WPF vs. Silverlight

Microsoft feels that user experience is important, and invested in multiple technologies to promote better user experience. Both WPF and Silverlight use XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) under the covers.

Let’s look at some of the different characteristics of each technology:

WPF:

• Ships as part of the .NET Framework (version 3.0 and onward)
• Runs as Windows application or as web "browser application" (called XBAP, for "XAML Browser Application"). Note that XBAPs run only in Internet Explorer with .NET 3.0 and in both Internet Explorer and Firefox with .NET 3.5.
• Runs on Windows machines only (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008)
• Richest functionality, including 3D graphics

Silverlight:

• Ships independently
• Runs in web browsers only (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari)
• Runs on Windows or Mac operating systems (also on Linux via Moonlight, which is an open source implementation of Silverlight based on Mono)
• Functionality is a subset of WPF’s feature set

When should you use each? The maddening answer is (of course): it depends!

WPF is a more mature technology and was designed with a richer feature set. It also has the advantage of being able to run in a browser or as an installed Windows-Form-type app.

Silverlight has a broader reach. You can access Silverlight from many operating systems and web browsers.

The most important reason to choose one over the other should be based on the intended audience for the application. For example, if a corporation is designing an application for internal use only and every employee has Windows XP as the company standard OS, then go with WPF to leverage the richer feature set. If a corporation is designing an external-facing website, then Silverlight is the better choice because potential customers can access the website from a variety of different operating systems and browsers.

LinQ useful links

Today one of my friend asking me about some links from where she can start learning Linq & have some practice on it. so here i am providing some of useful links. Hope this will also helps others also who want to start learning Linq.

Here are the some the very important links where you can find useful materials to learn Linq with ASP.NET 3.5.

Start with Video:

Click here…

101 LINQ Samples:

Click here…

MSDN for LinQ:

Click here…

Other Useful Article:

1. Introduction to LINQ and VS 2008 web application by Ashrafur Rahaman : Click here

2. Using LINQ with ASP.NET (Part 1) by Scott Guthrie : Click here

3. Understanding LINQ (C#) by Amro Khasawneh: Click here

4. Using LINQ to Objects in C# by salysle : Click here

5. Brian Mains discusses LINQ to SQL capabilities in the Visual Studio 2008 designer : Click here

6. Using LINQ to SQL (Part 1) by Scott Guthrie : Click here

7. Dynamic LINQ (Part 1: Using the LINQ Dynamic Query Library) by Scott Guthrie : Click here

8. C# 3.0 and LINQ Posted by Scott : Click here

Books List:

Click here…

Web Site vs. Web Application Projects

Web site projects:

Web sites are a little simpler if you are doing inline code instead of code behind. Web sites also reflect changes in code files without needing to be manually compiled. That means you can edit a file and just refresh the browser.

If you need to explicitly "build", so you can ensure your code doesn’t have errors for example, you can still do so. However, the "build" command doesn’t really compile the project… it just verifies it using the dynamic compiler. While 99% of the time this is fine, I have come across a couple of minor cases where the verification compiler didn’t find an error, but attempting to run the site for real did.

Major advantages of web sites:

• Everything in the project’s folder is part of the project. This makes it easy to use other editors or tools with web sites. If you add files outside Visual Studio, they will still be part of the project. If you edit a file outside VS it will still be compiled and the changes visible when the site is viewed in a browser.
• You can deploy without having to compile… just XCOPY and go. Web sites do support pre-compilation if you choose to use it.
• Files don’t have to be written in the same language. VS will support having a mix of VB and C# code on a file-by-file basis. Sounds good, but I’ve never found this useful personally. Maintaining a site is much easier if you stick with one language.
• The add "item" dialogs in Visual Studio are more intuitive for web sites. I’m not sure why both projects don’t use the same dialogs, but they certainly don’t.
• Profile’s design time compilation is automatic. The ProfileCommon class is created dynamically making it easy to work with the profile provider in a strongly typed way.

