Like a doctor checks up the patient before a big surgical operation, every website needs some checks up before you start working hard on your SEO strategy, some factors are always very critical: 1 – Domain Name Some search engines still gives higher weight to those URLs having keywords, this is not ...

Like a doctor checks up the patient before a big surgical operation, every website needs some checks up before you start working hard on your SEO strategy, some factors are always very critical: 1 – Domain Name Some search engines still gives higher weight to those URLs having keywords, this is not ...

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the important considerations that any Internet web-site needs to design with in mind.  A non-trivial percentage of Internet traffic to sites is driven by search engines, and good SEO techniques can help increase site traffic even further. Likewise, small mistakes can significantly impact the search relevance of your site?s content and cause you to miss out on the traffic that you should be receiving.  Some of these mistakes include: multiple URLs on a site leading to the same content, broken links from a page, poorly chosen titles, descriptions, and keywords, large amounts of viewstate, invalid markup, etc.  These mistakes are often easy to fix - the challenge is how to discover and pinpoint them within a site.

Introducing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Today we are shipping the first beta of a new free tool - the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it. You can install the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer I blogged about earlier this week.  You can install it through WebPI using the ?install now? link on the IIS SEO Toolkit home .  Once installed, you?ll find a new ?Search Engine Optimization? section within the IIS 7 admin tool, and several SEO tools available within it: The Robots and SiteMap tools enable you to easily create and manage robots.txt and sitemap.xml files for your site that help guide search engines on what URLs they should and shouldn?t crawl and follow. The Site Analysis tool enables you to crawl a site like a search engine would, and then analyze the content using a variety of rules that help identify SEO, Accessibility, and Performance problems within it.

Using the IIS SEO Toolkit?s Site Analysis Tool

Let?s take a look at how we can use the Site Analysis tool to quickly review SEO issues with a site.  To avoid embarrassing anyone else by turning the tool loose on their site, I?ve decided to instead use the analysis tool on one of my own sites: www.scottgu.com .  This is a site I wrote many years ago (last update in 2005 I think).  If you install the IIS SEO Toolkit you can point it at my site and duplicate the steps below to drill into the SEO analysis of it. Open the Site Analysis Tool We?ll begin by launching the IIS Admin Tool (inetmgr) and clicking on the root node in the left-pane tree-view of the IIS7 admin tool (the machine name ? in this case ?Scottgu-PC?).  We?ll then select the ?Site Analysis? icon within the Search Engine Optimization section on the right.  Opening the Site Analysis tool at the machine level like this will allow us to run the analysis tool against any remote server (if we had instead opened it with a site selected then we would only be able to run ...

Author: glad Subject: APPLICATION FOR A.I.I.M.S. M.D./M.S./M.D.S NOV 2010 EXAM Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2010 6:32 pm (GMT 5.5) http://www.aippg.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=208203http://202.144.108.139 http://202.144.108.139/AIIMS-PG-FORM-2010/Aiimspd_MD_MS_MCH6/UploadedImages/MDMSMCH-Prospectus.pdf _________________ Help others to help yourself, in the end faith only matters

