do this with ASP.NET 4.5, but more importantly help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

Continuing his series on Angular, Paul looks at logging as a reporting tool for debugging, warnings, errors, and other types of messages, as well as calling classes to log to the console, local storage, and Web API.

Improved standards support in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 makes developing sites that work across browsers simpler and less time consuming. The latest release of the world’s most popular Web browser includes upgrades to the Web platform, compatibility, and functionality designed to keep you on-point creating high-quality interactive experiences, not debugging browser interop issues. Let’s discuss how to best take advantage of these new features while ensuring your Web pag...es continue to work correctly in older browsers.See More

You’re probably already using Markdown for HTML text entry and formatting your README.md files. But Markdown is good for so much more—Rick shows you parsing, stable content in a website, embedding converted HTML into a Razor output, and 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.

Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix (http://www.asp.net/webmatrix.WebMatrix), which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers.

When considering mobile development, you have a variety of techniques to choose from. In many cases, reactive rendering (using CSS media queries) provides a good solution. Additional mobile customization can be achieved by using ASP.NET MVC4 device detection/customization to provide adaptive rendering. Both of these techniques follow the traditional Web development pattern where each page is focused on a specific task. In an application managing a list, there is a page d...evoted to the list of items, a second page to view details, and perhaps a third to edit a specific item.See More

If you don’t need the enormity of a SPA, you don’t have to lose the benefits of a framework. Shawn recommends using Vue to simplify the code and make it both more reliable and more testable.

I foresee that in a couple of years pretty much any Web site will be easy to consume from within mainstream devices. I deliberately used the term “mainstream devices” instead of more specific terms like tablets and smartphones just to give a measure of how fluid the situation is.

Jan/Feb 08 MVP Corner Article

How did we ever survive without social networks? I asked myself that today and couldn’t come up with an answer I liked. If I need to find contact information for that DBA I worked with three jobs ago, it’s off to LinkedIn or Plaxo. When I’m wondering about that guy from high school who was going to be a world famous rock star, Facebook is only a couple of clicks away. Out of town for a conference? No worries, I just check Twitter to see where my friends are.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has become the de facto data transfer standard for client-side Web applications that use JavaScript. JSON is a JavaScript-based object/value encoding format that looks very close to raw JavaScript and can be very easily parsed by JavaScript code because JavaScript can effectively evaluate a JSON string and re-materialize an object from it. Unlike XML there’s no parsing involved in the process, so it’s easy to work with and also relativel...y quick because the actual parsing (or rather evaluating) of a JSON string is done internally in the JavaScript engine rather than through manual code. The format and data types are also well defined so it’s easy to generate JSON strings in other languages like .NET (although parsing is a bit more complex).See More

If you want to build efficient, reliable, and scalable apps, you’ll find the Nest.js framework to be an essential tool. Bilal shows you how to build a server-side app as he shows you Nest’s intrinsic compatibilities with other libraries and databases.

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

WCF 4 is all about productivity.

Can you imagine a world without search?I don’t think a single day goes by when I don’t do a least one Internet search. Internet search has gotten leaps and bounds better than what it started out as years ago; yet aside from adding a search box to the browser chrome, browsers, as of yet, have not significantly changed the way that users search online.

In .NET Web applications you can find that in many places custom classes and collections are better choices than the DataSet or DataTable. The custom classes or the custom class collections, which are truly object oriented, allow developers to employ all object-oriented programming techniques.

Great performance is one of many things being delivered in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, the latest version of the popular browser. Beyond a much faster JScript engine, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 includes profound performance improvements and exciting new developer features that make it one of the most exciting browser releases in years.

Be aware that this is not going to be a classic how-to article that delves more or less deeply into some technical issue or feature. It is, instead, an article that aims at providing an overview of the options you have at present for architecting Web solutions.

First Premier Bankcard (www.firstpremier.com) is the 10th largest issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards in the United States.First Premier employs multiple thousands of people spread across the state of South Dakota. A major percentage of the employees at First Premier work in call-center operations helping people apply for credit cards.

Everyone knows that there are standards when it comes to building apps. And most people know that there are standards for accessibility. But did you know that writing accessible apps is better for everyone? Ashleigh shows you what to think about the next time you sit down to create something.

