The ASP.NET Routing system cleanly decouples URLs from web page file names and does so in a manner that is easier to implement and without the aforementioned baggage inherent in traditional URL rewriting approaches. This article does not explore the depths of ASP.NET Routing - see Routing with ASP.NET Web Forms and the ASP.NET Routing technical documentation for a deeper look at the ins and outs of ASP.NET Routing. Instead, this article walks through the steps you will need to perform to use ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms application.

Also, be sure to download the sample web application, available at the end of this article. It includes a working data-driven, Web Forms-based web application that utilizes ASP.NET Routing. This demo application is discussed and screen shots are provided in the steps below.

Step 0: Prerequisites

In order to use the ASP.NET Routing system you need to be using ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. If you are using Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 you're good to go.

Today’s post covers a cool new runtime feature in ASP.NET 4 – which is the ability to use URL routing with Web Forms based pages.
What is URL Routing?

URL routing was a capability we first introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, and which is already used within ASP.NET MVC applications to expose clean, SEO-friendly “web 2.0” URLs. URL routing lets you configure an application to accept request URLs that do not map to physical files. Instead, you can use routing to define URLs that are semantically meaningful to users and that can help with search-engine optimization (SEO).

For example, the URL for a traditional page that displays product categories might look like below:

http://www.mysite.com/products.aspx?category=software

Using the URL routing engine in ASP.NET 4 you can now configure the application to accept the following URL instead to render the same information:

http://www.mysite.com/products/software

With ASP.NET 4.0, URLs like above can now be mapped to both ASP.NET MVC Controller classes, as well as ASP.NET Web Forms based pages.

Asset bundling for .NET web apps

Dumping your scripts into a folder is no way to manage your client-side code!

Cassette automatically sorts, concatenates, minifies, caches and versions all your JavaScript, CoffeeScript, CSS, LESS, Sass and HTML templates.

It's flexible, extensible and optimized for developer happiness.

First, let's quickly discuss some of the things you shouldn't do when building an application that requires authentication

Tracks are series of courses grouped to help you master a topic or language. Choose one to start learning!

A lightweight (4.3k) javascript date library for parsing, manipulating, and formatting dates.

Write regular CSS with your .NET apps,
then add a few variables, mixins and nested rules.

Initializr is an HTML5 templates generator to help you getting started with a new project based on HTML5 Boilerplate. It generates for you a clean customizable template with just what you need to start!

The dynamic stylesheet language.
LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the client-side (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js and Rhino.

Couple of good answers on this one...

I've been using jQuery UI for some basic page enhancements. Button and input styling and modal dialog boxes. Now I've come across Bootstrap and it looks pretty good.

Has anyone any experience of going from using jQuery UI to Bootstrap? This what I am thinking to do but before I do this I'd like to be aware of what problems I could face.

Update: another good solution for this topic is to use the external template engine found here (http://www.knockmeout.net/2011/03/using-external-jquery-template-files.html).

A question recently came up on the Knockout forums about how to get better design time support in Visual Studio when working with jQuery templates and how to incorporate external template files into Knockout projects. Here are three different takes on solving both of these problems that each build on the previous idea.

The Knockout.js External Template Engine extends Knockout.js to allow you to load templates asynchronously from a remote resource. It currently supports both native and jquery templates.

What is Less?
A “dynamic” CSS

According to the official website, Less is a “dynamic stylesheet language”. I have a question for you now: How many stylesheet languages do you know?

Well except if you developed your own language and a dedicated browser to interpret it, chances are that you only know CSS. You might even have never thought about “What if there were another stylesheet language?”. Well Less is kind of one. “Kind of” because you develop using the Less language, but in the end, it’s compiled to pure CSS so that browsers can read it.

It’s also called “dynamic” because it enriches CSS with many common features available in most modern dynamic programming languages (like variables for instance). During the development phase, you’ll be able to use all those new cool features we’ll see in this tutorial and it will help you code way more efficiently.

Less compiler, which is written in JavaScript, will convert all your Less code into CSS to be interpretable by the client. When does this conversion happen? Well you have 2 options: client-side or server-side.

programmer humor

This started out as a list of top Computer Science blogs, but it more closely resembles a set: the order is irrelevant and there are no duplicate elements; membership of this set of blogs satisfies all of the following conditions:

they are written by computer scientists and focus on computer science research;
they are of consistently high quality;

Scenario: Installing Team Foundation Server on a Single-Server

You can install Team Foundation Server and all its prerequisites on a single server. This scenario focuses on using new installations of prerequisite software, but you can use existing installations as long as you install all the software on the same computer.

