Application Pages Vs Site Pages

Remember the difference between them in SharePoint (MOSS 2007)

Yesterday, somebody asked me the difference between the application page and site page in Sharepoint. Having developed five custom site and application pages in Sharepoint, I couldn't explain what exactly it is. I really got confused over time, as usual my brain was blank.

In a second after opening a SharePoint VS solution file, I got it. Just remember as the name indicates, Application pages can be used across SharePoint Web Applications and the Site pages are used across the Site(s). When you remember this, then you wont get confused. If its across applications then its the only _layout folder which is helping us. Wherein the site pages are the ones what we want to be specific for a site or to its contents and OOB example are AllItems.aspx, default.aspx etc.

Yes, I agree that working in a dozen of pages will also help you to remember, but in the beginning, even after a year,  lot of things in SharePoint is confusing and time consuming. Main reason behind this is our lack of basic understanding and poor memory. I strongly recommend every SharePoint developer to read the Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and a SharePoint administrator to read Microsoft SharePoint Services Administrator's Pocket Consultant.

Free ASP.NET MVC eBook

Source : Hanselman & ScottGu

CSS Reference for SharePoint 2007

Most of the time we endup changing the CSS styles of an existing Sharepoint Page objects like Top Horizontal Navigation, Search, Site Actions etc.
The CSS for the same can be found IE Developer Toolbar, but we miss the list of those or atleast the frequently used ones. Heather Solomon haves it here.

ASP.Net MVC RC1

Few days back, ScottGu announced the shipment of ASP.Net MVC 's RC1. Check his blog post for more details.

And had couple of issues in installing it. One being uninstalling the ASP.Net MVC Beta. It didnt get removed immediately and stayed there for nearly an hour.

And the other was installing the new ASP.Net MVC RC1. The setup didnt respond for couple of times, so I installed it after few reboots. I also had some problem in the Virtual Server 2005 R2 & its KB948515. So after solving this with a re-boot, I brought ASP.Net MVC RC1 into my machine.

Sharepoint Support Expired

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 without SP1 support expired on 13th Jan 2009. I thought its getting expired on 31th Jan.

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The service packs for both WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007 are available and now the cummulative upate is here.

Free SQL Server 2008 Hosting

Again, MaximumASP has comeup with free SQL Server 2008 hosting like Free IIS 7 hosting account. This SQL Server 2008 account comes with 100 MB Space. Worth to try!!

http://www.sqlserverbeta.com/

Silverlight inside NOKIA

Nokial has annouced to support Silverlight in its Series 60 applications.

.Net 3.5

The new .Net Framework is 3.5. Even it comes with Visual Studio 2008, with which can start developing applications. Still I could see people thinking .Net 3.5 is a new Framework with new Architecture(s).

Unlike .Net 2.0 & .Net 1.1, .Net 2.0, 3.0 & 3.5 are closed integrated. We can tell .Net 2.0 is a subset of .Net 3.0 which in turn is a subset of .Net 3.5!

Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

Computer ZEN presents the updated list of tools. Many tools, from the List is what Im using, and also the list is only making me to learn those-which are mostly new to me!! Thanks to Scott.

  Link to Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

C# Threading

Found a great site/article for C# Threading. Its really good, and very simple and covers threading to make you an expert. 

[Link]

Taking your ASP.Net Web Application Offline

My work mostly revolves around ASP.Net based Projects, and so I frequently come across a situation where I release the application (or a part of it - may be dll ) for Testing, when someone is accessing. Generally I used to delete the web folder and install the new one after a informal notification. For this I cant stop or pause the Web server, as some other web application is running side by side will get affected. In times, I will just replace the web folder as such (taking advantage of the xcopy deployment). Its not the exact way to do so!!

At last I found the solution for this : Simply add a file called app_offline.htm to your root of the web folder. The application wont respond to any of the further requests. It just throws  404 - Error ( The resource cannot be found. )

app_offline.htm  - can be a empty file. This is a simple way to bring your application Offline!

To bring it back (making it online is so simple - deleting the file app_offline.htm will do!

I have checked with ASP.Net 2.0, and not tried with ASP.Net 1.1 Even I dont know whether this feature is there in ASP.Net 1.1

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