The ASP.NET MVC tutorials at http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc/ are an excellent resource to learning Microsoft’s MVC implementation for .NET.   In particular, there are a number of tutorials focussed on creating a Contact Manager ASP.NET MVC Application which are a great walkthrough of the MVC structure.  The C# tutorials start athttp://www.asp.net/learn/mvc/tutorial-26-cs.aspx. Unfortunately there is a bug with the tutorial code. [...]

ASP.NET membership provides the ability to authenticate users to your web application using forms based authentication against a database of users or directory services.  This article explains the steps required to provide authentication against Active Directory, either for new sites with no authentication, or for existing sites using database authentication. Step 1 – Set up [...]

This post has been updated! Check Creating a Content Management System for your ASP.NET Web Site with CKEditor When developing web sites for clients, a simple yet powerful value added proposition is to allow your customers the ability to easily change text on their web site, such as updating contact details, news items, or promotions. This [...]

SQL Server 2008 Express edition with Tools has finally been released (It was launched on August 11th, but only today are the management tools available). As I’ve been building web servers today, I’ve put together this comprehensive guide to setting up your website to work with SQL Server 2008.

Yesterday I managed to take down my development web server. I changed one of my customer’s web sites from an SQL database to Microsoft Access, and as I am running 64 bit Windows Server 2008 and there is no 64-bit OleDB driver for Access, I had to change the Advanced Settings in the site’s application [...]

While Microsoft have released their new Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control, I still haven’t found a decent wrapper that converts addresses to langitude and longitude co-ordinates.  There is a Geo coder web service available here (this shows the co-ordinates for the White House) but it seems to only work for US addresses, which doesn’t help me at all. So [...]

The Listview control introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 fixes a number of issues with the old Gridview and Repeater controls.  In particular, one of my biggest problems with the Gridview was the inability to add an item through an empty row in the Gridview footer.  While there are several workarounds to achieve this functionality, the Listview [...]

Full details and download link at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 delivers: Improved WPF designers SQL Server 2008 support ADO.NET Entity Designer Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’) Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration [...]