ASP.NET 3 Release

This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release.  Today’s build includes some additional features not in last month’s drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation.

You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here.  You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here.

Controller Action Method Changes

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release, along with some additional tweaks and adjustments. 

You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method.  For example:

which would render the below HTML when run:

Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an “ActionResult” object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it.  This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything).  It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow.

For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them.  The code below will cause three pieces of “ViewData” to be passed to the view – “Title” and “CategoryName” string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object):

One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required).  Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above:

 

We can then author a “Browse” ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action:

When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we’ll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red):

Note that in addition to support a “ViewResult” response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning “JsonResult” (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), “ContentResult” (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results.  

The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you’ll see us add several more built-in result types.

Improved HTML Helper Methods

The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3.  In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements.

Automatic Value Lookup

With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers.  For example: to include a value within a <input type=”text” value=”some value”/> element you would write:

The above code continues to work – although now you can also just write:

The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use.

SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels

New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc).  One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render. 

For example, below I’m creating a SelectList view-model class over the set of unique category objects in our database.  I’m indicating that I want to use the “CategoryID” property as the value of each item in the list, and the “CategoryName” as the display text.  I’m also setting the list selection to the current CategoryId of the Product we are editing:

Within our view we then just have to write the below code to indicate that we want to create a drop-downlist against the SelectList we put into ViewData:

This will then render the appropriate drop down with items and selection for us at runtime:

 

Built-in error validation support isn’t included with our HTML helpers yet (you currently need to write code for this) – but will show up in the future, which will make form editing scenarios even easier.

You’ll also start to see ASP.NET AJAX helper methods show up in future preview releases as well, which will make it easier to integrate AJAX into MVC applications with a minimum of code.

URL Routing Improvements

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes a number of improvements to the URL routing system.  URL routing is one of the most “fundamental” components of a web MVC framework to get right, hence the reason we’ve spent a lot of focus the first few previews getting this area nailed.  Our new URL routing engine will ship in .NET 3.5 SP1 this summer, and will support both Web Forms and MVC requests.  ASP.NET MVC will be able to use the built-in .NET 3.5 SP1 routing engine when running on .NET 3.5 SP1. ASP.NET MVC will also include its own copy of the assembly so that it can also work on non-SP1 systems.

Some of the URL Routing Improvements in the Preview 3 release include:

MapRoute() and IgnoreRoute() helper methods

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes new “MapRoute” and “IgnoreRoute” helper methods that you can use to more easily register routing rules.  MapRoute() provides an easy way to add a new MVC Route rule to the Routes collection.  IgnoreRoute() provides an easy way to tell the URL routing system to stop processing certain URL patterns (for example: handler .axd resources in ASP.NET that are used to serve up JavaScript, images, etc). 

Below is an example of the default RegisterRoutes() method within Global.asax when you create a new ASP.NET MVC project where you can see both of these new helper methods in action. 

The MapRoute() helper method is overloaded and takes two, three or four parameters (route name, URL syntax, URL parameter default, and optional URL parameter regular expression constraints). 

You can call MapRoute() as many times as you want to register multiple named routes in the system.  For example, in addition to the default convention rule, we could add a “Products-Browse” named routing rule like below:

We can then refer to this “Products-Browse” rule explicitly within our Controllers and Views when we want to generate a URL to it.  For example, we could use the Html.RouteLink view helper to indicate that we want to link to our “Products-Browse” route and pass it a “Food” category parameter using code in our view template like below:

This view helper would then access the routing system and output an appropriate HTML hyperlink URL like below (note: how it did automatic parameter substitution of the category parameter into the URL using the route rule):

We could alternatively use the new Url.RouteUrl(routeName, values) within views if we wanted to just retrieve the URL for a named route (and not output the <a> html element). 

We could also use the new RedirectToRoute(routeName, values) helper method on the Controller base class to issues browser redirects based on named routing rules. 

Richer URL Route Mapping Features

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also supports a bunch of new URL route mapping features.  You can now include “-“, “.”, “;” or any other characters you want as part of your route rules.

