Marketing Ninja

Every week or two I am going to try to throw together a feature list of 10 ASP.NET articles that I’ve found interesting or have been referred to by my readers, so I’ll start with 10 hot ASP.NET tips for today, 9/17/2007.

1. Try… Catch… Now What – Summarizes how a lot of try catch blocks are used inefficiently by ASP.NET developers. The author demonstrates how to utilize “using” blocks instead to take care of the legwork. This approach was recommended by AjaxNinja readers in my How to Design a Great Data Layer in .NET article.

2. Events and Delegates (event-driven .NET) – The first part of a two-part series on Events and Delegates by Anthony Grace; the reason why I like this article is it quickly explains what events and delegates are and how to implement them. Specifically events and delegates are important for event-driven .NET programming; an event is something simple like a new connection being opened or a button being clicked, but a delegate is data type that references “callback” function, meaning that once the event is raised the handling of that event is delegated to the function referenced by the delegate type.

3. Calculating Baseball Statistics With LINQ – I have yet to experiment with Language Integrated Query (LINQ), but this year-old tutorial on using LINQ to calculate some baseball statistics is a fun read and it’s informative.

4. Using a Modal Popup to Modify LINQ GridViews – More LINQ! In this article David shows us how to modify the LINQ results in a gridview the AJAX Control Tool Kit for ASP.NET 3.5 in Visual Studio 2008. It’s an in-depth example that combines three very cool .NET technologies.

5. Integrating Customized Roles, Membership and Profiles in ASP.NET 2.0 – Peter Bromberg, a C# Most Valuable Professional, walks us through the Membership and Roles frameworks in ASP.NET 2.0. This is probably an older article and I hope these frameworks don’t undergo too much change in the .NET 3.5 release in the future, but I think these two frameworks really help cut down on total development time and should be understood by all ASP.NET developers.

6. Website screenshot capture with ASP.NET and PHP – This article shows you how to do page or screen scraping with either ASP.NET or PHP.

7. Implementing a Custom Data Paging Class for .NET – Break up a larger data set into smaller pages using this class from the Code Project.

8. Spice up ASP.NET validation with AJAX Control Toolkit – Demonstrates a few ways to use the AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET to improve the ASP.NET validation controls. I think having validation performed in real time on the client using AJAX is preferable to using postbacks so this is a good resource for learning how to implement such a validation interface.

9. Introduction to System.Enum – This article from the Visual Basic Notebook for .NET introduces us to enumerations and enumerated data types in VB.NET; I prefer C# but I can go back and forth. VBN is an excellent .NET blog and I HIGHLY recommend adding it to your RSS feed.

10. Programming Silverlight 1.0 with C# – Photo Carousel (Part 1) – Nikhil Kothari, the same ASP.NET developer who brought us Facebook.NET, has a great Silverlight 1.0 code sample up. I haven’t had a chance to play around with Silverlight yet as my course work has been intense but I enjoyed glossing over his sample!

That’s all for this week. Got any cool ASP.NET hacks, tips, tricks, or best practices that you want me to run in the future? Shoot me an email at jiive[dot]aaron[at]gmail[dot]com.

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