All posts by : ScottGus Blog

1 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available - Today we shipped the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate (RC).  Click here to download it (note: the link just went live so if it isn’t working wait a few minutes for the server you are hitting to refresh).  It works with both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 (which is free). Today’s RC is the last public release of ASP.NET MVC that we’ll ship prior to the final “1.0” release.  We expect to ship the final ASP.NET MVC 1.0 release next month. In addition to bug fixes, today’s build includes several new features.  It also includes some refinements to existing features based on customer feedback.  Please read the release notes that ship with the A......

2 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery and Upcoming View Improvements with the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate - Today we launched a new ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery on the www.asp.net site.  The design gallery hosts free HTML design templates that you can download and easily use with your ASP.NET MVC applications.  Included with each design template is a Site.master file, a CSS stylesheet, and optionally a set of images, partials, and helper methods that support them.  The gallery allows you to preview each of the designs online, as well as download a .zip version of them that you can extract and integrate into your site.  The gallery allows anyone to create and submit new designs under the creative commons license.  Visitors to the gallery can vote to provide feedback o......

3 of 36 | New ASP.NET Charting Control: - Microsoft recently released a cool new ASP.NET server control - <asp:chart /> - that can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios: Download the free Microsoft Chart Controls Download the VS 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Documentation Visit the Microsoft Chart Control Forum Once installed the <asp:chart/> control shows up under the "Data" tab on the Toolbox, and can be easily declared on any ASP.NET page as a standard server control: <asp:chart /> supports a rich assortment of char......

4 of 36 | Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 - We shipped Silverlight 2 last month.  Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines.  It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises.  Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed. Silverlight 2 was a major release, and delivered an impressive set of cross-browser, cross-platform functionality for Media and Rich Internet Application experiences.  It has been great watching new sites launch using it. Media Exper......

5 of 36 | Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 - Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications.  One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects.  Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt and create optimal user experience designs. The WPF UI framework shipped in Silverlight further enables a great designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts like layout management......

6 of 36 | Silverlight 2 Released - Today we shipped the final release of Silverlight 2.  You can download Silverlight 2, as well the Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2 tool support to target it, here. Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform browser plugin that enables rich media experiences and .NET RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the browser. Silverlight 2 is small in size (4.6MB) and takes only 4-10 seconds to install on a machine that doesn't already have it.  It does not require the .NET Framework to be installed on a computer to run - the Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to play video or run applications. Developer......

7 of 36 | October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service.  This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application: Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynam......

8 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios - This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  You can download the new release here.  This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1.  It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4").  You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here.  ......

9 of 36 | Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released - Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today.  You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here. Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine.  It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines.  These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial application......

10 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release - This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release.  Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here.  You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here. Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discuss......

11 of 36 | May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF - Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately.  Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control: Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls: Another great post from Matt that descr......

12 of 36 | Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta - Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.  These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November.  They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them). We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and install the beta here. Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form - so you should be careful about installin......

13 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview - We recently opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex Project that we will be using to provide previews (with buildable source code) for several upcoming ASP.NET features and releases. Last month we used it to publish the first drop of the ASP.NET MVC source code.  This first drop included the source for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release that we shipped at MIX, along with Visual Studio project files to enable you to patch and build it yourself. A few hours ago we published a refresh of the ASP.NET MVC source code on the site.  This source refresh is not an official new ASP.NET MVC preview release - instead it is an interim drop that provides a look at the current state of the sour......

14 of 36 | April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight - Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET More ASP.NET Security Tutorials: The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials.  His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts. Building a VS 2008 Styled Grid with the ListView and DataPager Controls: Matt Berseth has a great article that talks about techniques you can use with the new ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to create a nicely......

15 of 36 | March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET - Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Three New ASP.NET Security Tutorials Now Available: Scott Mitchell continues his great ASP.NET security tutorials. These three new ones cover creating and managing roles, assigning roles to users, and implementing role based authorization.  You can also find more security articles by reading posts on my blog tagged with security. .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 APIs: Scott Hanselman's latest "weekly source code" ......

16 of 36 | New Log Reporting, Database Management, and other cool admin modules for IIS 7 - One of the core priorities we focused on when building IIS 7 was to enable a rich .NET extensibility model that provides developers with the hooks to easily plug-in and extend the web server.  These extensibility hooks are provided in the web-server pipeline (enabling scenarios like the new IIS7 Bit Rate Throttler), within the configuration system (enabling developers to create new web.config schema settings), within the health monitoring system (enabling developers to add custom trace events), and within the admin tool (enabling developers to plug-in new admin UI modules). We added these extensibility hooks so that anyone can easily extend and enhance the web server using .N......

