Scheduled for Q3 this year - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/servicing/sp1_vs05/default.aspx

Looking forward to seeing what they've fixed/tweaked as I've got a short list (in my head and should probably write down) of wierdness they'll hopefully have ironed out. But overall it's a nice tool. Makes VS03 feel yesteryear already.

Yay! MS have a shiney new website just for IIS at http://www.iis.net. If I were you, my first port of call would be the .NET show interview with Bill Staples and Scot Guthrie where they show off some of the really cool features that are going to be part of IIS7.

Tess Ferrandez has a great article on why debug=true is generally a bad thing to leave lying around in your ASP.NET app's web.config file. This can be a pain for hosting companies like the one I work for when customers upload their app still as a debug build and with debug=true left switched on. We have shared servers that have up to 700 websites on them and it took us a fair bit of time and effort to tune the Application Pools to work around this problem in ASP.NET 1.x. Fortunately now we get to turn it off globally in the machine.config file in ASP.NET 2.0.

Doug Stewart has a nice article about keeping your production ASP.NET apps happy and healthy. All good stuff.

This is a pretty handy feature for taking your ASP.NET 2.0 app offline (for maintenance or whatever) and displaying a friendly message explaining why the site is down.

Just place a file called 'App_offline.htm' in the root of your site with whatever message you want to give your users and bingo your app shuts down and the contents of App_offline.htm are served. Just delete or rename App_offline.htm to something else to bring the app back online again.

You may know this already but if you're running ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 on the same box then make sure you create a separate application pool for ASP.NET 2.0. You can just clone the Default Application pool if you want, but that can have security implications if you're box is a shared hosting environment because re-using NETWORK SERVICE as the process identity will leave your 2.0 sites open to file harvesting by Full Trust 1.1 apps (that said you are encrypting your connection strings, aren't you? :-) ).

Once you've created the app domain, goto the site or vdir that needs to run ASP.NET 2.0, open the property pages, choose ASP.NET 2.0 from the ASP.NET tab then choose the new ASP.NET 2.0 Application Pool in Home Directory Tab -> Application Settings: Application Pool drop down.

Failure to run ASP.NET 2.0 in it's own app pool will result in the evil 'Server Application Unavailable' message because the ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 runtimes can't co-reside in the same worker process.

This is old hat and more of a bookmark for me when I bump into this each time I'm working with XML documents that have default namespace declared. But I thought I'd share anyway.

Take the following simple XML document:

<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8" ?>
< products xmlns = " urn:backoffice:products " >
   < product id = " 100-1100 " >
      < description > JVC CD Player </ description >
      < price > 120.99 </ price >
      < category > 100 </ category >
   </ product >
   < product id = " 100-1101 " >
      < description > Sony CD Player </ description >
      < price > 122.99 </ price >
      < category > 100 </ category >
   </ product >
   < product id = " 100-1102 " >
      < description > LG DVD Player </ description >
      < price > 109.99 </ price >
      < category > 110 </ category >
   </ product >
   < product id = " 100-1103 " >
      < description > Technics DVD Player </ description >
      < price > 199.99 </ price >
      < category > 110 </ category >
   </ product >
</ products >

You might expect that the code to select all the product nodes would look like:

XmlNamespaceManager nsm = newXmlNamespaceManager(newNameTable());
nsm.AddNamespace("", "urn:backoffice:products");
XmlNodeList productList = products.SelectNodes("/products/*", nsm);

The above seems the logical thing to do because the default namespace doesn't have a prefix so you naturally go ahead and specify String.Empty (or "", whichever) when adding it to the namespace manager. Additionally if you execute the code and breakpoint after setting adding the namespace and inspect the DefaultNamespace property of 'nsm' you'll see that it's even set to "urn:backoffice:products". However, the XmlNodeList returned from products.SelectNodes has no nodes.

This confused the hell out of me when I first encountered it way back when and I tripped up on it again last week. What's going on?

Basically XPath expressions select nodes that are either in a namespace or in the empty namespace. The XPath expression '/products/*' is selecting nodes from the empty namespace (xmlns="") but the document above is defining a default namespace of 'urn:backoffice:products' which is not the empty namespace. We have to tell XPath to select nodes from the namespace 'urn:backoffice:products' otherwise no nodes will be returned.

So how do we do this?

We add the namespace with an arbitrary prefix and the XmlNamespaceManager is used to expand 'p' to the default namespace name which then brings the nodes we're interested in into scope.

One thing still puzzles me though is the purpose of the DefaultNamespace property in the XmlNamespaceManager and I guess some digging around will uncover it's intentions because the MS docs are pretty vague.

This week I'm down at DevWeek 2006 which I also attended last year. It's quite good value for money and the quality of the speakers and topics is good again this year. The sessions I've attended so far are:

Tuesday:

Keynote - Dave Wheeler
Power ASP.NET 2.0 Programming - Jeff Prosise
Exploring Unit Testing with Visual Studio Team System - Kevin Jones
Writing Extensible Applications Using Reflection - Jason Clark

Wednesday:

Understanding Threads and Thread Synchronisation - Jason Clark
Distributed .NET - Ted Neward
Extending System.Xml - Ted Neward
ASP.NET, AJAX, and you: Introducing MS AJAX - Jeff Prosise

It's nice to know from sessions such as the Jason Clark ones that I'm doing all the right things :-)

More later.

Scott Guthrie announced the release of the second preview of the Web Application Project type for VS05. You can read about it here and download it from here.

Oldish news now but it's the first chance I've had to play with it.

If you miss the VS.NET 2002/3 web project concept or are migrating larger legacy projects to VS 2005 then this should make your day.

The ASP.NET team have released a preview of the Web Application Project for VS 2005.

One of the neat things is that unlike in VS.NET 2003/3 the dependancy on FPSE to open/edit projects is gone, and gone is the fragile .webinfo file and hardcoded http:// paths in the solution file.

Remember it's a preview and so isn't feature complete yet.

Check out Scott Guthries blog entries:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/07/432630.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/16/433374.aspx

Web Application Project website:

http://webproject.scottgu.com/Default.aspx