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• C#.NET vs VB.NET, Which language is better?

  Features I cannot say any language good or bad as long as it's compiler can produce MSIL can run under .NET CLR. If someone says C# has more futures, you can understand that those new features are of C# compiler but not .NET, because if C# has a specific future then CLR cannot understand them. So the new features of C# will have to convert to the code understood by CLR eventually. that means the new features are developed for C# compiler basically to facilitates the developer to write their code in better way. so that means no difference in feature list between C# and VB.NET if you think in CLR perspective. Ease of writing Code I feel writing code in C# is easy, because my background is C and C++, Java, syntaxes very are similar. I assume most developers feel the same. Readability But some people say VB.NET code most readable for the members who are from non technical background, because keywords are generally in English rather special charectors. No of Projects in Market I assume 80 percent of market uses C# in their .NET development. for example in my company many projects are there .nET and all are using C#. Productivity & Experience though the feature list is same, generally developers wants to write code in their familiar languages. because it increase the productivity. Hope this helps to choose the language which suits for you. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• C#.NET vs VB.NET, Which language is better?

  Features I cannot say any language good or bad as long as it's compiler can produce MSIL can run under .NET CLR. If someone says C# has more futures, you can understand that those new features are of C# compiler but not .NET, because if C# has a specific future then CLR cannot understand them. So the new features of C# will have to convert to the code understood by CLR eventually. that means the new features are developed for C# compiler basically to facilitates the developer to write their code in better way. so that means no difference in feature list between C# and VB.NET if you think in CLR perspective. Ease of writing Code I feel writing code in C# is easy, because my background is C and C++, Java, syntaxes very are similar. I assume most developers feel the same. Readability But some people say VB.NET code most readable for the members who are from non technical background, because keywords are generally in English rather special charectors. No of Projects in Market I assume 80 percent of market uses C# in their .NET development. for example in my company many projects are there .nET and all are using C#. Productivity & Experience though the feature list is same, generally developers wants to write code in their familiar languages. because it increase the productivity. Hope this helps to choose the language which suits for you. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Customize the SimpleMembership in ASP.NET MVC 4.0

  - by thangchung

  As we know, .NET 4.5 have come up to us, and come along with a lot of new interesting features as well. Visual Studio 2012 was also introduced some days ago. They made us feel very happy with cool improvement along with us. Performance when loading code editor is very good at the moment (immediate after click on the solution). I explore some of cool features at these days. Some of them like Json.NET integrated in ASP.NET MVC 4.0, improvement on asynchronous action, new lightweight theme on Visual Studio, supporting very good on mobile development, improvement on authentication… I reviewed them, and found out that in this version of .NET Microsoft was not only developed new feature that suggest from community but also focused on improvement performance of existing features or components. Besides that, they also opened source more projects, like Entity Framework, Reactive Extensions, ASP.NET Web Stack… At the moment, I feel Microsoft want to open source more and more their projects. Today, I am going to dive in deep on new SimpleMembership model. It is really good because in this security model, Microsoft actually focus on development needs. As we know, in the past, they introduce some of provider supplied for coding security like MembershipProvider, RoleProvider… I don’t need to talk but everyone that have ever used it know that they were actually hard to use, and not easy to maintain and unit testing. Why? Because every time you inherit it, you need to override all methods inside it. Some people try to abstract it by introduce more method with virtual keyword, and try to implement basic behavior, so in the subclass we only need to override the method that need for their business. But to me, it’s only the way to work around. ASP.NET team and Web Matrix knew about it, so they built the new features based on existing components on .NET framework. And one of component that comes to us is SimpleMembership and SimpleRole. They implemented the Façade pattern on the top of those, and called it is WebSecurity. In the web, we can call WebSecurity anywhere we want, and make a call to inside wrapper of it. I read a lot of them on web blog, on technical news, on MSDN as well. Matthew Osborn had an excellent article about it at his blog. Jon Galloway had an article like this at here. He analyzed why old membership provider not fixed well to ASP.NET MVC and how to get over it. Those are very good to me. It introduced to me about how to doing SimpleMembership on it, how to doing it on new ASP.NET MVC web application. But one thing, those didn’t tell me was how to doing it on existing security model (that mean we already had Users and Roles on legacy system, and how we can integrate it to this system), that’s a reason I will introduce it today. I have spent couples of hours to see what’s inside this, and try to make one example to clarify my concern. And it’s lucky that I can make it working well.The first thing, we need to create new ASP.NET MVC application on Visual Studio 2012. We need to choose Internet type for this web application. ASP.NET MVC actually creates all needs components for the basic membership and basic role. The cool feature is DoNetOpenAuth come along with it that means we can log-in using facebook, twitter or Windows Live if you want. But it’s only for LocalDb, so we need to change it to fix with existing database model on SQL Server. The next step we have to make SimpleMembership can understand which database we use and show it which column need to point to for the ID and UserName. I really like this feature because SimpleMembership on need to know about the ID and UserName, and they don’t care about rest of it. I assume that we have an existing database model like So we will point it in code like The codes for it, we put on InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute like [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]     public sealed class InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute     {         private static SimpleMembershipInitializer _initializer;         private static object _initializerLock = new object();         private static bool _isInitialized;         public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)         {             // Ensure ASP.NET Simple Membership is initialized only once per app start             LazyInitializer.EnsureInitialized(ref _initializer, ref _isInitialized, ref _initializerLock);         }         private class SimpleMembershipInitializer         {             public SimpleMembershipInitializer()             {                 try                 {                     WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection("DefaultDb", "User", "Id", "UserName", autoCreateTables: true);                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     throw new InvalidOperationException("The ASP.NET Simple Membership database could not be initialized. For more information, please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=256588", ex);                 }             }         }     }And decorating it in the AccountController as below [Authorize]     [InitializeSimpleMembership]     public class AccountController : ControllerIn this case, assuming that we need to override the ValidateUser to point this to existing User database table, and validate it. We have to add one more class like public class CustomAdminMembershipProvider : SimpleMembershipProvider     {         // TODO: will do a better way         private const string SELECT_ALL_USER_SCRIPT = "select * from [dbo].[User]private where UserName = '{0}'";         private readonly IEncrypting _encryptor;         private readonly SimpleSecurityContext _simpleSecurityContext;         public CustomAdminMembershipProvider(SimpleSecurityContext simpleSecurityContext)             : this(new Encryptor(), new SimpleSecurityContext("DefaultDb"))         {         }         public CustomAdminMembershipProvider(IEncrypting encryptor, SimpleSecurityContext simpleSecurityContext)         {             _encryptor = encryptor;             _simpleSecurityContext = simpleSecurityContext;         }         public override bool ValidateUser(string username, string password)         {             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(username))             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Argument cannot be null or empty", "username");             }             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(password))             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Argument cannot be null or empty", "password");             }             var hash = _encryptor.Encode(password);             using (_simpleSecurityContext)             {                 var users =                     _simpleSecurityContext.Users.SqlQuery(                         string.Format(SELECT_ALL_USER_SCRIPT, username));                 if (users == null && !users.Any())                 {                     return false;                 }                 return users.FirstOrDefault().Password == hash;             }         }     }SimpleSecurityDataContext at here public class SimpleSecurityContext : DbContext     {         public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }         public SimpleSecurityContext(string connStringName) :             base(connStringName)         {             this.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = true;             this.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled = false;         }         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);                          modelBuilder.Configurations.Add(new UserMapping());         }     }And Mapping for User as below public class UserMapping : EntityMappingBase<User>     {         public UserMapping()         {             this.Property(x => x.UserName);             this.Property(x => x.DisplayName);             this.Property(x => x.Password);             this.Property(x => x.Email);             this.ToTable("User");         }     }One important thing, you need to modify the web.config to point to our customize SimpleMembership <membership defaultProvider="AdminMemberProvider" userIsOnlineTimeWindow="15">       <providers>         <clear/>         <add name="AdminMemberProvider" type="CIK.News.Web.Infras.Security.CustomAdminMembershipProvider, CIK.News.Web.Infras" />       </providers>     </membership>     <roleManager enabled="false">       <providers>         <clear />         <add name="AdminRoleProvider" type="CIK.News.Web.Infras.Security.AdminRoleProvider, CIK.News.Web.Infras" />       </providers>     </roleManager>The good thing at here is we don’t need to modify the code on AccountController. We only need to modify on SimpleMembership and Simple Role (if need). Now build all solutions, run it. We should see a screen like thisIf I login to Twitter button at the bottom of this page, we will be transfer to twitter authentication pageYou have to waiting for a moment Afterwards it will transfer you back to your admin screenYou can find all source codes at my MSDN code. I will really happy if you guys feel free to put some comments as below. It will be helpful to improvement my code in the future. Thank for all your readings. 

