All posts by : ScottGus Blog

51 of 94 | CSS Control Adapter Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 Released - Tired of having <table> elements rendered by the built-in ASP.NET server controls and wishing you could use a pure CSS solution instead?  Read on...   Today we published the CSS Control Adapter Toolkit for ASP.NET.  This toolkit provides information about how the ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter Architecture works, as well as a set of 5 sample control adapters (with full source that you can optionally tweak/modify) that provide CSS friendly adapters for 5 of the built-in ASP.NET controls (specifically: Menu, TreeView, DetailsView, FormView and DataList).    You can download this release for free from here, and immediately begin using it in your ASP.NET 2.0 sites t......

52 of 94 | Atlas Control Toolkit Hopefully Shipping Next Week - Shawn gave a quick update on the Atlas Control Toolkit, and a potential refresh drop his team is pushing to-do next week.  His team has been doing a great job of answering posts on the Atlas Control Toolkit Forums and in getting feedback and suggestions on improvements.  It sounds like a lot of nice feature additions (including several new cool controls) and bug fixes will be coming next week -- along with expanded Safari browser support. If you are interested in following the Atlas Control Toolkit, you should definitely subscribe to Shawn's blog here. If you have no idea what the Atlas Control Toolkit is or what I am talking about, you should read my post about it here, and ......

53 of 94 | Atlas Control Toolkit Refresh Hopefully Shipping Next Week - Shawn gave a quick update on the Atlas Control Toolkit, and a potential refresh drop his team is pushing to-do next week.  His team has been doing a great job of answering posts on the Atlas Control Toolkit Forums and in getting feedback and suggestions on improvements.  It sounds like a lot of nice feature additions (including several new cool controls) and bug fixes will be coming next week -- along with expanded Safari browser support. If you are interested in following the Atlas Control Toolkit, you should definitely subscribe to Shawn's blog here. If you have no idea what the Atlas Control Toolkit is or what I am talking about, you should read my post about it here, and ......

54 of 94 | Atlas Control Toolkit Refresh Hopefully Shipping Next Week - Shawn gave a quick update on the Atlas Control Toolkit, and a potential refresh drop his team is pushing to-do next week.  His team has been doing a great job of answering posts on the Atlas Control Toolkit Forums and in getting feedback and suggestions on improvements.  It sounds like a lot of nice feature additions (including several new cool controls) and bug fixes will be coming next week -- along with expanded Safari browser support. If you are interested in following the Atlas Control Toolkit, you should definitely subscribe to Shawn's blog here. If you have no idea what the Atlas Control Toolkit is or what I am talking about, you should read my post about it here, and ......

55 of 94 | Atlas Control Toolkit Refresh Hopefully Shipping Next Week - Shawn gave a quick update on the Atlas Control Toolkit, and a potential refresh drop his team is pushing to-do next week.  His team has been doing a great job of answering posts on the Atlas Control Toolkit Forums and in getting feedback and suggestions on improvements.  It sounds like a lot of nice feature additions (including several new cool controls) and bug fixes will be coming next week -- along with expanded Safari browser support. If you are interested in following the Atlas Control Toolkit, you should definitely subscribe to Shawn's blog here. If you have no idea what the Atlas Control Toolkit is or what I am talking about, you should read my post about it here, and ......

56 of 94 | XHTML Validation Module Checker for ASP.NET 2.0 - Josh and Bruusi have a great .NET blog here.  They've recently published a very cool XHTML Validation module for ASP.NET 2.0 that allows you to easily identify and catch any non-XHTML markup with your application.  You register it as an ASP.NET HttpModule within your app's web.config file, and then it watches and checks all page output for XHTML compliance:  This makes it much easier to test different user-interaction scenarios that can't be easily verified with online XHTML validators (for example: pages that require someone to login, or which do posts, etc), and provides a really easy way to verify that your markup is standards compliant.  You can learn more abo......

