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

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  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

• 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. :-)

Hope this helps,

Scott