Indigo is the next generation application connectivity and services from Microsoft, superseding the variety of .NET connectivity solutions available today: ASMX Web services, Remoting, and Enterprise Services. Since .NET debuted some five years ago, all three technologies have been inundated in either hype or misconceptions. With Indigo around the corner, it is time to take a long hard look at these three technologies, and separate fact from myth so that you will be best... prepared for Indigo. This article starts by examining the existing technologies, describing their merits and shortcomings, putting them in the correct perspective of a modern distributed application, and suggests where to best apply them. Then the article briefly describes the Indigo programming model, and assesses how to best mitigate the cost of the migration.See More

The ADO.NET Entity Framework raises the level of abstraction at which developers work with data.Rather than coding against rows and columns, the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows you to define a higher-level Entity Data Model over your relational data, and then program in terms of this model. You get to deal with your data in the shapes that make sense for your application and those shapes are expressed in a richer vocabulary that include concepts like inheritance, complex... types, and explicit relationships.The ADO.NET Entity Framework raises the level of abstraction at which developers work with data.Rather than coding against rows and columns, the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows you to define a higher-level Entity Data Model over your relational data, and then program in terms of this model. You get to deal with your data in the shapes that make sense for your application and those shapes are expressed in a richer vocabulary that include concepts like inheritance, complex types, and explicit relationships.See More

Rick explores the new features in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core and shows you that the wait was worth it.

In the world of browser-based development, interoperability is king. Unfortunately, interoperability can be at the expense of performance.

Reviewing where we’ve been over the last decade in the world of .NET and Visual StudioAt the brink of a new release of .NET and Visual Studio, you may wonder where all of this new technology is taking us. Not only do we now have a number of new flavors of Visual Studio targeted to release on April 12, 2010, we also get to enjoy a plethora of new technologies such as Silverlight 4 and RIA Services, as well as new hardware platforms to consider, such as Windows Phone 7 Ser...ies. Understanding the future usually begins with a reflection upon the past so let’s take a look at how Visual Studio has changed in the last decade.See More

HTTP content retrieval is an important component for applications these days.Although .NET reduces the need to explicitly retrieve content from the Web through built-in mechanisms in the Web Services framework, ADO.NET and the XML classes, there are still many needs to retrieve Web content directly and manipulate it as text or data downloaded into files. In this article, I will describe the functionality of the HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse classes and provide an ea...sy to use wrapper class. The class simplifies the HTTP access and provides most of the common features in a single interface while still providing full access to the base functionality of the HttpWebRequest class. In the process, I will describe some sticky issues like string encoding and Cookie handling and some related topics like implementing events and running multiple threads to service Web requests.See More

With ever-larger Web applications being built to service very large numbers of simultaneous users pounding away at Web sites, the issue of scaling applications beyond a single machine is important for Web application developers and network administrators.While hardware capabilities seem to be increasing to the point that high-powered single machines can handle tremendous loads, there will always be those apps that push beyond a single machine. In addition, for many admin...istrators and IT planners, it's often not good enough to say that a server can handle x number of users. They want redundancy, backup and overflow support, so a Web server or hardware failure or an unexpected surge of visitors doesn't cripple the corporate Web site. In this article, Rick discusses the issues of scalability and how load balancing services can help provide redundancy and extra horsepower to large Web sites.See More

The Internet Explorer team has made significant investments to ensure that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is the most secure version to date.Many of these improvements (like the SmartScreen anti-phishing/anti-malware filter) operate automatically and require no changes to Web pages or add-ons. However, other security improvements will impact Web applications and browser add-ons. This article describes how to take advantage of these new Internet Explorer security features to ...help protect Web users and applications.See More

If HTTPS or HTTP over TLS and registering certificates has got you down, you’ll want to read Rick’s take on this required technology. He’ll show you how to keep your website safe and introduce you to some useful new technologies.

In the first installment of his new series, Paul addresses who needs access to what in Angular, and how to make sure that nothing unpleasant happens on the client-side.

In this second installment of his Angular security series, Paul authenticates a user against a SQL Server table and secures Web API methods with the JSON Web Token standard.

In this third installment of his Angular security series, Paul addresses the Angular 6 release and shows you how to build an array of claims without single properties for security.

Data in XML format will play a significant role for the foreseeable future.Moreover, it's clear that XML and XSL will play a significant role in most, if not all, of my future applications. Why is it, however, that almost everything we read talks about merging XML+XSL on the client side, which requires IE 5 or higher browsers? In this article, Steve shows how to apply XSL transformations on the server to get around this problem.

The title of this article is a misnomer, but I still picked this title because it is indeed the problem we are trying to solve. The problem is session state, especially in-process session state, is just evil. It makes your application less predictable, less reliable, less scalable, and locks you out of possibilities such as Windows Azure.