This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the Python programming language.

All predictions of the future of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe must account for the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or a loss of the energy available to do work, must increase over time.[1] Stars must eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out; close encounters will gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies. Eventually, matter itself will come under the influence of radioactive decay, as even the most stable materials break apart into subatomic particles. However, as current data suggest that the Universe is flat, and thus will not collapse in on itself after a finite time,[2] the infinite future potentially allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of a Boltzmann brain.

These timelines cover events from roughly eight thousand years from now to the farthest reaches of future time. A number of alternate future events are listed to account for questions still unresolved, such as whether protons decay or whether the Earth will be destroyed by the Sun's expansion into a red giant.

The concept arises from the need to explain why we observe such a large degree of organization in the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy in a closed universe will never decrease. We may think of the most likely state of the universe as one of high entropy, closer to uniform and without order. So why is the observed entropy so low?

Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world are a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. Even in a near-equilibrium state, there will be stochastic fluctuations in the level of entropy. The most common fluctuations will be relatively small, resulting in only small amounts of organization, while larger fluctuations and their resulting greater levels of organization will be comparatively more rare. Large fluctuations would be almost inconceivably rare, but are made possible by the enormous size of the universe and by the idea that if we are the results of a fluctuation, there is a "selection bias": We observe this very unlikely universe because the unlikely conditions are necessary for us to be here, an expression of the anthropic principle.

Administrators for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server install, configure, and maintain Team Foundation Server, and they perform the following tasks:
backing up and restoring data
adding servers and other resources to the deployment

administering permissions and security for other roles
organizing projects and the resources that support them by creating and maintaining team project collections
maintaining the security of the deployment by creating server-level and collection-level groups for managing users and their permissions
managing groups and permissions on servers that are integrated with the deployment, such as SQL Server Reporting Services and SharePoint Products, or coordinating with the administrators of those servers to ensure the smooth operation of Team Foundation Server with those resources
managing the services and service accounts that are used in the deployment

Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk about cats, but when I do, I make it count.

We've used automated cat feeders since 2007 with great success. (My apologies for the picture quality, but it was 2007, and camera phones were awful.)

Looks like an interesting magazine. Not too cluttered (yet!).

The .NET Framework 4 can be installed side-by-side with previous versions of the .NET Framework on a single computer. If IIS was previously enabled on the computer, the setup process for the .NET Framework automatically registers ASP.NET 4 with IIS. However, if you install the .NET Framework 4 before you enable IIS, you must run the ASP.NET IIS Registration tool in order to register the .NET Framework with IIS and create application pools that use the .NET Framework 4.

Today we’re going to take a look at how you can build a single-page application (SPA) supporting graceful degradation using some of jQuery’s Best friends; DocumentCloud’s Backbone.js, Underscore.js, LAB.js and jQuery templating to name but a few.

Comparing LABjs and RequireJS

LABjs works best in pages with today’s scripts that need to be efficiently loaded in a particular order, and the dependencies can all be tracked at the top level. LABjs is so performant because it loads all scripts in parallel, regardless of location, and executes them in proper dependency order as needed. To assist with dependency management, a server-side LABjs component is forthcoming. LABjs is ~2.2k when minified and gzip’d.

RequireJS allows you to efficiently load today’s scripts but encourages a modular approach with CommonJS code sharing and nested dependency resolution. The built in optimization tool can reduce the number of scripts that need to be loaded and to minifies the scripts for even better performance. RequireJS allows you reuse your modules in more than one JS environment. RequireJS can be built in a few ways: from the very basic 2.9k version that does not include plugin capability, multiversion and page ready support, to the 6k deluxe version that includes plugin capability, multiversion and page ready support, and the text, i18n, JSONP and order plugins. All sizes are minified and gzip’d.

Whatever your particular needs may be, choosing either loader over plain <script> tags is almost certainly going to be better, not only for your site/application but also for your end users.