57 of 94 | VS 2005 Web Application Project Release Candidate Now Available - Today we published the Release Candidate of the VS 2005 Web Application Project on the web.  You can download it now from here.    Over the next few days we’ll be updating the in-depth tutorials on how to use it on http://webproject.scottgu.com.  You can also read more about the original motivation for adding the VS 2005 Web Application Project option here.   There is also a new forum on http://forums.asp.net that is dedicated to VS 2005 Web Application Project questions.  You can access it here.   What is new with today’s release?   Today’s release is a major refresh that provides a ton of new functionality and rounds out the feature-set. ......

58 of 94 | ASP.NET Connections Tips and Tricks Slides+Demos Posted - I'm about to head downstairs for my ASP.NET Tips and Tricks talk at ASP.NET Connections in Orlando.  I'm talking about and demoing a number of nice new things in ASP.NET 2.0 that make web development easier: App_Offline.htm Cross Page Post-backs Validation Groups Maintaining Scroll Positions Control Focus, Default Buttons, Error Focus Client Scripting and Client Confirmations Data-binding Expressions Config-based Control Registration CSS Control Adapters RSS Feeds and Subscriptions You can download my slides + samples here.  Each sample above has a sub-directory containing a sample showing it off (note: the one exception is the CSS Control Adapters -- which I will be demoing......

59 of 94 | Upcoming ASP.NET Releases in April - I was chatting with someone at the MIX conference who mentioned he’d love to have an easy way to stay up to-date with all of the things Microsoft is coming out with in the ASP.NET space.  To help folks better track things I’ve decided to try and do a monthly “coming soon” post that outlines the list of things we are working on releasing from the team in the weeks ahead.   The current list of ASP.NET related things planned in April includes:   VS 2005 Web Application Project: As I mentioned in this earlier post, we are a few days away from shipping the feature-complete release candidate of the VS 2005 Web Application Project (see http://webproject.scottgu.com for more details ......

60 of 94 | Great Atlas Map Mashup Tutorial - Jonathan Hawkins from the Atlas/ASP.NET team just posted a nice tutorial walking through how to build a map-based mashup using the Atlas Virtual Earth control and some custom web-services that serve up mountain information (note: Jonathan is an avid hiker!).  You can read and download his tutorial here. This tutorial shows off some of the great "client-centric Ajax programming" power available with Atlas.  For more on Atlas (and to see my own fun tutorial building a todo task list), check out http://atlas.asp.net.  I also posted my slides+demos from an Atlas presentation I did in Amsterdam here.  Hope this helps, Scott...

61 of 94 | ASP.NET 2.0 Membership, Roles, Forms Authentication, and Security Resources - I usually try and spend at least an hour or two each night hanging out on the ASP.NET Forums answering questions.  The last week or so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Security Forum answering a lot of “how to” questions about some of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0 (in particular the new Membership, Role Management and Login Controls) and pointing people at resources and samples around the web about them.  What I thought I’d try and do with this post is consolidate a lot of pointers to different ASP.NET 2.0 security resources in one place.   Getting Started with ASP.NET 2.0 Membership, Roles and Forms Authentication Video   If you haven’t watched this great onli......

62 of 94 | Awesome ASP.NET 2.0 RSS Tool-Kit Released - Dmitry on the ASP.NET Team posted an awesome RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 on his blog earlier tonight.  It provides a ton of great support for both consuming and exposing RSS from ASP.NET 2.0 applications, and ships with full source code.   Some of the features/scenarios in the new RSS Toolkit include:   RSS Data-binding Control Support   You can now declaratively databind any ASP.NET control to the new RSSDataSource control provided in the toolkit.  For example, to build a simple blog post aggregator for my blog you could follow the below steps with the free Visual Web Developer tool:   1) Create a new blank page     2) Drag/Drop the standard ASP.N......