17 of 36 | March 14th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and .NET - I'm slowly recovering from keynoting at MIX last week, and have been digging my way out of backlogged email the last few days.  I'm going to try and finish catching up on blog comments this weekend - apologies for the delay in getting back to some of your questions. To kick-start my blogging again I thought I'd post a new link-listing series.  Today's post is mostly focused on ASP.NET and web related links.  I'm going to be doing more Silverlight and WPF posts soon. ASP.NET Tag Cloud Filters with ASP.NET 3.5's LinqDataSource and ListView Controls: Matt Berseth has a cool post that shows off using LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET 3.5 to build a tag-cloud navigat......

18 of 36 | My Presentations in Arizona this Tuesday - This week I'm visiting Scottsdale Arizona and will be presenting at a free user group event during the day.  I'm presenting two sessions myself: 1) Developing Applications using Silverlight 2: This will be a drill-down into the new Silverlight 2 Beta1 release, and how you can build applications with it using VS 2008 and Expression Blend.  You'll leave this session with a good understanding of the basics of Silverlight programming and how to start building applications with it. 2) Developing Applications using ASP.NET MVC: This session will be a drill-down into the new ASP.NET Model-View-Controller framework option (which last week was updated .  You'll leave this ses......

19 of 36 | First Look at Silverlight 2 - Last September we shipped Silverlight 1.0 for Mac and Windows, and announced our plans to deliver Silverlight on Linux.  Silverlight 1.0 is focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser, and supports a JavaScript/AJAX programming model. We are shortly going to release the first public beta of Silverlight 2, which will be a major update of Silverlight that focuses on enabling Rich Internet Application (RIA) development.  This is the first of several blog posts I'll be doing over the weeks and months ahead that talk in more depth about it. Cross Platform / Cross Browser .NET Development Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Fr......

20 of 36 | Feb 6th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Studio, .NET, WPF - Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET ASP.NET Security Tutorial Series: Scott Mitchell (who wrote the excellent Data Access Tutorial Series for us last year), has recently begun a new free tutorial series focused on ASP.NET Security.  Today we published the first three article in the series on the www.asp.net site: ASP.NET Security Basics, Overview of Forms Authentication, and Forms Authentication Configuration and Advanced Topics.  For even more ASP.NET Security Information, please check out the security tutorials I've also done......

21 of 36 | .NET Framework Library Source Code now available - Last October I blogged about our plan to release the source code to the .NET Framework libraries, and enable debugging support of them with Visual Studio 2008.  Today I'm happy to announce that this is now available for everyone to use. Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries: .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) W......

22 of 36 | Dynamic LINQ (Part 1: Using the LINQ Dynamic Query Library) - LINQ (language integrated query) is one of the new features provided with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  LINQ makes the concept of querying data a first class programming concept in .NET, and enables you to efficiently express queries in your programming language of choice. One of the benefits of LINQ is that it enables you to write type-safe queries in VB and C#.  This means you get compile-time checking of your LINQ queries, and full intellisense and refactoring support over your code: While writing type-safe queries is great for most scenarios, there are cases where you want the flexibility to dynamically construct queries on the fly.  For example: you might want to ......

23 of 36 | ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Preview Released - Earlier today we released the first CTP preview of an "ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions" release that we've been working on (click here to read my previous post about our product roadmap).  This release brings additional runtime functionality to ASP.NET and .NET 3.5.  You can download it here (if you are using the MVC features also click here to download the MVC Toolkit extras). This first ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release includes: ASP.NET AJAX Improvements: New ASP.NET AJAX features in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release include better browser history support (back/forward button integration, and server-side history management support), improved AJAX content li......

24 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 4): Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios - The last few weeks I have been working on a series of blog posts that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on.  The ASP.NET MVC Framework is an optional approach you can use to structure your ASP.NET web applications to have a clear separation of concerns, and make it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing site.  It covered the high-level concepts behind MVC, and demonstrated how to create a new ASP.NET MVC project from scratch to implement and test this e-commerce product listing functionality.  The second post drilled deep into the URL routing architecture......

25 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views - The last few weeks I have been working on a series of blog posts that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on.  The ASP.NET MVC Framework is an optional approach you can use to structure your ASP.NET web applications to have a clear separation of concerns, and make it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing site.  It covered the high-level concepts behind MVC, and demonstrated how to create a new ASP.NET MVC project from scratch to implement and test this e-commerce product listing functionality.  The second post in this series drilled deep into the URL routi......

26 of 36 | .NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7) - Last week we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.  This release is a big one for .NET, and delivers a ton of new capabilities and improvements for web, client, office and mobile development. Over the next few months we'll be delivering a series of additional products that build on top of this VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 foundation, and make .NET development even better.  Below is a road-map of some of the upcoming initiatives and releases for .NET web development that my team is currently working on for the months ahead: Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries We announced last month that we'll provide the ability for developers to download and browse t......