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• Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2

  - by rajbk

  We continue building our report in this three part series. Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1 Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3 Creating the Client Report Definition file (RDLC) Add a folder called “RDLC”. This will hold our RDLC report.   Right click on the RDLC folder, select “Add new item..” and add an “RDLC” name of “Products”. We will use the “Report Wizard” to walk us through the steps of creating the RDLC.   In the next dialog, give the dataset a name called “ProductDataSet”. Change the data source to “NorthwindReports.DAL” and select “ProductRepository(GetProductsProjected)”. The fields that are returned from the method are shown on the right. Click next.   Drag and drop the ProductName, CategoryName, UnitPrice and Discontinued into the Values container. Note that you can create much more complex grouping using this UI. Click Next.   Most of the selections on this screen are grayed out because we did not choose a grouping in the previous screen. Click next. Choose a style for your report. Click next. The report graphic design surface is now visible. Right click on the report and add a page header and page footer. With the report design surface active, drag and drop a TextBox from the tool box to the page header. Drag one more textbox to the page header. We will use the text boxes to add some header text as shown in the next figure. You can change the font size and other properties of the textboxes using the formatting tool bar (marked in red). You can also resize the columns by moving your cursor in between columns and dragging. Adding Expressions Add two more text boxes to the page footer. We will use these to add the time the report was generated and page numbers. Right click on the first textbox in the page footer and select “Expression”. Add the following expression for the print date (note the = sign at the left of the expression in the dialog below) "© Northwind Traders " & Format(Now(),"MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm tt") Right click on the second text box and add the following for the page count.   Globals.PageNumber & " of " & Globals.TotalPages Formatting the page footer is complete.   We are now going to format the “Unit Price” column so it displays the number in currency format.  Right click on the [UnitPrice] column (not header) and select “Text Box Properties..” Under “Number”, select “Currency”. Hit OK. Adding a chart With the design surface active, go to the toolbox and drag and drop a chart control. You will need to move the product list table down first to make space for the chart contorl. The document can also be resized by dragging on the corner or at the page header/footer separator. In the next dialog, pick the first chart type. This can be changed later if needed. Click OK. The chart gets added to the design surface.   Click on the blue bars in the chart (not legend). This will bring up drop locations for dropping the fields. Drag and drop the UnitPrice and CategoryName into the top (y axis) and bottom (x axis) as shown below. This will give us the total unit prices for a given category. That is the best I could come up with as far as what report to render, sorry :-) Delete the legend area to get more screen estate. Resize the chart to your liking. Change the header, x axis and y axis text by double clicking on those areas. We made it this far. Let’s impress the client by adding a gradient to the bar graph :-) Right click on the blue bar and select “Series properties”. Under “Fill”, add a color and secondary color and select the Gradient style. We are done designing our report. In the next section you will see how to add the report to the report viewer control, bind to the data and make it refresh when the filter criteria are changed.   Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3

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• WP7 Tips–Part I– Media File Coding Techniques to help pass the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Certification Requirements

  - by seaniannuzzi

  Overview Developing an application that plays media files on a Windows Phone 7 Device seems fairly straight forward.  However, what can make this a bit frustrating are the necessary requirements in order to pass the WP7 marketplace requirements so that your application can be published.  If you are new to this development, be aware of these common challenges that are likely to be made.  Below are some techniques and recommendations on how optimize your application to handle playing MP3 and/or WMA files that needs to adhere to the marketplace requirements.   Windows Phone 7 Certification Requirements Windows Phone 7 Developers Blog   Some common challenges are: Not prompting the user if another media file is playing in the background before playing your media file Not allowing the user to control the volume Not allowing the user to mute the sound Not allowing the media to be interrupted by a phone call  To keep this as simple as possible I am only going to focus on what “not to do” and what “to do” in order to implement a simple media solution. Things you will need or may be useful to you before you begin: Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2010 Feature Packs Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Windows Phone Emulator Resources Silverlight 4 Tools For Visual Studio XNA Game Studio 4.0 Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone Note: Please keep in mind you do not need all of these downloaded and installed, it is just easier to have all that you need now rather than add them on later.   Objective Summary Create a Windows Phone 7 – Windows Media Sample Application.  The application will implement many of the required features in order to pass the WP7 marketplace certification requirements in order to publish an application to WP7’s marketplace. (Disclaimer: I am not trying to indicate that this application will always pass as the requirements may change or be updated)   Step 1: – Create a New Windows Phone 7 Project   Step 2: – Update the Title and Application Name of your WP7 Application For this example I changed: the Title to: “DOTNETNUZZI WP7 MEDIA SAMPLE - v1.00” and the Page Title to:  “media magic”. Note: I also updated the background.   Step 3: – XAML - Media Element Preparation and Best Practice Before we begin the next step I just wanted to point out a few things that you should not do as a best practice when developing an application for WP7 that is playing music.  Please keep in mind that these requirements are not the same if you are playing Sound Effects and are geared towards playing media in the background.   If you have coded this – be prepared to change it:   To avoid a failure from the market place remove all of your media source elements from your XAML or simply create them dynamically.  To keep this simple we will remove the source and set the AutoPlay property to false to ensure that there are no media elements are active when the application is started. Proper example of the media element with No Source:   Some Additional Settings - Add XAML Support for a Mute Button   Step 4: – Boolean to handle toggle of Mute Feature Step 5: – Add Event Handler for Main Page Load   Step 6: – Add Reference to the XNA Framework   Step 7: – Add two Using Statements to Resolve the Namespace of Media and the Application Bar using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; using Microsoft.Phone.Shell;   Step 8: – Add the Method to Check the Media State as Shown Below   Step 9: – Add Code to Mute the Media File Step 10: – Add Code to Play the Media File //if the state of the media has been checked you are good to go. media_sample.Play(); Note: If we tried to perform this operation at this point you will receive the following error: System.InvalidOperationException was unhandled Message=FrameworkDispatcher.Update has not been called. Regular FrameworkDispatcher.Update calls are necessary for fire and forget sound effects and framework events to function correctly. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=193853 for details. StackTrace:        at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.FrameworkDispatcher.AddNewPendingCall(ManagedCallType callType, UInt32 arg)        at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.UserAsyncDispatcher.HandleManagedCallback(ManagedCallType managedCallType, UInt32 managedCallArgs) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.UserAsyncDispatcher.AsyncDispatcherThreadFunction()            It is not recommended that you just add the FrameworkDispatcher.Update(); call before playing the media file. It is recommended that you implement the following class to your solution and implement this class in the app.xaml.cs file.   Step 11: – Add FrameworkDispatcher Features I recommend creating a class named XNAAsyncDispatcher and adding the following code:   After you have added the code accordingly, you can now implement this into your app.xaml.cs file as highlighted below.   Note:  If you application sound file is not playing make sure you have the proper “Build Action” set such as Content.   Running the Sample Now that we have some of the foundation created you should be able to run the application successfully.  When the application launches your sound options should be set accordingly when the “checkMediaState” method is called.  As a result the application will properly setup the media options and/or alert the user accordinglyper the certification requirements.  In addition, the sample also shows a quick way to mute the sound in your application by simply removing the URI source of the media file.  If everything successfully compiled the application should look similar to below.                 <sound playing>   Summary At this point we have a fully functional application that provides techniques on how to avoid some common challenges when working with media files and developing applications for Windows Phone 7.  The techniques mentioned above should make things a little easier and helpful in getting your WP7 application approved and published on the Marketplace.  The next blog post will be titled: WP7 Tips–Part II - How to write code that will pass the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Requirements for Themes (light and dark). If anyone has any questions or comments please comment on this blog. 

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• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM

  - by Eilon

  Note: ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM isn’t yet released! But this tool will help you get your ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications ready for when it is! I have updated the MVC App Converter to convert projects from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM. This should be last the last major change to the MVC App Converter that I released previews of in the past several months. Download The app is a single executable: Download MvcAppConverter-MVC2RTM.zip (255 KB). Usage The only requirement for this tool is that you have .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 on the machine. You do not need to have Visual Studio or ASP.NET MVC installed (unless you want to open your project!). Even though the tool performs an automatic backup of your solution it is recommended that you perform a manual backup of your solution as well. To convert an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 project built with Visual Studio 2008 to an ASP.NET MVC 2 project in Visual Studio 2008 perform these steps: Launch the converter Select the solution Click the “Convert” button To convert an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 project built with Visual Studio 2008 to an ASP.NET MVC 2 project in Visual Studio 2010: Wait until Visual Studio 2010 is released (next month!) and it will have a built-in version of this tool that will run automatically when you open an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 project Perform the above steps, then open the project in Visual Studio 2010 and it will perform the remaining conversion steps What it can do Open up ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects from Visual Studio 2008 (no other versions of ASP.NET MVC or Visual Studio are supported) Create a full backup of your solution’s folder For every VB or C# project that has a reference to System.Web.Mvc.dll it will (this includes ASP.NET MVC web application projects as well as ASP.NET MVC test projects): Update references to ASP.NET MVC 2 Add a reference to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations 3.5 (if not already present) For every VB or C# ASP.NET MVC Web Application it will: Change the project type to an ASP.NET MVC 2 project Update the root ~/web.config references to ASP.NET MVC 2 Update the root ~/web.config to have a binding redirect from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 to ASP.NET MVC 2 Update the ~/Views/web.config references to ASP.NET MVC 2 Add or update the JavaScript files (add jQuery, add jQuery.Validate, add Microsoft AJAX, add/update Microsoft MVC AJAX, add Microsoft MVC Validation adapter) Unknown project types or project types that have nothing to do with ASP.NET MVC will not be updated What it can’t do It cannot convert projects directly to Visual Studio 2010 or to .NET Framework 4. It can have issues if your solution contains projects that are not located under the solution directory. If you are using a source control system it might have problems overwriting files. It is recommended that before converting you check out all files from the source control system. It cannot change code in the application that might need to be changed due to breaking changes between ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and ASP.NET MVC 2. Feedback, Please! If you need to convert a project to ASP.NET MVC 2 please try out this application and hopefully you’re good to go. If you spot any bugs or features that don’t work leave a comment here and I will try to address these issues in an updated release.