63 of 94 | ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando from April 2nd-5th - The east-coast ASP.NET Connections conference is coming up in Orlando from April 2nd-5th this year.  I'll be speaking there along with a ton of other great speakers.  There are 37 dedicated ASP.NET breakout talks at the event (click here to see the session list).  You can also cross-register with the VS Connections, SQL Connections and the new SharePoint Connections conferences going on at the same location, and get a pass that allows you to attend non-ASP.NET talks as well. If you are looking to either get started with ASP.NET 2.0, or take your ASP.NET 2.0 development to the next level (some more advanced talks on the session list: Atlas, Workflow, Personalization, eCommerc......

64 of 94 | Great ASP.NET 2.0 Site Navigation Tutorial Series - Scott Mitchell has written a really great tutorial series on the new ASP.NET 2.0 Site Navigation system and features.  He recently published Part 3 of the series, which discusses the "SecurityTrimming" feature new to ASP.NET 2.0 that allows you to automatically show/hide nodes within the site navigation hierarchy based on the current Authentication and Role status of an incoming user (for example: you could hide portions of a menu automatically if the current user isn't in an "Admin" role). Part 4 of the series talks about building a custom site map provider.  In case you missed my post from last-month, you might also want to check out Jeff Prosise's cool new SQL Site Map Pr......

65 of 94 | MSBuild Community Tasks Project for VS 2005 - David Yack posted a great pointer to a community project where you can find a long list of cool MSBuild Custom Tasks that you can use within your VS 2005 build environments.  You should be able to use these with both the VS 2005 Web Deployment Project and with the VS 2005 Web Application Project option in VS 2005 when building ASP.NET 2.0 projects. You can learn about the project and download a .MSI setup containing them here.  Check out the current list of cool MSBuild tasks they have on the web-site: AppPoolController* Allows control for an application pool on a local or remote machine with IIS installed. AppPoolCreate* Creates a new application pool on a local or remote ......

66 of 94 | Adding your own Validation Schema to Visual Web Developer / VS 2005 - I blogged about some of my favorite html source editor features in Visual Web Developer and VS 2005 a few months ago.  In case you missed it, you can read that post here. One of the features I mentioned was the ability to get per-browser/device/standard intellisense and validation.  The ensures that the editor only shows you those elements, attributes and client-side javascript OM that is supported by the particular browser or standard you are targetting. What is cool about the html source engine is that it is extensible, and you can add your own schemas to the built-in list that ships with the product (all you need to-do is author your XML schema file).  Mikhail has just pos......

67 of 94 | Code Snippets in Visual Web Developer and VS 2005 - One of the nice new features of Visual Web Developer (which is free) and VS 2005 is the new "Code Snippet Support" that has been added.  This handy feature allows you to quickly find and use code-libraries of common patterns (examples: get/set property definitions, data access code, file IO, exception handling blocks, etc). To try it out, just right-click within a code file to bring up a context menu: Select "Insert Snippet" from the context menu, and then choose the category of snippet you want to use (for example: "File System"): And then the code-nugget to inject: You'll then have the code added at that location in the editor.  Common variable values will be automatica......

68 of 94 | Adding Custom Properties to XML Site Maps in ASP.NET 2.0 - I published a step by step tutorial on using Master Pages and Site Navigation last week.  One of the questions that someone posted in the comments was whether there was an ability with Site Navigation to add custom properties or settings on a per-node basis.  For example: a custom icon property (eg: imageUrl) for each item in the Site Map that could then be later rendered by the new asp.net 2.0 menu control on a page:    <siteMapNode url="default.aspx" title="Home"  description="The home page" imageUrl="home.gif"> Betrand just published a cool blog post + source code sample that shows exactly how to-do this.  You can read it here. Hope......