A fast-training course for REST - Representational State Transfer, a new approach to systems architecture and a lightweight alternative to web services

This is really cool...
Cubism.js is a D3 plugin for visualizing time series. Use Cubism to construct better realtime dashboards, pulling data from Graphite, Cube and other sources. Cubism is available under the Apache License on GitHub.

Arch Linux is something of a rising star in the Linux community, and when we showed you how to pick the right distro for you, many of you really resonated with the fact that with Arch, you install pretty much everything from scratch—which requires a certain level of comfort with the command line, but it also gives you complete control over how customized the overall installation is for you. Installing Arch really is like building a distro that has your name on it, and it can be as simple or complex as you need it to be. For the minimal crowd who prefers lightweight installs, you can keep your system lean and mean. For the feature-lovers, you can load it up as much as you want. It's a great distro for people who really want to learn the ins and outs of Linux, even if it's not the easiest, most mainstream, or newbie-friendly. You'll learn a lot, though, and if you're all about Arch, you shouldn't miss our own Whitson Gordon's guide to building a killer Arch Linux installation.

Javascript SHA-256
The SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) is one of the many cryptographic hash functions. It is suggested that SHA256 or greater must used for critical technology. This script is used to process variable length message into a fixed-length output using the SHA256 algorithm. It is fully compatible with UTF-8 encoding.

The Mixmaster software is specifically designed to make it impossible for anyone to trace the emails. The system does not record logs of connections, details of who sent messages, or how they were routed. This is because the Mixmaster network is specifically designed to resist censorship, and support privacy and anonymity.

Scanner Radio grants you access to more than 5,000 such stations, across the United States and Canada. The app's clean, intuitive user interface provides three directories of scanner feeds: RadioReference, SHOUTcast Scanner, and User Favorites. The RadioReference directory accesses more than 4,000 stations from the US and Canada. US feeds are organized by state and county.

I am looking for a charts library to be displayed on a website. I will use intensively this library (for area, line and bar charts mainly), so I prefer to secure my choice before starting implementing.
...
However after some researches on this forum and investigations on the web, I have reduced my candidate list to these two libraries:

Flot jQuery plugin
Google Visualization

This is a parser for HTTP messages written in C. It parses both requests and
responses. The parser is designed to be used in performance HTTP
applications. It does not make any syscalls nor allocations, it does not
buffer data, it can be interrupted at anytime. Depending on your
architecture, it only requires about 40 bytes of data per message
stream (in a web server that is per connection).

FAQ in Web Forms

Database Object Naming Rules

(Visual Studio 2010) Provides properties and methods for client-side programming of the ReportViewer Web server control.

The ReportViewer Web server control creates an instance of this class in the client browser as a handle for you to programmatically interact with the client-side control. Use this instance to customize the behavior of the client-side control with minimal postbacks to the server.

Remarks

You do not create an instance of the ReportViewer class directly. Instead, you access the ReportViewer instance. The ReportViewer instance is created every time the Web server control is rendered in the client browser and persists as long as the Web page is open in the browser and the Web server control is not rerendered. If the ReportViewer Web server control is placed inside an UpdatePanel control, the ReportViewer instance is disposed and recreated every time the update panel is refreshed in the client browser by a partial-page update.

To access the ReportViewer instance, use the Sys.Application.findComponent method or the $find shortcut with the ID of the ReportViewer instance. For example, the ASP.NET page snippet below registers the JavaScript file, ClientCode.js, in the ScriptManager control. The ClientCode.js file then defines a rezoom method that uses the $find method to access the ReportViewer instance using the client-side ID of the ReportViewer Web server control. Adding script references to the ScriptManager control ensures that registered scripts are executed after the Microsoft AJAX Library is loaded.

Compiling .net projects in Notepad++
Download this file and put it in your Documents folder:
Download tryCompile.txt (rename it as .bat)
Rename it to tryCompile.bat... and always read batch files before running them on your own machine. (On a stranger's machine you can afford to be less cautious)

Useful note:
In remote processing mode, the ReportViewer controls in Visual Studio 2010 support SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services or SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services.

Naming guidelines provide guidance on selecting appropriate identifiers for the elements that make up class libraries including assemblies, namespaces, types, members, and parameters. Choosing identifiers that conform to these guidelines improves the usability of your library and encourages users to trust that your library will not require learning a new set of conventions.

