Technical Notes

Here's are some more helpful ASP.Net 2.0 tips and tricks:

• Optimizing C# Refactoring Performance - Scott Guthrie shows how to improve this performance in web projects where it can degrade significantly
• adding a client confirmation message to a GridView control
• Conditional Compilation in ASP.NET 2.0 - K. Scott Allen

Drew McLellan has given us all a great gift this year.  His compilation of articles, 24 Ways has an web development article for each day in December leading up to Christmas.  Each one looks good and had I found them sooner, I would have read them all.  Here are some highlights:

• He descibes how to allow users to edit a page and save the changes (Edit-in-Place) with Ajax
• Richard Rutter keeps it simple in Easy Ajax with Prototype
• Ethan Marcotte positions tabbed navigation in the center with CSS
• Andy Clarke on layering items with z-index - this technique has the potential for awesome visual effects
• Broader Border Corners by Patrick Griffiths creates rounded or other custom corners
• Jeremy Keith uses the DOM to improve Blockquotes
• Kimberly Blessing discusses Avoiding CSS Hacks for Internet Explorer - this will be huge with IE7 coming out

Here are some links to various .NET 2.0 resources:

• Codebehind and Compilation in ASP.NET 2.0 by Fritz Onion
• Query Notifications in ADO.NET 2.0 by  Bob Beauchemin
• Changes to Validation Controls in ASP.NET 2.0 by Scott Mitchell
• Custom Data Control Fields by Dino Esposito
• questions and answers about ASMX 2.0, WSE 3.0 and WCF by Aaron Skonnard
• Serializing, Consuming and Binding Generics by Thiru Thangarathinam

Continuing the catch-up theme of the week, here are links to RSS-related resources.

• allowing readers to take action immediately by Mark Woodman
• Syndication's Next Wave - presentation notes from Scott Gatz
• another approach towards linking to feeds by Jeffrey Veen
• download the feed icon agreed upon by Mozilla and Microsoft

For those looking to stay abreast of ASP.NET development, I highly recommend following Scott Guthrie's blog. He covers all sizes of topics and links to insightful articles. This past month he’s been so prolific I've been unable to keep up  Here’s a quick list of his articles and links I need to make sure I don't lose thanks to his efforts.

• Sharing Authentication Cookies between ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 applications
• Using the CLR Profiler to Tune ASP.NET Code by K. Scott Allen who's also had a bunch of nice articles
• Richer CSS Support with the CSS Properties Window
• Complex Data Binding Expressions by Fritz Onion
• Cross-Page Navigation Techniques by Ting-hao Yang
• ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapters

Aaron Gustafson created a javascript tracing routine called jsTrace.  This is a new debugging technique I'll have to try. 

Dean Edwards suggests an optimized method of object detection in javascript.

Bill Merikallio and Adam Pratt offer an educational and entertaining exortation on why to not use tables for layout on the web.