The next version of Silverlight should be available by the time you read this article. The Silverlight team has followed a fast pace during the last few years, producing four versions of their framework in only thirty months. Each new version of Silverlight has been full of surprises and useful features. Version 5 is no different. Let’s look as some of the best features available in SL 5

One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production.All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet another problem of being an on-demand consultant is that the clock starts ticking even before I've understood the problem desc...ription.One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production. All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet anotherSee More

It seems you cannot turn in one direction or another and not hear about a new JavaScript library or CSS framework that promises to be the silver bullet-to be THE thing that will make web-based application development a breeze. This article will introduce you to Knockout.js (http://knockoutjs.com/). Knockout.js is an open source library (under the MIT License) that is pure JavaScript that works with any existing web framework and every mainstream browser. Further, Knockou...t.js is fully documented with a complete set of online tutorials. What does Knockout.js do? It simplifies the task of building data-aware web UIs through the application of the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) pattern. Regardless of the business problem your web applications are built to solve, all web applications, and just about every other application for that matter, shares the following characteristics:See More

TypeScript is a new Microsoft offering that seeks to change the way we write JavaScript. As the name implies, TypeScript associates a strongly typed layer in conjunction with JavaScript. TypeScript also associates an object-oriented layer with JavaScript.

The Silverlight ListBox is much more than you may think. When most people think of a ListBox they typically think of just a simple control that displays rows of text. However, the Silverlight ListBox is one of the most flexible controls you will find. I tend to think of the ListBox as similar to the ASP.NET Repeater control as it too is very flexible. In this article, I will show you six different ways to display data in a Silverlight ListBox.

If you've ever wondered how to commit changes to a database using ASP.NET Web API as the service provider, Jeff Etter gives you the recipe for the secret sauce.

One of the classic problems with database applications is refreshing stale data. Imagine a typical e-commerce site with products and categories. A vendor’s product list most likely does not change very often and their category list changes even less frequently. However, those same lists must be queried from the database over and over again every time a user browses to that Web site. This is an annoyingly inefficient use of resources and developers and architects have bee...n stuck playing cat-and-mouse trying to reduce the waste.See More

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

Web applications are essentially made up of functions that map inputs (requests) to outputs (responses).This article looks at a way to store the relationship between request and response and pre-generate responses, thus reducing the resources needed fulfill requests.

Derick shows us how to achieve a high level of interactivity in our Web applications with small-scale functionality.

Hot on the heels of the groundbreaking release of ASP.NET MVC CTP 1 in December of 2007, an open source project called MvcContrib came to life.MvcContrib has enjoyed tens of thousands of downloads since it started in December of 2007. In this article, I will explain MvcContrib; it’s major components, how to use it, and how to get involved in its continued development.

Craig shows you how to gracefully resolve conflicts and synchronization issues with disconnected databases.

If you want your Web page to hold audio recordings that play when users want them to, you’ll want to read John’s article. He shows you that it’s not only quick, but it’s easy!

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!

Are you moving a Windows desktop application to the browser, and sweating bullets, or perhaps just not quite sure about how all the new Web and data tools work together?With each passing year, Microsoft offers newer and more powerful tools for building rich database applications on the Web. So many and so frequently, in fact, that it can be hard to keep up with the new tools and still meet the requirements of your job! This article will show you how to get the most out o...f the new features in ASP.NET 3.5. The article will also show how you can use features in LINQ, even if you only use stored procedures for data access. And finally, since most applications use reporting, I’ll throw in a few nuggets on using SQL Server Reporting Services.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

Rick Strahl discusses considerations when writing JavaScript

HTML-based Web development has dominated application development for the last six years or so and there are no signs of that changing.However, things are changing as the .NET initiative takes hold. Although Microsoft has put a lot of effort into its Web-based interfaces, which include the powerful new ASP.NET Web Forms framework, I am guessing that there will actually be a push back to desktop-driven, forms-based applications once .NET takes hold.

When you wrap your JavaScript code into a closure, you won’t have bugs caused by unnecessary variables. Paul shows you how to do this using a templating tool called Mustache, which will help you get closer to coding in Angular.

You’ve been hearing a lot about Angular and it’s time to see what it can do for you. Paul continues his excellent series on Angular, the tool you need to create solid, reusable, and extensible code.

Paul continues his deep dive into AngularJS. This time, he uses this important tool to insert, update, and delete data by building some Web API calls.

Paul continues his deep dive into AngularJS. This time, he adds validation to the page so you can spot input errors.

In this article you will learn how to isolate yourself from change by taking advantage of the Provider Model.Designing your applications using the Provider Model will allow you to swap components out at runtime, thus allowing you to upgrade them easily.

The new view engine for ASP.NET MVC and WebMatrix combines simplicity and functionality to facilitate clean view development. In this article, I’ll dive into the Razor View Engine, the new default view engine for the ASP.NET MVC framework and WebMatrix products. Razor’s main goal is to simplify view development and to improve developer productivity while providing a clean view infrastructure.

