In the last few posts on LINQ to SQL I’ve showed how to set up an object model using the O/R designer and how to handle a couple data binding scenarios with Comboboxes here and here. Last post on this topic we implemented a one-to-many data entry form and I showed how to work with stored procs as well as how to properly configure delete behaviors. In this post I want to explore how to easily add validation rules to our LINQ to SQL classes and how we can get these rules automatically displayed in the UI.

Beth Massi – Sharing the goodness that is VB : Simple Validation with LINQ to SQL Classes

"Master Page" support was one of the most popular features introduced with ASP.NET 2.0, and is one of those features that almost every new ASP.NET project now uses to deliver consistent layout template support across a web site.

One of the cooler scenarios that ASP.NET 2.0 supports is the ability to have "nested master pages" – where you can create a root master page for a site that defines a site’s overall layout, and then create nested master pages that are based on the root master and further customize the layout (for example: you could create a SingleColumn.Master and TwoColumn.Master that defined 1 or 2 column layout structures based on the root master template).  This nested master page feature is extremely flexible, and enables developers and designers to quickly and very cleanly make changes to the layout and organization of a site with minimal code changes and no content duplication.  The one (big) catch, though, is that Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t really support using nested master pages, and pages based on nested masters can’t be edited within the VS 2005 WYSIWYG designer. 

The good news is that VS 2008 fully supports nested master pages, and makes using them super easy.  Going forward I recommend that almost all ASP.NET projects should advantage of this feature – since it can add tremendous flexibility to the UI of your projects.

VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support – ScottGu’s Blog

An exciting new Entity Framework Designer feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to generate DDL that will create a database that can store your entity data model. This feature is not only exciting because it brings a long overdue capability to life, but because it is fully extensible: You can take control of the entire process, or plug into parts of it. For example, you can take over the DDL generation step to add support for your database of choice, or to customize the DDL generation process. Alternatively, you can take over the inheritance mapping step and replace our out-of-the box strategy (which is table-per-type) with your own. Or take over the entire mechanism and generate both stored procedure mappings and CRUD stored procedures for all your types. In a future post, we will show you exactly how to do this and provide an implementation of the table-per-hierarchy mapping for you to use or modify.

For now, let’s take a quick look at this feature by taking a very simple model:

ADO.NET team blog

One of the new controls in ASP.NET 3.5 that I think will be very popular is the <asp:ListView> control.  The ListView control supports the data editing, insertion, deleting, paging and sorting semantics of higher-level controls like the GridView.  But – unlike the GridView – it provides you with complete control over the html markup generated. 

The ListView control, when combined with the new Web Designer and rich CSS support in VS 2008, enables you to build much cleaner HTML UI.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be putting together several blog posts that show off how you can use it.

The asp:ListView control (Part 1 – Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS UI) – ScottGu’s Blog

As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen. Baby Smash will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can’t get out of the application. Pressing ALT-F4 will exit the application and Shift-Ctrl-Alt-O brings up the options dialog. I’m always interested in your feedback as well!

I wrote BabySmash! for my 2 year old and 5 month old so they could bang on the keyboards of my Windows machines without hurting anything. It’s a copy/homage of the very fine and free AlphaBaby for the Macintosh. BabySmash is free also and the source code is available on my blog soon. Enjoy!

Baby Smash! by Scott Hanselman

I don’t like the complexity that’s crept into my application. Not sure how else to put it – but the architecture needs to be shaken a bit so in this episode I tackle this complexity head on using DDD.

MVC Storefront « Rob Conery

A few weeks ago I wrote about an "app building" exercise we did on the Silverlight Toolkit team to help test our controls and identify potential issues with Silverlight 3 before it was released. My contribution to that effort was HeadTraxExtreme, an organizational hierarchy viewer loosely based on an internal tool. That blog post has been fairly popular, and I wanted to update the sample code for the recent release of Silverlight 3 so people can continue to learn from the sample and so I can walk through a fairly typical application upgrade scenario to show what’s involved.

Delay’s Blog : An "extreme" update for the Silverlight 3 release [HeadTraxExtreme sample application updated]

Data binding is a connection between the User Interface and a business object or other data provider . The User Interface object is called the target, the provider of the data is called the source.

Data-binding assists with the separation of the User Interface level of your application from the other layers of  your application (business objects, data, and so forth). This separation of responsibility is further reinforced by decoupling the UI target from its source through  the use of a Binding object.

The binding object can be thought of as a black box with a universal connectors on one side for the target and on the other side for the source. There are switches on top, the most important of which is the Data Binding Mode switch which determines which way the data will flow.

Tutorials : The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site

One of the great things about .NET Framework is that there is so much included to make your life as a developer easier. Over the past few years we’ve been flooded with new capabilities. Staying current with all of these tools is nearly a full-time job. So what’s a developer to do? I choose to pick the tools that apply directly to a problem I need to solve and use those new capabilities to enhance my productivity. Even more power and flexibility comes when we can take several of these capabilities and combine them for a unique solution to a problem.

We’re going to look specifically at three pieces of the framework that can be combined to provide a new technique. This technique helps in writing more responsive ASP.NET pages, while at the same time making the code more readable. The three technologies are: XML literals, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Factory Services and LINQ. XML literals and LINQ are new in Visual Basic 9 (VB9). LINQ gives us a common syntax for querying just about any data, be it SQL, XML or objects. Even though WCF has been here for a while, the out-of-the-box readiness for building factory services is little-known. Here we’ll show you how to create WCF services without changes to config files for endpoints, behaviors and bindings.

Visual Studio Magazine Online | On VB: XML Literals, WCF and LINQ

http://wiki.lessthandot.com/index.php/ASP.NET:_Drawing_images_and_bar_charts_with_System.Drawing

http://biztechmagazine.com/print_friendly.asp?item_id=270