Author: glad Subject: APPLICATION FOR AIIMS M.D/M.S& M.D.S FOR NOV2010 EXAM Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2010 6:26 pm (GMT 5.5) AT A GLANCE Last date for receipt of Registration Slip at A.I.I.M.S. ? Status of receipt of Registration Slip at AIIMS : : 5th October 2010 (upto 5.00 PM) 20th October 2010 EXAMINATION SCHEDULE : MD/MS/MDS Date of hosting the Admit Cards at www.aiimsexams.org : 06-11-2010 Entrance Examination : 14.11.2010 Expected date of declaration of Result Ist Counselling 2nd Counselling Open Selection : : : : 29.11.2010 10.12.2010 16.12.2010 28.01.2011 All the final results will be displayed on the Notice Board of Examination Section, AIIMS and will also be available on internet at www.aiims.ac.in, www.aiims.edu and www.aiimsexams.org Result of individual candidate will NOT be informed on telephone. Application Fee: Online: General /OBC Category : Rs. 1000/- (SC/ST Category : Rs. 800/-) + Transaction Charges as applicable. NOTE : The candidate is advised to read the Prospectus carefully before filling up the on line Application Form and ensure that no column is left blank*. In the event of rejection of the application form, no correspondence/request for reconsideration, will be entertained. Please retain the copy of Registration Slip till the completion of Admission Process. * Read the instructions carefully while selecting/filling each column. AT A GLANCE (3 years course) 1. The candidates joining M.D./M.S./M.D.S. degree courses shall be called Junior Residents in the Clinical Disciplines and Junior Demonstrators in Basic Clinical Disciplines. The number of seats available in each speciality for the January 2011 session is shown below : Code A. CLINICAL SCIENCES Total Seats UR OBC S.C. S.T. Sponsored/ Foreign 01 Anaesthesiology 6 4 1 1 0 2 02 Dermatology & Venereology 2 2 0 0 0 1 03 Medicine 11 8 1 1 1 0 04 Nuclear Medicine 0 0 0 0 0 1 05 Obst. & Gynaecology 7 4 2 1 0 0 06 Ophthalmology 18 13 2 2 1 2 07 Orthopaedics 2 1 0 1 0 0 08 Otorhinolaryngology 3 1 1 1 0 1 09 Paediatrics 4 4 0 0 0 1 10 Psychiatry 4 2 1 1 0 2 11 Radio Diagnosis 3 2 0 1 0 0 12 Radiotherapy 0 0 0 0 0 3 13 Surgery 4 3 0 1 0 1 14 Community Medicine 4 2 1 1 0 3 15 Phy. Med. & Rehabilitation 2 1 1 0 0 3 B. BASIC CLINICAL SCIENCES 16 Anatomy 9 7 1 1 0 3 17 Biochemistry 2 1 1 0 0 3 18 Biophysics 3 0 2 0 1 3 19 Forensic Medicine 3 1 1 0 1 3 20 Lab. Medicine 5 3 1 0 1 3 21 Microbiology 8 5 1 1 1 3 22 Pathology 6 4 1 1 0 2 23 Pharmacology 3 2 1 0 0 3 24 Physiology 3 2 1 0 0 3 C. MDS 25 Orthodontics 1 0 0 0 1 0 26 Prosthodontics 1 1 0 0 0 0 27 Conservative Dentistry 1 1 0 0 0 0 28 Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery 2 1 1 0 0 0 GRAND TOTAL (A+B+C) 117 75 21* 14 7 46 (Code to be used by Sponsored/Foreign National candidate only) *21 (Twenty One) PG seats as above for OBC are subject to the ...

We recently released a new free Silverlight 4 Training Kit that walks you through building business applications with Silverlight 4.  You can browse the training kit online or alternatively download an entire offline version of the training kit .  The training material is structured on teaching how to use the new Silverlight 4 features to build an end to end business application. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands on labs. Below is a breakdown and links to all of the content. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Module 1: Introduction

Click here to watch this module. In this video John Papa and Ian Griffiths discuss the key areas that the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course focuses on. This module is the overview of the course and covers many key scenarios that are faced when building business applications, and how Silverlight can help address them.

Module 2: WCF RIA Services

Click here to explore this module. In this lab, you will create a web site for managing conferences that will be the basis for the other labs in this course. Don?t worry if you don?t complete a particular lab in the series ? all lab manual instructions are accompanied by completed solutions, so you can either build your own solution from start to finish, or dive straight in at any point using the solutions provided as a starting point. In this lab you will learn how to set up WCF RIA Services, create bindings to the domain context, filter using the domain data source, and create domain service queries. Online Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 2.1 - WCF RIA Services Ian Griffiths sets up the Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services for the sample Event Manager application for the course. He covers how to set up the services, how the Domain Services work and the role that the DomainContext plays in the sample application. He also reviews the metadata classes and integrating the navigation framework. Module 2.2 ? Using WCF RIA Services to Edit Entities Ian Griffiths discusses how he adds the ability to edit and create individual entities with the features built into WCF RIA Services into the sample Event Manager application. He covers data binding fundamentals, IQueryable, LINQ, the DomainDataSource, navigation to a single entity using the navigation framework, and how to use the Visual Studio designer to do much of the work . Module 2.3 ? Showing Master/Details Records Using WCF RIA Services Ian Griffiths reviews how to display master/detail records for the sample Event Manager application using WCF RIA Services. He covers how to use the Include attribute to indicate which elements to serialize back to ...