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• LLBLGen Pro feature highlights: grouping model elements

  - by FransBouma

  (This post is part of a series of posts about features of the LLBLGen Pro system) When working with an entity model which has more than a few entities, it's often convenient to be able to group entities together if they belong to a semantic sub-model. For example, if your entity model has several entities which are about 'security', it would be practical to group them together under the 'security' moniker. This way, you could easily find them back, yet they can be left inside the complete entity model altogether so their relationships with entities outside the group are kept. In other situations your domain consists of semi-separate entity models which all target tables/views which are located in the same database. It then might be convenient to have a single project to manage the complete target database, yet have the entity models separate of each other and have them result in separate code bases. LLBLGen Pro can do both for you. This blog post will illustrate both situations. The feature is called group usage and is controllable through the project settings. This setting is supported on all supported O/R mapper frameworks. Situation one: grouping entities in a single model. This situation is common for entity models which are dense, so many relationships exist between all sub-models: you can't split them up easily into separate models (nor do you likely want to), however it's convenient to have them grouped together into groups inside the entity model at the project level. A typical example for this is the AdventureWorks example database for SQL Server. This database, which is a single catalog, has for each sub-group a schema, however most of these schemas are tightly connected with each other: adding all schemas together will give a model with entities which indirectly are related to all other entities. LLBLGen Pro's default setting for group usage is AsVisualGroupingMechanism which is what this situation is all about: we group the elements for visual purposes, it has no real meaning for the model nor the code generated. Let's reverse engineer AdventureWorks to an entity model. By default, LLBLGen Pro uses the target schema an element is in which is being reverse engineered, as the group it will be in. This is convenient if you already have categorized tables/views in schemas, like which is the case in AdventureWorks. Of course this can be switched off, or corrected on the fly. When reverse engineering, we'll walk through a wizard which will guide us with the selection of the elements which relational model data should be retrieved, which we can later on use to reverse engineer to an entity model. The first step after specifying which database server connect to is to select these elements. below we can see the AdventureWorks catalog as well as the different schemas it contains. We'll include all of them. After the wizard completes, we have all relational model data nicely in our catalog data, with schemas. So let's reverse engineer entities from the tables in these schemas. We select in the catalog explorer the schemas 'HumanResources', 'Person', 'Production', 'Purchasing' and 'Sales', then right-click one of them and from the context menu, we select Reverse engineer Tables to Entity Definitions.... This will bring up the dialog below. We check all checkboxes in one go by checking the checkbox at the top to mark them all to be added to the project. As you can see LLBLGen Pro has already filled in the group name based on the schema name, as this is the default and we didn't change the setting. If you want, you can select multiple rows at once and set the group name to something else using the controls on the dialog. We're fine with the group names chosen so we'll simply click Add to Project. This gives the following result:   (I collapsed the other groups to keep the picture small ;)). As you can see, the entities are now grouped. Just to see how dense this model is, I've expanded the relationships of Employee: As you can see, it has relationships with entities from three other groups than HumanResources. It's not doable to cut up this project into sub-models without duplicating the Employee entity in all those groups, so this model is better suited to be used as a single model resulting in a single code base, however it benefits greatly from having its entities grouped into separate groups at the project level, to make work done on the model easier. Now let's look at another situation, namely where we work with a single database while we want to have multiple models and for each model a separate code base. Situation two: grouping entities in separate models within the same project. To get rid of the entities to see the second situation in action, simply undo the reverse engineering action in the project. We still have the AdventureWorks relational model data in the catalog. To switch LLBLGen Pro to see each group in the project as a separate project, open the Project Settings, navigate to General and set Group usage to AsSeparateProjects. In the catalog explorer, select Person and Production, right-click them and select again Reverse engineer Tables to Entities.... Again check the checkbox at the top to mark all entities to be added and click Add to Project. We get two groups, as expected, however this time the groups are seen as separate projects. This means that the validation logic inside LLBLGen Pro will see it as an error if there's e.g. a relationship or an inheritance edge linking two groups together, as that would lead to a cyclic reference in the code bases. To see this variant of the grouping feature, seeing the groups as separate projects, in action, we'll generate code from the project with the two groups we just created: select from the main menu: Project -> Generate Source-code... (or press F7 ;)). In the dialog popping up, select the target .NET framework you want to use, the template preset, fill in a destination folder and click Start Generator (normal). This will start the code generator process. As expected the code generator has simply generated two code bases, one for Person and one for Production: The group name is used inside the namespace for the different elements. This allows you to add both code bases to a single solution and use them together in a different project without problems. Below is a snippet from the code file of a generated entity class. //... using System.Xml.Serialization; using AdventureWorks.Person; using AdventureWorks.Person.HelperClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.FactoryClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.RelationClasses; using SD.LLBLGen.Pro.ORMSupportClasses; namespace AdventureWorks.Person.EntityClasses { //... /// <summary>Entity class which represents the entity 'Address'.<br/><br/></summary> [Serializable] public partial class AddressEntity : CommonEntityBase //... The advantage of this is that you can have two code bases and work with them separately, yet have a single target database and maintain everything in a single location. If you decide to move to a single code base, you can do so with a change of one setting. It's also useful if you want to keep the groups as separate models (and code bases) yet want to add relationships to elements from another group using a copy of the entity: you can simply reverse engineer the target table to a new entity into a different group, effectively making a copy of the entity. As there's a single target database, changes made to that database are reflected in both models which makes maintenance easier than when you'd have a separate project for each group, with its own relational model data. Conclusion LLBLGen Pro offers a flexible way to work with entities in sub-models and control how the sub-models end up in the generated code.

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• Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3

  - by rajbk

  We continue building our report in this three part series. Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1 Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2 Adding the ReportViewer control and filter drop downs. Open the source code for index.aspx and add a ScriptManager control. This control is required for the ReportViewer control. Add a DropDownList for the categories and suppliers. Add the ReportViewer control. The markup after these steps is shown below. <div> <asp:ScriptManager ID="smScriptManager" runat="server"> </asp:ScriptManager> <div id="searchFilter"> Filter by: Category : <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlCategories" runat="server" /> and Supplier : <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlSuppliers" runat="server" /> </div> <rsweb:ReportViewer ID="rvProducts" runat="server"> </rsweb:ReportViewer> </div> The design view for index.aspx is shown below. The dropdowns will display the categories and suppliers in the database. Changing the selection in the drop downs will cause the report to be filtered by the selections in the dropdowns. You will see how to do this in the next steps.   Attaching the RDLC to the ReportViewer control by clicking on the top right of the control, going to Report Viewer tasks and selecting Products.rdlc.   Resize the ReportViewer control by dragging at the bottom right corner. I set mine to 800px x 500px. You can also set this value in source view. Defining the data sources. We will now define the Data Source used to populate the report. Go back to the “ReportViewer Tasks” and select “Choose Data Sources” Select a “New data source..” Select “Object” and name your Data Source ID “odsProducts”   In the next screen, choose “ProductRepository” as your business object. Choose “GetProductsProjected” in the next screen.   The method requires a SupplierID and CategoryID. We will set these so that our data source gets the values from the drop down lists we defined earlier. Set the parameter source to be of type “Control” and set the ControlIDs to be ddlSuppliers and ddlCategories respectively. Your screen will look like this: We are now going to define the data source for our drop downs. Select the ddlCategory drop down and pick “Choose Data Source”. Pick “Object” and give it an id “odsCategories”   In the next screen, choose “ProductRepository” Select the GetCategories() method in the next screen.   Select “CategoryName” and “CategoryID” in the next screen. We are done defining the data source for the Category drop down. Perform the same steps for the Suppliers drop down.   Select each dropdown and set the AppendDataBoundItems to true and AutoPostback to true.     The AppendDataBoundItems is needed because we are going to insert an “All“ list item with a value of empty. Go to each drop down and add this list item markup as shown below> Finally, double click on each drop down in the designer and add the following code in the code behind. This along with the “Autopostback= true” attribute refreshes the report anytime a drop down is changed. protected void ddlCategories_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { rvProducts.LocalReport.Refresh(); }   protected void ddlSuppliers_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { rvProducts.LocalReport.Refresh(); } Compile your report and run the page. You should see the report rendered. Note that the tool bar in the ReportViewer control gives you a couple of options including the ability to export the data to Excel, PDF or word.   Conclusion Through this three part series, we did the following: Created a data layer for use by our RDLC. Created an RDLC using the report wizard and define a dataset for the report. Used the report design surface to design our report including adding a chart. Used the ReportViewer control to attach the RDLC. Connected our ReportWiewer to a data source and take parameter values from the drop downlists. Used AutoPostBack to refresh the reports when the dropdown selection was changed. RDLCs allow you to create interactive reports including drill downs and grouping. For even more advanced reports you can use Microsoft® SQL Server™ Reporting Services with RDLs. With RDLs, the report is rendered on the report server instead of the web server. Another nice thing about RDLs is that you can define a parameter list for the report and it gets rendered automatically for you. RDLCs and RDLs both have their advantages and its best to compare them and choose the right one for your requirements. Download VS2010 RTM Sample project NorthwindReports.zip   Alfred Borden: Are you watching closely?

