Weird Window in Visual Studio 2008

Every time that I fired up VS2008, a empty, small window appears for a few seconds before VS is completely opened, since I installed SP1 for VS, so yesterday I finally catch the window, this is how its looks like:

I thinks is a orphan window, maybe with SP2 the window is gone.

Visual Studio CodeName Hawaii

After a keynote presented by Paramesh Vaidyanathan, Product Unit Manager of VS Platform & Ecosystem, and Rico Mariani (a.k.a. Bill Murray) Chief Architect of Visual Studio, we have an idea about what is next on Visual Studio CodeName “Hawaii”, they are taking seriously extensibility as well another improvements for VS, here there are a few features:

• WPF-based text editor
• Small, so obviously faster
• More modular, reliable, WPF-based look and feel
• Help developers through Live Search

Using WPF in Visual Studio is an amazing idea, so with WPF Visual Studio will become like ExpressionStudio (just look and feel, I guess), right now on VS2008, the Properties panel on a WPF-Application Project seems to be built with WPF. 

My First ASP.NET MVC Application

As an exercise to test the news bits on ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview 3, I have been building a simple application that manages information about books, I called it the BooksStore, it has CRUD operations for authors, publishers, books, catalog of books, some security, authentication and authorization, using LINQ to SQL Classes as the layer to access data and only the use of FormsAuthentication and the MembershipProvider for SQLServer.

Above a screenshot of the catalog it shows a summary of the book that includes the title, authors, publisher, number of pages and price, the title is a link to the “Show” action of the Book Controller for show detailed information of the book.

Also I have a Rss action of the Home controller that renders a rss channel

Now with the new preview 4 of ASP.NET MVC, I have to change the functionality for user access, with this new preview an Account controller is by default on the template, this is a quickstart for us.

Update: Here is the code

AJAX 1.0 and Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 allows to built a project targeting a specific framework (2.0, 3.0 and 3.5) this feature is called multi-targeting which is great when we have to maintain an old project, but unfortunately VS2008 doesn’t work by default with web projects that contains AJAX 1.0, the version of the controls(ScriptManager, ScriptManagerProxy, etc)  for AJAX Extensions is 3.0, on this state only the AJAX Control Toolkit v3.0 is supported.

In order to add the AJAX Control Toolkit v.1.0 to the Toolbox and can work with projects that support AJAX 1.0 you must perform the following tasks:

1. Download the AJAX Extensions for ASP.NET from here and install it.
2. Add the controls on System.Web.Extensions.dll to the Toolbox, to do that, right click on AJAXExtensions tab on the Toolbox, choose ‘Choose items’ the Choose Toolbox Items dialog appears, click on Browse and search for the Extensions library usually installed on /ProgramFiles/Microsoft ASP.NET/ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, click OK is expected to have to instances of the controls but is not, don’t worry is OK. VS loads the correct version of the extensions according to the configuration of the project.
3. Create a new toolbox tab for AJAX Control Toolkit v1.0 and for version 3.0, download it from CodePlex, compile it and add to the toolbox as in step2.

Is everything is right you must see

and for the toolkit something similar

Unfortunately when you create a web project targeting the .net framework 2.0 the web.config file does not contain everything necessary to develop with AJAX, the sample config file on the install directory of the AJAX Extensions 1.0 must be added manually to the project, with projects on framework 3.5 there is not such problem.