[ In addition to blogging, I?m also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Over the last few weeks I?ve been polling developers to see how many are using the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) toolkit to increase traffic to their web-sites.  I?ve been surprised by how many people either have never heard of the tool, or have not yet had a chance to run it against their websites.  This blog post provides a quick summary about why anyone doing web-development should check it out.

Why use the free SEO Toolkit?

In a nutshell ? the free SEO Toolkit Analyzer helps you increase traffic and visitors to your site, and as a result can increase the revenue you directly or indirectly make through your web-site. The SEO Toolkit Analyzer increases traffic to your site by helping you assess and improve the search relevancy ranking of your site with search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  As your search relevancy ranking improves, and your site becomes more search engine optimized, you?ll find that your site receives more and more user traffic from search engine queries. 

Takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Analyzer

It takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Toolkit Analyzer against your web-site.  You simply point the tool at the top-level URL of your web-site, and then it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would ? following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a human friendly report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site - along with suggestions on how to fix each of them:  

It works with any web-server

The SEO Toolkit works with any web-server. It works with IIS5, IIS6, IIS7 and IIS7.5 ? it will even work with Apache web-servers running on Linux.  Basically you can point the SEO Analyzer at any remote HTTP server and it will crawl the site and generate a SEO report.  You do not need to setup any software on the remote server ? instead the tool crawls and analyzes the site remotely just like a search engine would.  This means you can even run the site on your friends (or potential customers) sites and generate reports for them. The SEO Toolkit does require that you have the IIS7 Admin tool installed on your local dev/client machine in order to host the SEO Analysis admin UI tool.  The IIS7 admin tool is a built-in feature of Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.  The IIS7 admin UI only needs to be installed on your local dev machine though ? you do not need to have IIS7 installed on the server.  The SEO utility running inside it will work fine against your IIS5, IIS6 and other web servers.

How to download and install the SEO Toolkit

You can easily install the SEO Toolkit using the Microsoft Web Pl ...

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site?s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit

A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we?ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites ( www.scottgu.com ) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I?ll cover later in this blog post:  

Search Relevancy and URL Splitting

Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site?s ?search relevancy? are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in ...

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the thirteenth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today?s post covers some of the improvements being made around Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with ASP.NET 4.

Why SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large percentage of traffic to sites now comes from search engines, and improving the search relevancy of your site will lead to more user traffic to your site from search engine queries (which can directly or indirectly increase the revenue you make through your site).

Measuring the SEO of your website with the SEO Toolkit

Last month I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit we?ve shipped that you can use to analyze your site for SEO correctness, and which provides detailed suggestions on any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in the site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further.

ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of new runtime features that can help you to further optimize your site for SEO.  Some of these new features include: New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties New URL Routing support for ASP.NET Web Forms New Response.RedirectPermanent() method Below are details about how you can take advantage of them to further improve your search engine relevancy.

Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties

One simple recommendation to improve the search relevancy of pages is to make sure you always output relevant ?keywords? and ?description? <meta> tags within the <head> section of your HTML.  For example: One of the nice improvements with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms is the addition of two new properties to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription that make programmatically setting these values within your code-behind classes much easier and cleaner.  ASP.NET 4?s <head> server control now looks at these values and will use them when outputting the <head> section of pages.  This behavior is particularly useful for scenarios where you are using master-pages within your site ? and the <head> section ends up being in a .master file that is separate from the .aspx file that contains the page specific content.  You can now set the new MetaKeywords and MetaDescription properties in the .aspx page and have their values automatically rendered by the <head> control within the master page. Below is a simple code snippet that demonstrates setting these properties programmatically within a Page_Load() ...

