Latest Articles: .net framework 3.0

Microsoft has premier partners to provide hosted ASP.NET services.

If you are looking for ASP .net hosting,this can be a good starting point, it lists Microsoft partners that offers ASP .net and AJAX hosting

You can check and compare prices and conditions

It does not guarantee the best hosting for your site, but at least you can get an idea of costs and features

When rolled into the page life cycle of an ASP.NET WebForm, that red bar is one of your application’s greatest enemies. No matter how well you optimize the rest of the page, even one slow task can become the sole factor determining a user’s perception of the entire page’s performance.

In this post, I’m going to show you one way to circumvent that problem. By placing ancillary content in user controls and delaying their load until the core page content has been displayed, you can drastically improve perceived performance.

Simple and nice sample about how to combine javascript calls to server side web services /script services in order to get an HTML and inject it using javascript / DOM inside a DIV using the property innerHTML.

If you just want to show readonly data this solution is excellent, users can keep on working on the page and once you get the info it will be loaded in background, if it's something that the users need to edit and post, things get a bit more difficult

In my previous column, I discussed the technologies on which AJAX relies, how you can create custom AJAX scripts to perform asynchronous postbacks, and productivity gains that the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions provide in general. In this column, I'll focus on ASP.NET AJAX configuration entries in web.config as well as on the role new HttpHandler and HttpModule classes play in AJAX-enabling Web sites.

Interesting info about how to play with web.config settings on AJAX, no more "blac magic" on such settings :-).

I've tried to investigate slow load of UpdatePanel. It works quick enough in FireFox, slow in IE 7 and even more slower in IE6.

A must read AJAX ASP .net trouble shooter bunch of links

How to play with compression, issues with IE6,issues with UpdatePanel, and magic web.config settings that will boost up you AJAX ASP .net application performance (compression, compilation debug, ...)

Registers a control for postback. This method is used for postback controls inside an UpdatePanel control that would otherwise perform asynchronous postbacks.

This method is not very well know, but quite useful for scenarios where you need perform a full postback on a button that is inside of an UpdatePanel

You don't have to fight anymore to fit outside from the UpdatePanel that full postback button, and you can activate just by adding one line of code in your codebehind.

If you are new to development with the Open XML File Formats, take a look at this Open XML Online Training series. This training provides 11 interactive modules and 3 additional videos.

OpenXML is the new standard for Office 2007 to store Excel, Word and Power point files

It's XML, it's open, and it's quite powerfull (no more XMLSS limitations like not showing charts on an excel spreadsheet), and... if you are using an older version of Office you can download compatibility packs

Full set of tutorials, if you need to add powerful Office generation / reading from your web site just start here !

This weekend I decided to focus my coding on some of the client JavaScript pieces in the ASP.NET AJAX framework that don't use UpdatePanels at all, and to experiment with alternative ways to use the server to easily generate HTML UI that can be dynamically injected into a page using AJAX. In the process I created what I think is a pretty useful library that can be used with both ASP.NET AJAX and other AJAX libraries to provide a nice template UI mechanism with ASP.NET, and which doesn't use or require concepts like postbacks or viewstate - while still providing the benefits of control encapsulation and easy re-use.

AJAX ASP .net UpdatePanel is something very easy to use, but in some scenarios sucks, it's not real AJAX (just partial rendering) and carries all the weight of the page in each request (ViewState, ...)

As a better solution you can call script services or page methods: easy to code for a hello world sample and changing a simple label, but not for refreshing a Gridview

There's an in between solution... this link shows you a superb solution, not very hard to code, but quite useful: encapsulate the funcionallity that you want to refresh in an user control, and then only refresh that control, What happens with the view state and page request? Well Scott does a trick/hack: it uses a fake dummy page to make the request. The only weak point of this solution is that you have to avoid using the ViewState (at least for the user control).

Another thing to take into consideration is that is not something Official and supported from Ms, maybe if there are changes in the future this code won't work

Today, I found another interesting post in Asp.net Ajax Web Service Forum. How do you ensure that your web service is called from your aspx page. The goal is to protect your web service from unauthorized usage.

Very interesting discussion, how do you integrate ASP .net + AJAX Web services security?

If you don't want to use WSE 3.0, here you will find some workarounds (session, page methods, passing tickets...). It's quite surprising to check that there is no silver bullet for this area (maybe on 2.0 version?).

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is finally released, and with it comes a bunch of great new features for writing and maintaining ASP.NET AJAX applications. Additionally, a new version of ASP.NET AJAX is included in the .NET Framework 3.5, which includes improvements over the current ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release. This article walks you through the steps you???ll need to follow to upgrade your existing ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Websites and Web Application Projects to use the AJAX support in .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. Note: With the new Multitargeting support in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, It is also possible to continue maintaining ASP.NET AJAX 1.0-based Websites and Web Application Projects in VS 2008 without upgrading them. A...(read more)

Did you have time to play with AJAX ASP .net v. 1.0?... well time to think about migrating to the new version .net fx 3.5

Things are going quite fast... some tips to migrate your current AJAX 1.0 app to Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (AJAX 3.5)

A few weeks ago I blogged about the new JavaScript Intellisense support in VS 2008 . One of the other JavaScript features that I'm sure will be popular in VS 2008 is the much-improved support for JavaScript debugging. This is enabled in both the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition as well as in Visual Studio, and makes using JavaScript and building AJAX applications significantly easier. Setting JavaScript breakpoints in ASP.NET pages One of the annoying things with VS 2005 is that you have to first run your ASP.NET pages before you can set JavaScript breakpoints in them in the debugger. VS 2008 makes this much better by adding new support that allows you to set client-side JavaScript breakpoints directly within your server-side Read...(read more)

Very didactic overview of some of the new JavaScript debugging features in Visual Studio 2008. JavaScript debugging has been significantly improved in VS 2008 and this blog post describes the new features using screenshots and concise comments, as usual from Scott Guthrie. This makes very easy for the reader to get a practical idea of the advantages you get when developing ASP.NET, Ajax and JavaScript in VS 2008.

In this part the author examines the various glinting features the two ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Futures January CTP libraries, namely PreviewGlitz and PreviewDragDrop, bring to us through concrete and distinct samples.

New goodies included in AJAX 2.0. Play with opacity in photos, add to controls floating behavior. With things like that you can make your site good looking.

Please note down that this is not yet available on the 1.0 version.