69 of 94 | Data Tutorial #2: Building our Master Page and Site Navigation Structure - This past weekend I posted a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a strongly-typed DAL (data access layer) using Visual Web Developer (which is free) and ASP.NET 2.0.   My plan over the next few weeks is to post many follow-up samples that show various ways to use this DAL to build common data scenarios using ASP.NET 2.0 (master details, filtering, sorting, paging, 2-way data-binding, editing, insertion, deletion, hierarchical data browsing, hierarchical drill-down, optimistic concurrency, and more).   Before doing that, I wanted to setup a common site structure to help organize all of these samples.  I wanted to make sure that all the samples in the site shares a consistent......

70 of 94 | Building a DAL using Strongly Typed TableAdapters and DataTables in VS 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 - One of my goals over the next few weeks is to publish a number of quick tutorial postings that walkthrough implementing common data binding design patterns using ASP.NET 2.0 (master details, filtering, sorting, paging, 2-way data-binding, editing, insertion, deletion, hierarchical data browsing, hierarchical drill-down, optimistic concurrency, etc, etc).   To help keep these samples shorter, and to help link them together, I’m going to use a common DAL (data access layer) implementation across the samples that is based on SQL Server’s Northwind sample database.   To build the DAL layer I decided to use the new DataSet Designer that is built-into Visual Web Developer (which you can......

71 of 94 | Cool VS 2005 Debugging Visualizers for ASP.NET 2.0 Development - One of the cool new features in VS 2005 is a debugging extensibility feature called "Debugger Visualizers".  Basically this provides a way for developers to build and use UI extensions within the VS debugger that provide richer data visualization and analysis of types and variables within a running program. K. Scott Allen published a cool sample today of an ASP.NET control graph visualizer that allows you to obtain a graph of a server control and its children.  Simply hover over a "this" (in C#) or "Me" (in VB) reference on your page while in the debugger, and you'll be able to see the entire server control hierarchy for your page while on a breakpoint in the debugger: ......

72 of 94 | New ASP.NET 2.0 SQL Site Map Provider - Jeff Prosise has a written a great sample and article for the February edition of MSDN magazine that walksthrough the new SQL Server based provider he built for the ASP.NET 2.0 Site Navigation System.  This enables you to store your site map structure in a database instead of using the default XML Provider that comes default.  Enabling it within an ASP.NET 2.0 site is as simple as configuring the provider in your web.config file -- no code needs to change in order to take advantage of it (and you can databind any page control to it using the new SiteMapDataSource control). What is really cool about his provider is that it also uses the new SQL Cache Invalidation feature to cache the sitemap......

73 of 94 | Encrypting Web.Config Values in ASP.NET 2.0 - One of the cool new features in the configuration system with ASP.NET 2.0 is the ability to encrypt any of the values stored within them (note: this works with any configuration section -- including ones you build yourself).  This is obviously important when storing sensitive information like connection strings -- and now enables you to avoid having to roll your own solution. K Scott Allen posted a super simple example of how to encrypt a section on his blog (spolier: it is a one-line command). Here are a few other good articles I found on the web that discuss it more as well: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zhhddkxy.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/federaldev/archive/2005/11/08/490319.......

74 of 94 | Efficient Data Paging with the ASP.NET 2.0 DataList Control and ObjectDataSource - Last weekend I posted about how to implement super efficient data-paging using the new ROW_FUNCTION() within SQL 2005 (which is supported with the free SQL Express edition and up) and the new ASP.NET 2.0 GridView/ObjectDataSource controls.   The BIG win with this approach is that it enables a web-application to efficiently retrieve only the specific rows it needs from the database, and avoid having to pull back dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of results to the web-server only to then end up trimming them down to the 10-15 you end up displaying on a web-page (which is what most data-paging solutions do today).  This can lead to significant performance wins within your application (both ......