The multi-targeting feature of Visual Studio 2010 allows web developers to develop web applications targeting ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0. The key benefit of multi-targeting is that you can use Visual Studio 2010 to create and develop new projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework (such as 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5). Multi-targeting in VS 2010 also lets you continue to develop projects that were created using earlier versions of Visual Studio such as Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. What's different about Multi-targeting in Visual Studio 2010? We supported multi-targeting of web applications in Visual Studio 2008 as well. But the capabilities we had for multi-targeting in VS 2008 were really a pseudo form of multi-targeting, i.e. even though VS 2008 allowed us to target different versions of the ASP.NET framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, the underlying Common Language Runtime (CLR) for all these frameworks is the same (= the .NET CLR 2.0). With the release of the new ASP.NET 4.0 Beta1 framework (that runs on top of the .NET CLR 4.0 that installs side-by-side with earlier versions of the .NET CLR) along with Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, we now have the ability in Visual Studio to target ASP.NET framework versions spanning multiple versions of the CLR (CLR 2.0 and CLR 4.0). VS 2010 can detect when your web project is targeting ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 (that runs on top of CLR 2.0) versus targeting ASP.NET 4.0 (that runs on top of CLR 4.0). Accordingly: VS 2010 allows you to choose ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 or 4.0 as the target framework when you create a new Website or Web Application Project (WAP) Figure 1 You can convert and migrate your web applications built using earlier versions of Visual Studio to Visual Studio 2010. Like you could do with VS 2008, you can continue to have your web project target lower framework versions like ASP.NET 2.0 after conversion. See "Converting web projects from earlier versions of Visual Studio" section below for details. Visual Studio automatically filters controls in toolbox, and types in intellisense and properties window based on the ASP.NET framework version being targeted Compilation and building of the web project works correctly based on the target framework, ie. VS 2010 will show errors when you try to use 4.0 controls or properties in a web project targeting 2.0 or 3.5. You can change targets from one ASP.NET framework to the other via the property pages (as you could in VS 2008). Note: In VS 2010, we prompt you to reload the project when you change the target framework of a website project (VS 2008 used to do this for WAP projects). This is to ensure that the references are updated correctly when you change the target. New capabilities in VS 2010: We already had the above multi-targeting capabilities in VS 2008. VS 2010 extends these capabilities to handle ASP.NET 4.0 (and the new CLR 4.0). Additio ...

This post introduces you to a small improvement that has been made in Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4 to reduce the size of the ASP.NET application level web.config 3.0 and 3.5 web.config As ASP.NET technology evolved, the application level Web.config had new things added to it. Since the earlier frameworks were using the same set of machine level configuration files, incremental feature that was added subsequent to the 2.0 release resulted in additional config settings included in the file. .NET 4 web.config With .NET 4, the web.config is tremendously reduced in size to improve the simplicity  of ASP.NET The config settings have been moved down to the machine config file. This includes registers all of the ASP.NET tag sections, handlers, modules and settings for the following: ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET Routing ASP.NET Chart Control You can look at the trimmed down web.config by creating a .Net 4 'ASP.NET Empty Web Application' in Visual Studio 2010. Following is the web.config file for .NET 4 C# 'ASP.NET Empty Web Application':     The config file above has settings to tell ASP.NET to enable debugging by default for the application and provides the version of .NET framework to use.(Please read the post http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/09/30/visual-studio-2010-property-grid-filtering.aspx to find out why targetFramework version attribute should not be updated manually)   Hope this helps, Deepak Verma | Visual Web Developer ...

A couple of additional properties on the Page Class to help set HTML meta tags.

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Prior to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010, the only way to upgrade an ASP.Net MVC 1 application to ASP.Net MVC 2 was to use Eilon Lipton’s tool . With the release of Visual Studio 2010 you will now be able to open your MVC 1 projects in Visual Studio 2010 and upgrade them to ASP.Net MVC 2 projects. Also, you can upgrade the target framework of the project to 4.0 or continue to target the 3.5 framework. When you first open an ASP.Net MVC 1 application in Visual Studio 2010, you will see the familiar Visual Studio Conversion Wizard.   ASP.Net MVC specific code runs during this wizard and updates all System.Web.MVC references from version 1 to version 2. The wizard also updates the version numbers in the project’s Web.config and the Views folder’s Web.config. The project guid is also updated to the MVC 2 project guid so you will now be able to take advantage of Add Area while working on your application. If you upgrade your project to 4.0, the project system will also upgrade System.Web.Routing and System.Web.Abstractions to 4.0 and modify the references in the project’s Web.config. At this point, you should be able to build and run your project. What about class libraries and Visual Studio Test projects in my solution? Unless you are using Visual Web Developer Express, the ASP.Net MVC upgrade wizard code does not upgrade your class libraries to the 4.0 framework, so make sure to upgrade them in the project properties if you choose to target the 4.0 framework when upgrading your ASP.Net MVC Application. Also you should check to make sure that class library references to System.Web.Abstractions and System.Web.Routing point to the version in the gac, now that these two assemblies are part of the 4.0 framework. Visual Studio Test projects do not support multi-targeting but for solutions with ASP.Net MVC applications they can be migrated to 4.0 along with your MVC Application. If you are using C#, your VS Test project will upgrade to 4.0 regardless of whether you upgrade your ASP.Net MVC 2 Application and your project will build and run whether you target 3.5 or 4.0. Visual Basic test projects will prompt for an upgrade to 4.0 so choose according to which framework you wish to target for your ASP.Net MVC app. In other words, don’t upgrade your app to 4.0 and not upgrade your test project or vice versa. Hope this helps you get your ASP.Net MVC apps up and running in Dev10! Joe Cartano | Visual Web Developer ...

