Silverlight’s starting to become more and more common online - Microsoft’s baking it into Bing and all other sorts of stuff - so the juxtaposition of it and ASP.NET tends to elevate the web application framework.  Think of it as relevance by association.

As for the ASP.NET details, Infragistics stated in a press release, “The new WebHierarchicalDataGrid leverages the power of ASP.NET to deliver the best user experience available in any ASP.NET hierarchical grid. With high performance and flexibility, the new data grid is perfect for line of business applications scenarios featuring multiple child band, pay to play model, animations, load on demand and much more.”

Also, according to the company, “WebEditors, WebMonthCalendar, and WebDataPicker new controls as well as the enhanced controls in this release provide extraordinarily sophisticated functionality as demanded by the application.  Each control includes advanced capabilities such as CSS support and one setting global styling.”

It looks like NetAdvantage for .NET will cost around $1,200, or $1,700 for people who prefer to receive priority support.

An official statement asserted, “Bitrix Site Manager ASP.NET offers Web2.0 features and has a user-friendly interface to meet all the emerging requirements in website content management use.  The main features include an advanced Visual Editor, an easy-to-navigate Control Panel, multi-content Media Players, and flexible access settings.”

More stuff (in the form of modules and Web 2.0 components) is supposed to be on the way, too.

As for why people would want to use the product, the statement continued, “Bitrix Site Manager ASP.NET allows content managers and web designers to easily manage text and graphical content, create blogs and forums, upload photos, play video and audio files, create product catalogs, publish news, use RSS import, etc.  Website developers, for their part, will appreciate the Smart ORM-System which helps minimize routine script writing and saves time that can be spent on creative work instead.”

So consider taking advance of Bitrix Site Manager ASP.NET’s availability - and showing your appreciation for the PHP-to-ASP.NET shift - if this sounds like your sort of thing.

The next time you’re in the position of wanting to get a job, it may be helpful to know what sort of stuff the interviewer is thinking.  And “How to Select and Hire the Best ASP.NET Developer” is the sort of document that an interviewer might have read.

Admittedly, the piece was written as a sort of advertisement for Website Optimization India, and reads as such.  But by picking up on the marketing points, it’s easy to see the sorts of things you should emphasize.

So, as Website Optimization India offers “flexible timelines to start or end projects,” don’t look like an out-the-door-at-5:30 type of person.  Also, where the company “can develop any complex or critical web dynamic pages,” and maintains “strict rules and protocols to develop secured, dynamic pages,” match it.

Although it might be a while before the economy fully recovers, then, hopefully these tips and the others in the article will give you an edge in the meantime.

The book promises to help readers understand both ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET terms and languages.  It talks about creating elements with ASP.NET’s built-in objects, letting individuals interact with a website, using the .NET Framework Class Library, and accessing and updating databases, too.

What’s more, the book comes with a CD, which means this is sort of a financial bargain, and also should keep you from having to do much paper-to-screen translation.

On Amazon.com, “ASP.NET for Dummies” is averaging four stars (out of five) after having received 46 customer reviews.  That’s not a bad number at all, given how critical some people can be.  Another important thing to consider is that the review voted “most helpful” gives the book five stars.

Then there’s the opinion of Anand Narayanaswamy to add to the equation.  Narayanaswamy wrote a review of “ASP.NET for Dummies” that AJAXWorld reproduced, and although he skipped using anything like a star or number system in it, maintained a very positive view throughout.

Narayanaswamy’s conclusion reads, “I must say that the author has taken a huge effort to present the complex topics in a simple way.  I must point out that the book helps a beginner to learn ASP.NET 3.5 quickly and in a user-friendly manner.  I very much liked the style of presentation and highly recommend the book for all level of developers.”

So if you’re in need (or want) a refresher - or if you’re just starting to learn about ASP.NET or want to give something to another complete newbie - “ASP.NET for Dummies” is probably one of the better options available.  Just remember, if you’re giving the book as a gift, to maybe apologize for the insult contained in the title so that you don’t simultaneously educate and offend someone.

Let’s return to the subject of those user interface extensions, though.  Here’s a bit relevant info: a lot of people agree that BMWs are some of the best-driving cars on the planet.  Look over reviews of them covering the past few years, though, and you’ll notice that even the biggest fans couldn’t help but be enraged by the awful iDrive interface.