75 of 94 | Paging through lots of data efficiently (and in an Ajax way) with ASP.NET 2.0 - David Hayden blogged about a cool new ROW_NUMBER() function that SQL 2005 provides that got me excited and inspired to write a little code last night.   You can download the sample app I built here.    Features of the Sample   This sample is a self-contained ASP.NET application that demonstrates a few things:   - How to implement a data-result search page built with ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas that can present hundreds of thousands of row results using the ASP.NET 2.0 GridView control.  The results are formatted using a paging based UI model where 15 results per page are displayed, and the user can skip from page to page to see their data.  For kicks I also added support for editing and deletin......

76 of 94 | Making a List, Checking it Twice (Cool Ajax Sample App with ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas) - In case you havent checked out the new Atlas preview release yet (which given that it shipped a few days ago and almost everyone is on vacation this week is very likely), you might want to consider finding some time to-do so when you get a chance and are back online.  It makes common Ajax-style scenarios a breeze to build, and really makes programming a lot of fun.    I played around using the Atlas drop with ASP.NET 2.0 a few days ago on a plane ride to the east-coast, and put together a simple task/to-do list application that shows off one of the new features that comes with it (specifically the new server control that allows you to use any shipping ASP.NET server control and get increm......

77 of 94 | ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter Architecture - I posted last night about a few things we`re working on to release in the near future.  One of the topics that seemed to get the most interest was our plan to release some control adapters (with full source) that demonstrate how to build pure-CSS style based rendering implementations for some of the built-in ASP.NET server controls. The architecture to-do this is pretty cool, and something we baked into ASP.NET 2.0 very early on in the project (early in the release we were planing to build mobile device adapters for all of the standard ASP.NET controls -- although we later backed off of this).  What is nice about the architecture is that the renderings can be controlled completely independe......

78 of 94 | Upcoming Releases of Useful ASP.NET 2.0 Things - A few people have asked me about what else is coming down the road in terms of downloads and other releases for ASP.NET 2.0.  Here is a non-exhaustive brain-dump of a few things coming out in the near future that we`ve been working on: - Major Update to the Atlas Project: A pretty significant update to Atlas will be coming out soon.  It adds a number of pretty cool features -- including a lot of additional support to make common Ajax-style scenarios dead-simple with ASP.NET (previous refreshes of Atlas provided a lot of power features -- this refresh drop is also making common scenarios super easy).  It also provides the beginning of really nice integration of Atlas functionality into the ......

79 of 94 | First Preview Download of VS 2005 Web Application Project Model Now Available - I wrote last week about a new web project model option we are going to make available for VS 2005 (you can read the original post here).  We are calling this option the ASP.NET Web Application project model (VS 2005 also has the ASP.NET Web Site project model built-in as well).   This new ASP.NET Web Application project model option provides the same conceptual web project semantics as VS 2003 web projects (a project file based structure where all code in the project is compiled into a single assembly), but with all the new features of VS 2005 (refactoring, class diagrams, test development, generics, etc) and ASP.NET 2.0 (master pages, data controls, membership/login, role management, Web P......

80 of 94 | Configuration Section Code Generator and XML Intellisense Schema Builder for Web.Config files - Dmitry (the Dev Manager for ASP.NET) has been working in his spare time on building a cool disk-based output caching module for ASP.NET 2.0 (he is planning to post it on the web once it is done).  One of the things he discovered in building it was how repetitive it was to have to hand-generate configuration section handlers for web.config files, as well as the intellisense schema files to provide intellisense support for them in VS 2005. So he wrote a very cool utility that helps with automate all of this.  You can read about it and download it from his blog here.  Full source code for the utility is also provided. Cool stuff... - Scott  ...

81 of 94 | New Web Project Model Option Coming for VS 2005 - One of the things that weve been working on the last few months is a new web project model option for Visual Studio 2005 that we are tentatively calling ASP.NET Web Projects.  Our plan is to have an initial preview web-download version of it available for people to install on top of VS 2005 sometime in the next few weeks.   The goal with this new project-option is to address some of the feedback weve heard from people who are finding migrating existing apps to the new web-site project model in VS 2005 more work than theyd like to-do (especially because of the new web site build semantics of compiling a web project into multiple assemblies).  The new project-type will also help enable some s......