Ladies and gentlemen we have outdone ourselves today. How many articles are there relating to hacking your way through search engine optimizing asp.net MasterPages? A thousand a hundred thousand? Who knows but I can tell you this none of them not a single one comes anywhere near what SpiderLoop SEO control panel can do for master pages as of today. It took me one hour to search engine optimize our entire SpiderLoop site and boy oh boy is it optimized. Different meta tags on every page, perfectly coordinated with the pages content, every alt text tag filled with relevant forward and reverse keywords, and relevant internal backlinks from the entire site. If you are using master pages on even one of your asp.net web sites then you absolutely positively must be using SpiderLoop. I have actually surprised myself with how easy this was to do and I built the thing. It takes one line of code in your master page ONE LINE and this is it <SpiderLoop:header ID= "tHeader" UseKeysNum=1 UseSupKeysNum=5 pageTitle= "none" StartKey=-1 TagsOption=2 useDataFile= True runat= "server" / > and your entire website is optimized if you skip the useDataFile=True tag it will randomly choose keywords for the pages which is fine but nothing like the control you have now check this out. <pages> <page pname= "about_spiderloop.aspx" startkey= "55" /> <page pname= "back_links.aspx" startkey= "45" /> <page pname= "resellers.aspx" startkey= "76" /> <page pname= "a_bright_future.aspx" startkey= "85" /> <page pname= "sell_spiderloop_1.aspx" startkey= "86" /> <page pname= "sell_spiderloop_2.aspx" startkey= "96" /> <page pname= "prices.aspx" startkey= "119" /> <page pname= "affiliate_banners.aspx" startkey= "111" /> <page pname= "download.aspx" startkey= "117" /> <page pname= "system_requirements.aspx" startkey= "118" /> <page pname= "technology.aspx" startkey= "69" /> <page pname= "what_people_are_saying.aspx" startkey= "29" /> <page pname= "success_stories.aspx" startkey= "17" /> <page pname= "screens.aspx" startkey= "38" /> <page pname= "rss_data_feeds.aspx" startkey= "121" /> <page pname= "contact.aspx" startkey= "19" /> <page pname= "support.aspx" startkey= "122" /> <page pname= "hosting.aspx" startkey= "123" /> <page pname= "quick_install.aspx" startkey= "65" /> </pages> This little XML file allows me to choose the keyword from my SpiderLoop control panel to optimize each individual page. (that's what took an hour) and wow it sure is pretty. Go look at the source code on SpiderLoop here's a snippet from the RSS feed page <title>How SpiderLoop internet marketing uses RSS data feeds</title> <META NAME= "keywords" content= "Best RSS feeds seo marketing, Affordable RSS feeds seo marketing, Professional RSS feeds seo marketing, ecommerce RSS feeds seo marketing, ...

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not only the job of the marketing department. It must be considered from a web site’s inception and throughout its lifetime by you, the web site developer. Making changes to the architecture of a web site and modifying presentation techniques can dramatically increase search engine rankings and traffic levels. [...] Post from: Busby SEO Test Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A

On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here ).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (we?ll ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using Silverlight ? a quick ?Hello World? application and a ?Twitter? data-snacking application.  Both applications were easy to build and only took a few minutes to create on stage.  Below are the steps you can follow yourself to build them on your own machines as well. [Note: In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Building a ?Hello World? Windows Phone 7 Application