For example, using a “-” separator you can now parse the language and locale values from your URLs separately using a rule like below:

This would pass appropriate “language”, “locale”, and “category” parameters to a ProductsController.Browse action method when invoked:

URL Route Rule	Example URL	Parameters Passed to Action method
{language}-{locale}/products/browse/{category}	/en-us/products/browse/food	language=en, locale=us, category=food
	/en-uk/products/browse/food	language=en, locale=uk, category=food

Or you can use the “.” file extension type at the end of a URL to determine whether to render back the result in either a XML or HTML format:

This would pass both “category” and a “format” parameters to the ProductsController.Browse action method when invoked:

URL Route Rule	Example URL	Parameters Passed to Action method
products/browse/{category}.{format}	/products/browse/food.xml	category=food, format=xml
	/products/browse/food.html	category=food, format=html

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also supports wildcard route rules (these were also in Preview 2).  For example, you can indicate in a rule to pass all remaining URI content on as a named parameter to an action method:

This would pass a “contentUrl” parameter to the WikiController.DisplayPage action method when invoked:

URL Route Rule	Example URL	Parameters Passed to Action method
Wiki/Pages/{*contentUrl}	/Wiki/Pages/People/Scott	contentUrl=”People/Scott”
	/Wiki/Pages/Countries/UK	contentUrl=”Countries/UK”

These wildcard routes are very useful to look at if you are building a blogging, wiki, cms or other content based system.

 

Summary

Today’s Preview 3 release of ASP.NET MVC includes a bunch of improvements and refinements.  We are starting to feel good about the URL routing and Controller/Action programming model of MVC, and feel that those areas are starting to bake really well.  In future preview releases you’ll start to see more improvements higher-up the programming model stack in areas like Views (html helpers, validation helpers, etc), AJAX, sub-controllers and site composition, deeper Login, Authentication, Authorization and Caching integration, as well as data scaffolding support. 

I also have a (very) long tutorial post that I started putting together this past weekend that walks-through building an application using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 that I’m hoping to wrap up and post in the next few days.  This should provide both a good intro to ASP.NET MVC, as well as help provide some context on how all the pieces fit together if you are interested in using the ASP.NET MVC option.

Hope this helps,

May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF

Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks – work and life have been busy here lately.  Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I’ve done myself in the past.

ASP.NET

• Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control: Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5.

• Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls: Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario.

• Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET: A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images.

• Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on.

• ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners: Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns).  The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated.  Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this.

ASP.NET AJAX

• ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control: Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control.

• Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch: Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads.  Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier.

• Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class: Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class.

• Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta: Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls.

.NET

• 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ: Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it.

• Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL: Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries.  Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility – which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries.

• DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers.

• Ukadc.Diagnostics: Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc).

Visual Studio

• 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know: A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio.

• Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series.  I confess I didn’t know this one.

Silverlight

• 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 – all in their "spare time".  Wow.

• AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes: Nikhil Kothari has a nice blog post that demonstrates how he built an auto-complete behavior control for Silverlight. 

• Scrolling through Large Resultsets with Silverlight 2 and LINQ to SQL: The Swiss MSDN team has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to scroll through large resultsets using the Silverlight DataGrid and LINQ to SQL.

• IValueConverter: The Swiss Army Knife of Bindings: David Anson has a useful blog post and sample that demonstrates how to use the IValueConverter feature in Silverlight and WPF to support richer bindings against complex objects.

• Silverlight 2 Pie Chart: Peter McGrattan has posted a nice control and article that demonstrates how to use a new Silverlight charting control he has written.

WPF

• WPF week on Channel9: Watch 6 great videos on Channel9.  Each one includes interviews and demos with members of the WPF team talking about some of the awesome work that went into WPF 3.5 SP1 (read my blog post here for a summary of some of it).

• WPF Testing and Application Quality Guide: Check out the 0.2 release of a free online book being developed by Microsoft that covers how to test WPF applications.  Definitely worth book-marking if you are doing WPF development.

• Moving Toward WPF Data Binding One Step at a Time: Josh Smith has a great article on CodeProject.com that explains WPF data binding and walksthrough how to use it.

• WPF 3.5 SP1 StringFormat: Lester has a nice post that describes how to use the new StringFormat feature in WPF 3.5 SP1.  This makes it much easier to handle formatting of databound values.

Hope this helps,

Scott

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Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta

Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.  These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November.  They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them).

We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and install the beta here.

Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes

The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form – so you should be careful about installing it on critical machines.  There are a few important SP1 Beta installation notes to be aware of:

1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta.  There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release.  These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release – until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta.