82 of 94 | VS 2005 Intellisense in web.config files - Ive seen a few questions about intellisense support for ASP.NET web.config files with VS 2005, and thought Id blog a quick post to answer a few of them.   First the good news:   VS 2005 now supports intellisense for web.config files you add to your web project (yea!).  It uses the new XML editor (which btw is much better in VS 2005), and has a built-in schema for all of the built-in .NET Framework settings:     Now one annoying gotcha:   There is one gotcha to be aware of, though, that can sometimes cause intellisense for the web.config file to stop working in the IDE.  This happens when a default namespace is added to the root element.  For example, like so:               configuration ......

83 of 94 | A few of my favorite new HTML source editor features in Visual Web Developer & VS 2005 - We spent a lot of time in Visual Web Developer and VS 2005 focusing on delivering a really great HTML source editing experience (we also did a lot in design-view but this blog post is just about the HTML source editor).  Below are a few of the cool new features it enables (none of these were in VS 2003).  All but one of the features are in the free Visual Web Developer Express version that you can download.   Intellisense Everywhere:   We now support intellisense everywhere within the HTML editor.  For example:   We now support it for ASP.NET directives:     We now support it for code blocks and nuggets:     We now support it for CSS style blocks (in additional to external CSS files)......

84 of 94 | ASP.NET 2.0 Site Navigation Features - The new Site Navigation features in ASP.NET 2.0 can make building navigation structures across a web-site much easier.   Scott Mitchell has published a good quick overview of the new ASP.NET 2.0 Site Navigation features if you arent familiar with them yet and want to come up to speed quickly.  There is also a ton of information on it on MSDN, and Danny Chen from the ASP.NET team has some extra great information on his blog.    At a high-level, the new Site Navigation features allow you to define (outside of code or pages) the site map structure of how your site is laid out.  Specifically, it allows you to define the relationships between pages on the site what is the home entry-point, wha......

85 of 94 | VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects - Later this week Microsoft is shipping on the web a new free add-on to Visual Studio that enables what we call Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects.  This add-on provides a lot of additional deployment features and capabilities that complement the built-in web project support in the product.  The below blog post provides a quick overview of some of the new things coming.  There are also some MSDN whitepapers that will document it more exhaustively over the next week as well.   Some background   The web project model changed in a number of ways between VS 2003 and VS 2005.  There was a lot of discussion this August over missing features that werent supported or were broken by it in Beta......

86 of 94 | Visual Studio 2005 Profiles and a Few Tweaks I like to Make - One of the new features in VS 2005 is the support for profiles in the IDE.  Profiles provide the ability to define pre-set defaults for options, menus, key-bindings, and command-bars across the tool-set.  VS 2005 ships with several built-in profiles out of the box including: VB, C#, C++, Web, Test, and a General Development Settings similar to 2003.  When VS launches the very first time it prompts a user to pick which of these profiles to use by default (note that you can build all app types and even use all languages regardless of which profile you pick).   If you ever want to change or reset your profile, you can select the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu option.  It will then walk......

87 of 94 | Tons of MSDN Content on the new ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Model - This will all be linked heavily on MSDN starting tomorrow, but I got the ok to forward the already-live links tonight. :-) In addition to 120+ pages of good word-content, almost all of the below sections also provide working C# sample implementations of the various provider types (usually going against an XML or text file for persistance).  Introduction to the Provider Model Membership Providers Role Providers Site Map Providers Session State Providers Profile Providers Web Event Providers Web Parts Personalization Providers Custom Provider-Based Services Hands-on Custom Providers: The Contoso Times One of the things that has been nice to see on the ASP.NET 2.0 forums has been how......

