Nice Learning Resources: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight

Scott Guthrie has provided some nice resource links for ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight on his Blog Link

Quoting to ScottGu

ASP.NET

• URL Routing in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that talks about the new URL routing features coming to Web Forms applications with ASP.NET 4.  Also check out my previous blog post on this topic.

• Control of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how it is now easy to control the client “id” value emitted by server controls with ASP.NET 4.

• Web Deployment Made Awesome: Very nice MIX10 talk by Scott Hanselman on the new web deployment features coming with VS 2010, MSDeploy, and .NET 4.  Makes deploying web applications much, much easier.

• ASP.NET 4’s Browser Capabilities Support: Nice blog post by Stephen Walther that talks about the new browser definition capabilities support coming with ASP.NET 4.

• Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that demonstrates how to call and integrate Twitter from within your ASP.NET applications.

• Improving CSS with .LESS: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that describes how to optimize CSS using .LESS – a free, open source library.

ASP.NET MVC

• Upgrading ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2: Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET team has a nice post that describes how to easily upgrade your ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2.  He has an automated tool that makes this easy. Note that automated MVC upgrade support is also built-into VS 2010.  Use the tool in this blog post for updating existing MVC projects using VS 2008.

• Advanced ASP.NET MVC 2: Nice video talk by Brad Wilson of the ASP.NET MVC team.  In it he describes some of the more advanced features in ASP.NET MVC 2 and how to maximize your productivity with them.

• Dynamic Select Lists with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery: Michael Ceranski has a nice blog post that describes how to dynamically populate dropdownlists on the client using AJAX.

AJAX

• Microsoft AJAX Minifier: We recently shipped an updated minifier utility that allows you to shrink/minify both JavaScript and CSS files – which can improve the performance of your web applications.  You can run this either manually as a command-line tool or now automatically integrate it using a Visual Studio build task.  You can download it for free here.

Visual Studio

• VS 2010 Tip: Quickly Closing Documents: Nice blog post that describes some techniques for optimizing how windows are closed with the new VS 2010 IDE.

• Collpase to Definitions with Outlining: Nice tip from Zain on how to collapse your code editor to outline mode using Ctrl + M, Ctrl + O.  Also check out his post on copy/paste with outlining here.

• $299 VS 2010 Upgrade Offer for VS 2005/2008 Standard Users: Soma blogs about a nice VS 2010 upgrade offer you can take advantage of if you have VS 2005 or VS 2008 Standard editions.  For $299 you can upgrade to VS 2010 Professional edition.

• Dependency Graphics: Jason Zander (who runs the VS team) has a nice blog post that covers the new dependency graph support within VS 2010.  This makes it easier to visualize the dependencies within your application.  Also check out this video here.

• Layer Validation: Jason Zander has a nice blog post that talks about the new layer validation features in VS 2010.  This enables you to enforce cleaner layering within your projects and solutions. 

• VS 2010 Profiler Blog: The VS 2010 Profiler Team has their own blog and on it you can find a bunch of nice posts from the last few months that talk about a lot of the new features coming with VS 2010’s Profiler support.  Some really nice features coming.

Silverlight

• Silverlight 4 Training Course: Nice free set of training courses from Microsoft that can help bring you up to speed on all of the new Silverlight 4 features and how to build applications with them.  Updated and current with the recently released Silverlight 4 RC build and tools.

• Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development: Nice blog post by Tim Heuer that summarizes how to get started building Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight.  Also check out my blog post from last week on how to build a Windows Phone 7 Twitter application using Silverlight.

• A Guide to What Has Changed with the Silverlight 4 RC: Nice summary post by Tim Heuer that describes all of the things that have changed between the Silverlight 4 Beta and the Silverlight 4 RC.

Path Based Layout – Part 1 and Part 2: Christian Schormann has a nice blog post about a really cool new feature in Expression Blend 4 and Silverlight 4 called Path Layout. Also check out Andy Beaulieu’s blog post on this.