June 26th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, .NET and NuGet

ASP.NET

• Introducing new ASP.NET Universal Providers: Great post from Scott Hanselman on the new System.Web.Providers we are working on. This release delivers new ASP.NET Membership, Role Management, Session, Profile providers that work with SQL Server, SQL CE and SQL Azure.

• CSS Sprites and the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Library: Great post from Scott Mitchell that talks about a free library for ASP.NET that you can use to optimize your CSS and images to reduce HTTP requests and speed up your site.

• Better HTML5 Support for the VS 2010 Editor: Another great post from Scott Hanselman on an update several people on my team did that enables richer HTML5 editing support within Visual Studio 2010.

• Install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet: Nice post by Stephen Walther on how you can now use NuGet to install the Ajax Control Toolkit within your applications. This makes it much easier to reference and use.

• May 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit: Another great post from Stephen Walther that talks about the May release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. It includes a bunch of nice enhancements and fixes.

• SassAndCoffee 0.9 Released: Paul Betts blogs about the latest release of his SassAndCoffee extension (available via NuGet). It enables you to easily use Sass and Coffeescript within your ASP.NET applications (both MVC and Webforms).

ASP.NET MVC

• ASP.NET MVC Mini-Profiler: The folks at StackOverflow.com (a great site built with ASP.NET MVC) have released a nice (free) profiler they’ve built that enables you to easily profile your ASP.NET MVC 3 sites and tune them for performance.

• Globalization, Internationalization and Localization in ASP.NET MVC 3: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to enable internationalization, globalization and localization support within your ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery solutions.

• Precompile your MVC Razor Views: Great post from David Ebbo that discusses a new Razor Generator tool that enables you to pre-compile your razor view templates as assemblies – which enables a bunch of cool scenarios.

• Unit Testing Razor Views: Nice post from David Ebbo that shows how to use his new Razor Generator to enable unit testing of razor view templates with ASP.NET MVC.

• Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3: Nice post by Phil Haack that covers a cool feature added to VS 2010 SP1 that makes it really easy to \bin deploy ASP.NET MVC and Razor within your application. This enables you to easily deploy the app to servers that don’t have ASP.NET MVC 3 installed.

.NET

• Table Splitting with EF 4.1 Code First: Great post from Morteza Manavi that discusses how to split up a single database table across multiple EF entity classes. This shows off some of the power behind EF 4.1 and is very useful when working with legacy database schemas.

• Choosing the Right Collection Class: Nice post from James Michael Hare that talks about the different collection class options available within .NET. A nice overview for people who haven’t looked at all of the support now built into the framework.

• Little Wonders: Empty(), DefaultIfEmpty() and Count() helper methods: Another in James Michael Hare’s excellent series on .NET/C# “Little Wonders”. This post covers some of the great helper methods now built-into .NET that make coding even easier.

NuGet

• NuGet 1.4 Released: Learn all about the latest release of NuGet – which includes a bunch of cool new capabilities. It takes only seconds to update to it – go for it!

• NuGet in Depth: Nice presentation from Scott Hanselman all about NuGet and some of the investments we are making to enable a better open source ecosystem within .NET.

• NuGet for the Enterprise – NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to integrate NuGet within enterprise build environments and enable it with CI solutions.

Original post can be found here...

Scott Hanselman's ASP.NET Interview Questions

I do a LOT of interviewing here, and for a while we were hiring ASP.NET people.  Here's some of the questions that I asked them.  I came up with these questions because you'd "just know" this stuff if you spent time working on a REAL WORLD ASP.NET site - through design, development, debugging, production debugging, and deployment.

Do they suck? Did I miss any?  How do you think people did?

• From constructor to destructor (taking into consideration Dispose() and the concept of non-deterministic finalization), what the are events fired as part of the ASP.NET System.Web.UI.Page lifecycle. Why are they important? What interesting things can you do at each?
• What are ASHX files?  What are HttpHandlers?  Where can they be configured?
• What is needed to configure a new extension for use in ASP.NET? For example, what if I wanted my system to serve ASPX files with a *.jsp extension?
• What events fire when binding data to a data grid? What are they good for?
• Explain how PostBacks work, on both the client-side and server-side. How do I chain my own JavaScript into the client side without losing PostBack functionality?
• How does ViewState work and why is it either useful or evil?
• What is the OO relationship between an ASPX page and its CS/VB code behind file in ASP.NET 1.1? in 2.0?
• What happens from the point an HTTP request is received on a TCP/IP port up until the Page fires the On_Load event?
• How does IIS communicate at runtime with ASP.NET?  Where is ASP.NET at runtime in IIS5? IIS6?
• What is an assembly binding redirect? Where are the places an administrator or developer can affect how assembly binding policy is applied?
• Compare and contrast LoadLibrary(), CoCreateInstance(), CreateObject() and Assembly.Load().

-Scott Hanselman's