ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, .NET and NuGet

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I've done in the last year.
[I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

ASP.NET

• Introducing new ASP.NET Universal Providers: Great post from Scott Hanselman on the new System.Web.Providers we are working on.  This release delivers new ASP.NET Membership, Role Management, Session, Profile providers that work with SQL Server, SQL CE and SQL Azure.

• CSS Sprites and the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Library: Great post from Scott Mitchell that talks about a free library for ASP.NET that you can use to optimize your CSS and images to reduce HTTP requests and speed up your site.

• Better HTML5 Support for the VS 2010 Editor: Another great post from Scott Hanselman on an update several people on my team did that enables richer HTML5 editing support within Visual Studio 2010.

• Install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet: Nice post by Stephen Walther on how you can now use NuGet to install the Ajax Control Toolkit within your applications.  This makes it much easier to reference and use.

• May 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit: Another great post from Stephen Walther that talks about the May release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. It includes a bunch of nice enhancements and fixes.

• SassAndCoffee 0.9 Released: Paul Betts blogs about the latest release of his SassAndCoffee extension (available via NuGet). It enables you to easily use Sass and Coffeescript within your ASP.NET applications (both MVC and Webforms).

ASP.NET MVC

• ASP.NET MVC Mini-Profiler: The folks at StackOverflow.com (a great site built with ASP.NET MVC) have released a nice (free) profiler they've built that enables you to easily profile your ASP.NET MVC 3 sites and tune them for performance. 

• Globalization, Internationalization and Localization in ASP.NET MVC 3: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to enable internationalization, globalization and localization support within your ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery solutions.

• Precompile your MVC Razor Views: Great post from David Ebbo that discusses a new Razor Generator tool that enables you to pre-compile your razor view templates as assemblies – which enables a bunch of cool scenarios.

• Unit Testing Razor Views: Nice post from David Ebbo that shows how to use his new Razor Generator to enable unit testing of razor view templates with ASP.NET MVC.

• Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3: Nice post by Phil Haack that covers a cool feature added to VS 2010 SP1 that makes it really easy to \bin deploy ASP.NET MVC and Razor within your application. This enables you to easily deploy the app to servers that don't have ASP.NET MVC 3 installed.

.NET

• Table Splitting with EF 4.1 Code First: Great post from Morteza Manavi that discusses how to split up a single database table across multiple EF entity classes.  This shows off some of the power behind EF 4.1 and is very useful when working with legacy database schemas.

• Choosing the Right Collection Class: Nice post from James Michael Hare that talks about the different collection class options available within .NET.  A nice overview for people who haven't looked at all of the support now built into the framework.

• Little Wonders: Empty(), DefaultIfEmpty() and Count() helper methods: Another in James Michael Hare's excellent series on .NET/C# "Little Wonders".  This post covers some of the great helper methods now built-into .NET that make coding even easier.

NuGet

• NuGet 1.4 Released: Learn all about the latest release of NuGet – which includes a bunch of cool new capabilities.  It takes only seconds to update to it – go for it!

• NuGet in Depth: Nice presentation from Scott Hanselman all about NuGet and some of the investments we are making to enable a better open source ecosystem within .NET.

• NuGet for the Enterprise – NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to integrate NuGet within enterprise build environments and enable it with CI solutions.

Hope this helps,
Scott

ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, EF, .NET

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I've done in the last year.
[I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

ASP.NET

• 35 ASP.NET and VS 2010 What's New Videos: 35 free videos from Joe Stagner that highlight some of the new features that came in ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010.

• Filling in PDF Forms with ASP.NET and iTextSharp: Nice article by Scott Mitchell on how to populate PDF forms using ASP.NET and iTextSharp – an open source PDF library for .NET.

• Building and Using Custom OutputCache Providers with ASP.NET: A good MSDN Magazine article on how to outputcache ASP.NET Content with MongoDB and the AppFabric Cache Provider.

• Using ASP.NET, Membership and jQuery to Determine Username Availability: Nice article from Scott Mitchell that talks about how to build client-side UI that can better detect if a username has already been taken.

ASP.NET MVC

• Data Annotations Extensions: Nice post from Scott Kirkland that discusses a very cool NuGet package that provides a bunch of additional DataAnnotations that you can take advantage of.

• SessionLess Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 3: Good post from David Hayden that talks about the new [SessionState] attribute in ASP.NET MVC 3 and how you can use it to indicate session behavior on Controller classes.

• Templated Razor Delegates: Phil Haack has a nice post that discuses how to take advantage of Razor's Templated Delegate support.  This enables you to build some pretty cool templated HTML helpers.

• Defining Default Content for a Razor Layout Section: Another great post from Phil Haack – this one showing how you can use Razor's templated helper support (see above) to build a new Html.RenderSection() helper that supports default content.

• Integrating the jQuery UI date picker and adding a jQuery validate date range validator: Nice post from Stuart Leeks that looks at how you can use the jQuery UI date picker within ASP.NET MVC 3.

ASP.NET and jQuery

• jQuery 1.5 Visual Cheat Sheet: A free PDF that you can download and print which provides an easy way to lookup and remember jQuery APIs and commands.

• Building a Tree Picker Dialog using jQuery UI and the ASP.NET TreeView Control: Nice post by Gunnar on how to create a hierarchical tree-view dialog picker.

Entity Framework

• EF 4.1 Release is Coming: The ADO.NET Team blogs about the release plans for EF 4.1 – which includes the new "code first" support that I've done several blog posts about.  Final release coming soon!

• How to Generate EF Code First Model Classes from an Existing Database: Nice post from John Galloway on how you can quickly generate EF Code First POCO model classes from an existing database.

• Oracle Support for Entity Framework 4: Blog post from Oracle that announces the beta of their official EF provider – which allows you to use EF and EF Code First against Oracle database.

• Model-First in the Entity Framework 4: Nice MSDN article from Jon Fancey that talks about how to use a model-first development approach with EF4.

.NET

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: James Michael Hare has a nice post that links to a number of great C#/.NET articles he has written that shows off cool tips and tricks.

• 5 Helpful DateTime Extension Methods: Nice post from Scott Mitchell that shows off 5 useful DateTime extension methods that you can take advantage of.

Hope this helps,
Scott