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• ASP.NET 4.0- Html Encoded Expressions

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  We all know <%=expression%> features in asp.net. We can print any string on page from there. Mostly we are using them in asp.net mvc. Now we have one new features with asp.net 4.0 that we have HTML Encoded Expressions and this prevent Cross scripting attack as we are html encoding them. ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a new expression syntax <%: expression %> which automatically convert string into html encoded. Let’s take an example for that. I have just created an hello word protected method which will return a simple string which contains characters that needed to be HTML Encoded. Below is code for that. protected static string HelloWorld() { return "Hello World!!! returns from function()!!!>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>"; } Now let’s use the that hello world in our page html like below. I am going to use both expression to give you exact difference. <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <strong><%: HelloWorld()%></strong> </div> <div> <strong><%= HelloWorld()%></strong> </div> </form> Now let’s run the application and you can see in browser both look similar. But when look into page source html in browser like below you can clearly see one is HTML Encoded and another one is not. That’s it.. It’s cool.. Stay tuned for more.. Happy Programming Technorati Tags: ASP.NET 4.0,HTMLEncode,C#4.0

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• ASP.NET Error Handling: Creating an extension method to send error email

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  Error handling in asp.net required to handle any kind of error occurred. We all are using that in one or another scenario. But some errors are there which will occur in some specific scenario in production environment in this case We can’t show our programming errors to the End user. So we are going to put a error page over there or whatever best suited as per our requirement. But as a programmer we should know that error so we can track the scenario and we can solve that error or can handle error. In this kind of situation an Error Email comes handy. Whenever any occurs in system it will going to send error in our email. Here I am going to write a extension method which will send errors in email. From asp.net 3.5 or higher version of .NET framework  its provides a unique way to extend your classes. Here you can fine more information about extension method. So lets create extension method via implementing a static class like following. I am going to use same code for sending email via my Gmail account from here. Following is code for that. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Net.Mail; namespace Experiement { public static class MyExtension { public static void SendErrorEmail(this Exception ex) { MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage(new MailAddress("[email protected]") , new MailAddress("[email protected]")); mailMessage.Subject = "Exception Occured in your site"; mailMessage.IsBodyHtml = true; System.Text.StringBuilder errorMessage = new System.Text.StringBuilder(); errorMessage.AppendLine(string.Format("<B>{0}</B>:{1}<BR/>","Exception",ex.Message)); errorMessage.AppendLine(string.Format("<B>{0}</B>:{1}<BR/>", "Stack Trace", ex.StackTrace)); if (ex.InnerException != null) { errorMessage.AppendLine(string.Format("<B>{0}</B>:{1}<BR/>", " Inner Exception", ex.InnerException.Message)); errorMessage.AppendLine(string.Format("<B>{0}</B>:{1}<BR/>", "Inner Stack Trace", ex.InnerException.StackTrace)); } mailMessage.Body = errorMessage.ToString(); System.Net.NetworkCredential networkCredentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("[email protected]", "password"); SmtpClient smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); smtpClient.EnableSsl = true; smtpClient.UseDefaultCredentials = false; smtpClient.Credentials = networkCredentials; smtpClient.Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; smtpClient.Port = 587; smtpClient.Send(mailMessage); } } } After creating an extension method let us that extension method to handle error like following in page load event of page. using System; namespace Experiement { public partial class WebForm1 : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender,System.EventArgs e) { try { throw new Exception("My custom Exception"); } catch (Exception ex) { ex.SendErrorEmail(); Response.Write(ex.Message); } } } } Now in above code I have generated custom exception for example but in production It can be any Exception. And you can see I have use ex.SendErrorEmail() function in catch block to send email. That’s it.. Now it will throw exception and you will email in your email box like below.   That’s its. It’s so simple…Stay tuned for more.. Happy programming.. Technorati Tags: Exception,Extension Mehtod,Error Handling,ASP.NET

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• Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - June 14-16, 2010

  - by SanjeevAgarwal

  Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - June 14-16, 2010 Web Development ASP.Net MVC 2 Auto Complete Textbox With Custom View Model Attribute & EditorTemplate - Sean McAlinden Localization with ASP.NET MVC ModelMetadata - Kazi Manzur Rashid Securing Dynamic Data 4 (Replay) - Steve Adding Client-Side Script to an MVC Conditional Validator - Simon Ince jQuery: Storing and retrieving data related to elements - Rebecca Murphey Web Design 48 Examples of Excellent Layout in Web Design...(read more)

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• My View on ASP.NET Web Forms versus MVC

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction A lot has been said on Web Forms and MVC, but since I was recently asked about my opinion on the subject, here it is. First, I have to say that I really like both technologies and I don’t think any is going away – just remember SharePoint, which is built on top of Web Forms. I see them as complementary, targeting different needs and leveraging different skills. Let’s go through some of their differences. Rapid Application Development Rapid Application Development (RAD) is the development process by which you have an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a visual design surface and a toolbox, and you drag components from the toolbox to the design surface and set their properties through a property inspector. It was introduced with some of the earliest Windows graphical IDEs such as Visual Basic and Delphi. With Web Forms you have RAD out of the box. Visual Studio offers a generally good (and extensible) designer for the layout of pages and web user controls. Designing a page may simply be about dragging controls from the toolbox, setting their properties and wiring up some events to event handlers, which are implemented in code behind .NET classes. Most people will be familiar with this kind of development and enjoy it. You can see what you are doing from the beginning. MVC also has designable pages – called views in MVC terminology – the problem is that they can be built using different technologies, some of which, at the moment (MVC 4) do not support RAD – Razor, for example. I believe it is just a matter of time for that to be implemented in Visual Studio, but it will mostly consist on HTML editing, and until that day comes, you have to live with source editing. Development Model Web Forms features the same development model that you are used to from Windows Forms and other similar technologies: events fired by controls and automatic persistence of their properties between postbacks. For that, it uses concepts such as view state, which some may love and others may hate, because it may be misused quite easily, but otherwise does its job well. Another fundamental concept is data binding, by which a collection of data can be fed to a control and have it render that data somehow – just thing of the GridView control. The focus is on the page, that’s where it all starts, and you can place everything in the same code behind class: data access, business logic, layout, etc. The controls take care of generating a great part of the HTML and JavaScript for you. With MVC there is no free lunch when it comes to data persistence between requests, you have to implement it yourself. As for event handling, that is at the core of MVC, in the form of controllers and action methods, you just don’t think of them as event handlers. In MVC you need to think more in HTTP terms, so action methods such as POST and GET are relevant to you, and may write actions to handle one or the other. Also of crucial importance is model binding: the way by which MVC converts your posted data into a .NET class. This is something that ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms has introduced as well, but it is a cornerstone in MVC. MVC also has built-in validation of these .NET classes, which out of the box uses the Data Annotations API. You have full control of the generated HTML - except for that coming from the helper methods, usually small fragments - which requires a greater familiarity with the specifications. You normally rely much more on JavaScript APIs, they are even included in the Visual Studio template, that is because much less is done for you. Reuse It is difficult to accept a professional company/project that does not employ reuse. It can save a lot of time thus cutting costs significantly. Code reused in several projects matures as time goes by and helps developers learn from past experiences. ASP.NET Web Forms was built with reuse in mind, in the form of controls. Controls encapsulate functionality and are generally portable from project to project (with the notable exception of web user controls, those with an associated .ASCX markup file). ASP.NET has dozens of controls and it is very easy to develop new ones, so I believe this is a great advantage. A control can inject JavaScript code and external references as well as generate HTML an CSS. MVC on the other hand does not use controls – it is possible to use them, with some view engines like ASPX, but it is just not advisable because it breaks the flow – where do Init, Load, PreRender, etc, fit? The most similar to controls is extension methods, or helpers. They serve the same purpose – generating HTML, CSS or JavaScript – and can be reused between different projects. What differentiates them from controls is that there is no inheritance and no context – an extension method is just a static method which doesn’t know where it is being called. You also have partial views, which you can reuse in the same project, but there is no inheritance as well. This, in my view, is a weakness of MVC. Architecture Both technologies are highly extensible. I have writtenstarted writing a series of posts on ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility and will probably write another series on MVC extensibility as well. A number of scenarios are covered in any of these models, and some extensibility points apply to both, because, of course both stand upon ASP.NET. With Web Forms, if you’re like me, you start by defining you master pages, pages and controls, with some helper classes to glue everything. You may as well throw in some JavaScript, but probably you’re main work will be with plain old .NET code. The controls you define have the chance to inject JavaScript code and references, through either the ScriptManager or the page’s ClientScript object, as well as generating HTML and CSS code. The master page and page model with code behind classes offer a number of “hooks” by which you can change the normal way of things, for example, in a page you can access any control on the master page, add script or stylesheet references to its head and even change the page’s title. Also, with Web Forms, you typically have URLs in the form “/SomePath/SomePage.aspx?SomeParameter=SomeValue”, which isn’t really SEO friendly, no to mention the HTML that some controls produce, far from standards, optimization and best practices. In MVC, you also normally start by defining the master page (or layout) and views, which are the visible parts, and then define controllers on separate files. These controllers do not know anything about the views, except the names and types of the parameters that will be passed to and from them. The controller will be responsible for the data access and business logic, eventually relying on additional classes for this purpose. On a controller you only receive parameters and return a result, which may be a request for the rendering of a view, a redirection to another URL or a JSON object, to name just a few. The controller class does not know anything about the web, so you can effectively reuse it in a non-web project. This separation and the lack of programmatic access to the UI elements, makes it very difficult to implement, for example, something like SharePoint with MVC. OK, I know about Orchard, but it isn’t really a general purpose development framework, but instead, a CMS that happens to use MVC. Not having controls render HTML for you gives you in turn much more control over it – it is your responsibility to create it, which you can either consider a blessing or a curse, in the later case, you probably shouldn’t be using MVC at all. Also MVC URLs tend to be much more SEO-oriented, if you design your controllers and actions properly. Testing In a well defined architecture, you should separate business logic, data access logic and presentation logic, because these are all different things and it might even be the need to switch one implementation for another: for example, you might design a system which includes a data access layer, a business logic layer and two presentation layers, one on top of ASP.NET and the other with WPF; and the data access layer might be implemented first using NHibernate and later on switched for Entity Framework Code First. These changes are not that rare, so care should be taken in designing the system to make them possible. Web Forms are difficult to test, because it relies on event handlers which are only fired in web contexts, when a form is submitted or a page is requested. You can call them with reflection, but you have to set up a number of mocking objects first, HttpContext.Current first coming to my mind. MVC, on the other hand, makes testing controllers a breeze, so much that it even includes a template option for generating boilerplate unit test classes up from start. A well designed – from the unit test point of view - controller will receive everything it needs to work as parameters to its action methods, so you can pass whatever values you need very easily. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything can be tested: views, for instance, are difficult to test without actually accessing the site, but MVC offers the possibility to compile views at build time, so that, at least, you know you don’t have syntax errors beforehand. Myths Some popular but unfounded myths around MVC include: You cannot use controls in MVC: not true, actually, you can, at least with the Web Forms (ASPX) view engine; the declaration and usage is exactly the same as with Web Forms; You cannot specify a base class for a view: with the ASPX view engine you can use the Inherits Page directive, with this and all the others you can use the pageBaseType and userControlBaseType attributes of the <page> element; MVC shields you from doing “bad things” on your views: well, you can place any code on a code block, at least with the ASPX view engine (you may be starting to see a pattern here), even data access code; The model is the entity model, tied to an O/RM: the model is actually any class that you use to pass values to a view, including (but generally not recommended) an entity model; Unit tests come with no cost: unit tests generally don’t cover the UI, although there are frameworks just for that (see WatiN, for example); also, for some tests, you will have to mock or replace either the HttpContext.Current property or the HttpContextBase class yourself; Everything is testable: views aren’t, without accessing the site; MVC relies on HTML5/some_cool_new_javascript_framework: there is no relation whatsoever, MVC renders whatever you want it to render and does not require any framework to be present. The thing is, the subsequent releases of MVC happened in a time when Microsoft has become much more involved in standards, so the files and technologies included in the Visual Studio templates reflect this, and it just happens to work well with jQuery, for example. Conclusion Well, this is how I see it. Some folks may think that I am being too rude on MVC, probably because I don’t like it, but that’s not true: like I said, I do like MVC and I am starting my new projects with it. I just don’t want to go along with that those that say that MVC is much superior to Web Forms, in fact, some things you can do much more easily with Web Forms than with MVC. I will be more than happy to hear what you think on this!