2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it – as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 – before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure).  You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things).  It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 – the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package.  We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta.

3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend.  This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running.  Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue.

Improvements for Web Development

.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain a bunch of feature improvements targeted at web application development. 

The VS Web Dev Tools team has more details (including specific bug fix details) on some of the VS specific work here.  Below are more details on some of the work in the web-space:

ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)

.NET 3.5 SP1 adds support for a rich ASP.NET data "scaffolding" framework that enables you to quickly build functional data-driven web application. With the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature you can automatically build web UI (with full CRUD – create, read, update, delete – support) against a variety of data object models (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, REST Services, and any other ORM or object model with a dynamic data provider).

SP1 adds this new functionality to the existing GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView controls in ASP.NET, and enables smart validation and flexible data templating options.  It also delivers new smart filtering server controls, as well as adds support for automatically traversing primary-key/foreign-key relationships and displaying friendly foreign key names – all of which saves you from having to write a ton of code.

You can learn more more about this feature from Scott Hanselman’s videos and tutorials here.

ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible new URL routing engine that allows you to map incoming URLs to route handlers.  It includes support for both parsing parameters from clean URLs (for example: /Products/Browse/Beverages), as well as support to dynamically calculate and generate new URLs from route registrations.

This new routing engine is used by both ASP.NET Dynamic Data as well as the new ASP.NET MVC framework.  It will support both WebForms and MVC based requests. 

ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support

.NET 3.5 SP1 adds new APIs to ASP.NET AJAX to allow you to better control the history list of a browser (enabling you to control the behavior of the back/forward button of the browser).

You can learn more about this feature in the article here and the screencast here.

ASP.NET AJAX Script Combining Support

.NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new <CompositeScript> element on the <asp:ScriptManager> server control, which allows you to declaratively define multiple script references within it.  All the script references within the CompositeScript element are combined together on the server and served as a single script to the client, reducing the number of requests to the server and improving page load time for ASP.NET AJAX applications.

The script combining feature supports both path based scripts and assembly resource based scripts, and dynamically serves up the combined scripts using the ScriptResources.axd handler.

Visual Studio 2008 Performance Improvements HTML Designer and HTML Source Editor

In February we released a HotFix roll-up that included a number of performance improvements and bug fixes for the VS 2008 Web Designer.  VS 2008 SP1 includes all of these fixes, as well as a number of additional performance improvements.

Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Script Formatting and Code Preferences

Visual Studio has for several releases supported rich source code formatting options for VB and C# (spacing, line breaks, brace positions, etc).

VS 2008 SP1 adds richer source code formatting support for JavaScript as well (both inline <script> blocks and .js files).  You can now set your Javascript coding preferences using the Tools->Options dialog:

These preferences will be automatically used as you type new Javascript code in the source editor.  You can also select existing code, right-click, and choose the "Format Selection" option to apply your style preferences to existing JavaScript code.  You can learn more about this new feature here.

Better Visual Studio Javascript Intellisense for Multiple Javascript/AJAX Frameworks

VS 2008 includes Javascript Intellisense support in source view.  The intellisense support with the initial VS 2008 release works well with vanilla JavaScript as well as code written using the ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript type patterns.  JavaScript is a very flexible language, though, and many JavaScript libraries use this flexibility to full advantage to implement their features – sometimes in ways that prevented the intellisense engine from providing completion support.

VS 2008 SP1 adds much better intellisense support for popular Javascript libraries (we specifically did work to support JQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, ExtJS, and other popular libraries).  You will get better default intellisense when you reference these libraries.  We are also looking at whether we can maintain additional intellisense hint files that you can download to get even better intellisense and documentation support for some of the more popular libraries.

Below is an example of using a JQuery startup function with the VS 2008 SP1 JavaScript intellisense engine:

Notice below how VS 2008 SP1 can now provide method argument completion even on chained JQuery selectors:

Visual Studio Refactoring Support for WCF Services in ASP.NET Projects

VS 2008 SP1 adds better refactoring support for WCF services included within both ASP.NET Web Site and ASP.NET Web Application Projects.

If you use the refactoring support to rename the class name, interface contract, or namespace of a WCF service, VS 2008 SP1 will now automatically fix up the web.config and SVC file references to it.

Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging

Previous versions of Visual Studio included support for intellisense and debugging within classic ASP (.asp) pages.  The file and project templates to create classic ASP pages/projects hasn’t been in VS for a few releases, though, and with the initial VS 2008 we incorrectly assumed this meant that people weren’t still using the classic ASP support.  We heard feedback after we shipped that indeed they were. 

With VS 2008 SP1 this support for classic ASP intellisense and debugging is back:

 

Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects

The Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition (which is free) is being updated in SP1 to add support for both class library and ASP.NET Web Application project types.  Previous versions of Visual Web Developer Express only supported ASP.NET web-site projects.

Among other benefits, the support of class library and web application projects will enable ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight projects to be built with the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.  All of the above JavaScript, Dynamic Data, Classic ASP, and AJAX improvements work with Visual Web Developer Express as well.

Improvements for Client Development

.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain major performance, deployment, and feature improvements for building client applications. 

Tim Sneath has a great blog post that talks about some of the client improvements here.  Below are more details on them:

Application Startup and Working Set Performance Improvements

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes significant performance improvements to the CLR that enable much faster application startup times – in particular with "cold start" scenarios (where no .NET application is already running).  Much of these gains were achieved by changing the layout of blocks within CLR NGEN images, and by significantly optimizing disk IO access patterns.  We also made some nice optimizations to our JIT code generator that allow much better inlining of methods that utilize structs.

We are today measuring up to 40% faster application startup improvements for large .NET client applications with SP1 installed.  These optimizations also have the nice side-effect of improving ASP.NET application request per second throughput by up to 10% in some cases.

New .NET Framework Client Profile Setup Package

.NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new setup package option for developers building .NET client applications called the ".NET Framework Client Profile".  This provides a new setup installer that enables a smaller, faster, and simpler installation experience for .NET client applications on machines that do not already have the .NET Framework installed.

The .NET Framework Client Profile setup contains just those assemblies and files in the .NET Framework that are typically used for client application scenarios.  For example: it includes Windows Forms, WPF, and WCF.  It does not include ASP.NET and those libraries and components used primarily for server scenarios.  We expect this setup package to be about 26MB in size, and it can be downloaded and installed much quicker than the full .NET Framework setup package.

The assemblies and APIs in the .NET Framework Client setup package are 100% identical to those in the full .NET Framework setup package (they are literally the same binaries).  This means that applications can target both the client profile and full profile of .NET 3.5 SP1 (no recompilation required).  All .NET applications that work using the .NET Client Profile setup automatically work with the full .NET Framework.

A developer can indicate that the client application they are building supports both the .NET Framework Client Profile and the full .NET Framework by pulling up the project properties page for a client application within VS 2008 SP1.  Within the project properties page they can select a new checkbox that indicates it only requires those assemblies included in the .NET Framework Client Profile:

VS 2008 will then ensure that the project can only reference those assemblies shipped in the client profile setup package (and it will generate a compile error if you try and use a type in an assembly not included in the client redist).  The compiled client application will then run on machines that have both the full .NET Framework installed, as well as machines that only have the .NET Framework Client Profile installed.

If you have a machine that only has the .NET Framework Client Profile installed, and you try and run a .NET application on it that did not mark itself as supporting the .NET Framework Client Profile, then the CLR will refuse to run the application – and will instead prompt the end-user to upgrade to the full .NET Framework package.  This ensures that applications always run correctly – and that developers do not need to worry about missing assembly exceptions at runtime if a user tries to run an application that requires the full .NET Framework on a machine that only has the .NET Framework Client Profile installed.

We believe that a large class of .NET client applications will be able to use this new .NET Client Profile setup to significantly speed up their installation, and enable a much more consumer friendly experience.

New .NET Framework Setup Bootstrapper for Client Applications

.NET 3.5 SP1 introduces a new "bootstrapper" component that you can use with client applications to help automate making sure that the right version of the .NET Framework is installed. 

The bootstrapper component can handle automatically downloading and installing either the .NET Framework Client Profile or the full .NET Framework Setup Package from the Internet if your machine doesn’t have either of them installed.  The boostrapper can also automatically handle upgrading machines that have a previous version of the .NET Framework installed.  For example, if your machine already has .NET 3.0 installed, and your application requires .NET 3.5, the bootstrapper can optionally download just the update files needed to upgrade it to .NET 3.5 (and avoid having to download the full .NET Framework setup download).