88 of 94 | Async Pages in ASP.NET 2.0 - One of the cool new advanced features in ASP.NET 2.0 is support for pages that execute otherwise blocking operations asynchronously.  This allows ASP.NET to re-use the worker thread while waiting for a completion (for example: calling a remote web-service and waiting for the response) and allows the server to execute much more efficiently. Jeff Prosise now has a great article on MSDN that describes how it works and how you can take advantage of it:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/10/WickedCode/default.aspx  ...

89 of 94 | Atlas Keynote Walkthrough - I mentioned a little earlier that Id post the Atlas sample code and overall talk flow from the keynote demo I was part of earlier today at the PDC.  Here it is below:   Step 1: The Web Service We Use   In the talk Anders used the new LINQ features in C# 3.0 to query for process information, then join it in memory with data from a database, and then transform it into XML.  Don then showed exposing it via Indigo as first a SOAP end-point, then an RSS end-point, and then finally as a JSON end-point that I could consume.   Unfortunately I dont have a snap-shot of the above code still with me (it is on another machine right now), so cant show what we really used during the keynote.  Here is a si......

90 of 94 | Building Re-Usable ASP.NET User Control and Page Libraries with VS 2005 - One of the questions Ive been asked a few times recently is whether it is still possible to build web projects that encapsulate common libraries of .ascx web user controls or .aspx pages with VS 2005 that can then be easily re-used across multiple other web projects (note: the quick answer is yes").   This blog post walks-through how to easily accomplish this with VS 2005, as well as some of the new features you can take advantage of to make this scenario even better than before.   Quick Scenario Overview   The scenario Im going to use to illustrate building re-usable page/control libraries in the below post is one where a development team wants to build a re-usable ecommerce web UI librar......

91 of 94 | Some techniques for better managing files in VS 2005 Web Projects - Ive seen several questions come up in the last few days regarding techniques for structuring project layouts with web projects in VS 2005.  In particular, Ive received several good questions asking for ways to manage large image directories as well as temporary storage directories underneath web project roots.  One goal with both questions has been to find ways to avoid these files from showing up in the VS web project solution explorer and cluttering up the web project view, as well as to avoid having these files/directories be prompted to be added to source control during check-in (note: you can just unclick having these files added to source control but having to-do so can be a pain).  ......

92 of 94 | Configuring ASP.NET 2.0 Application Services to use SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 - One question Ive seen asked a few times by people over the last few weeks is how do I setup the new ASP.NET Membership, Role Management, and Personalization services to use a regular SQL Server instead of SQL Express This blog entry walks you though a few simple steps on how to-do this.   Quick Review: What are the new ASP.NET 2.0 Application Services   ASP.NET 2.0 includes a number of built-in building block application services.  We call them building blocks because they are useful core frameworks for enabling super-common scenarios with web applications today and as a result can provide significant productivity wins and time-savings for developers.   They include: a membership API for m......

93 of 94 | Using IIS with VS 2005 and the new Web Project system - A number of people have asked me questions through my blog over the last few days about how VS 2005 uses and handles IIS (especially in cases of nested applications and virtual directories).  This blog entry provides more information on how this works, and hopefully clears up a few questions people might have.   Quick Review: How does IIS map applications and sites   IIS supports hosting multiple sites on a server.  These sites are defined as a unique IP address, hostname, and/or port address combination.  For example: my site www.scottgu.com is a site with an IP address (192.197.157.24) a hostname www.scottgu.com and a port number of 80 (the default http port). Nikhils site (www.nikhilk.ne......

94 of 94 | VS 2005 Web Project System: What is it and why did we do it - There has been a lot of online discussion lately about the new web project system that is being introduced with VS 2005.  My goal with this post is to explain a little more about what it is, and provide some background as to the features it provides and the motivation we had in introducing it. What are Web Projects Web Projects are used when building ASP.NET applications inside Visual Studio 2005.  They can be used either standalone where everything within an application lives inside a single project, or together with class library, data, web-service, unit-test and/or any other project supported by Visual Studio as part of a Solution.  They fully support references and project build-orderin......