ASP.NET MVC Tutorial in PDF format

We are getting closer to official release of Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. There are couple of tutorials and videos to get started with this new approach to enterprise web applications development. I found an eight part series of tutorial (in both C# and VB) on ASP.NET Website; good news is that all of these tutorial parts are available in PDF format too. I downloaded all of them and compress them in a single .rar file.

You can download it at http://www.sharplife.net/Files/ASPNETMVCTutorialPDFVersion.rar (approx. 1.7 MB).

Enjoy ;-)

Some ASP.NET Articles

Omar Al Zabir has recently listed 10 cool articles about ASP.NET, AJAX, … which he has published this year. From my personal view these articles are interesting:

• Cleanup
  inactive anonymous users from ASP.NET Membership Tables
• Prevent
  Denial of Service (DOS) attacks in your web application
• 13 disasters for
  production website and their solutions

Current ASP.NET URL Rewriting Solutions VS. IIS 7.0 Solution

It’s a few months I have been using UrlRewriting.NET component for my Url Rewriting needs in ASP.NET 2.0. Since it’s free and open source and covers many features that I need, it was a good choice for my projects. The big problem with this (and also other available components) is that it can’t rewrite fake directories. For example if you have a url like http://myurl.com/products/productcategory.aspx?name=Phone and want to rewrite it to something like http://myurl.com/products/Phone/ you must have a folder named Phone in products folder containing a blank Default.aspx file inside it or in another way map all requests to ASP.NET engine in IIS. Both ways (especially second) are annoying and waste resources.

Because I’m working on a project that needs to rewrite fake URLs and also server resource management is so important in this project I searched for other solutions today and I reached UrlRewiter.NET; but unfortunately this one doesn’t support fake URL rewriting as well as previous ones. [There are some tricks to handle fake directories like using customErrors default error page and etc. which you can find on CodeProject.com]. So it is not a good solution for me too. So I searched again and I reached this. It seems that IIS 7.0 new structure lets developers do this. In fact just by adding a few lines to Web.Config you can use your current module to Rewrite all URLs (See this post).

It’s a good news but IIS 7.0 is still in Beta and many servers don’t support it. Should we wait until Windows Server 2008 to use IIS 7.0?

It’s a big question for me that while PHP developers are using this simple feature since a few years ago, why Microsoft don’t offer a solution before IIS 7.0 official release.

UPDATE 1: Looking for IIS 6.0 Solutions? See this.
UPDATE 2: Wyatt Barnett has commented on this post and introduced an article written by himself which explains some tricks to make IIS 6.0 Play With UrlRewriting. See it.

Scott’s 2007 Tools List

Scott Hanselman, like past years, introduced a 2007 list of developer and power users tools for Windows. If you are familiar with his cool lists you can enjoy his fresh 2007 version of it and if you didn’t hear anything about his list before its time to take a look at it.

In addition to those tools I’ve ever been using, I downloaded these tools in my first look at list and I will read list exactly later!: Query Express, CollectionGen, Code Style Enforcer, Microsoft BPA, Resource Refactor.

Thanks Scott, you are an angel!

CSS Adapter for ASP.NET 2.0

Microsoft released beta 1.1 version of CSS friendly ASP.NET 2.0 control adapters Beta 1.1. This is a free tool let you force your server side controls render html output as you like based on CSS technology. As is read on its web site:

“ASP.NET is a great technology for building web sites but it would be even better if
it rendered different HTML. For example, the Menu control makes it simple to add a menu to
a web site but it would be better if it didn’t create <table> tags and was easier to style
using CSS. Happily, it’s easy to “teach” the Menu control how to generate the kind of HTML that
you prefer. Indeed, you can modify any ASP.NET control so it produces better HTML.

The key is to use something that may be new to you: control adapters. These are little chunks
of logic that you add to your web site to effectively “teach” an ASP.NET control how to render
better HTML.”

You can download it for ASP.NET 2.0 here. Also you can find a complete guide and some live examples here.