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I am back from delivering Tech.Ed India 2009 , particularly the web platform track where I delivered three sessions across 2 days.  In addition, we also had Stephen Walther from the ASP.NET Team deliver sessions on ASP.NET 4.0, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX. Over the next few posts, I would like to get all the content that we discussed during Tech.Ed India and possible videos so that even if you missed the action over there, you could benefit right here.  To begin with, the sessions focussing on ASP.NET were ASP.NET 4.0 by Stephen Walther ASP.NET MVC by Stephen Walther ASP.NET Dynamic Data by Harish Ranganathan (that’s me) IIS 7.5, Server Core with ASP.NET – Windows Server 2008 R2 by Praveen Srivatsa ASP.NET AJAX by Stephen Walther VS 2010 Web Deployment features by Harish Ranganathan ASP.NET – A day in the life of an ASP.NET Request by Harish Ranganathan While bulk of the above require VS 2010 bits, to begin with, lets pick up the sessions which don’t require ex.-  The session on ASP.NET Dynamic Data.  In this post, I would specify the things to get started and cover up the actual content in the next post

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ASP.NET Sessions at Tech.Ed India 2009

Working primarily on web applications, I’ve focused most of my time on ASP.NET Web Forms since the very early betas.  Web Forms were truly a great revolution in the web world.  Once I saw the functionality when it first came out (when I was using ::shudder::  “classic” ASP), I couldn’t wait to start using it.  I began right away with ASP+, as it was called back in 2000 , abandoning Visual Interdev and ASP, yippee.  The release of Version 1.0 came out January 16, 2002, changing the way we work with the web. Flash-forward 7 years (9 from the early betas), and the programming world has changed.  With things like TDD (Test Driven Development), AJAX, JSON, jQuery, etc, and the complexity of web applications growing, sometimes Web Forms would get in the way.  To be fair, the Web Form framework is very robust and tries to be helpful, but sometimes we developers like to shoot ourselves in the foot.  One example that I’m sure many of you have experienced is trying to interface with a server-rendered element on the page.  Performing something like a document.getElementById(‘UserName’) in JavaScript doesn’t exactly work as expected when the ID of your textbox is now something along the lines of “ctl00_mainContent_LoginCtrl_UserName,” does it?  On this particular topic, ASP.NET 4.0 has a solution for this problem , but that isn’t the focus of this post.  The Client Id problem, is just one example of the framework “getting in your way.”  This is one of the many reasons behind the advent of ASP.NET MVC .  Having just finished Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from Wrox, I’m a convert

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Book Review – Wrox Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0

A little over a month ago, Microsoft released the fourth preview of ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX.  This is the new release of the Microsoft AJAX Framework that will be released with ASP.NET 4.0.  We’re getting closer to the RTM release of .NET 4.0 (hopefully later this year), so I figured this would be a good time to start posting about ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX.  There are some very exciting things coming along with ASP.NET 4.0, and the ASP.NET AJAX component is no exception.  The best news about ASP.NET AJAX is that you can start using it today without having to wait for the full blown ASP.NET AJAX framework.  Keep in mind that these components are still in “preview” mode (meaning no Microsoft support), though they are usable at your own risk.  For more information, you can check out the license on CodePlex. In this post, I’ll be talking about the client templates that can be found in the latest release.  Client templates are very powerful.  They are a key component for rich client-side applications.  Up until now, I have been using jTemplates , a client template solution plugin for jQuery.  If you aren’t familiar with jTemplates, check out Dave Ward’s article “ Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater .”  jTemplates is really a nice plugin, but it’s a bit disconnected from the flow of the page.  Enter ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX and the DataView control. Introducing the Sys.UI.DataView Control The ASP.NET AJAX DataView (not to be confused with the ADO.NET DataView), is a new control that functions similar to a server-side repeater as you will see.  The first thing to note with the DataView is that this control operates without ASP.NET, meaning you can use this in any framework or even a straight HTML page.  This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, since you can download the ASP.NET AJAX Library 3.5 as standalone scripts today.  Having said that, let’s start with an simple example that will just run in a standard HTML page.  For this first example, I will walk through declaratively setting up template binding.  Let’s get started… Want to follow along with the examples?

Link:
ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX – Preview 4 – Client Templates

The layout system in Silverlight is, in my opinion, one of the key differentiators in presentation engine capabilities from HTML/CSS (on a related note, see my post long ago about my browser/scripting wish list and the references to need for core layout primitives). The Silverlight platform provides a set of out-of-the-box layouts like Grid, so you don’t have to simulate them with low-level absolute positioning, and float/clear css attributes.