Major Disadvantages of web sites:

• No way to really "exclude" a file without renaming it. Refactoring tools and the "compiler" have to crawl through every file in your application. This can get slow if you have a lot of files. For example, I often use FCKEditor, which has a dump-truck load of files. Most of them are not asp.net files. But just having to scan through them when I build or refactor can really slow things down. This has gotten a little better in VS 2008, but not fast enough for my tastes.
• No control over your namespaces. Sure, you can manually add namespaces to pretty much anything, but visual studio will fight you every step of the way. With generated code such as ADO.NET Datasets and such, this gets very hard to control. Eventually you will give up and just let VS put everything in the default namespace. In large applications this gets very annoying, especially if you like a well structured application.
• It is hard (read, nearly impossible) to reference pages, user controls, etc from custom classes in the app_code folder. This produces some interesting problems if you are doing anything fancy like dynamically loading pages or controls and such.
• The application compiles to the asp.net temporary internet files folder. This is a drop location for all that dynamically compiled code that the asp.net compiler will produce. This is a fine mechanism until it breaks. When it breaks you can get really weird errors from the compiler that doesn’t make obvious sense. These are pretty easy to cause by accident. For example, if you tell VS to "build" then refresh a browser pointed at the site at the same time…. the two compiles often conflict in some bizarre manner corrupting the temp asp.net files. When this happens, assuming you figure out that this is the cause of the problem, you have to shut down VS and the web server, manually remove the files from the temp folder, and then restart everything.
• No ability to product XML comment output files.
• Not much control over build outputs. In most projects you can set whether a file is compiled, copied to the output directory, and such. But not with web sites. If a file is in the project’s folder structure, it is part of the project.
• Team Build hates web sites. Lacking a project file, you can use the web deployment project add-on to help out, but even still I’ve found that trying to automate a build for any significantly complex web site is a disaster and time-sink.
• Disconnected Source Control. VS supports working disconnected from source control these days, but I find that it often has problems keeping web sites in sync when you reconnect. This is a sporadic problem, and hard to reproduce, but seems to be more common with delete, rename, and add operations.

The web application project:

The web application project is a little more formal than web sites. You get an actual project file by which Visual Studio tracks the files that are in your project. Web applications do generate "designer" files for your pages that link the code-behind to the controls you’ve put in the markup, but unlike old VS 2003 projects these are much simpler and leverage partial classes and such.

Drawbacks are:

• The site has to be compiled / built before it will run.
• Your project is specific to only one language.
• No automatic support for a Profile class. You have to use a separate tool to generate Profile Common or write one manually.

Advantages are:

• You can split the site into multiple projects.
• Include pre and post build steps to compilation.
• Disconnected source control seems to work more consistently with web application projects.
• Compile and refactoring is much faster since VS has a way to track what is in the project and doesn’t have to scan everything in every folder. Also, you can have stuff in the folders that aren’t part of the project (I find this useful sometimes).
• You can control namespaces, assembly names, and build behavior for various files in the project. Namespaces are also automatically managed by VS based on the application’s folder structure. This includes a real "project properties" editor too with all those familiar things like build options, references, settings, etc…
• You can generate XML comment output files.
• You can exclude files from the project without having to rename them.
• Custom code files don’t have to be in a specific folder, you can put them anywhere and organize them however you see fit.
• Classes can reference pages and controls.

Show "Loading" image until grid is populated?

Hi Readers,

Today I have faced one problem in which i have to display Loading image with progress bar when i update content of Datalist / Gridview. So i have done some googling on this topic so that i can resolve this problem fast.

I always believe that if some of our friends have already solved such issues so why not i use their solutions.

During my googling i found very useful articles written by Matt Berseth, so here i am sharing it with you people so that you can also get benefit from that.

• Using an UpdatePanelAnimationExtender to place an animated gif over a GridView
• YUI Style AJAX Progress Indicator
• Google Analytics like AJAX Progress Indicator
• Rendering a Gmail-like ‘Loading’ Indicator over a Specific ASP.NET Control

These articles has every thing that developer need to display different style of loading UI.

UI special effect are really add special attraction in web application & these kind of small small effect make it more user friendly & effective.

Hope this helps to you also !!!

Jai Ganesh