Rolling Your Own Website Administration Tool - Part 1   23 May 2007 00:00 GMT

Forms-based authentication combined with ASP.NET 2.0's Membership and Roles systems makes creating and managing user accounts incredibly easy. I continue to be amazed at how the login-related Web controls encapsulate the array of tasks that I had always had to code by hand in classic ASP.

To help administer users, roles, and authorization settings, ASP.NET 2.0 includes the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT). WSAT is available from the Visual Studio 2005 Website menu via the ASP.NET Configuration menu option. Launching the WSAT from Visual Studio, however, allows only local websites to be administered. Such restrictions are limiting when hosting a website remotely with a web hosting company. (Granted, the WSAT's files are available in the %WINDOWS%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ASP.NETWebAdminFiles folder and can be deployed from there.)

Rather than move the existing WSAT tool to my remote host, I decided to build my own WSAT-like tool from the ground up. My version duplicates all features inside the Security section of the WSAT and adds a useful "Access Rules Summary" view of the website security as applied to any given user or role. The complete code can be downloaded from the end of this article and added to your site within a matter of minutes. This article provides an overview of my custom WSAT implementation and explores the user list and add and edit user pages in detail. A future article will explore the role management and access rules sections in detail. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

Quickly Stop the Build in Your .NET IDE   18 May 2007 22:55 GMT
Find out how to stop a build in it's tracks.
Source: DevX

The Baker's Dozen: 13 Steps for Building an ASP.NET Database Lookup Page   18 May 2007 01:56 GMT
Build a database search Web page using new features in ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and .NET generics in C#.
Source: DevX

Silverlight: Microsoft Set to Mix It Up in RIA Delivery   17 May 2007 00:12 GMT
Microsoft MIX '07 offers a glittery, Las Vegas preview of a complete family of tools, frameworks, and services for the design, development, and deployment of media-rich applications.
Source: DevX

Debugging SQL Server 2005 Stored Procedures in Visual Studio   16 May 2007 00:00 GMT

With Microsoft SQL Server 2000 it was possible to debug stored procedures from directly within Query Analyzer (see Debugging a SQL Stored Procedure from inside SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer for more information). With SQL Server 2005, however, this functionality was moved out of SQL Server Management Studio and into the Visual Studio IDE. Using this technique, it is possible to step into your stored procedures, one statement at a time, from within Visual Studio. It is also possible to set breakpoints within your stored procedures' statements and have these breakpoints hit when debugging your application.

All editions of SQL Server 2005 include debugging support (including the Express Edition). However, only the Team Systems and Professional editions of Visual Studio enable stored procedure debugging from within the IDE. In short, if you are using Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio Standard Edition then you cannot step through a stored procedure or enter the stored procedure via application debugging.

In this article we will examine how to debug SQL Server 2005 stored procedures through the Visual Studio IDE. We will look at both stepping into a stored procedure directly from the IDE as well as how to set breakpoints within the stored procedure that are then hit when debugging the application. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

How To Create a Custom Policy Injection Application Block Handler   15 May 2007 02:15 GMT
Using custom policy injection, you can configure and apply policies exactly the way you want them, doing it right requires a little effort.
Source: DevX

Use Transformations to Draw Your Own Great Graphs   11 May 2007 20:07 GMT
Use .NET to build your own graphing control that displays bar, line, and point data either on its own surface, in a printout, or in an image file.
Source: DevX

Designing Lookless Controls in Window Presentation Foundation   10 May 2007 19:07 GMT
Learning to use and design lookless controls can free your WPF applications from the boring monotony of gray buttons forever.
Source: DevX

Deploying a Local Database to a Remote Web Host   09 May 2007 00:00 GMT

Microsoft Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition make it easy to design, develop, and test ASP.NET web applications locally. In my books, tutorials, and classes, the explanations, examples, and assignments often use these tools to develop web applications locally. After creating a usable, interesting web application, readers and students invariably ask, "How do I get this website on the Internet?" Web applications designed for personal use, as a hobby, or for small- to medium-sized businesses are typically hosted by a web host provider. A web host provider is a company that has a plethora of computers that are accessible from the Internet. For a monthly fee, you can upload your web application to a web hosting company's servers to make your site available.

Deploying a web application from your local development machine to the web host company's servers requires uploading the files and information needed to serve your site. Many of these files can simply be uploaded to the web hosting company's servers using FTP or FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE). What is more challenging is uploading a Microsoft SQL Server database from the local development machine to the remote web host. This challenge stems in part from the fact that most web hosting companies disallow use of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and instead require that you use a database on their database server (which might be SQL Server 2000 or 2005). Therefore, to deploy your site you will need to somehow duplicate your database's schema and data on the web hosting company's database server.

In short, duplicating a database's schema and data often means obtaining the T-SQL scripts to create the schema and add the data and executing that script on the remote database server. Fortunately, this process is greatly simplified by Microsoft's SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard. This wizard allows you to create the script needed to publish a database directly from within Visual Studio. Read on to learn more!
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Source: 4GuysFromRolla

Take a Sneak Peek—Microsoft .NET Developers Test Drive Avaya's Latest SDK   05 May 2007 01:46 GMT
Microsoft .NET and C# developers: Get a sneak preview of Avaya's latest SDK for developing enterprise telephony applications for Avaya's Communication Manager (CM). You can now preview the new .NET SDK for Device and Media Call Control (DMCC) for free.
Source: DevX