Hello, I'm   Jason

I was just checking out the improvements the team has made in beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8. While I haven’t had time to mess with all of the improvements, I see lots of opportunities to create enhancements for my sites to allow visitors to get what they are looking for faster. Be sure to check out the full list of improvements at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/28/part-i-better-everyday-browsing.aspx. You can download IE8 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.

Chris Love, posted a tweet today about Adobe Kuler. Kuler is a web/flash based application that allows developers and designers to upload and download color swatches for Adobe Photoshop. It’s a great way, as Chris put it, for developers to pick up color schemes/themes.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Velocity and how this distributed caching system can improve your web applications? Then you’d better check out the new Velocity podcast at ASP.NET Podcast. You can download the MP3 at http://www.aspnetpodcast.com/PodcastFiles/ASPNETPodcast20080820-Velocity.mp3.

On one of the email lists that I’m on, someone had posted a question about running a website using the root path “/” or a different virtual path than the project name that is populated by default. James Crowley pointed out a blog entry from Scott Guthrie where Scott walks through this process in 4 easy steps. To check it out, visit http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/12/19/tip-trick-how-to-run-a-root-site-with-the-local-web-server-using-vs-2005-sp1.aspx.

Sounds like Windows 7 might be previewed at the PDC. If not, significant details will surely be shared. No, I didn’t escape one of the Microsoft buildings with their business plan but rather came across the team’s new blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/. The first posts were yesterday (August 14th) and I’m sure more posts will be coming soon. Be sure to check it out!

Scott Galloway from the Microsoft DevDiv team has posted a couple of known issues with Service Pack 1 in ASP.NET 3.5 on the ASP.NET forums at http://forums.asp.net/t/1305800.aspx. The issues he currently has on the post are:

I was looking for a quick and easy solution to export data from SQL into an Excel format from within my ASP.NET application. I came across a great video posted by Beth Massi on the asp.net website (Video #7 at the bottom at http://www.asp.net/learn/linq-videos/). Beth steps through creating the LINQ to XML and how you can populate your Excel document. When I used this in an ASP.NET application, I added the XML declaration to the Response.Write so that Excel could understand the document. In ASP.NET, the XMLDocument type has a tendency to drop the XML declaration when writing out the document using .ToString.

ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1, which was formerly called the ASP.NET 3.5 extensions, has been released. The NetFX update was available as part of the SQL Server 2008 download available on Friday. Now it is available as a separate download. There are quite a few enhancements in 3.5 including Dynamic Data, the Entity Framework, the AJAX History control, better Silverlight support and more! Be sure to download it today at http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-sp1/.

I came across a postback issue while using the CascadingDropDown AJAX control. I had a web page with 3 DropDownList controls. The data for these controls was populated from the CascadingDropDown which would bind the data at runtime. The issue with this is that when data is being bound at runtime, it cannot be validated during postback unless each value is registered with the page.  In most cases, this wouldn’t make sense. So, we have to fall back to turning off EventValidation at an application level in the web.config (attribute is found on the pages element) or at the page level (attribute is added to the page directive). It’s best to turn off the EventValidation at the page level. There is no way to turn this off at the control level unless you are building your own control that does not contain the SupportsEventValidation attribute.

When using a DropDownList, you can set the selected item by using the SelectedIndex property. However, if your DropDownList is being populated by the CascadingDropDown control (from the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit), that doesn’t work. Instead, you must use the SelectedValue property on the CascadingDropDown control.