Last week I gave three presentations at the DevConnections spring show in Orlando.  I received a lot of great feedback from attendees which I definitely appreciate, especially since I was feeling a little bit bad about having run out of time in my first two talks (and overcompensating a bit on my last one, which ended a few minutes ...

I've been posting about some feature requests for ASP.NET/Visual Studio, so here's one more in that thread. One nice feature of Blend is the ability to select a chunk of XAML and choose to ''Extract User Control''.  The result works very nicely, creating the separate control and inserting the reference to that control into the original XAML ...

I have three things that have been on my wish list for ASP.NET and/or Visual Studio that I'm curious to know what others think.  I've mentioned some of these before on my blog or elsewhere - they're not exactly earth shattering and I'm not saying that I want them more than any other feature they might add.  But each one would make my ...

Sadly, Microsoft decided that with the addition of the Title attribute on the @Page directive, it would make sense to include it by default with some text that one would absolutely never want to use as the title, "Untitled Page".  They could have named it "Customer Reporting" or "My Britney Fan Page" and it would ...

I am presenting two sessions at the Seattle Code Camp, Saturday Jan 26 - Sunday Jan 27, Both of my talks are on Sunday. An ASP.NET Ajax talk at 9:15 AM and a Programming Reporting Services talk at 3 PM. Everything can be found on the Code Camp site, including the schedule and a description of the sessions. The conference is at DigiPen in ...

Visual Studio 2008 is a done deal. It's just a matter of releasing the various versions to the people. Right now, you can download a copy of any of the express versions (VIsual Web Developer Express, Visual C# Express, Visual Basic Express, or Visual C++ Express) from the Express Downloads page. These are the real deal, not some late beta ...

Saw this error today working with the SiteMapDataSource in ASP.NET 3.5/VS2008.  Apparently this is a bug that has been around for a while, and is discussed here and logged in Connect here. The issue, however, is that the securityTrimmingEnabled attribute pops up in Intellisense in VS2008 when editing the web.sitemap file.  However, ...

I'm in Vegas a few days early (before DevConnections) to attend DevExpress's TechSummit2007, where they've invited a bunch of MVPs, authors, speakers, etc. to come and learn more about their controls and tools.  Yesterday we saw some of what they're working toward in the WPF space, with some charts and grids that are not quite ...

This from Steve Dybing at Microsoft: We know many of you have been testing the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPC images, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx.  It has been brought to our attention that the current Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPC images will expire on November 1, 2007, rather than March 15, 2008 as originally ...

I'm in the midst of wrapping up a multi-year long project to replace the advertising engine used to host sponsored ads on a few dozen .NET web sites.  This system traces its "lineage" back to an old ASP application written in 2001 (it served its first 207 impressions on 31 March 2001), and has since been upgraded to ASP.NET ...