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• New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output in ASP.NET 4 (and ASP.NET MVC 2)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the nineteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers a small, but very useful, new syntax feature being introduced with ASP.NET 4 – which is the ability to automatically HTML encode output within code nuggets.  This helps protect your applications and sites against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks, and enables you to do so using a nice concise syntax. HTML Encoding Cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML encoding attacks are two of the most common security issues that plague web-sites and applications.  They occur when hackers find a way to inject client-side script or HTML markup into web-pages that are then viewed by other visitors to a site.  This can be used to both vandalize a site, as well as enable hackers to run client-script code that steals cookie data and/or exploits a user’s identity on a site to do bad things. One way to help mitigate against cross-site scripting attacks is to make sure that rendered output is HTML encoded within a page.  This helps ensures that any content that might have been input/modified by an end-user cannot be output back onto a page containing tags like <script> or <img> elements.  ASP.NET applications (especially those using ASP.NET MVC) often rely on using <%= %> code-nugget expressions to render output.  Developers today often use the Server.HtmlEncode() or HttpUtility.Encode() helper methods within these expressions to HTML encode the output before it is rendered.  This can be done using code like below: While this works fine, there are two downsides of it: It is a little verbose Developers often forget to call the HtmlEncode method New <%: %> Code Nugget Syntax With ASP.NET 4 we are introducing a new code expression syntax (<%:  %>) that renders output like <%= %> blocks do – but which also automatically HTML encodes it before doing so.  This eliminates the need to explicitly HTML encode content like we did in the example above.  Instead you can just write the more concise code below to accomplish the same thing: We chose the <%: %> syntax so that it would be easy to quickly replace existing instances of <%= %> code blocks.  It also enables you to easily search your code-base for <%= %> elements to find and verify any cases where you are not using HTML encoding within your application to ensure that you have the correct behavior. Avoiding Double Encoding While HTML encoding content is often a good best practice, there are times when the content you are outputting is meant to be HTML or is already encoded – in which case you don’t want to HTML encode it again.  ASP.NET 4 introduces a new IHtmlString interface (along with a concrete implementation: HtmlString) that you can implement on types to indicate that its value is already properly encoded (or otherwise examined) for displaying as HTML, and that therefore the value should not be HTML-encoded again.  The <%: %> code-nugget syntax checks for the presence of the IHtmlString interface and will not HTML encode the output of the code expression if its value implements this interface.  This allows developers to avoid having to decide on a per-case basis whether to use <%= %> or <%: %> code-nuggets.  Instead you can always use <%: %> code nuggets, and then have any properties or data-types that are already HTML encoded implement the IHtmlString interface. Using ASP.NET MVC HTML Helper Methods with <%: %> For a practical example of where this HTML encoding escape mechanism is useful, consider scenarios where you use HTML helper methods with ASP.NET MVC.  These helper methods typically return HTML.  For example: the Html.TextBox() helper method returns markup like <input type=”text”/>.  With ASP.NET MVC 2 these helper methods now by default return HtmlString types – which indicates that the returned string content is safe for rendering and should not be encoded by <%: %> nuggets.  This allows you to use these methods within both <%= %> code nugget blocks: As well as within <%: %> code nugget blocks: In both cases above the HTML content returned from the helper method will be rendered to the client as HTML – and the <%: %> code nugget will avoid double-encoding it. This enables you to default to always using <%: %> code nuggets instead of <%= %> code blocks within your applications.  If you want to be really hardcore you can even create a build rule that searches your application looking for <%= %> usages and flags any cases it finds as an error to enforce that HTML encoding always takes place. Scaffolding ASP.NET MVC 2 Views When you use VS 2010 (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express) you’ll find that the views that are scaffolded using the “Add View” dialog now by default always use <%: %> blocks when outputting any content.  For example, below I’ve scaffolded a simple “Edit” view for an article object.  Note the three usages of <%: %> code nuggets for the label, textbox, and validation message (all output with HTML helper methods): Summary The new <%: %> syntax provides a concise way to automatically HTML encode content and then render it as output.  It allows you to make your code a little less verbose, and to easily check/verify that you are always HTML encoding content throughout your site.  This can help protect your applications against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks.  Hope this helps, Scott

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• Asp.net ADO.NET Entity Framework or ADO.NET

  - by sharru

  I'm starting a new project based on ASP.NET and Windows server. The application is planned to be pretty big and serve large amount of clients pulling and updating high freq. changing data. I have previously created projects with Linq-To-Sql or with Ado.Net. My plan for this project is to use VS2010 and the new EF4 framework. It would be great to hear other programmers options about development with Entity Framework Pros and cons from previous experience? Do you think EF4 is ready for production? Should i take the risk or just stick with plain old good ADO.NET?

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• DevDays ‘00 The Netherlands day #1

  - by erwin21

  First day of DevDays 2010, I was looking forward to DevDays to see all the new things like VS2010, .NET4.0, MVC2. The lineup for this year is again better than the year before, there are 100+ session of all kind of topics like Cloud, Database, Mobile, SharePoint, User experience, Visual Studio, Web. The first session of the day was a keynote by Anders Hejlsberg he talked about the history and future of programming languages. He gave his view about trends and influences in programming languages today and in the future. The second talk that i followed was from the famous Scott Hanselman, he talked about the basics of ASP.NET MVC 2, although it was a 300 level session, it was more like a level 100 session, but it was mentioned by Scott at the beginning. Although it was interesting to see all the basic things about MVC like the controllers, actions, routes, views, models etc. After the lunch the third talk for me was about moving ASP.NET webform applications to MVC from Fritz Onion. In this session he changed an example webform application part by part to a MVC application. He gave some interesting tips and tricks and showed how to solve some issues that occur while converting. Next and the fourth talk was about the difference between LINQ to SQL and  the ADO.NET  Entity Framework from Kurt Claeys. He gave a good understanding about this two options, the demos where in LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework, the goal was to get a good understanding when and where to use both options. The last talk about this day was also from Scott Hanselman, he goes deeper into the features of ASP.NET MVC 2 and gave some interesting tips, the ninja black belt tips. He gave some tips about the tooling, the new MVC 2 html helper methods, other view engines (like NHaml, spark),T4 templating. With this tips we can be more productive and create web applications better and faster. It was a long and interesting day, I am looking forward to day #2.

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• Implementing History Support using jQuery for AJAX websites built on asp.net AJAX

