Silverlight Toolkit October 2009 Released

I am glad to announce that my favorite Silverlight Toolkit has a next release out for production use earlier release was in July 2009 and now its the October Release. You can download this release at http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=30514#DownloadId=88327 Change List includes

Visual Studio 2010 Support
  • All controls updated to provide a great design time experience in Visual Studio 2010
Charting
  • All classes now unsealed
  • ISeries interface introduced as base interface for all Series
  • Breaking change: StylePalette renamed Palette and type changed to IEnumerable<ResourceDictionary> from IEnumerable<Style>
  • LegendItemStyle introduced to provide easier customization of LegendItem
Drag & Drop
  • Drag & drop support added for common items controls such as ListBox, TreeView, DataGrid, and charting controls.
  • System.Windows.Controls.Data.Toolkit assembly added.
  • The System.Reactive assembly is now installed alongside other Silverlight Toolkit binaries.

Other Updates

Accordion
  • Themes updated to add support for this control
ChildWindow
  • Themes updated to add support for this control
DataForm
  • Themes updated to add support for this control
DataPager
  • Themes updated to add support for this control
DomainUpDown
  • Mouse wheel support added to change value
GlobalCalendar
  • Mouse wheel support added to navigate between months in year mode and years in decade mode
GridSplitter
  • Themes updated to add support for this control
TimePicker / TimeUpDown
  • Mouse wheel support added
TreeMap
  • VB Sample added

by Aashish Kumar

System.IO.FileNotFoundException Could not load file or assembly 'App_Web, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified

I recently faced this problem with one of my WCF services, i was unable to find the reason for this as it complains that it could not load an assembly which in my case never existed.So seeing the error i knew that it was not my fault but it was the fault of the framework itself. What i know and what seemed to me is that this error occurs due to some invalid data in the temporary files which .net creates while running an application.Due to the differences in the code of the temporary files from the actual code this error arises. Little help from Google suggested me that it’s a known issue and Microsoft has not yet found any fix for this situation although there are a few workarounds which you can do in order to escape from this problem. In this article i will discuss those workarounds and remember there is no specific workaround so you have to test all whichever may suite you.

  • First of all just try this one and see if it works then its the easiest, just make a note of whichever control is causing trouble to you it could be your masterpage, you usercontrol or your web service or WCF service.Just go to that control or service and simply edit something, just deleting a small space or pressing an enter key and deleting some white spaces would do and save the document, what this will do is it will ask the runtime to regenerate the temporary file and the regenerated temporary file will be correct as earlier somehow the temporary file generated for this file was incorrect.So most of the times this would do the trick especially in case of services.
  • If the first solution doesn’t help you then you can go to c:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727Temporary ASP.NET Files and delete all the files and force a complete recompile of the whole application.You have to be very careful in deleting the temporary files and don’t try this on the production server this tip is for those who know about the working of .net.If some files are locked then you can unlock them using “Unlocker”
  • If the above 2 steps don’t work for you then add the batch= “false” compilation tag in your web.config

I think these three steps are sufficient to overcome this problem. Moreover one thing which i want to add is that never directly start updating your production website with the new updates by just copying the new files on the production server, before copying just take the website down i.e pause the website and once your are done with your changes again put the website to go live or else you will run into this trouble every now and then. If you have faced similar problems and you found some other solution or cause to this problem you can just share it here with smallworkarounds readers to help the community. Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

by Aashish Kumar

Customizing Asp.net menu control to use jQuery,Superfish and CSS Friendly Control Adapters

I have used Asp.net menu controls in a lot of applications earlier but now a days with so many new things and controls asp.net menu control seems to lag in many basic functionalities, there are various other options available to be used as a replacement of the asp.net menu control. But what i loved with the asp.net menu control was its seamless integration with the sitemap datasource and with no hassle i could display whole of my site’s navigation in the menu control by just configuring them in the sitemap file. What i disliked most was that the menu control by default is rendered as a table structure and not as div structure. So to fight this abnormality Microsoft released CSS Friendly Control Adapters so that most of the controls which are rendered as tables can be rendered as a simple and clean div structure. But today i was experimenting with other available options and i found a really cool Superfish jQuery plug-in which we can attach with the asp.net menu control to achieve very cool affects. In this article i will share the steps on how to hook up the Superfish jQuery Menu plug-in into your asp.net website to beautify your asp.net menu control. Also please check various option available with the Superfish plug-in on how it can be customized from the Superfish plug-in website. http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/#examples Now let’s look at the steps to integrate superfish menu with asp.net menu

Main JavaScript file which is required is superfish.js along with jQuery any version.js rest files are optional and are used if we use some advanced features and customizations with the superfish menu. Main CSS file is superfish.css and for this demo we will modify this file only.