The fact that poor radio and navigation controls could piss off professional evaluators and the owners of “ultimate driving machines” should prove how important user interfaces are.

Anyway, Vassil Terziev, the co-CEO of Telerik, gave some details about his company’s offering by calling it “a purpose-built UI suite that fully leverages the advantages of Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC framework.”

He then continued, “By developing native architecture from the ground up that is tailored specifically to the ASP.NET MVC environment, we avoid many of the pitfalls associated with non-native controls that have their roots in WebForms.  Instead, we are providing a model that is perfectly mated to the MVC platform.”

Joe Stagner, who’s a Senior Program Manager in Microsoft’s Developer Tools and Platform Group, recently ran (on his own time) a comparison pitting ASP.NET against PHP.  He made the contest as fair as he could, using the same machine for all tests and recording and publishing some detailed data sets.

If you feel like looking over Stagner’s results spreadsheet, it is in fact available here.

But to cut to the chase, he concluded, “ASP.NET is universally faster than PHP (on Windows and on Linux) with the exceptions of File Copy and Attribute operations.”

Stagner also wrote, “ASP.NET (C#) operations, object use, library calls, etc. are SIGNIFICANTLY faster that the PHP equivalents.”

Since Stagner tried so hard to be impartial, the ASP.NET camp should take these findings as a real victory of sorts.  And assuming you can find the time, we hope you have fun celebrating.

Cynical individuals can rest easy; the process that led up to this acknowledgment was rather more involved than pulling a name out of a hat.  Svetlin Boychev, the CEO and founder of WindowsHostingASP.Net, explained in a statement, “The WindowsHostingASP.Net Awards are given to the Best ASP.NET Hosting Providers in the industry, who have proven themselves by delivering high quality services and the latest ASP.NET technologies to their customers.”

Boychev also mentioned one other method of assessment: “All of the awarded ASP.NET Hosts are rated and tested by our experienced webmasters team.”

This represents a nice feather in DiscountASP.NET’s cap, then, and its status as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner should also help the company stand out in most crowds.

Moreover, if you think about the matter while acknowledging the idea that every entity has the power to improve the reputation of its entire breed, this is a development of which the whole ASP.NET community should be proud.

Let’s talk about scheduling first, since if you can’t attend, nothing else matters too much.  The course will last for four days, and move between Toronto, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Ottawa.  You can view the exact dates here.

As for some other info, the course will last for four days and focus on about six things.  You should learn how to “[b]uild and deploy secure, scalable Web applications using the MVC framework in ASP.NET” and “[d]evelop powerful application controllers with practical URLs to ensure application robustness,” for starters.

Also, according to an official course description, you’ll be taught how to “[p]roduce a clean, maintainable code base using the Model View Controller (MVC) architecture,” “[c]reate flexible views for user interaction with view helpers,” “[d]esign rich user interfaces with AJAX and jQuery,” and “[s]ecure applications using authentication and role-based authorization.”

Mind you, all of this is rather pricey - standard tuition’s $2,790.  But if your company’s willing to get you trained (we do appear to be coming out of the recession, after all), the series of courses might represent a decent opportunity to pick up some new tricks and do a little networking.

Scott Mitchell wrote, “These tutorials walk readers through hosting an ASP.NET website with a web host provider and are aimed at beginning to intermediate ASP.NET developers interested in getting a small- to medium-sized ASP.NET application online.”

All of the lessons should be pretty useful.  The first covers the subject of displaying a custom error page.  Then, there’s something about processing unhandled exceptions.  The third one relates to logging error details with ASP.NET health monitoring.

Next, Mitchell wrote about logging error details with ELMAH, and moves on to discuss precompiling your website.  The subject of the final tutorial is managing users and roles on the production website.

So if you’d like to get some free information - and who doesn’t? - Mitchell’s hosting tutorials are worth a look.  Ten previously-written ones exist, too, if you want to learn even more.

For some reason, there is no API available anywhere within the BCL to retrieve the last modified date of a response - you can only set it.

Since the module wouldn’t work without a way to read the last modified date of the response, I had to use Reflector to figure out how to pull the information out using reflection. The result became a simple little method to retrieve the date. It looks like this:

And you can use it like this:

If you know of another way to retrieving the last-modified date, please let me know.

Comments