  - by anil.kasalanati

  Problem Statement: Most modern day website use AJAX for page navigation and gone are the days of complete HTTP redirection so it is imperative that we support back and forward buttons on the browser so that end users navigation is not broken. In this article we discuss about solutions which are already available and problems with them. Microsoft History Support: Post .Net 3.5 sp1 Microsoft’s Script manager supports history for websites using Update panels. This is achieved by enabling the ENABLE HISTORY property for the script manager and then the event “Page_Browser_Navigate” needs to be handled. So whenever the browser buttons are clicked the event is fired and the application can write code to do the navigation. The following articles provide good tutorials on how to do that http://www.asp.net/aspnet-in-net-35-sp1/videos/introduction-to-aspnet-ajax-history http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ajaxhistorymanagement.aspx And Microsoft api internally creates an IFrame and changes the bookmark of the url. Unfortunately this has a bug and it does not work in Ie6 and 7 which are the major browsers but it works in ie8 and Firefox. And Microsoft has apparently fixed this bug in .Net 4.0. Following is the blog http://weblogs.asp.net/joshclose/archive/2008/11/11/asp-net-ajax-addhistorypoint-bug.aspx For solutions which are still running on .net 3.5 sp1 there is no solution which Microsoft offers so there is  are two way to solve this o   Disable the back button. o   Develop custom solution.   Disable back button Even though this might look like a very simple thing to do there are issues around doing this  because there is no event which can be manipulated from the javascript. The browser does not provide an api to do this. So most of the technical solution on internet offer work arounds like doing a history.forward(1) so that even if the user clicks a back button the destination page redirects the user to the original page. This is not a good customer experience and does not work for asp.net website where there are different views in the same page. There are other ways around detecting the window unload events and writing code there. So there are 2 events onbeforeUnload and onUnload and we can write code to show a confirmation message to the user. If we write code in onUnLoad then we can only show a message but it is too late to stop the navigation. And if we write on onBeforeUnLoad we can stop the navigation if the user clicks cancel but this event would be triggered for all AJAX calls and hyperlinks where the href is anything other than #. We can do this but the website has to be checked properly to ensure there are no links where href is not # otherwise the user would see a popup message saying “you are leaving the website”. Believe me after doing a lot of research on the back button disable I found it easier to support it rather than disabling the button. So I am going to discuss a solution which work  using jQuery with some tweaking. Custom Solution JQuery already provides an api to manage the history of a AJAX website - http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history We need to integrate this with Microsoft Page request manager so that both of them work in tandem. The page state is maintained in the cookie so that it can be passed to the server and I used jQuery cookie plug in for that – http://plugins.jquery.com/node/1386/release Firstly when the page loads there is a need to hook up all the events on the page which needs to cause browser history and following is the code to that. jQuery(document).ready(function() {             // Initialize history plugin.             // The callback is called at once by present location.hash.             jQuery.history.init(pageload);               // set onlick event for buttons             jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() {                 //                 var hash = this.page;                 hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, '');                 isAsyncPostBack = true;                 // moves to a new page.                 // pageload is called at once.                 jQuery.history.load(hash);                 return true;             });         }); The above scripts basically gets all the DOM objects which have the attribute rel=”history” and add the event. In our test page we have the link button  which has the attribute rel set to history. <asp:LinkButton ID="Previous" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="PreviousOnClick">Previous</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="AsyncPostBack" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="NextOnClick">Next</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="HistoryLinkButton" runat="server" style="display:none" onclick="HistoryOnClick"></asp:LinkButton>   And you can see that there is an hidden HistoryLinkButton which used to send a sever side postback in case of browser back or previous buttons. And note that we need to use display:none and not visible= false because asp.net AJAX would disallow any post backs if visible=false. And in general the pageload event get executed on the client side when a back or forward is pressed and the function is shown below function pageload(hash) {                   if (hash) {                         if (!isAsyncPostBack) {                           jQuery.cookie("page", hash);                     __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", "");                 }                isAsyncPostBack = false;                             } else {                 // start page             jQuery("#load").empty();             }         }   As you can see in case there is an hash in the url we are basically do an asp.net AJAX post back using the following statement __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", ""); So whenever the user clicks back or forward the post back happens using the event statement we provide and Previous event code is invoked in the code behind.  We need to have the code to use the pageId present in the url to change the page content. And there is an important thing to note – because the hash is worked out using the pageId’s there is a need to recalculate the hash after every AJAX post back so following code is plugged in function ReWorkHash() {             jQuery("a[@rel='history']").unbind("click");             jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() {                 //                 var hash = jQuery(this).attr("page");                 hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, '');                 jQuery.cookie("page", hash);                 isAsyncPostBack = true;                                   // moves to a new page.                 // pageload is called at once.                 jQuery.history.load(hash);                 return true;             });        }   This code is executed from the code behind using ScriptManager RegisterClientScriptBlock as shown below –       ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(_Default), "Recalculater", "ReWorkHash();", true);   A sample application is available to be downloaded at the following location – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Source/HistoryTest.zip And a working sample is available at – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Samples/Default.aspx

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• CascadingDropDown jQuery Plugin for ASP.NET MVC

  - by rajbk

  CascadingDropDown is a jQuery plugin that can be used by a select list to get automatic population using AJAX. A sample ASP.NET MVC project is attached at the bottom of this post.   Usage The code below shows two select lists : <select id="customerID" name="customerID"> <option value="ALFKI">Maria Anders</option> <option value="ANATR">Ana Trujillo</option> <option value="ANTON">Antonio Moreno</option> </select>   <select id="orderID" name="orderID"> </select> When a customer is selected in the first select list, the second list will auto populate itself with the following code: $("#orderID").CascadingDropDown("#customerID", '/Sales/AsyncOrders'); Internally, an AJAX post is made to ‘/Sales/AsyncOrders’ with the post body containing  customerID=[selectedCustomerID]. This executes the action AsyncOrders on the SalesController with signature AsyncOrders(string customerID).  The AsyncOrders method returns JSON which is then used to populate the select list. The JSON format expected is shown below : [{ "Text": "John", "Value": "10326" }, { "Text": "Jane", "Value": "10801" }] Details $(targetID).CascadingDropDown(sourceID, url, settings) targetID The ID of the select list that will auto populate.  sourceID The ID of the select list, which, on change, causes the targetID to auto populate. url The url to post to Options promptText Text for the first item in the select list Default : -- Select -- loadingText Optional text to display in the select list while it is being loaded. Default : Loading.. errorText Optional text to display if an error occurs while populating the list Default: Error loading data. postData Data you want posted to the url in place of the default Example : { postData : { customerID : $(‘#custID’), orderID : $(‘#orderID’) }} will cause customerID=ALFKI&orderID=2343 to be sent as the POST body. Default: A text string obtained by calling serialize on the sourceID onLoading (event) Raised before the list is populated. onLoaded (event) Raised after the list is populated, The code below shows how to “animate” the  select list after load. Example using custom options: $("#orderID").CascadingDropDown("#customerID", '/Sales/AsyncOrders', { promptText: '-- Pick an Order--', onLoading: function () { $(this).css("background-color", "#ff3"); }, onLoaded: function () { $(this).animate({ backgroundColor: '#ffffff' }, 300); } }); To return JSON from our action method, we use the Json ActionResult passing in an IEnumerable<SelectListItem>. public ActionResult AsyncOrders(string customerID) { var orders = repository.GetOrders(customerID).ToList().Select(a => new SelectListItem() { Text = a.OrderDate.HasValue ? a.OrderDate.Value.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy") : "[ No Date ]", Value = a.OrderID.ToString(), }); return Json(orders); } Sample Project using VS 2010 RTM NorthwindCascading.zip

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• LLBLGen Pro feature highlights: automatic element name construction