First make sure you?ve installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP ? this includes the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone development tool (which will be free forever and is the only thing you need to develop and build Windows Phone 7 applications) as well as an add-on to the VS 2010 RC that enables phone development within the full VS 2010 as well. After you?ve downloaded and installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP , launch the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone that it installs or launch the VS 2010 RC (if you have it already installed) , and then choose ?File?->?New Project.?  Here, you?ll find the usual list of project template types along with a new category: ?Silverlight for Windows Phone?. The first CTP offers two application project templates. The first is the ?Windows Phone Application? template - this is what we?ll use for this example. The second is the ?Windows Phone List Application? template - which provides the basic layout for a master?details phone application: After creating a new project, you?ll get a view of the design surface and markup. Notice that the design surface shows the phone UI, letting you easily see how your application will look while you develop. For those familiar with Visual Studio, you?ll also find the familiar ToolBox, Solution Explorer and Properties pane. For our HelloWorld application, we?ll start out by adding a TextBox and a Button from the Toolbox. Notice that you get the same design experience as you do for Silverlight on the web or desktop. You can easily resize, position and align your controls on the design surface. Changing properties is easy with the Properties pane. We?ll change the name of the TextBox that we added to username and change the page title text to ?Hello world.? We?ll then write some code by double?clicking on the button and create an event handler in the code-behind file (MainPage ...

In our series about ASP.NET authentication, so far we’ve covered all the rather normal cases where you’d want to have the ability to log into different domains attached to the same application?  There are a few additional hurdles you’ll need to overcome to make this work correctly. The first is, how do I let each [...] ASP.NET Authentication – Multiple Domains w/ Same Application is a post from: .NET Answers

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 contains ASP.Net MVC 2 in the box so there is no need to install an out of band update to Visual Studio 2010 to develop ASP.Net MVC applications. Phil Haack posted about the in-box experience for Beta 2 andd also provides some info on how to upgrade your ASP.Net MVC 1 apps to ASP.Net MVC 2. From a tooling perspective, all of the new functionality released in ASP.Net MVC 2 Preview 2 for Orcas is available in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 including support for  Single Project Areas . Additionally, if you look in the Scripts folder of a new ASP.Net MVC application, you will notice that jquery.validate is included as well as a vsdoc file to go with it. I'll post more on how to use jquery.validate in the coming weeks but for now, you should notice rich intellisense in your pages that use jquery.validate thanks to the inclusion of jquery.validate-vsdoc in your ASP.Net MVC 2 application.  Joe Cartano | Visual Web Developer

RichB posted the following comment:   ... Now, if Microsoft were to produce a set of functionality which “profiled”; code and allowed a functional tester to see a straight percentage of how much of the codebase they had exercised during a black-box QA session and linked this with test scripts (English, verbal, scripts) and a bug database - it would be much more useful to most of the QA teams out there. Imagine setting a “profile”; flag in an ASP.Net website and then getting the QA team to test a build of the website. After the QA session ends, the profile gets attached to the test management application for that particular test run. The developer logs onto the test management application to see the results of the test run - and sees graphically which parts of the code got executed, which caused exceptions, which caused crashed and bugs that were entered. If Microsoft can deliver this functionality, then they have hit the holy grail. --     Rich, thanks again for taking the time to post your comments… I really appreciate your feedback.   The scenario you mention above will be possible in Visual Studio Team System in two ways [YES! We can do this for you!]:   ASP.NET Profiling: As you mention you instrument the code used by the ASP.NET site, point testers or automated test scenarios at the site, and when the cycle is over collect performance data concerning how the ASP.NET application performed.   ASP.NET Code Coverage: Again, as you note above, you instrument the code used by the ASP.NET application, run your functional tests or have testers use the application, and when the cycle is over collect information specifically concerning exactly what code in your ASP.NET application was touched by your test activity.   The great thing is that this functionality, Profiling and Code Coverage, are both offered for all types of tests and all types of applications. Profiling enables developers to see exactly how much time a specific method took to execute along with many other performance related information. Code Coverage gives you percentages and roll ups of what was hit by a test or a scenario and actually can show you visually what code was touched in your application vs. missed. Check out the great article by my partner-in-crime Tom Arnold and Paul Schafer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvsent/html/vsts-test.asp for an actual screen shot (though the example provided is not ASP.NET specific).   ASP.NET specific functionality was not included in the bits that we made available at Tech Ed... Cod ...