Increasingly, we rely on NuGet Packages in our .NET Development efforts. When you need to add a library to your project, whether it is Entity Framework, AutoMapper, jQuery, etc., NuGet makes that task a simple one. What happens when you are on a plane, train, an automobile - in some circumstance where you are not online and consequently, not connected to your NuGet package source? This is where a local NuGet package source comes in handy. Locally, we can easily stand up ...an IIS-based NuGet package source. While useful, that is not the simplest thing we can do. Fortunately, the NuGet authors had the foresight and wisdom to allow us to create file directory-based NuGet package sources. This brief article will take you through the steps to create your own local NuGet package source.See More

The ASP.NET team has created lots of new goodies. One of the most useful, SignalR, is an async library for .NET to help build real-time, multi-user interactive web applications. Imagine this scenario: you have a web application and would like a simple way to push notifications to any number of clients. Perhaps you want to inform the client when something happens. You could write a polling mechanism, but that is inefficient. An event-based approach is a much more efficien...t approach. Event-based systems that can publish and subscribe to events are typically loosely coupled systems that easily adapt to change and are highly scalable. The SignalR library makes it very easy to build loosely coupled scalable applications that can send real-time updates to specified clients. In this article, I will take you through the some basic steps to get up and running with SignalR.See More

This oft-maligned language is made compelling when John takes it apart for us.

In another of his edifying series, John shows us how to get a response whether your code fails or succeeds using promises.

In the last 12 months, Windows Azure has undergone a dramatic transformation. It’s gone from “What is it?” to “We need it!” in very short order. Much, if not all of this, can be attributed to the stellar leadership of Scott Guthrie and his team. It should come as no surprise the ASP.Net team, which includes all the goodies from ASP.Net MVC, Web API and SignalR to name a few, were and continue to be under ScottGu’s leadership. It’s another reminder of what the power of pe...ople (really smart people to boot), working together in furtherance of a common vision can accomplish. Today, Windows Azure is a manifestation of that accomplishment. Windows Azure is actually many things. It can host TFS, Windows (obviously), SQL Server as well as other non-Windows technologies like PHP, Ubuntu, Java, Node.js to name a few. Windows Azure also has the capacity to host “Big Data” and to be a full-fledged media server. One of the biggest catch phrases today is “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS). Though its virtual machine features, Windows Azure delivers this capability as well. For the full details on what Windows Azure can deliver, navigate to windowsazure.com.See More

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

In this continuation of his series, Sahil focuses on TypeScript and why it’s mandatory if you want to write good, reliable code in JavaScript.

Rick Strahl discusses LINQ to SQL features.

If you have some small files to upload to a Web API, there’s no reason to use the same cumbersome process that works for larger files. Paul shows you how to save a lot of time and effort using Angular.

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

The Web View October 2007

Ruby is a very popular programming language. Ben explains why it’s so popular and helps us build our first app. And he helps us find beer.

What developer wants to spend hours manually writing Ajax pluming when the Ajax.NET framework does this for free? The Ajax.NET Framework presents a remarkably easy-to-use framework that will simplify Ajax development and allow developers to spend more time on implementation details and less time on parsing XML.

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.

Web services with Visual FoxPro (VFP) have never been easy. The most common Web service tool for FoxPro is the SOAP Toolkit, which has been discontinued and which had a host of problems when dealing with complex types passed over Web Services. In this article I’ll show how you can leverage the powerful Web service features of .NET and the new Windows Communication Foundation in your FoxPro application through COM Interop.

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

Originally published as a blog post - Fixing Web UI

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

Rick Strahl discusses the current status of the Web.

In this issue, you’ll find information on all things related to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.From Web Slices to Developer Tools, from our improvements in performance to the great new features for building Web 2.0 applications, there’s something here for everyone.

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.

Get ready for an exciting list (and examples) as Shawn explores the new tools in ASP.NET Core 3.0.

For those of you who have been waiting to see what Microsoft has been cooking up for the standards-based Web, dinner is served! Released to the Web in August 2008, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 delivers much more than just a snack for today’s ravenous tech-savvy users. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 dispenses a four-course meal guaranteed to please even the most discriminating of palates.

Chris shows you not only how, but also why you really want to use a Micro JavaScript Library.

When developing with Windows Live services, you open your application to a whole new world of software integration. In this fascinating realm of mash-up mania, developers can find tools for adding maps, searches, video, chats, and even social networking services directly into their applications and ultimately right into their users’ browsers. The benefit of adding services like Virtual Earth and Silverlight Streaming are obvious-creating dazzling content and facilitating... rich user experiences. Yet services like these are still limited to specific contexts within your program. They are perfectly wonderful for beefing up the user experience in Web sites, but wouldn’t it be great if the folks at Microsoft provided a service that helps you administer user accounts and customize services around your Web site? Well indeed they have, and its name is Windows Live Admin Center (admincenter.live.com).See More

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.

Sahil takes a look at some strange behavior on the part of JavaScript. He provides a list of common mistakes and what to do about them.

You may be wondering, with all the hype over XML, what can XML do for me today?You see the power of XML but may be having a hard time figuring out where it belongs in your application development strategy. In this article browser based applications will be discussed from the perspective of using XML as the data transport mechanism.