There’s an updated version of the shared-source controls within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that’s just been released.

Those that know it will just want to go here. Those that don’t will want to read this (and look at the samples in the left-hand column), or perhaps be happy just to understand that the Control Toolkit is a collection of shared-source controls hosted on CodePlex and created by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers.

There’s an interesting account of a recent round-table discussion between representatives of the Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera browser-developement teams about the possible future introduction of a <video> HTML tag amongst other things. All under the moderation of Douglas Crockford from Yahoo!

Given the increasingly rich nature of the net it makes for interesting reading.

You’ll find details on Bertrand Le Roy’s ASP.NET AJAX/Atlas weblog here. It

Apropos of nothing, I discovered that the Wii uses Opera as its browser technology from this discussion. I’m not sure why this brightened my day, but it did.

NET components leveraging the Enterprise Library 1.1 tend to behave poorly with ASP.NET 2.0. Most of the misbehavior arises from configuration information management changes in the library. In this article Tom Fischer explores how you can by-pass these and other frustrations by adapting how the Enterprise Library 1.1 obtains and acts upon configuration information.

Following Morgan Skinner's introduction to Workflow Foundation, Tom Fischer delves more deeply under the hood of WF, explaining some of the issues you'll need to think about when using WF with ASP.NET 2.0, in particular focusing on using the WorkflowInstance and WorkflowRuntime objects in an ASP.NET environment. Tom also touches on service configuration, the design of activities and architectural issues for an enterprise workflow.

Analysis Management Object (AMO) is a new object model for managing and administering Analysis Services 2005. AMO enables developers to automate the creation and processing of Analysis Services objects, such as Dimension, Cube, and Partition. In this article, you'll learn the basics of the AMO object model, classes in the object model, and common properties and methods in the AMO class. You'll also learn how to automate the creation of Analysis Services objects using AMO programming within .NET. Throughout the article, you'll build a sample application that allows for the generation and processing of Analysis Services OLAP objects.

In this article, Brian Myers explains how and why he upgraded an existing real-world Visual Basic .NET (VB .NET) project created with Visual Studio 2003 (VS2003) and SQL Server 2000 to a new Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) project along with SQL Server 2005. The first part of this article explores in general terms the reasons behind the decision to upgrade an existing production application. Brian also describes the main issues he encountered while upgrading both the VB .NET project and the database, and he identifies features of the new project structure within VS2005.

The second part of this article looks in more detail at two of the features that contributed to the motivation to upgrade this project: the new GridView control and support for encryption of configuration files.

This third and final article of a series by Christophe Nasarre which shows how to use reflection to examine what's changed in version 2 of the CLR. This article focuses on dissecting the members of each type, from the constructor to the P/Invoke signatures using the unmanaged COM-based Reflection API. New features related to Generics are also covered.

This is the second article in Christophe Nasarre's series about using managed and unmanaged reflection to very precisely discover the contents and changes between CLRs. This article focuses on listing the contents of assemblies from attached attributes to the different types, showing namespaces in between. A specific coverage of generics is also provided with the details of the reflection methods to use in order to get the constraints attached to a type.

At this point, VS .NET 2005 Beta 2 is supposed to be feature-complete. Therefore, this is a good time to check on the features that will be available when it goes public. In this three-part series, Christophe Nasarre explores some of the problems encountered when comparing the previous versions of the CLR to the new version 2.0. He also demonstrates how to use managed and unmanaged reflection to precisely discover the contents and updates, and includes specific coverage of generics. Additionally, the article details the changes in the reflection APIs for version 2.0 to support generics.

The first part of the series specifically explores the locations in which the different versions of the CLR are stored on your system, and also digs into the possible ways to load an assembly in memory. The second and third parts explain how to dissect and dump the contents of an assembly in detail—from the namespace to each kind of type member.

Many discussions of the new Membership and Personalization services describe how to register someone as a member on your site, set up personalized profiles for your visitors, and assign roles. Very little has been written about how to keep track of members for separate sites on the same server or what to do if the profile information and roles vary among your websites. In this article Geoffrey Pennington describes how to segregate users and roles by application in the aspnetdb database when using the Membership and Role services.

ASP.NET's new functionalities, like Membership, Personalization, and Profile, are based on the provider model. The provider model defines an easy plug-and-play architecture. You can use custom providers or write your own providers and use them without rewriting and recompiling the entire solution. In this article, Kamran M Qamar will explain what the provider model is, when it should be used, which functionalities in ASP.NET are using it, how you can create your own providers, and finally how you can architect your own solution to reap the benefits of the provider model.

AJAX is an acronym for a couple of technologies that make it possible for developers to update a web page content at the control level without having to do a complete page refresh. In this article Pieter Siegers takes a look at how far Ajax has evolved today with respect to .NET. He will take three current popular Ajax frameworks for .NET development – Atlas, Anthem.NET and Ajax.NET Professional -, and look at various aspects of their installation and use in ASP.NET applications. Then he will compare all three frameworks and look at their capacity to make Ajax-like development for .NET simpler. In part 2 of this article, he will continue the comparisons and produce a table that compares features for each of the frameworks.

