Using field codes to replace values in content, templates, and reports allows users and designers a great deal of flexibility for creating and managing content and templates without requiring code changes.

This article is a summary of how to use field codes in content, templates, or reports and how to convert them to object property values and format and replace them when displayed or rendered.  This is based on a similar pattern that Microsoft Word uses when formatting fields.  It’s also commonly used in WordPress and WordPress themes.Read More...

Getting the right date and time sounds simple enough, but when you look at a few interesting scenarios with multiple teams coordinating actions across multiple time zones with multiple clients and servers, designing for the date and time for a given event becomes complicated very quickly.  I’d like to share an some approaches that I think work well in .Net.Read More...

On October 14, 2008, Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0, the cross-platform browser plug-in for both Macintosh and PC platforms.

Silverlight includes several Rich Internet Application (RIA) features, including:

• WPF UI Framework
• Rich Controls
• Rich  Networking Support
• Rich Base Class Library Read More...

Microsoft announced August 11 availability of the following new downloads.

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

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The limitations of your tools are your limitations. Choose your tools wisely. Read More...

Visual Studio.Net (2003, 2005 and 2008) keeps a list of recent projects shown on the Start Page in the IDE. Sometimes when moving projects around on the disk, one can end up with duplicate names and this can be confusing. To resolve this, the list in the registry must be updated.

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On Dec 9, Microsoft released the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Preview for Visual Studio 2008.  Scott Guthrie outlines some  ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Preview key features this preview release provides.

These include:

• ASP.NET Ajax Improvements
• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support
• ASP.NET Silverlight Support
• ADO.NET Data Services

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On November 19, 2007, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008.  Scott Guthrie outlines some of the Visual Studio 2008 key features.

Some reasons on why you may want to upgrade.

Key VS 2008 Features

• Full tool support in VS 2008 for WF, WCF, and WPF
• Target builds for .Net 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5
• Java Script intellisense and richer Java Script debugging
• Nested ASP.Net master pages
• Rich CSS editing and layout support within the WYSIWYG designer 
• Continued support for web site and web application project models
• ASP.NET AJAX support
• ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control
• LINQ (language integrated query) support
• Intellisense code editing improvements

Key .Net 3.5 Features

• LINQ support
• ASP.NET AJAX
• New WCF Protocols (including AJAX, JSON, REST, POX, RSS, ATOM, and several new WS-* standards)
• New base class library features

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Microsoft announced on Nov 19, 2007 the availability of Visual Studio 2008.  It also made available to the public a free version of the developer tools.  Check out the following links to obtain your free copy of these tools.

• Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• Popfly
• SQL Server Express
• SQL Server Compact Edition

The Visual Web Developer version includes a significantly improved HTML web designer also used in Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression Web.

MSI installation projects created in Visual Studio 2003 allowed the setting of a PORT value. This port value would be used to search the IIS sites and install the web application by default on the first site that corresponded to the specific port.

Users migrating from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 have found that support for the PORT property has been removed and there are few technical options available to solve this problem.

This article outlines how using Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and a command line and MSI custom actions to install a web application on a site configured for a specific port.

After an update to VS 2008, I see no options that resolves this in VS 2008 either.

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