The setup bootstrapper component can be used with both ClickOnce based setup packages, as well as with third party installer products (like Installshield).  The boostrapper optionally enables fully customized setup branding experiences (splash screens, custom setup wizard steps, etc) and should make it much easier to build optimized client setup experiences.

ClickOnce Client Application Deployment Improvements

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes several improvements for ClickOnce deployment of both Windows Forms and WPF applications.  Some of these improvements include:

• Support for the .NET Framework Client Profile (all ClickOnce features are supported with it)
• ClickOnce applications can now be programmatically installed through a ‘Setup.exe’ while displaying a customized, branded install UX
• ClickOnce improvements for generating MSI + ClickOnce application packages
• ClickOnce error dialog boxes now support links to application specific support sites on the Web
• ClickOnce now has design-time support for setting up file associations
• ClickOnce application publishers can now decide to opt out of signing and hashing the ClickOnce manifests as they see appropriate for their scenarios.
• Enterprises can now choose to run only Clickonce Applications Authenticode signed by ‘Known Publishers’ and block anything else from running
• FireFox browser extension to support Clickonce installations using FireFox browsers

Windows Forms Controls

SP1 adds several new Windows Forms controls – including new vector shape, Printing, and DataRepeater controls:

 

WPF Performance Improvements

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes several significant performance optimizations and improvements to WPF.  Some of the specific graphics improvements include:

• Smoother animations
• Hardware accelerated rendering of Blur and DropShadow Bitmap Effects
• Text Rendering speed improvements – especially with VisualBrish and 3D scenes
• 2D graphics improvements – especially with z-index scenarios
• A new WriteableBitmap class that enables real-time and tear-free bitmap updates.  This enables custom "paint"-style applications, data visualizations, charts and graphs that optionally bypass the default WPF 2D graphics APIs.
• Layered window performance improvements

SP1 also adds support for better data scalability in WPF.  The ListView, ListBox and TreeView controls now support "item container recycling" and "virtualization" support which allows you to easily achieve a 40% performance improvement with scrolling scenarios.  These controls also now optionally support a "deferred scrolling" feature which allows you to avoid scrolling in real time and instead wait until a user releases the scroll thumb (the default scrolling mode in Outlook). This can be useful when scrolling over very large data sets quickly. 

WPF Data Improvements

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes several data binding and editing improvements to WPF.  These include:

• StringFormat support within {{ Binding }} expressions to enable easy formatting of bound values
• New alternating rows support within controls derived from ItemsControl, which makes it easier to set alternating properties on rows (for example: alternating background colors)
• Better handling and conversion support for null values in editable controls
• Item-level validation that applies validation rules to an entire bound item
• MultiSelector support to handle multi-selection and bulk editing scenarios
• IEditableCollectionView support to interface data controls to data sources and enable editing/adding/removing items in a transactional way
• Performance improvements when binding to IEnumerable data sources

WPF also now exposes hooks that enable developers to write custom panels w/ virtualized scrolling.  We’ll be using this support together with the above data binding improvements to build the new WPF datagrid that will be shipping later this year.

WPF Extensible Shader Effects

.NET 3.5 SP1 adds support in WPF for a new shader effects architecture and API that allows extremely expressive visual effects to be created and applied to any control or element within WPF.  These shader effects support blending multiple input compositions together.  What makes them particularly powerful is that WPF executes effects (including custom effects you build yourself) using the GPU – giving you fully hardware accelerated graphics performance.  Like almost everything in WPF, you can also use WPF databinding and animation on the properties of an effect (allowing them to be fully integrated into an experience).

Applying an effect onto a Control is super easy – just set a Control’s "Effect" property.  For example, to add a hardware accelerated drop-shadow effect on a button you can use the built-in <DropShadowEffect> on it via either code or XAML:

Which will cause the button to render like so:

Because Effects are extensible, developers can create their own custom Effect objects and apply them.  For example, a custom "DirectionalBlurEffect" could be created and added to a ListBox control to change its scroll appearance to use a blur effect if you rapidly scroll across it:

Keep an eye on Greg Schechter’s blog to learn more about how the Effects architecture works and to learn how you can both create and apply new effects within your applications (his first set of posts are here). 

