13th May 2008

ASPAlliance Times

The industry newsletter for Active Software Professionals

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Featured Article

With the release of the Silverlight 2.0 beta plug-in, Microsoft has introduced a number of new UI controls to the Silverlight platform. These tools make the task of building complete Silverlight applications much easier, so it is essential to understand their function. In this article, we examine in-depth all of the new UI controls provided in Silverlight 2.0 and demonstrate how they can be used to quickly build professional Rich Internet Applications.

http://aspalliance.com/1636_First_Look_Silverlight_20_UI_Controls

Editor's Comments

Yesterday Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta. This service pack includes a large number of fixes as well as some new functionality, and Scott Hanselman helps answer the critical question, "Should I fear this (Beta) Release?" The answer: maybe a little bit. There are some things that are incompatible with the current release, in particular other betas like Silverlight Beta 1. If you’re not on the bleeding edge with a bunch of other beta software installed, it should be pretty safe to install this SP1 beta.

In terms of what's new, this includes ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Data Services ("Astoria"), the new Routing Engine (originally packaged with MVC), AJAX Back/Forward button history support, AJAX Script Combining support, and improvements to the performance of Visual Studio. Another important addition for students and hobbyists is class library and web application project support has been added to Visual Studio Web Developer 2008 Express edition, which is free. WPF also has a number of performance improvements. TFS users will also see improvements, detailed here. Overall it looks like this will be a great improvement to a huge number of Microsoft developer tools and products.

Steve's Blog

New Articles on ASPAlliance.com

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In this video Mohammad Azam demonstrates how you can load the UI based on a user's demand. This technique improves performance by saving the size of the initial page load. [5:16]

In this video Mohammad Azam demonstrates how to display role based data using the LoginView control. [8:08]

This article describes how to manage configuration data programatically through an ad hoc API in ASP.NET 2.0. After providing a brief introduction, Sanjit examines the usage and application of connection strings and encryption with the help of source code. Finally, you will learn the concepts involved with the configuration provider.

This article discusses how and when the objects within LINQ to SQL are created and instantiated, and how it maintains a list of the changes that need submitted to the database. It also discusses how this can be managed and some of the intricacies in LINQ with the help of source code.

Advanced data-aware components for Visual Studio have traditionally been unable to consume large datasets efficiently. In this whitepaper, see how with DevExpress LINQ-Enabled Grid Controls, these performance limitations are a thing of the past. You’ll learn how and why complex data analysis and mining operations like grouping, sorting, filtering, and summary computations against large remote datasets can now easily be leveraged by developers for client machines.

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Sometimes you need to create reports quickly. You might not always have time to format fancy reports containing graphs. Or maybe you have to create reports that do not need graphs. Reusing one ASP.NET web page you can display many reports.

In this article the author presents a comprehensive solution to build a GridView with template fields generated at run time with in-place Insert, Delete and Edit operations with a full description of an effective implementation and usage of ITemplate interface.

Determine if a user's Session is still active.

This article provides some tips to improve the performance of your ASP.NET applications by using multiple recordsets, paged data access, and Cache API. The author further examines Per-request, Page output, and Kernel caching mechanisms along with a description of connection pooling and GZip compression.

AJAX is the latest buzzword in the web development industry. But what is it, and how can you use it? Ramaprasad Potturi and Sanjay Patnaik explain the technology and provide a real-world example of a web page that presents a country and state pair of drop-down lists, where the state drop-down list is populated dynamically on the client side, removing the need for the page to post back to the server.

Crystal Alliance Recent Articles

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Creating reports can be a daunting task. Reports can demand a great deal of effort and time, especially if you have not worked with Crystal Reports much. In this article, Jeff provides six quick Crystal Reports Design Tips to assist in creating killer reports with style and speed. Among other tips, you will learn how to add WaterMarks to your reports. Each tip has been deeply examined with the help of relevant explanations and screenshots for better understanding.

Crystal Reports 2008 was released in October 2007. This article (written in Jan 08) explains the ins and outs of the CR2008 versions, integration with VS versions, side-by-side compatibility, upgrading reports and general features of interest to Visual Studio Developers.

In this review, Eric starts with a basic introduction and layout of Brian's Crystal Reports book. He then provides chapter wise detailed opinion of the contents and also some of his recommendations.

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