Steve Vinoski posted an interesting reflection about the use of description languages on RESTful services. I have to agree 200% with Steve, WSDL and 1.1 and simply horrendous. Although WSDL 2.0 drastically improves in the modeling aspects of the services it does not solve one of the fundamental problems of its predecessors which tightly couple web Services with RPC and object oriented models. This gets even worse when you are working with ESBs or Integration Servers that are highly dependent on WSDL...(read more)

A workaround for asp.net menu parent menuitem highlighting

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/code_to_live

I was on Code To Live.  Check it out as we talk about Ajax, Astoria, and all kinds of stuff.

Wally 

Good deal: 3 free e-books from Microsoft Press!

Go to http://csna01.libredigital.com/?urvs5cn3s8 sign with your Windows Live ID and get the full complete books!

Introducing Microsoft LINQ
by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo

Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX
by Dino Esposito

Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0
by Laurence Moroney

You can find many updated controls as well as 9 new controls in the Control Gallery. Add a color picker with NetColorPicker, adjust audio with ASP.Net Audio, add a tooltip with ASPNetToolTip, or find other controls to use in your own ASP.NET applications!

The IComparer available in .Net let you sort number or string. This little class available in both C# and VB shows how to implement an IComparer which will work with Mixed characters and numbers.

The Jobs Site Starter Kit (JSSK) has been updated to demonstrate many features of ASP.NET 3.5 including themes, master pages, data controls, membership, roles, profiles and AJAX. JSSK is a web application that provides a platform for candidates seeking job and the employers to share their needs.

This is the big news today. You can now configure Visual Studio 2008 to step through .NET 3.5 source. Scott Hanselman has the steps to set this up...except for one detail. When installing the QFE (KB944899) patch, you'll need to have your the VS 2008 installation disk you used to install in your DVD drive (or have the ISO mounted). If you don't, the patch just silently rolls back and fails.

Hey All,

Was having some wierd issues with asp.net ajax in firefox. If for example you put a textbox and a button in an updatepanel and put in a value and click the button. Then you hit F5, in IE the value will be gone, but in FireFox the value is still there. This is due to firefox caching input values. The only way to clear that textbox in FF is to do a ctrl + F5. I had an issue in a paged datagrid where if you paged to say page 5, hit F5 it would be at page 1, hit nextpage and it would be back at 5. This had me stumped until I realised that firefox is caching the values and most likely the __VIEWSTATE hidden field is being cached and this is causing the issues. So I added this to my page load:

Response.Cache.SetNoStore()


This made firefox work but this turns off client caching which might not be a good idea. A developer (Steve) at work had a form with a button and textbox which in FF would not remember the value, this was a real WTF moment. I got his code and double checked the differences between them. The only thing different was that in his form he had autocomplete="off" set on the form due to using an autocomplete extender. I added this to my form and presto it was working perfectly. This was ok but you might not want to turn autocomplete off for your whole form so what can we do:

Solution:


Thinking about this I thought of what fields could affect this. Looking at a page you have the following hidden fields:

__VIEWSTATE, __EVENTTARGET, __EVENTARGUMENT, __EVENTVALIDATION.


I decided to try and turn of autocomplete for only these fields using some script at the bottom of my page:

<script>
       function setAutoCompleteOff(id) {
            var elem = document.getElementById(id);
            if(elem) {
                elem.setAttribute('autocomplete', 'off');
            }           
        }
       
        setAutoCompleteOff('__VIEWSTATE');
        setAutoCompleteOff('__EVENTTARGET');
        setAutoCompleteOff('__EVENTARGUMENT');
        setAutoCompleteOff('__EVENTVALIDATION');
</script>


Then I turned autocomplete back on on the form, and gave it a go, and to my supprise it worked perfectly. Now FF was not using sending over the cached values on hitting F5 and was using the original values. This meant my page works fine. One more thing is you can now turn on EnableEventValidation on your page and it seems to work fine now.

 

To see for yourself setup a test page with some controls in an updatepanel and a link which will output the value of the ViewState for example. Check the value of the viewstate and do some async postbacks that change things. Check the viewstate again, it will be different. Hit F5 and check the viewstate you would expect it to be the same as the viewstate in step 1. But it is not. Add my code changes and do the same, now in step 2 you get the same viewstate as in step 1.



If anyone has any suggestions let me know.

 
 

Thanks

Stefan
 

Watch a video by Chris Pels about working with cookies, a video by Noam Ben-Ami about the ADO.NET Entity Designer, and 3 more videos in the LINQ series by Scott Stanfield.

While this is not a book for beginners in the ASP.NET world I found the book to be very informative.  Joydip Kanjilal has taken a section of data handling and display, dug into the internals and brings it to the pages of his first book.  Even though I've been in the ASP.NET world since it's inception I've never been a strong UI type developer.  With this book I have the essentials for using Win UI data display components.

Now, for the little nits:  While all the bits and parts were covered the book and the author displays a very clear understanding of the subject it was a little rough in parts.  Some of it was due to inconsistent indentations in code examples, some code bits that would obviously (to a seasoned developer) not compile due to syntax errors (using upper ASCII instead of quotes, line wrap issues not marked, etc).

For a first dive into LINQ Joydip did an excellent job.  While many people are trying to determine if LINQ is the right fit I see many uses for it in current and future development.  While some are against writing inline SQL in their business objects and others are all for it I think LINQ is the middle part of data <--> business that has been missing.  Yes, you can go directly against a data store with LINQ but I think the versatility of LINQ will shine in the middle layers.  Joydip does a good job of tickling your creative juices with his samples and helps open up some possibilities that have been lacking for a long time.  Not only can LINQ go directly against data sources like SQL and XML it can be a querying object against arrays, lists, generic collections and more.  It makes a great data source for a Model View Controller/Presenter approach as well.  Check out the LINQ Forums for more ideas.

Overall I liked the book.  I would recommend anyone interested in displaying data in ASP.NET to at least peruse the book and determine if there is enough for what they need.  I look forward to more books by Joydip. 

Cross posted from my blog at http://schema.sol3.net/kbarrows

Yet another article about converting to Excel XML Format, which reduces a programmer's work to the bare minimum

This article presents code that augments any INPUT box with an auto-suggest feature, AJAX-capable

This article discusses how to create an HTML Editor server control for use within an ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 environment.

The easiest way to localize projects for .NET developers

Want to debug the .net framework?  Or super geeky and just want to see how it's all done?  The .NET framework libraries' source is now available.

• .NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).

• ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)

• Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)

• Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)

• ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/16/net-framework-library-source-code-now-available.aspx

 

Shows a method for unit testing views in the .net MVC framework