Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 screenshots

Write regular CSS with your .NET apps, then add a few variables, mixins and nested rules. .less (pronounced dot-less) is a .NET port of the funky ruby LESS library.

This edition of Discoveries This Week includes both the very best of what I saw at PDC 2009 and the most outstanding things I’ve glimpsed going on in the F# community. Please do enjoy.

Well, PDC09 is over and it was a blast. What a relief it is to finally be able to show the world what the Silverlight team has been working on since Silverlight 3. Based on the feedback at the conference, people are excited to dig into the new bits and start building solutions. As a round-up of resources from PDC, I’m putting some of my favorites here.

When you have command line arguments to parse, the place to look is Mono.Options. To date, I have not found anything better to get the job done. It is a single C# file if you do not want to download the entire Mono Library to use it. I was first introduced in Mono 2.2. The equivalent product is NDesk.Options by Jonathan Pryor. His single Options.cs file has been implemented as Mono.Options. To demonstrate how easy command line parsing can be, I’m going to sh...

This code is used to generate basic Google XML site map according to the SiteMap protocol.

WPF data templates let you determine the pieces a repetitive control uses to display its items. Learn some unique and interesting ways to use data templates for displaying the items in ListBoxes, ComboBoxes, and ListViews.

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform. This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out. Here is a quick overview:

In this article, Yi demonstrates how to create a modal popup login page in ASP.NET. By using Login controls, AJAX Extensions, and the AJAX Control Toolkit, you can easily accomplish this task without much coding. The demo project is based on Visual Web Developer Express 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. It also assumes you have installed the AJAX Control Toolkit.

During this week I helped a company with the design of a RIA with Silverlight. In the existing Web and Window Forms application they have a form where the users can enter an account id (or was it a customer id ;)). When they leave the TextBox they did a check if the account id already exists or not. They use their own way of showing the validation message. Now in the new application they want to use the red boxes showed up in Silverlight when a validation fails. In Silverlight 3 the validation only showed up if the bounded property of a TextBox thrown an exception in the set method. It’s not easy to manually trigger the nice red validation message box for a specific control outside the set method of a bounded property. Every call to the service layer from the Client should be asynchronous and in that way the callback can’t trigger the validation error box. With Silverlight 4 it’s now possible to notify when a validation fails when an async. method is completed.

Imagine for a second that you are writing a application like outlook… lets call it MiMail.exe! This application is very basic and has 3 views that are relevant to me! i want to be able to see my mail, contacts and calendar! There is also 3 specific tasks that I want to be able to execute: new mail, new contact and new appointment!

An introduction to using Ajax with JQuery and ASP.NET MVC. Basic examples of the JQuery and server-side code.

Examples introducing some of the more advanced Ajax features available with ASP.NET MVC. Retrieving and submitting forms are covered using both JQuery and the built-in MVC Ajax libraries.