Note: In addition to introducing the new Shader Effects API, WPF in SP1 also has updated the existing Blur and DropShadow Bitmap effects already in WPF to be hardware accelerated.

WPF Interoperability with Direct3D

.NET 3.5 SP1 adds support to efficiently integrate Direct3D directly into WPF.  This gives you more direct access to the hardware and to take full advantage of the Direct3D API within WPF applications.  You will be able to treat Direct3D content just like an image within an application, as well as use Direct3D content as textures on WPF controls. 

For example, below are three samples from the Direct3D SDK:

We could either load them in as image surfaces within a WPF application, or map them as textures on WPF controls.  Below is an example of mapping them as textures onto cubes in a WPF 3D application:

Note: the Direct3D integration isn’t today’s SP1 beta release.  It will appear in the final SP1 release.

VS 2008 for WPF Improvements

VS 2008 SP1 includes several significant improvements for WPF projects and the WPF designer.  These include:

• Several performance improvements
• Events tab support within the property browser
• Ability to sort properties alphabetically in the property browser
• Margin snaplines which makes form layout much quicker
• Better designer support for TabControl, Expander, and Grid
• Code initiated refactoring now updates your XAML (including both control declarations and event declarations in XAML)
• Go to Definition and Find All References now support things declared in XAML

The debugger has also been updated in SP1 so that runtime errors in XAML markup (for example: referencing styles, datasources and/or other objects that don’t exist) will now be better identified within the debugger:

Data Development Improvements

.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 include a bunch of improvements for data development. Some of them include:

SQL 2008 Support

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are being updated to include support for the upcoming SQL 2008 release.  Visual Studio 2008 data designers, projects and wizards now fully supporting connecting and working against SQL 2008 databases. 

ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities:

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes the new ADO.NET Entity Framework, which allows developers to define a higher-level Entity Data Model over their relational data, and then program in terms of this model.  Concepts like inheritance, complex types and relationships (including M:M support) can be modeled using it.  VS 2008 SP1 now includes built-in designer support to help with this modeling:

The ADO.NET Entity Framework and the VS 2008 Entity Framework Designer both support a pluggable provider model that allows them to be used with any database (including Oracle, DB2, MySql, PostgreSQL, SQLite, VistaDB, Informix, Sybase, and others).

Developers can then use LINQ and LINQ to Entities to query, manipulate, and update these entity objects.

ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria")

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible framework that enables the creation of REST-based data services.  Formerly code-named "Astoria", the ADO.NET Data Services framework provides support for publishing data through a standard REST URI syntax and using standard HTTP verbs to operate on the data resources.  Developers can easily expose data models created using the ADO.NET Entity Framework, and/or use a pluggable provider model to expose other data models.

In addition to publishing data sources, the framework also adds a client API for working with remote REST services.  Included with this client API is a LINQ library that allows the remote query of REST services.

WCF Development Improvements

.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 include several enhancements for WCF development.  Some of these include:

• Significant scalability improvements (5-10x) in Web-hosted application scenarios
• Support for using ADO.NET Entity Framework entities in WCF contracts
• API usability improvements with DataContract Serializers, and with the UriTemplate and WCF web programming models
• Enhanced TestClient support within VS 2008 SP1
• New Hosting Wizard in VS 2008 SP1 for WCF Service Projects
• Improved debugging support in partial trust scenarios

VB and C# Improvements

The VB and C# teams have also added some nice improvements to VS 2008 SP1:

Visual Basic

You can now add "XML to Schema" items to Visual Basic projects.  On adding these project items a wizard will open that allows you to create a XSD schema set from a variety of XML sources.  This schema set is then added to the project and it enables VB XML intellisense. This support was previously available as a web download – you can learn more about it here.

A XSD browser is also now included with VS 2008 SP1 and allows you to browse XSD schema sets.  With the final SP1 release, developers will be able to right-click on XML element names (either in XML properties or XML literals) in the VB code editor and select “Go To XML Schema Definition” – this will open the XSD browser and display the schema set (and select the current element) for the VB project.