  • After downloading the superfish menu files now we should download the CSS Friendly Adapter from http://cssfriendly.codeplex.com/
  • Place the CSSFriendly.dll into your website bin folder and the CSSFriendlyAdapters.browser in your App_Browser folder.Also remember to comment out the unwanted code from the CSSFriendlyAdapters.browser file as we are dealing only with the menu.
 <controlAdapters>
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.Menu"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.MenuAdapter" />
      <!--adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.TreeView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.TreeViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.DetailsView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.DetailsViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.FormView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.FormViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataList"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.DataListAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridView"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.GridViewAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.ChangePassword"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.ChangePasswordAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.LoginAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.LoginStatus"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.LoginStatusAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.CreateUserWizard"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.CreateUserWizardAdapter" />
      <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.PasswordRecovery"
               adapterType="CSSFriendly.PasswordRecoveryAdapter" /-->
    </controlAdapters>

 

  • Also download the latest version of jQuery, otherwise there is already a version of jQuery in the Superfish package.
  • Now start creating your pages and once you are done , just create a sitemap file to list your whole website.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" >
    <siteMapNode url="" title=""  description="">
        <siteMapNode url="Default.aspx" title="Home" description=""/>
        <siteMapNode url="AboutUs.aspx" title="About Us"  description="" />
        <siteMapNode url="Services.aspx" title="Services"  description="" >
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service1.aspx" title="Service1" description="">
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService1.aspx" title="SubService1" description="" />
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService2.aspx" title="SubService2" description="" />
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService3.aspx" title="SubService3" description="" />
                <siteMapNode url="Services/SubService4.aspx" title="SubService4" description="" />
            </siteMapNode>
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service2.aspx" title="Service2" description=""/>
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service3.aspx" title="Service3" description=""/>
            <siteMapNode url="Services/Service4.aspx" title="Service4" description=""/>
        </siteMapNode>
        <siteMapNode url="ContactUs.aspx" title="Contact Us" description=""/>
    </siteMapNode>
</siteMap>
  • After building all this your solution architecture should be like this.

  • Now just the master page configuration is left and you are ready to go then
<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.master.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>

    <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.3.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

    <script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/superfish.js"></script>

    <link type="text/css" href="~/Styles/superfish.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen"
        runat="server" />
    <link href="Styles/stylemain.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

    <script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function() {
            $('ul.AspNet-Menu').superfish();
        }); 
    </script>

    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="head" runat="server">
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div id="outerWrapper">
        <div id="header">
            <div id="logo">
                <asp:HyperLink runat="server" NavigateUrl="~/Default.aspx" ID="lnkLogo">    
                </asp:HyperLink>
            </div>
        </div>
        <div id="menu">
            <asp:Menu ID="menuMain" runat="server" DataSourceID="stmpDataSource" Orientation="Horizontal">
            </asp:Menu>
            <asp:SiteMapDataSource ID="stmpDataSource" runat="server" ShowStartingNode="false" />
        </div>
        <div id="mainContent">
            <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server">
            </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
        </div>
        <div id="footer">
        </div>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>
  • Important :- By default the Superfish menu css file contains the settings aligned with the ul name sf-menu but the asp.net menu control renders the ul element as AspNet-menu so the important step is to replace all the occurrences of sf-menu in the superfish.css with AspNet-menu to make this menu work.

You can download the sample project and plug and play with the CSS file customized for the asp.net menu if you find difficulties in customizing by your self.

After embedding this in your master page you are done with the settings and customization and you are ready to go, i got this menu in just 15 minutes so simple and so easy.

Working Demo can be seen here https://www.smallworkarounds.com/demos/superfish.demo/

Download the Demo from https://www.smallworkarounds.com/blog/democode/Superfish/Superfish.Demo.zip

Happy Programming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

by Aashish Kumar