August 30th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.

ASP.NET

• Recreating the Google Analytics Table as an ASP.NET GridView: Matt Berseth has a great post on how you can templatize the control to provide really nice UI paging options. 

• ASP.NET Charting with NPlot: Olav Lerflaten has a great article on 4GuysFromRolla.com that describes how to use the free NPlot chart engine for .NET to create professional scientific charts of data using ASP.NET.

• Export GridView to Excel: Matt Berseth has another excellent post on how you can export data to Excel from within your ASP.NET application.

• How to use PayPal Payment System in ASP.NET: Alexandr Golovanov has a great article that details how to implement a paypal payment system within your ASP.NET applications.

• Using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to Store Date/Time Values: Scott Mitchell has a useful article that describes how to use the UTC format to store date/time values within a SQL database so that it is transportable across timezones.  This is important to think about if your business operates in multiple geographic locations (or if your hosted web-server is located in a different time zone).

• Fixing Firefox Slowness with localhost on Vista (or XP with IPv6): One annoying issue I've run into with Firefox is that sometimes - when doing localhost development - it can take several seconds to connect back to a local page.  It turns out this slowness is caused by a Firefox IPv6 issue with DNS resolution.  Dan Wahlin has a good pointer on how to fix this.

• Microsoft Patterns & Practices Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications: The final release of the Microsoft PAG group's Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications has been posted.  You can learn more about this release from J.D. Meier's blog post here.

ASP.NET AJAX

• Using the AJAX Timer Control as an UpdatePanel Trigger: Matt Berseth has a nice post on how to use the ASP.NET AJAX Timer Control to trigger AJAX updates of a page. 

• Seamless Inline Text Editing with ASP.NET AJAX: Dave Ward has a nice post on how to enable inline editing of content on a page using ASP.NET AJAX.

• ASP.NET AJAX Exception Logging: Kazi Manzur Rashid has a nice article that shows how to create an effective error logging system with ASP.NET AJAX to catch and record client JavaScript errors.

• The Ever-Useful $get and $find ASP.NET AJAX Shortcut Functions: Matt Berseth has another nice post on using the $get and $find JavaScript shortcut functions built-into ASP.NET AJAX.

• How Do I: Trigger an UpdatePanel refresh from a DropDownList Control: Joe Stagner covers how to use the SelectedIndexChanged event on drop-downlist controls to trigger AJAX refreshes of an ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel.

• How Do I: Localize an ASP.NET AJAX Application: Chris Pels provides an overview of the localization capabilities in ASP.NET, and then looks at how to use these with ASP.NET AJAX.

• How Do I: Implement the Persistent Communications Pattern using Web Services: Joe Stagner discusses ways to implement the persistent communications pattern for ASP.NET AJAX.

IIS 7.0

• Developing IIS7 Modules and Handlers with the .NET Framework: Mike Volodarksy from the IIS7 team has an excellent step-by-step blog post that describes how you can now write HttpModules and HttpHandlers using managed code that participate in all requests to a web-server.  This enables you to easily do scenarios that previously required custom C++ ISAPIs to achieve.

LINQ

• LINQPad: Joseph Albahari has an incredibly awesome LINQ query expression tool that you can use to quickly try out LINQ expressions.  Think of it as SQL Query Analyzer - but with LINQ expressions as the queries.  Definitely a useful free tool to add to your toolbox.

Visual Studio

• The SQL Data Tools in VS 2008: Rick Strahl talks about some of the new database schema comparison, data comparison and SQL Refactoring features within Visual Studio 2008.

• Open Folder in Windows Explorer in Visual Studio: Rick Strahl blogs about a small but cool feature addition to VS 2008 that enables you to easily open a Windows explorer view of a folder inside a VS 2008 project.  Also make sure to check out Bobby DeRosa's "Explore in Windows" Add-In for Visual Studio 2005 that you can download to enable this with VS 2005 today.

• Multithreaded Debugging Features in VS 2008: John Robbins has a nice blog post that describes some of the new multi-threading debugger features in VS 2008.

Silverlight

• Recreating ITunes in Silverlight: Jose Fajardo has an absolutely fantastic blog with a ton of Silverlight content on it.  One of the projects he has been working on has been recreating Apple's ITunes Media Player using Silverlight.  Check out his multi-part blog series that discusses step-by-step how he built it.  Absolutely brilliant.

• New Halo3 Video using Silverlight: The new Halo3 preview video was recently posted to the web - using Silverlight 1.0 to build a custom viewer and stream a HD version of it.  Click here for a lower resolution version if you are on a slow network.

• Sudoku for Silverlight: David Anson has built a cool online sample using Silverlight that helps you play the popular Sudoku game.  Useful for both Sudoku addicts and developers wanting to learn Silverlight.  

• Font Embedding and RSS data in Silverlight: Tim Heuer has a cool blog post that shows how you can create your own font-type and embed it within your Silverlight 1.0 application.  He then has his application retrieve dynamic content from an RSS feed and use the custom font to display it.  You can run the finished application online here (all of the text here is dynamic - not a screen-shot).

• Silverlight Drag and Drop JavaScript Framework: Roberto Hernandez-Pou has a nice article and sample that describes how to implement a drag/drop mechanism for Silverlight 1.0 (using JavaScript).  This article is in both Spanish and English - scroll down if you are looking for the English version.

• Pascal Support for Silverlight: RemObjects Software now has a project template for VS 2008 that enables you to write Silverlight 1.1 .NET applications using Pascal.  It is kinda wild to see a screenshot of FireFox on the Mac, running a Silverlight application, written with a Pascal code-behind file built with VS 2008. 

.NET

• Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows: This blog post is definitely one to bookmark.  It contains literally hundreds of great pointers to cool productivity savers for .NET developers.  BTW - Scott Hanselman officially joins my team within Microsoft next week.  Woohoo!

• LLBLGen Pro V2.5 released: Last week Frans Bouma released the latest version of LLBLGen Pro, which is an excellent ORM implementation for .NET.  New features include richer auditing, authorization, and dependency injection support.

• IronLisp: A new codeplex project has recently started that provides the beginnings of a LISP implementation for .NET which is built using the new DLR (dynamic language runtime) framework for .NET.  Earlier this month I was thinking to myself "I really need to spend some time using LISP or Scheme".  Now I can do it on .NET.  Sweet.

Hope this helps,

Scott