By now it will be obvious to everyone that I have stopped work on BitC. An explanation of *why* seems long overdue. One answer is that work on Coyotos stopped when I joined Microsoft, and the work that I am focused on *now *doesn't really require (or seem to benefit from) BitC. As we all know, there is only so much time to go around in our lives. But that alone wouldn't have stopped me entirely. A second answer is that BitC isn't going to work in its current form. I had hit a short list of issues that required a complete re-design of the language and type system followed by a ground-up new implementation. Experience with the first implementation suggested that this would take quite a while, and it was simply more than I could afford to take on without external support and funding. Programming language work is not easy to fund. But the third answer may of greatest interest, which is that I no longer believe that type classes "work" in their current form from the standpoint of language design. That's the only important science lesson here.

PyPN provides a great way to add functionality to Programmer’s Notepad by writing simple Python code, but you might want to do something more advanced. For this there’s the Programmer’s Notepad Extension SDK.
The SDK lets you extend PN using C++, allowing you to react to editor events and provide new commands in the menu. PyPN is itself implemented as an extension using this same SDK, and you can use the SDK to provide support for other scripting languages too.

This is a really interesting approach to coding. The video gets the point across very well...
Zen Coding is a system for writing HTML and CSS in text editors, expanding shorthand notation to full code.

The css.properties file that comes with 2.23 does not use all the styles defined in LexCSS.cxx. So this is the properties file that I use to make my web sites. It uses all of them with comments to make it hopefully easier to change without reading the lexer code.

...Lehrer goes on to quote a wonderful, concise bit from a 2007 Wilson paper: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

I love those first two sentences. But as profound and compelling as I find them, the third gives me pause, reminding me of the difference between the straight biological sciences and the human sciences. My sense is that in the human domain it is precisely the tension between selfishness and altruism and the choices we make between ourselves and our collective commitments—Wilson’s “commentary—that is most interesting and uncertain (not just theoretically, but in actual social life).

jsBCrypt is an implementation of BCrypt written in JavaScript.

This is best explained using an example:

Lets say I have a simple script called bacftp.sh that I use to FTP my zipped backup file to a remote server. It looks like this

DVB-T sticks based on the Realtek RTL2832U can be used as a cheap SDR, since the chip allows transferring the raw I/Q samples to the host, which is officially used for DAB/DAB+/FM demodulation. The possibility of this has been discovered by the V4L/DVB kernel developer Antti Palosaari.

this is the sort of thing that makes git suck.
...There is a proposal to change the default behaviour of 'git push' on the Git mailing list. The goal of this message is to encourage you to discuss it before it happens (or the change is aborted, depending on the outcome of the discussion). In the current setting (i.e. push.default=matching), 'git push' without argument will push all branches that exist locally and remotely with the same name. This is usually appropriate when a developer pushes to his own public repository, but may be confusing if not dangerous when using a shared repository. The proposal is to change the default to 'upstream', i.e. push only the current branch, and push it to the branch 'git pull' would pull from. Another candidate is 'current'; this pushes only the current branch to the remote branch of the same name.

Another really cool javascript library tool.
...ShareJS is an Operational Transform library for NodeJS & browsers. It lets you easily do live concurrent editing in your app.

Very nice!
...Smoothie Charts is a really small charting library designed for live streaming data. I built it to reduce the headaches I was getting from watching charts jerkily updating every second. What you're looking at now is pretty much all it does. If you like that, then read on.

Very nice!...Smoothie is a simple library for displaying smooth live time lines.

Great programming blog. Good, knowledgeable writer.

This video demonstrates a simple Windows Phone game built on the Farseer Physics Engine. Learn how to manipulate the Farseer world with bodies, shapes and fixtures and how Farseer can provide your game with realistic motion, collision detection and gravity. (This is Jeff Weber's project.)

You've reached the website for Arch Linux, a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

Interesting programmer/writer podcasts on c++ and more.

Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes

FlexBox is a jQuery plugin that is intended to be a very flexible replacement for html
textboxes and dropdowns, optionally using ajax to retrieve and bind JSON data.

