.NET news » ASP.NET

The Caching Application Block's provider mechanism lets you create a custom provider that stores cached data anywhere you want. It was this that made me wonder if it was possible to cache data within or through a web service, which would allow the provider to cache its data almost anywhere—remotely or locally—without having to write specific code that is directly integrated within Enterprise Library.

The principle is simple enough. Instead of having the backing store provider within the Caching Application Block interact directly with the backing store (the usual approach, as implemented in the Isolated Storage provider and Database provider), the backing store provider simply packages up the data and sends it to a web service..

"Web application development has come a long way in a fairly short period of time." A quote like that surely won't send anyone into shock anytime soon because it's accepted as fact. From basic, static HTML pages to totally data-driven and data-centric Web applications, the demands on a Web developer are much more complex and demanding than they were just a few years ago. The advent of social networking sites like MySpace, which is written in ASP.NET 2.0, interactive mapping sites, and sites streaming full motion video has required the Web developer to adapt and change with the times. One of the best tools to use to build these types of Web applications is Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0. In this article I am going to delve into some of the more interesting features of ASP.NET 2.0 and show you how you can begin using ASP.NET 2.0 on your next Web project.

It is easy to develop your own ASP.NET web application. But making it do some useful things for your users while keeping the design simple and elegant is not so easy. If you are lucky, your web application will be used by more than a handful of users, in that case, performance can become important. For some of the web applications I worked on, performance is vital: the company will lose money if users get frustrated with the slow response.

There are many factors that can result in bad performance, the number of users is just one of them. As a developer in a big corporation, you usually don't have a chance to mess with real production servers. However, I think it is very helpful for developers to take a look at the servers that are hosting their applications...

This article presents a component that is used to add a sort indication image to GridView columns.

The Internet provides a lot of sites that show how you can add some sort of sort indicator to a GridView, but all do this for a single GridView. Our application has quite a lot of GridViews that need this feature and therefore I decided that a component would be the right way to go. A component has the advantage that I have to code the behaviour just once and not for every single GridView over and over again.

The rest of this article shows you how you can use the GridViewSortExtender (that's the name of the component) and how it work on the inside.

The ModalPopupExtender control provided by the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit allows the display of content in a div panel that floats in the middle of the page and prevents the user from interacting with the rest of the page until the div panel has been closed, thus creating a modal form type of entry on a web page. This is really useful technology but I wanted to make a few improvements in this modal form-like interface.

A cleaner more OO-way to load web user controls in ASP.net

No matter how much content you provide or how good it is, if your customers can't find what they're looking for they'll go elsewhere. It's no wonder then that there are hundreds of search technology vendors. Which solution should you choose?

Windows Live Search crawls content on the Internet and also exposes search functionalities to developers through a Web service that allows the search to be scoped down to just your site. You can then render the results however you see fit.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is another good choice. It's a complete site-building and management solution that also provides robust search functionality...

ASP.NET AJAX was released by Microsoft to answer this need in Web application development. My goal in writing this article is to expand your knowledge of a central component of ASP.NET AJAX called the ScriptManager control and to show how advanced programming of ASP.NET AJAX is achieved using it. ScriptManager is a server-side control that sits on your Web Form and enables the core of ASP.NET AJAX. Its primary role is the arbitration of all other ASP.NET AJAX controls on the Web Form and the addition of the right scripting libraries to the Web browser so that the client portion of ASP.NET AJAX can function. Often you will find yourself using the ScriptManager to register other controls, Web services, and client scripts...

An article on creating a DataSourceControl with full design time support

The Web Service Software Factory is designed to provide guidance and enhanced tools for building Web services using ASMX or WCF.