C#

The C# code editor now identifies and displays red squiggle errors for many semantic code issues that previously required an explicit compilation to identify.  For example, if you try to declare and use an unknown type in the C# code-editor today you won’t see a compile error until you do a build.  Now with SP1 you’ll see live red squiggle errors immediately (no explicit compile required):

The debugger in VS 2008 SP1 has also been improved to provide more debugging support for evaluating LINQ expressions and viewing results at debug time:

LINQ enabled data sources now have a "Results View" node show up within the debugger watch window.  Expanding this node will evaluate a LINQ expression and allow you to examine the materialized objects it returns:

Team Foundation Server Improvements

TFS 2008 SP1 includes a ton of improvements.  Please read Brian Harry’s Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 Preview blog post for more details.

Summary

.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 provide a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements, and additional feature enhancements that make building all types of .NET applications better.  It will be a fully compatible service pack release. 

We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and use the beta now here.

Hope this helps,

Scott

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Persistent Email sending error

 HI all, i have been trying the code below. But alas. I read it somewhere to configure SMTP server locally.

 
1) Right click on Default SMTP Virtual Server and select properties
2) Select the access tab
3) Click the Relay button
4) Click the Add button
5) Type in your ip address

But there is no access time on my dialog box. Where can i specify the IP?

Below the code : 

 

'Delcaring variables
        Dim From As String = txtFrom.Text
        Dim Subject As String = txtSubject.Text
        Dim Recipient As String = txtTo.Text
        Dim url As String = "url"

        'Create an instance of the MailMessage class
        Dim Mailmsg As New MailMessage(From, Recipient, Subject, url)

        'Assigning the mail property
        Mailmsg.Subject = subject
        Mailmsg.Body = url

        Mailmsg.IsBodyHtml = True

        Dim SMTP As New SmtpClient("127.0.0.1", 25)
        SMTP.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis
        SMTP.Send(Mailmsg)

CSS background image trouble! please help…m a newbie!

 Hi,…

      i am using Css to get a background image for my header in my default.aspx file but its just not showing up in the design view, not even when i view it in IE. please help.

this is my css :

body
{
	padding-right: 1%;
	padding-left: 1%;
	padding-bottom: 1%;
	margin: 0%;
	padding-top: 1%;
	height: 98%;
	background-color: #cc9966;
	text-align: center;
}
#headerGraphic
{
	background-image: url(Images/bannerfinal2.jpg);
	clear: both;
	float: none;
	width: 700px;
	height: 246px;
}

 

and this my default.aspx file

 <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"&gt;

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml&quot; >
<head runat="server">
    <title>Untitled Page</title>
    <style type="text/css">
    p
    {
        text-align: justify;
    }
    .centerAlign
    {
        text-align: center;
    }
</style>
    <link href="CSS/StyleSheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
    <div id="headerGraphic"></div>    
    <div id="navigationArea">| link1 | link2 | link3 |</div>
    <div id="bodyArea">
    <div id="bodyLeft">left text</div>
    <div id="bodyRight">right text</div>
    </div>
    <div id="footerArea">Copyright 2008 – 2009: MySite, Inc.</div>
        
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

 

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April 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight

ASP.NET

• Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET’s membership, roles, and profile support.  In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET’s Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site.

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update: The ASP.NET team last week released an update of the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature.  This update adds several new features including cleaner URL support using the same URL routing feature that ASP.NET MVC uses, as well as better confirmation, foreign-key, and template support. 

• ASP.NET Testing with Ivonna: Travis Illig blogs about a new testing framework named Ivonna that enables unit testing of ASP.NET web forms.

ASP.NET AJAX

• ASP.NET AJAX UI Templates: Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team has a cool post that shows off a prototype he has been working on that enables clean client-side AJAX templating of UI. 

• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit TabContainer Theme Gallery: Matt Berseth has another of his excellent posts – this one shows off a bunch of cool themes you can use to style the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

• Reducing Page Load Times with UpdatePanels and Timers: Paul Glavich posts of a cool trick you can use with tab controls to asynchronously load their content in the background in order to improve perceived page load time.

• Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? Dave Ward has a useful article that talks about the page methods feature in ASP.NET AJAX, and explains why they are static methods.

• JQuery Intellisense in VS 2008: Brad Vincent posts about using the VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix we released in February to get a nice JavaScript intellisense experience in Visual Studio 2008 when using the JQuery AJAX library.

ASP.NET MVC

• Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing: Fredrik Kalseth has a cool article that talks about the concepts behind inversion of control (IOC) and how you can use this with ASP.NET MVC to better isolate dependencies and enable better unit testing of your code.