Cycling sandals have become increasingly popular over the past few years, and for good reason; they’re comfortable, light, convenient, and walkable. I’ve been wearing Shimano sandals for the past 18 months and I find them to be far more comfortable than traditional cycling shoes, both on the bike and walking about. As Sheldon Brown put it, “These are my very favorite footwear. In the summertime I go for weeks on end without ever having anything else on my feet. Far and away the most comfortable cycling footwear ever.“

1. What is the difference between the ScriptManager control and the ToolkitScriptManager control?
We recommend that you use the ToolkitScriptManager control when using the Ajax Control Toolkit. The ToolkitScriptManager uses a later version of ASP.NET Ajax than the ScriptManager control. Also, the ToolkitScriptManager performs automatic script combining on the server.You are required to use the ToolkitScriptManager when using the Ajax Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 3.5

This section includes topics that show you how to create custom ASP.NET web server controls. The topics provide information and code examples that illustrate different control-authoring tasks such as rendering, defining properties, managing state, and creating composite controls.

There’s an increasing interest with the D programming language amongst my readers so I figured I’ll post a bunch of short posts about D and see what happens.

Thanks for reply.

It's a pity... But I found another way to do it without MaskSettings, with SpinEdit:

Common Features - Masked Input

A new tech demo featuring sophisticated performance-capture technology made by the game developer Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Indigo Prophecy) was inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near.

The clip, which David Cage, the head of Quantic Dream, unveiled on Wednesday at a Game Developers Conference presentation, shows an android named Kara becoming self-aware as she is being assembled, and desperately insisting that her sentience is a feature and not a bug.

Very nice set (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672526)...
Free for commercial use. The Font Awesome webfont and CSS libraries are completely free for commercial use.

Welcome to the 2nd Edition of Learn Python the hard way. You can visit the companion site to the book at http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ where you can purchase digital downloads and paper versions of the book. The free HTML version of the book is available at http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/.

glyphicons free, only small png, 350 glyphicons, creative commons license

The Obama administration laid out its position in a legal brief last month, arguing that customers have "no privacy interest" in CSLR held by a network provider. Under a legal principle known as the "third-party doctrine," information voluntarily disclosed to a third party ceases to enjoy Fourth Amendment protection. The government contends that this rule applies to cell phone location data collected by a network provider.

While this may be a plausible reading of previous precedents, the practical implications are alarming. While CSLRs are not as detailed as data that can be gathered via GPS, months of data can still reveal a host of sensitive information about a person's movements. If the third-party doctrine allows the government to obtain such information without a warrant, that's a strong argument for re-considering the third-party doctrine.

The world’s single largest online collection of historical maps launched earlier this week at Old Maps Online. By the end of the year, the site aims to have 60,000 maps available for public access. Cooperating institutions include the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Czech Republic’s Moravian Library and the San Francisco Bay Area’s David Rumsey Map Collection. The University of Portsmouth’s Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System hosts the collection in conjunction with Switzerland’s Klokan Technologies.

Vimium is a Google Chrome extension which provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor. Watch this video to get a feel for how it works:

The Microsoft URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 enables IIS administrators to create powerful customized rules to map request URLs to friendly URLs that are easier for users to remember and easier for search engines to find. You can use the URL Rewrite module to perform URL manipulation tasks, some of which include:

''using the Enumerable class in LINQ to generate a random array''

This is the code to generate the random sequence:

System.Random rnd = new System.Random();
IEnumerable<int> numbers = Enumerable.Range(1, 100).OrderBy(r => rnd.Next()).OrderBy(r => r);
numbers.Dump();

There is something very important to be clear about - The WF Rules Engine is although a part the the technology called Windows Workflow Foundation, but it can be used without being hosted inside a business process that was built with Windows Workflow Foundation.

The WF Rules Engine has it own API that allows developers to integrate rules capabilities into their applications. It also has many extensibility points for building custom actions, conditions and more.

In the pas I've written several posts about it:

Here is a simple application I built using jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap. Even though the application is simple, it covers some common requirements of mobile applications: database access through JSON services, multi-level master-detail views, parameter passing between views, etc. You can play with the application here, or download the source code below and build it for different mobile platforms (using the PhoneGap tools or the cloud-based build service at http://build.phonegap.com).

We will first see in this article what the added values of PhoneGap for HTML5 applications are. We’ll then discover how to create our very first project where we will retrieve the accelerometer’s values from our JavaScript code. At last, we will review a complete HTML5 gaming sample almost ported as-is to PhoneGap to use the accelerometer available on the Windows Phones.