Author:Pieter Siegers
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:James Greenwood, Saurabh Nandu

In Part 1 of this series, Pieter Siegers explained how Ajax help you develop web applications that are more responsive, faster, and put less load on the network, and in particular took three .NET-based Ajax frameworks – Anthen.NET, Ajax.NET Professional, and Atlas, and showed how to obtain and install them. This article will continue with the examples. You’ll see a comparison between these frameworks with respect to their capacity to ease Ajax-like web development. Finally Pieter supplies a simple feature-comparing table where you can easily determine which framework suits you best.

In the second article of her series introducing site design in ASP.NET 2.0, Chris Hart introduces themes. She explains how to set up a theme, allowing greater separation of the visual design and the backend code for the site. The article also touches on techniques to apply different themes based on user preferences, thus allowing each users to some extent to customize his own visual appearance of the site.

Author:Chris Hart
Editor:Simon Robinson
Reviewers:Neil Piggot, Kunal Cheda

In November 2001, Marshall Rosenstein wrote How to Create a Zip Code Webservice. That zip application enabled you to find cities and zip code distances using a combination of a SQL Server 2000 and ASP.NET 1.x web services. The technologies at that time involved SQL Data Transformation Services, T-SQL user-defined functions and procedures, and ASP.NET web services. SQL Server 2005 contains new features that will allow you to create an improved solution architecture for this kind of scenario. In this article, Marshall will show how to use SQL Integration Services to import zip code data, SQL CLR to create stored procedures and user-defined functions, and SQL 2005 HTTP Endpoints to expose the zip code web service. You’ll create a zip code application that runs entirely in SQL Server 2005.

Author:Marshall Rosenstein
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Alex Thissen, Saurabh Nandu

With the soon to be released version of ASP.NET v2.0, web developers will be introduced to various new web server and data source controls. In this article Stewart Way will provide an overview of the new controls that will be available. A sample is also developed using the Northwind database to show how easy and fast you can develop highly complex, data driven web pages using the new web controls.

Author:Stewart Way
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Damien Foggon, Mark Horner

The GridView is a new and powerful control in ASP.NET 2.0. It is designed to replace the very familiar DataGrid control you probably used in many of your ASP.NET 1.x applications. Together with the new ObjectDataSource I will show you how to implement efficient sorting and paging using custom data objects while taking advantage of the new SQL Server 2005 row_count function.

Author:Benton Stark
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Saurabh Nandu, Damien Foggon

ASP.NET 2.0 has introduced a series of new data source controls that simplify the life of developers. Developers can now connect to a database and perform CRUD operations with a minimal amount of code or in some cases no code at all. To enable developers to insert business logic into their applications the new ObjectDataSource control is provided in ASP.NET 2.0. In this article Kuldeep Deokule will use an example Employee listing application to show how to incorporate business logic in a 3 tier application using the new ObjectDataSource control.

Author:Kuldeep Deokule
Editor:David Schultz
Reviewers:Damien Foggon, Stewart Way

In this article, Chris Hart shows you how to use master pages to create a standard template for a site, and how to use the navigation controls that make it really simple to add page hierarchies, quick links and breadcrumbs. The article is pitched at an introductory level, explaining how the controls work and is aimed at developers who are migrating from ASP.NET 1.x and so encountering these new features for the first time. It forms part of a two part series on site design in ASP.NET 2.0; the follow-up article will cover skins and themes.

Author:Chris Hart
Editor:Simon Robinson
Reviewers:Neil Piggot, Kunal Cheda

I saw this on Scott Guthrie’s blog and – after a quick look – just had to pass it on. Joe Stagner has completed his update of all the ‘How Do I’ videos on the asp.net site to work with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.

Following on the from my post a couple of days ago about how to get IE6 and IE7 running on the same machine, here’s a good post about how to get ASP.NET 1.1 running on IIS7 which is a problem people are going to increasingly run into as Vista starts to ship.

On 20th November Microsoft quietly released the 1.0 version of their ASP.NET CSS Friendly Control Adapters. A rather nifty set of extensions to ASP.NET bundled together in the form of a series of C# and VB project templates in a .vsi file. The adapters modify the HTML output that ASP.NET creates by default when rendering markup for server-side controls. More specifically, it removes ASP.NET’s use of the <table> tag and replaces it with the much more CSS- (and user-) friendly alternative of nested <ul> tags which make the output of your server-side controls both easier to style and much more accessible to users with screen-readers or limited browsing capabilities.*

Another cool CTP I came across recently was the Iron Python for ASP.NET CTP. IronPython was released as an open-source project earlier this year (it’s available to download from CodePlex ) which was pretty cool in itself, but now there’s a nifty add-on for ASP.NET that allows you to use IronPython in your code-behind (or –beside, as the mood takes you) pages.