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Specialized Layout Panels for Silverlight

Ensuring the security of a Web application is critical and requires careful planning throughout the design, development, deployment, and operation phases. It is not something that can be slapped onto an existing application. In this article, Mike Volodarsky outlines best practices that allow you to take advantage of the security features of ASP.NET 2.0 and IIS 6.0 to build and deploy more secure Web applications

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Are You Protected?: Design and Deploy Secure Web Apps with ASP.NET 2.0 and IIS 6.0

Here Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello cover the plumbing of the Membership API and its inherently extensible nature, based on pluggable providers. To demonstrate the features, they take an existing ASP.NET 1.x authentication mechanism and port it to ASP.NET 2.0, exposing the legacy authentication mechanism through the new Membership API. Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello MSDN Magazine November 2005

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Who Goes There?: Upgrade Your Site’s Authentication with the New ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API

ASP.NET provides a number of ways to maintain user state, the most powerful of which is session state. This article takes an in-depth look at designing and deploying high-performance, scalable, secure session solutions, and presents best practices for both existing and new ASP.NET session state features straight from the ASP.NET feature team. Mike Volodarsky MSDN Magazine September 2005

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Best Practices: Fast, Scalable, and Secure Session State Management for Your Web Applications

Navigation is central to a well functioning Web application and it can be implemented numerous ways using today’s technologies. This article highlights some of the key details of the new navigation controls that are part of the upcoming ASP.NET 2.0, and talks about how to design and implement one of these navigation controls today. This article contains a simple Web site that demonstrates the use of these navigation controls, pointing out some of the key items such as a breadcrumb control and things to watch for along the way

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Controls: Plan Your Migration to the Visual Studio 2005 Navigation Controls

In an earlier article the authors showed how to build a custom WebMethods extension that provides XML Schema validation, a function that is lacking in ASP.NET. In the process they established a foundation for enforcing business rules during the deserialization of XML data. The technique, which is described in this article, uses declarative XPath assertions to test business rule compliance.In building this business rules validation engine, the authors integrate the validation descriptions into the WSDL file that is automatically generated by the WebMethod infrastructure.

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Web Services: Extend the ASP.NET WebMethod Framework with Business Rules Validation

One way that Web sites and applications become better able to meet the needs of customers is by allowing them to personalize their experience. For Web sites, this means displaying the content as the user wants to see it. For rich-client applications, this often means allowing the user to choose the user interface through a technique known as skinning, which is similar to themes in Windows XP.

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Site Skinning: Rich XML Classes Let Users Personalize Their Visual Experience on Your ASP.NET Site

If you’re planning to build an e-commerce site, you’ll be pleased to see that ASP.NET makes it easier than ever. Existing controls can be used and extended to add a great deal more functionality than you might expect. In this article, forms-based authentication is used to verify the identity of users and make certain areas of the site, such as the check-out page, inaccessible to unauthorized users.

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Commerce with ASP.NET: Leverage the Authentication and Form Validation Features of ASP.NET to Bolster Your Commerce App

Forms authentication is one of the most compelling and useful new features of ASP.NET. It enables developers to declaratively specify which files on their site can be accessed and by whom, and allows identification of a login page. When an unauthenticated user attempts to retrieve a page protected by forms authentication, ASP.NET automatically redirects them to the login page and asks them to identify themselves.

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ASP.NET Security: An Introductory Guide to Building and Deploying More Secure Sites with ASP.NET and IIS, Part 2

ASP.NET and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) work together to make building secure Web sites a breeze. But to do it right, you have to know how the two interrelate and what options they provide for securing access to a Web site’s resources. This article, the first in a two-part series, explains the ABCs of Web security as seen through the eyes of ASP.NET and includes a hands-on tutorial demonstrating Windows authentication and ACL authorizations

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ASP.NET Security: An Introductory Guide to Building and Deploying More Secure Sites with ASP.NET and IIS

To help stop the spread of worms, viruses, and other hostile activity, it is important to track down and report the servers used in these attacks along with those used to send spam. Many Web administrators, however, don’t take the time to track them because the manual process can be quite cumbersome. The Microsoft .NET Framework comes to the rescue with several networking classes, including the Dns class and the TcpClient class, that abstract away the complexity of performing DNS and WHOIS lookups.

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Virus Hunting: Track and Report Server Attacks Quickly and Easily with the .NET Networking Classes

Web Forms have the potential to change Web programming by introducing a new programming model built around server-side controls-a model in which controls render their own UIs by generating HTML to return to clients and firing events that are handled by server-side scripts. Since all the action takes place on the Web server, virtually any browser can run a Web Forms app. And thanks to Visual Studio .NET, building a Web Forms app is a lot like using Visual Basic: just drop a control onto a form then write an event handler

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ASP.NET: Web Forms Let You Drag And Drop Your Way To Powerful Web Apps