Some groups within Microsoft do “get” the web and search. To prove that, the IIS Team recently released the IIS SEO Toolkit. If you haven't already heard of it, it's a simple yet powerful extension that you can add into IIS that will basically act as a bot or spider to crawl your own sites and give you an analysis of how well your site is doing from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.
As a developer working with Office, working directly with documents in your managed code can save you boat loads of time. It also opens the door for creating many types of applications that were difficult or impossible to build previously.
Anand Narayanaswamy reviews Nevron .NET Vision's chart and diagram controls, Nevron Chart for .NET and Nevron Diagram for .NET, for ASP.NET and Windows platforms.
Need some ideas on how to make sure you're getting the best consultants for your needs? I have a few ideas to add to my article earlier this year on the same topic. Because you responded so urgently to that discussion, I wanted to continue it with you.
As web developers, we've enjoyed a season of relative prosperity during the last 10 years while there have been no significant changes to the HTML 4.01 specification. But what will the coming introduction of HTML 5.0 bring?
Microsoft has just released a public beta of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework (FX) 4.0. Sadly, as with most new releases, there are entirely too many improvements, changes, and facets to easily cover in a single briefing, but what follows is a quick round-up of some of the changes and developments that you may be interested in.
As developers, we spend a lot of time working on the ins and outs of software. But hardware plays a huge role in our lives, and it can make a difference in both the quality and quantity of the software we're able to create. I share my hardware purchasing secrets with you: desktop or laptop; multiple monitors—good or bad; buying speed for your hard drives; and what about those Solid State Drives.
Recently I described requirement gathering problems I encountered and the negative impact they had on project delivery. I asked for your feedback and said that I'd do a follow-up sharing your views. Happily, a number of you emailed and commiserated, and also sent along some great advice. So here it is, along with a couple of my thoughts improving development project process.
It's no secret that successful IT and development projects require careful planning and requirements gathering. But striking the balance of whom to gather those requirements from is like walking the razor's edge: without enough input from key players, you can eventually end up in utter ruin, and when too much input is solicited, you may never get started.
As part of Scott Guthrie's keynote March 18th at Mix 2009, Microsoft announced the final release of ASP.NET Model View Controller( MVC). If you haven't had a chance to look at it yet, now is your chance as it's officially out of beta and into full production.
ASP.NET MVC has been obviously touted as being search engine optimization (SEO ) friendly by easily enabling the use of pretty urls within web sites. In this briefing I'll also look at how it provides a fantastically flexible architecture that makes easy to cleanly, and intelligently, handle requests for missing or moved content with just a few lines of code.
In my recent development project, I took advantage of two approaches that let me write literally thousands of fewer lines of code and save a ton of development time by taking a more 'hands-off' approach to coding. The first solution I used was an ORM (or Object-Relational-Mapping solution) that saved me days of coding when it came to data access. I also took advantage of templates which I was also able to use to generate the core functionality for a large number of web pages designed to interact with my data.
Development can be a dicey endeavor. Take, for example, recent problems with Google's integration of AJAX functionality into search, and it becomes obvious that the union of two great things doesn't always result in a great outcome.
If you're like most developers, you've probably heard about the ASP.NET ReportViewer control. It's been around awhile: It shipped with Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0. This control frequently gets overlooked by developers looking to create reporting or graphing capabilities within their sites. This is really too bad, because it tool offers a number of huge benefits.
ASP.NET's intrinsic cache functionality has long been one of my favorite aspects of ASP.NET. With a little bit of planning and organization, you can use it to create highly scalable applications with robust fidelity.
This article walks through the network/WAN monitoring application that I wrote and illustrates several useful .NET Framework classes—some of which can be useful when writing an application that depends on remote access to the LAN or WAN. It also illustrates several “alerting” techniques to draw attention to the fact that something is wrong.
I've been working on a series of videos touting some of the new features and benefits of SQL Server 2008. I've spent a lot of time working with SQL Server 2008 and reading through Books Online (BOL) to catch the biggest changes. But there are a bunch of smaller changes and improvements that frequently get overlooked, so I thought I’d cover a few of them that have really made my life easier over the past few months.
Web 2.0 is being used to label a new approach that addresses business failures associated with traditional web applications. This flavor of Web 2.0 espouses business approaches more in line with those of viral marketing and customer evangelization advocates.
In the upcoming ASP.NET 4.0, instead of the current behavior where naming containers successively concatenate identifiers into the names of your rendered object IDs, we'll now be able to have some control over how those IDs should be rendered on the server.
To be successful far into the future developers need to assess how they can add strategic value to their organizations, and how they can best engage the entire IT department in the most efficient creation, deployment, and operation of software.