• Stephen Walther’s ASP.NET MVC Talk: Stephen Walther delivered a many-hour ASP.NET MVC post conference talk at ASP.NET Connections last week.  You can download his slides + demos for free.  Also check out his previous posts on Unit Tests with Visual Studio 2008 and TDD with Rhino Mocks.

• MVC Contrib Project Update: Eric Hexter blogs about some of the latest updates to the open source MvcContrib project to work with the latest ASP.NET MVC interim source release.

• Testing Action Results with ASP.NET MVC: Jeremy Skinner blogs about some cool extension method helpers he has added to MvcContrib to enable pretty sweet testing of Controller actions.

• MVC Membership Starter Kit – 1.2 Release: Troy Goode has posted an update to his excellent MVC Membership Starter Kit.  This version works with the interim ASP.NET MVC source release.

Silverlight

• Defining Silverlight DataGrid Columns at Runtime: Scott Morrison from the Silverlight team has a cool blog post that talks about how to define Silverlight DataGrid Columns via code at runtime.  Visit my Silverlight links page for more DataGrid posts.

• Silverlight HTTP Networking Stack (Part 1), (Part 2), (Part 3): Karen Corby from the Silverlight team has a great three part blog series that talks about the new Silverlight 2 networking stack and how cross domain security works with it.

• Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with Sockets (Part 1) and (Part 2): Dan Wahlin demonstrates how to implement a “GameStream” socket server and connect to it from a Silverlight client using Silverlight 2’s built-in network sockets support. 

• Silverlight – the Song: Spike Xavier and Dan Wahlin have posted another of their unique and special songs.

•  

Formview and button

Hi,

I have problems with code-behind. In my code behind I have this code: 

private void InitializeComponent()

{

this.Button2.Click += new System.EventHandler(this.Button1_Click);

The Button2 I have in Formview with ID=Formview2 :

<asp:FormView ID=”FormView2″ runat=”server” DataSourceID=”SqlDataSource2″ >

<InsertItemTemplate

>

 

<asp:button id=”Button2″ runat=”server” Text=”Ulož na server”></asp:butto>

 

And when I launch it, so Compiler say this:

 Compiler Error Message: CS0117: ‘Detail’ does not contain a definition for ‘Button1’

Source Error:

Line 54: Line 55: { Line 56: this.Button1.Click += new System.EventHandler(this.Button1_Click);

Interesting problem with getting OUTPUT parameters from SQL Server using C#

 I have the following SP:

 

Create procedure dbo.example

(

@test INT OUTPUT

)

AS

BEGIN

SET @test = 5

SELECT * from Users

END

GO

 

 

and when I try calling it from C# using an SqlCommand with adding an output parameter and getting it's value, I get that the value is NULL. (I should mention that I use ExecuteReader)

However,  if I alter the SP and remove the select line, the c# code works and returns the value 5.

 

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How to keep RETURNURL when accessing a secure page, yet disable it when logging in explicitly ?

I have a loginstatus control on my masterpage so that a user would have the ability to login no matter what page of the website he is on.  When he clicks on that, it brings him to the login page with the login control.  I explicitly hardcoded a specific page for the destinationpageurl attribute of the login control, but it seems the returnurl overrides that setting.  It seems the returnurl is set for the page I was previously on.  Why is the returnurl being set if I wanted to just login explicitly?  How would the hardcoded destinationpageurl ever get a chance to work then?

However, the returnurl is very useful to me in other situations.  For example, say an unauthenticated user is browsing the site and he clicks on a button (or link or whatever) that leads to a secure page (all of my secure pages are under a folder allowing only authenticated users to view them).  The site directs him automatically to the login page with the returnurl instructing the site to forward him to the intended destination after successful login.  This is desirable.  However, as stated earlier, when a user explicitly clicks on the loginstatus to log in, I want him to be directly led to a specfic page (like myaccount.aspx or something).

How do I do this?

Thanks in advance.

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How to remove a star from Rating control?

I'm trying to let the user set their preference on a scale of 0 to 5.  Something like:

Pref 1  ***** select rating

Pref 2 ***** select rating

Pref 3 ***** select rating

 After they make a selection I want to remove a star from the other unselected rating controls.  So in other words the rating values can only be used once.  How can I accomplish this?

 

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