A few hours ago we released a Microsoft Security Advisory about a security vulnerability in ASP.NET.  This vulnerability exists in all versions of ASP.NET. This vulnerability was publically disclosed late Friday at a security conference.  We recommend that all customers immediately apply a workaround (described below) to prevent attackers from using this vulnerability against your ASP.NET applicat

One of the things my team has been working on has been a new view engine option for ASP.NET. ASP.NET MVC has always supported the concept of “view engines” – which are the pluggable modules that implement different template syntax options.  The “default” view engine for ASP.NET MVC today uses the same .aspx/.ascx/.master file templates as ASP.NET Web Forms.  Other popular ASP.NET MVC view engines

Developers today build and test ASP.NET sites and applications using one of two web-servers: The ASP.NET Development Server that comes built-into Visual Studio The IIS Web Server that comes built-into Windows Both of the above options have their pros and cons, and many ASP.NET developers have told us: “I wish I could have the ease of use of the ASP.NET Development Server, but still have all the po

[In addition to blogging, I am now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. You can follow me on Twitter at: twitter.com/scottgu (@scottgu is my twitter name)] This is the eleventh in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s post covers WPF 4. WPF 4 Improvements WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is one of the core components of the .NET F

This is the third in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post discusses VS 2010’s enhanced multi-targeting support – which allows you to use and target multiple versions of .NET.  We did significant architectural work in the VS 2010 release to enable a number of new multi-targeting features, and provide a much better experience. Understanding Side-b

Today we officially shipped the final release of Silverlight 3. Silverlight 3 Features Silverlight 3 is a major update and delivers a ton of new features and capabilities.  Some of the new Silverlight 3 runtime capabilities include: HD Media Silverlight 3 now supports hardware graphics acceleration – enabling both video and graphics compositing to be offloaded onto a GPU.  This can dramatically lo

jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code.  jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to quer

Someone on a listserv recently asked whether there was a way to figure out why and when ASP.NET restarts application domains.  Specifically, he was looking for the exact cause of what was triggering them on his application in a production shared hosted environment (was it a web.config file change, a global.asax change, an app_code directory change, a directory delete change, max-num-compilations r

Last September we shipped Silverlight 1.0 for Mac and Windows, and announced our plans to deliver Silverlight on Linux.  Silverlight 1.0 focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser, and supports a JavaScript/AJAX programming model. We are shortly going to release the first public beta of Silverlight 2, which will be a major update of Silverlight that focuses on enabling Rich Internet App

This past December we released the first preview of a new ASP.NET MVC Framework as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Release. I also wrote a number of blog posts that provide more detail on what the ASP.NET MVC framework is and how you can optionally use it: Introducing the ASP.NET MVC Framework ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 1) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Part 2: Url Routing) ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Par

There are a couple of ways we could write code within our ProductsController class to process these three types of incoming URLs.  One way would be to override the "Execute" method on the Controller base class and write our own manual if/else/switching logic to look at the incoming URL being requested and then execute the appropriate logic to process it. A much easier approach, though, is to use a

Tip/Trick: How to Register User Controls and Custom Controls in Web.config I've been including this technique in my ASP.NET Tips/Tricks talks the last year, but given how many people are always surprised by its existence I thought it was worth a dedicated tip/trick post to raise the visibility of it (click here to read other posts in my ASP.NET Tips/Tricks series). Problem: In previous versions of

Tip/Trick: Show Detailed ASP.NET Error Messages to Developers (and only to Developers) Problem: You are developing/maintaining an ASP.NET web-site, and would like the ability to conditionally show/hide runtime error messages depending on who the user visiting the site is. For a normal user visiting the site you want to be able to display a friendly error message like this when a runtime error occu