  - by FransBouma

  (This post is part of a series of posts about features of the LLBLGen Pro system) One of the things one might take for granted but which has a huge impact on the time spent in an entity modeling environment is the way the system creates names for elements out of the information provided, in short: automatic element name construction. Element names are created in both directions of modeling: database first and model first and the more names the system can create for you without you having to rename them, the better. LLBLGen Pro has a rich, fine grained system for creating element names out of the meta-data available, which I'll describe more in detail below. First the model element related element naming features are highlighted, in the section Automatic model element naming features and after that I'll go more into detail about the relational model element naming features LLBLGen Pro has to offer in the section Automatic relational model element naming features. Automatic model element naming features When working database first, the element names in the model, e.g. entity names, entity field names and so on, are in general determined from the relational model element (e.g. table, table field) they're mapped on, as the model elements are reverse engineered from these relational model elements. It doesn't take rocket science to automatically name an entity Customer if the entity was created after reverse engineering a table named Customer. It gets a little trickier when the entity which was created by reverse engineering a table called TBL_ORDER_LINES has to be named 'OrderLine' automatically. Automatic model element naming also takes into effect with model first development, where some settings are used to provide you with a default name, e.g. in the case of navigator name creation when you create a new relationship. The features below are available to you in the Project Settings. Open Project Settings on a loaded project and navigate to Conventions -> Element Name Construction. Strippers! The above example 'TBL_ORDER_LINES' shows that some parts of the table name might not be needed for name creation, in this case the 'TBL_' prefix. Some 'brilliant' DBAs even add suffixes to table names, fragments you might not want to appear in the entity names. LLBLGen Pro offers you to define both prefix and suffix fragments to strip off of table, view, stored procedure, parameter, table field and view field names. In the example above, the fragment 'TBL_' is a good candidate for such a strip pattern. You can specify more than one pattern for e.g. the table prefix strip pattern, so even a really messy schema can still be used to produce clean names. Underscores Be Gone Another thing you might get rid of are underscores. After all, most naming schemes for entities and their classes use PasCal casing rules and don't allow for underscores to appear. LLBLGen Pro can automatically strip out underscores for you. It's an optional feature, so if you like the underscores, you're not forced to see them go: LLBLGen Pro will leave them alone when ordered to to so. PasCal everywhere... or not, your call LLBLGen Pro can automatically PasCal case names on word breaks. It determines word breaks in a couple of ways: a space marks a word break, an underscore marks a word break and a case difference marks a word break. It will remove spaces in all cases, and based on the underscore removal setting, keep or remove the underscores, and upper-case the first character of a word break fragment, and lower case the rest. Say, we keep the defaults, which is remove underscores and PasCal case always and strip the TBL_ fragment, we get with our example TBL_ORDER_LINES, after stripping TBL_ from the table name two word fragments: ORDER and LINES. The underscores are removed, the first character of each fragment is upper-cased, the rest lower-cased, so this results in OrderLines. Almost there! Pluralization and Singularization In general entity names are singular, like Customer or OrderLine so LLBLGen Pro offers a way to singularize the names. This will convert OrderLines, the result we got after the PasCal casing functionality, into OrderLine, exactly what we're after. Show me the patterns! There are other situations in which you want more flexibility. Say, you have an entity Customer and an entity Order and there's a foreign key constraint defined from the target of Order and the target of Customer. This foreign key constraint results in a 1:n relationship between the entities Customer and Order. A relationship has navigators mapped onto the relationship in both entities the relationship is between. For this particular relationship we'd like to have Customer as navigator in Order and Orders as navigator in Customer, so the relationship becomes Customer.Orders 1:n Order.Customer. To control the naming of these navigators for the various relationship types, LLBLGen Pro defines a set of patterns which allow you, using macros, to define how the auto-created navigator names will look like. For example, if you rather have Customer.OrderCollection, you can do so, by changing the pattern from {$EndEntityName$P} to {$EndEntityName}Collection. The $P directive makes sure the name is pluralized, which is not what you want if you're going for <EntityName>Collection, hence it's removed. When working model first, it's a given you'll create foreign key fields along the way when you define relationships. For example, you've defined two entities: Customer and Order, and they have their fields setup properly. Now you want to define a relationship between them. This will automatically create a foreign key field in the Order entity, which reflects the value of the PK field in Customer. (No worries if you hate the foreign key fields in your classes, on NHibernate and EF these can be hidden in the generated code if you want to). A specific pattern is available for you to direct LLBLGen Pro how to name this foreign key field. For example, if all your entities have Id as PK field, you might want to have a different name than Id as foreign key field. In our Customer - Order example, you might want to have CustomerId instead as foreign key name in Order. The pattern for foreign key fields gives you that freedom. Abbreviations... make sense of OrdNr and friends I already described word breaks in the PasCal casing paragraph, how they're used for the PasCal casing in the constructed name. Word breaks are used for another neat feature LLBLGen Pro has to offer: abbreviation support. Burt, your friendly DBA in the dungeons below the office has a hate-hate relationship with his keyboard: he can't stand it: typing is something he avoids like the plague. This has resulted in tables and fields which have names which are very short, but also very unreadable. Example: our TBL_ORDER_LINES example has a lovely field called ORD_NR. What you would like to see in your fancy new OrderLine entity mapped onto this table is a field called OrderNumber, not a field called OrdNr. What you also like is to not have to rename that field manually. There are better things to do with your time, after all. LLBLGen Pro has you covered. All it takes is to define some abbreviation - full word pairs and during reverse engineering model elements from tables/views, LLBLGen Pro will take care of the rest. For the ORD_NR field, you need two values: ORD as abbreviation and Order as full word, and NR as abbreviation and Number as full word. LLBLGen Pro will now convert every word fragment found with the word breaks which matches an abbreviation to the given full word. They're case sensitive and can be found in the Project Settings: Navigate to Conventions -> Element Name Construction -> Abbreviations. Automatic relational model element naming features Not everyone works database first: it may very well be the case you start from scratch, or have to add additional tables to an existing database. For these situations, it's key you have the flexibility that you can control the created table names and table fields without any work: let the designer create these names based on the entity model you defined and a set of rules. LLBLGen Pro offers several features in this area, which are described in more detail below. These features are found in Project Settings: navigate to Conventions -> Model First Development. Underscores, welcome back! Not every database is case insensitive, and not every organization requires PasCal cased table/field names, some demand all lower or all uppercase names with underscores at word breaks. Say you create an entity model with an entity called OrderLine. You work with Oracle and your organization requires underscores at word breaks: a table created from OrderLine should be called ORDER_LINE. LLBLGen Pro allows you to do that: with a simple checkbox you can order LLBLGen Pro to insert an underscore at each word break for the type of database you're working with: case sensitive or case insensitive. Checking the checkbox Insert underscore at word break case insensitive dbs will let LLBLGen Pro create a table from the entity called Order_Line. Half-way there, as there are still lower case characters there and you need all caps. No worries, see below Casing directives so everyone can sleep well at night For case sensitive databases and case insensitive databases there is one setting for each of them which controls the casing of the name created from a model element (e.g. a table created from an entity definition using the auto-mapping feature). The settings can have the following values: AsProjectElement, AllUpperCase or AllLowerCase. AsProjectElement is the default, and it keeps the casing as-is. In our example, we need to get all upper case characters, so we select AllUpperCase for the setting for case sensitive databases. This will produce the name ORDER_LINE. Sequence naming after a pattern Some databases support sequences, and using model-first development it's key to have sequences, when needed, to be created automatically and if possible using a name which shows where they're used. Say you have an entity Order and you want to have the PK values be created by the database using a sequence. The database you're using supports sequences (e.g. Oracle) and as you want all numeric PK fields to be sequenced, you have enabled this by the setting Auto assign sequences to integer pks. When you're using LLBLGen Pro's auto-map feature, to create new tables and constraints from the model, it will create a new table, ORDER, based on your settings I previously discussed above, with a PK field ID and it also creates a sequence, SEQ_ORDER, which is auto-assigns to the ID field mapping. The name of the sequence is created by using a pattern, defined in the Model First Development setting Sequence pattern, which uses plain text and macros like with the other patterns previously discussed. Grouping and schemas When you start from scratch, and you're working model first, the tables created by LLBLGen Pro will be in a catalog and / or schema created by LLBLGen Pro as well. If you use LLBLGen Pro's grouping feature, which allows you to group entities and other model elements into groups in the project (described in a future blog post), you might want to have that group name reflected in the schema name the targets of the model elements are in. Say you have a model with a group CRM and a group HRM, both with entities unique for these groups, e.g. Employee in HRM, Customer in CRM. When auto-mapping this model to create tables, you might want to have the table created for Employee in the HRM schema but the table created for Customer in the CRM schema. LLBLGen Pro will do just that when you check the setting Set schema name after group name to true (default). This gives you total control over where what is placed in the database from your model. But I want plural table names... and TBL_ prefixes! For now we follow best practices which suggest singular table names and no prefixes/suffixes for names. Of course that won't keep everyone happy, so we're looking into making it possible to have that in a future version. Conclusion LLBLGen Pro offers a variety of options to let the modeling system do as much work for you as possible. Hopefully you enjoyed this little highlight post and that it has given you new insights in the smaller features available to you in LLBLGen Pro, ones you might not have thought off in the first place. Enjoy!

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• .Net to Oracle Connectivity using ODBC .NET

  - by SAMIR BHOGAYTA

  You can use the new ODBC .NET Data Provider that works with the ODBC Oracle7.x driver or higher. You need to have MDAC 2.6 or later installed and then download ODBC .NET from the MS Web Site http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?url=/code/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/668/msdncompositedoc.xml&frame=true. MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Component) 2.7 contains core component, including the Microsoft SQL server and Oracle OLE Database provider and ODBC driver. Insta ...You can use the new ODBC .NET Data Provider that works with the ODBC Oracle7.x driver or higher. You need to have MDAC 2.6 or later installed and then download ODBC .NET from the MS Web Site http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?url=/code/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/668/msdncompositedoc.xml&frame=true. MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Component) 2.7 contains core component, including the Microsoft SQL server and Oracle OLE Database provider and ODBC driver. Install ODBC .NET from the MS Web Site http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?URL=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/943/msdncompositedoc.xml Create a DSN, using either Microsoft ODBC for Oracle or Oracle supplied Driver if the Oracle client software is loaded. here for eq. TrailDSN. While creating DSN give user name along with passward for eq. scott/tiger. using Microsoft .Data.Odbc; private void Form1_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { try { OdbcConnection myconnection= new OdbcConnection ("DSN=TrialDSN"); OdbcDataAdapter myda = new OdbcDataAdapter ("Select * from EMP", myconnection); DataSet ds= new DataSet (); myda.Fill(ds, "Table"); dataGrid1.DataSource = ds ; } catch(Exception ex) { MessageBox.Show (ex.Message ); } }

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• Coexistence of projects between Visual Studio 2010 and 2012

  - by sreejukg

  Microsoft has released another version of Visual Studio named Visual Studio 2012. As you can see there are user interface (UI) changes in all/most of the Microsoft applications as Microsoft is moving towards Windows 8 and changing the UI scheme for all of the applications. Visual Studio 2012 is a move to adapt the new interface requirements that are in coherent with Windows 8. Not only this Visual Studio 2012 has lots of improvements in several areas and it supports .Net framework 4.5. In the past, whenever a new version of Visual Studio launches, developers needed to upgrade the project to new version of Visual Studio which was a pain, especially when you are working with a team of developers. Once a solution is upgraded to a newer version, it was not possible to going back. With Visual studio 2012, you can avoid the pain of upgrading. Developers will be able to open their project in Visual Studio 2012 along with Visual Studio 2010 SP 1. This means if you create a project using Visual Studio 2012, you will be able to open it with Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 and vice versa. There are some exceptions (as always!). Visual Studio 2012 supports some new project types, which was not there in 2010 version. Such project, you will not be able to open in Visual Studio 2010. For e.g. Visual Studio 2012 brings a new project type named “Windows 8 Modern Applications”, such projects you will not be able to open using the 2010 version of Visual Studio. Just to prove the said subject, I am going to perform some simple operations. I installed Visual Studio 2010 with SP 1 and Visual Studio 2012 on my PC. See the snapshots for both the installations. Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2012 Now I am going to perform two test cases. First create a project in 2010 Version and open it in 2012 version and vice versa. If you are interested, you can continue scrolling down, otherwise just say bye bye to this article. Case 1: Open a solution created using Visual Studio 2010 in 2012 version. I created a project in VS 2010 named TestProject2010 using empty ASP.Net web application template. Once created the project appears in VS 2010 as follows. I closed Visual Studio and opened the solution file using VS 2012 by using the Open Project dialog(File -> Open Project/Solution). Surprisingly, there is not even a warning message, just the project opened fine in Visual Studio 2012. Case 2: Open a solution created using Visual Studio 2012 in 2010 version. I have created a project in Visual Studio 2012 named testProject2012. See the screenshot of the project in VS 2012 below. Now try opening the solution in Visual Studio 2010. The solution loaded successfully, but Visual Studio failed to load project. See the screenshot. At first I was surprised. The Web application project template is available in both versions, So there should not be any problem. What is making the incompatibility? Is it ASP.Net version? Yes it is. VS 2012 assign ASP.Net 4.5 as the default version that was causing the trouble for Visual Studio 2010. I changed the version to .Net framework 4.0 and saved the project after that I was able to open the project in Visual Studio 2010. This as an excellent move from Visual Studio Team and allows enterprises to perform gradual upgrade to the new version. Now developers can work in any version based on availability and preference, simply I can use Visual Studio 2012 as my IDE while my colleague working on the same project can still use Visual Studio 2010.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 SERIES