27 of 36 | Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released - Today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.  You can download the final release using one of the links below: If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site (note: some of the builds are just finishing being uploaded now - so check back later during the day if you don't see it yet). If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here.  A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week.  A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here. If you ......

28 of 36 | Nov 17th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, VS 2008, .NET 3.5, IIS7, Silverlight - Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET GridViewControlExtender - Row MouseOver and Click Styles, Header Cell MouseOver Styles, and 5 Themes Based on Google's Personalized HomePage: Matt Berseth has three cool posts that show off techniques you can use to customize the look and feel of the ASP.NET GridView control. ASP.NET AJAX Exploring one of Microsoft AJAX's often overlooked features: AddHandler: Dave Ward starts a new series covering some of ASP.NET AJAX's client-side JavaScript features, and begins the series by exploring the $AddHandler method,......

29 of 36 | ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1) - Two weeks ago I blogged about a new MVC (Model View Controller) framework for ASP.NET that we are going to be supporting as an optional feature soon.  It provides a structured model that enforces a clear separation of concerns within applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow.  It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and can optionally provide more control over the HTML that is emitted from them. Since then I've been answering a lot of questions from people eager to learn more about it.  Given the level of interest I thought it might make sense to put together a few blog posts that descr......

30 of 36 | Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries - One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year. We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml),......

31 of 36 | Tip/Trick: Building a ToJSON() Extension Method using .NET 3.5 - Earlier this year I blogged about a new language extensibility feature of C# and VB called "Extension Methods".  Extension methods allow developers to add new methods to the public contract of an existing CLR type, without having to sub-class it or recompile the original type.  In doing so they enable a variety of useful scenarios (including LINQ).  They also provide a really convenient way to add a dash of "syntactic sugar" into your code. Over the last few months I've been making a list of cool extension methods that I plan to sit down and implement when I get some free time (not sure when that is... but at least I can still have fun coming up with th......

32 of 36 | IIS 7.0 Hits RC0 - Lots of cool new IIS7 Extensions Also Now Available - One of the products that my team builds that I am most proud of is IIS 7.  IIS 7 is a *major* update of our web-server stack, and introduces a significantly new and improved extensibility, configuration, and administration architecture.  I've blogged about some of its features in the past here and here.  Doing a major re-architecture on a mature product is never easy.  Doing so on one that runs more than 40% of the web servers on the Internet is especially daunting.  The final product, though, is fantastic - and delivers an incredibly flexible, scalable, and robust server architecture that is going to enable us to-do really exciting things goin......

33 of 36 | The C# ?? null coalescing operator (and using it with LINQ) - One of the subtle (but cool) language features of C# is the ?? "null coalescing" operator.  This provides a nice, terse way to check whether a value is null, and if so return an alternate value. Simple Example Usages Several folks have blogged about the ?? operator in the past - read here, here, here, and here for some previous examples on how to use it.  Simply put, the ?? operator checks whether the value provided on the left side of the expression is null, and if so it returns an alternate value indicated by the right side of the expression.  If the value provided on the left side of the expression isn't null, then it returns the original value......

34 of 36 | September 16th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7, Visual Studio, Silverlight - Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Creating a User Polling System with ASP.NET 2.0: Scott Mitchell has written a nice three-part tutorial series for www.4guysfromrolla.com that demonstrates how to implement a poll user control for ASP.NET that you can use to poll users on your site for their opinions on questions, and then display a graphical output of the poll results.  Here are part 2 and part 3 of the series. Debugging Script: Dumping out Current and Recent ASP.NET Requests: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET support team has an ex......

35 of 36 | Silverlight 1.0 Released and Silverlight for Linux Announced - Silverlight is a cross platform, cross browser plug-in that enables designers and developers to build rich media experiences and .NET based RIAs for the web.  I first blogged about Silverlight back in May after we announced it at our MIX conference in Las Vegas.  Silverlight 1.0 and Expression Encoder 1.0 Released Today we shipped the Silverlight 1.0 release for Mac and Windows.  Silverlight 1.0 is focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser. Some of its features include: Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser.  The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience......

36 of 36 | August 30th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET - Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Recreating the Google Analytics Table as an ASP.NET GridView: Matt Berseth has a great post on how you can templatize the <asp:gridview> control to provide really nice UI paging options.  ASP.NET Charting with NPlot: Olav Lerflaten has a great article on 4GuysFromRolla.com that describes how to use the free NPlot chart engine for .NET to create professional scientific charts of data using ASP.NET. Export GridView to Excel: Matt Berseth has another excellent post on how you can export data to ......