UK Launch - Building Web Applications with VS2008 Demo

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Thank you to everyone who came along to my session at the launch in Birmingham yesterday - it was certainly pretty packed! I promised a lot of people a copy of the demos and they'll be here soon. In the meantime, I've uploaded a "live" version of my demo site if you want to have a play with it.

The demo source code should be up by the end of today. I've had to change a couple of things in my server control to make sure it works in FireFox as well as IE. Note - you can now get the demo code here.

Click below to see the demo site.

Picture1

It's only 4 pages and you probably had to see the session for it to make much sense - here's a quick summary:

  • I created a standard CSS 2 column layout using the new CSS features in Visual Studio 2008 and turned this into a masterpage for the site
  • Default.aspx (Home) uses a little bit of JavaScript to display a Virtual Earth map overlaid with the properties in my Houses database and traffic information for the local area
    • The properties come from a SQL Server db queried using Linq to Sql
    • The traffic information comes from the BBC queried using Linq to XML and then "localised" by using Linq to Objects
    • Both are exposed as web services and called from JavaScript
  • GridView.aspx (Properties 1) was a demo of a GridView control binding to a Linq query expression and a LinqDataSource control
  • ListView.aspx (Properties 2) was similar but using the new ListView control and adding sorting and editing capabilities
  • ImageView.aspx (ImageView) also uses a ListView (and paging) to display the same data in a very different way. It uses an ASP.NET AJAX server control to display a picture of the property and a Virtual Earth map that appears if you mouseover the picture. The page also uses the RounderCornersExtender from the AJAX Control Toolkit and an UpdatePanel for partial page refreshes.

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