  - by carlone

    Estimados Lectores,   Luego de un tiempo ausente en mi blog, re-tomamos el rumbo… en esta oportunidad quiero comunicarles que iniciaré una serie de screencast sobre ASP.NET MVC, en donde me estare enfocando desde los conceptos básicos del patrón, pasaremos por las definiciones y conceptos utilizados dentro del ASP.NET MVC para la Vista, El controlador y el Modelo.   Estos videos tengo pensados que sean cápsulas no mayores a los 10 minutos para que sean fáciles de entender y visualizar.   Para los que quieran prepararse con tiempo les recomiendo descargar las tools requeridas para esta series-curso:   Descargar los tools de ASP.NET MVC 3 para VS2010: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1491 , seleccionar el archivo “AspNetMVC3ToolsUpdateSetup.exe” (Nota: si tienen el web platform installer también pueden instalar desde esta tool el ASP.NET MVC 3)   Recuerden que pueden utilizar el Web Developer Express 2010 también para el desarrollo:  mi recomendación es que lo hagan por medio del Web Platform Installer:  Install Visual Web Developer Express Free   Bueno esten pendientes de los próximos videos que estaré publicando.   Cualquier comentario o sugerencia es bienvenido!   Saludos   Carlos A. Lone

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• Running ASP.NET Webforms and ASP.NET MVC side by side

  - by rajbk

  One of the nice things about ASP.NET MVC and its older brother ASP.NET WebForms is that they are both built on top of the ASP.NET runtime environment. The advantage of this is that, you can still run them side by side even though MVC and WebForms are different frameworks. Another point to note is that with the release of the ASP.NET routing in .NET 3.5 SP1, we are able to create SEO friendly URLs that do not map to specific files on disk. The routing is part of the core runtime environment and therefore can be used by both WebForms and MVC. To run both frameworks side by side, we could easily create a separate folder in your MVC project for all our WebForm files and be good to go. What this post shows you instead, is how to have an MVC application with WebForm pages  that both use a common master page and common routing for SEO friendly URLs.  A sample project that shows WebForms and MVC running side by side is attached at the bottom of this post. So why would we want to run WebForms and MVC in the same project?  WebForms come with a lot of nice server controls that provide a lot of functionality. One example is the ReportViewer control. Using this control and client report definition files (RDLC), we can create rich interactive reports (with charting controls). I show you how to use the ReportViewer control in a WebForm project here :  Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010. We can create even more advanced reports by using SQL reporting services that can also be rendered by the ReportViewer control. Now, consider the sample MVC application I blogged about called ASP.NET MVC Paging/Sorting/Filtering using the MVCContrib Grid and Pager. Assume you were given the requirement to add a UI to the MVC application where users could interact with a report and be given the option to export the report to Excel, PDF or Word. How do you go about doing it?   This is a perfect scenario to use the ReportViewer control and RDLCs. As you saw in the post on creating the ASP.NET report, the ReportViewer control is a Web Control and is designed to be run in a WebForm project with dependencies on, amongst others, a ScriptManager control and the beloved Viewstate.  Since MVC and WebForm both run under the same runtime, the easiest thing to is to add the WebForm application files (index.aspx, rdlc, related class files) into our MVC project. You can copy the files over from the WebForm project into the MVC project. Create a new folder in our MVC application called CommonReports. Add the index.aspx and rdlc file from the Webform project   Right click on the Index.aspx file and convert it to a web application. This will add the index.aspx.designer.cs file (this step is not required if you are manually adding a WebForm aspx file into the MVC project).    Verify that all the type names for the ObjectDataSources in code behind to point to the correct ProductRepository and fix any compiler errors. Right click on Index.aspx and select “View in browser”. You should see a screen like the one below:   There are two issues with our page. It does not use our site master page and the URL is not SEO friendly. Common Master Page The easiest way to use master pages with both MVC and WebForm pages is to have a common master page that each inherits from as shown below. The reason for this is most WebForm controls require them to be inside a Form control and require ControlState or ViewState. ViewMasterPages used in MVC, on the other hand, are designed to be used with content pages that derive from ViewPage with Viewstate turned off. By having a separate master page for MVC and WebForm that inherit from the Root master page,, we can set properties that are specific to each. For example, in the Webform master, we can turn on ViewState, add a form tag etc. Another point worth noting is that if you set a WebForm page to use a MVC site master page, you may run into errors like the following: A ViewMasterPage can be used only with content pages that derive from ViewPage or ViewPage<TViewItem> or Control 'MainContent_MyButton' of type 'Button' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server. Since the ViewMasterPage inherits from MasterPage as seen below, we make our Root.master inherit from MasterPage, MVC.master inherit from ViewMasterPage and Webform.master inherits from MasterPage. We define the attributes on the master pages like so: Root.master <%@ Master Inherits="System.Web.UI.MasterPage"  … %> MVC.master <%@ Master MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Root.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" … %> WebForm.master <%@ Master MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Root.Master" Inherits="NorthwindSales.Views.Shared.Webform" %> Code behind: public partial class Webform : System.Web.UI.MasterPage {} We make changes to our reports aspx file to use the Webform.master. See the source of the master pages in the sample project for a better understanding of how they are connected. SEO friendly links We want to create SEO friendly links that point to our report. A request to /Reports/Products should render the report located in ~/CommonReports/Products.aspx. Simillarly to support future reports, a request to /Reports/Sales should render a report in ~/CommonReports/Sales.aspx. Lets start by renaming our index.aspx file to Products.aspx to be consistent with our routing criteria above. As mentioned earlier, since routing is part of the core runtime environment, we ca easily create a custom route for our reports by adding an entry in Global.asax. public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");   //Custom route for reports routes.MapPageRoute( "ReportRoute", // Route name "Reports/{reportname}", // URL "~/CommonReports/{reportname}.aspx" // File );     routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults ); } With our custom route in place, a request to Reports/Employees will render the page at ~/CommonReports/Employees.aspx. We make this custom route the first entry since the routing system walks the table from top to bottom, and the first route to match wins. Note that it is highly recommended that you write unit tests for your routes to ensure that the mappings you defined are correct. Common Menu Structure The master page in our original MVC project had a menu structure like so: <ul id="menu"> <li> <%=Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home") %></li> <li> <%=Html.ActionLink("Products", "Index", "Products") %></li> <li> <%=Html.ActionLink("Help", "Help", "Home") %></li> </ul> We want this menu structure to be common to all pages/views and hence should reside in Root.master. Unfortunately the Html.ActionLink helpers will not work since Root.master inherits from MasterPage which does not have the helper methods available. The quickest way to resolve this issue is to use RouteUrl expressions. Using  RouteUrl expressions, we can programmatically generate URLs that are based on route definitions. By specifying parameter values and a route name if required, we get back a URL string that corresponds to a matching route. We move our menu structure to Root.master and change it to use RouteUrl expressions: <ul id="menu"> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypHome" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=default,controller=home,action=index%>">Home</asp:HyperLink></li> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypProducts" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=default,controller=products,action=index%>">Products</asp:HyperLink></li> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypReport" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=ReportRoute,reportname=products%>">Product Report</asp:HyperLink></li> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypHelp" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=default,controller=home,action=help%>">Help</asp:HyperLink></li> </ul> We are done adding the common navigation to our application. The application now uses a common theme, routing and navigation structure. Conclusion We have seen how to do the following through this post Add a WebForm page from a WebForm project to an existing ASP.NET MVC application Use a common master page for both WebForm and MVC pages Use routing for SEO friendly links Use a common menu structure for both WebForm and MVC. The sample project is attached below. Version: VS 2010 RTM Remember to change your connection string to point to your Northwind database NorthwindSalesMVCWebform.zip

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• Why isn't ASP.NET MVC 2.0 part of the .NET 4.0 BCL ?

  - by Max Toro

  Why isn't ASP.NET MVC 2.0 part of the .NET 4.0 BCL ?

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• Configurable UI Plugin frameworks for .NET Compact Framework

  - by Andy White

  Is anyone aware of any frameworks for configuring UIs and possibly plugins for .NET Compact Framework (rich client) applications? Ideally, I'm hoping to find something that would allow you to bascially configure an application's UI and screenflow via an XML file, or some other configuration mechanism, and allow you to plugin different "Action" classes to take care of specific events, etc. in the app. We basically want to have a base application, which allows you to plugin specific/custom functionality to support different customers. I know it's a lot to find, but feel free to throw out any frameworks that might support any or all of these types of things.

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• Traditional ASP.Net WebForms vs ASP.Net MVC

  - by Pankaj Upadhyay

  ASP.Net MVC has been around for some time now. The latest one, i.e MVC3 comes with Razor View Engine. My question: How long is traditional ASP.Net here to stay. Does Microsoft have any plans to eliminate it in aid of ASP.Net MVC in the future and will the next release of VS incorporate it? Also, I would like to know if there is any merit of traditional over ASP.Net MVC, other than the controls-aid?

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