Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Web Application Toolkit

Web Application Toolkit: Bing Search

James Senior — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:08:00 GMT

Bing is a powerful new Decision Engine designed to help consumers accomplish tasks and make faster, more informed decisions. The Bing Application Programming Interface (API) provides developers programmatic access to Bing, offering flexible options for building or enhancing your site or applications. This Web Application Toolkit shows how to take advantage of the Bing API to add search capabilities to your Web site by leveraging the various search results that the Bing API provides, including Web content, images, news and videos, among others. Through this Web Application Toolkit you will also discover how to use ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery to provide an enhanced and more interactive end user experience when using the Bing API.

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We love to hear your feedback, ideas and comments so drop us an email to webapp@microsoft.com. Keep up-to-date with the latest releases of Web App Toolkits by subscribing to the blog http://blogs.msdn.com/webapptoolkits or following us on Twitter here: http://www.twitter.com/microsoftweb

Web Application Toolkit: Internet Explorer 8 Extensibility

James Senior — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:21:00 GMT

Today users can access rich information and services while they are browsing a site; it's not a trivial task to expose this content to the same users when they are not on that site. The goal of this Web Application Toolkit is to leverage the new features in Internet Explorer 8 (Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search Providers) to extend the reach of your web site and services also to those users that are not on your site. The Web Application Toolkit includes a set of ASP.NET Web Controls that you can use to take advantage of these IE new features in your own Web application.

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Web Application Toolkits

Jonathan Carter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:07:00 GMT

What a day it’s been! As well as releasing Web Platform Installer Version 2, we’ve also launched a bunch of Web App Toolkits that show you how to accomplish common web development tasks with small sample apps. We provide all the source code so that you can go from 0 to F5 in less than 60 seconds. The scenarios we’ve covered with the first round of Web App Toolkits include:

Web Application Toolkits: FAQ

James Senior — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:05:00 GMT

The majority of Web sites have the need to display a list of frequently asked questions to their users. Although it's not difficult to create a simple set of FAQ pages, creating a great user experience that supports searching for FAQs, filtering, and paging, can become more difficult. Furthermore, this is often common functionality that has to be implemented repeatedly in multiple Web sites.

The goal for this Web Application Toolkit is to provide a reusable set of assets, like ASP.NET pages, data access code, and database schemas, for integrating Frequently Asked Questions into your own Web application. The FAQ pages of this Toolkit include the following features:

Browse and view FAQs organized by topics
An interactive user experience using jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX
Search for FAQs by keywords
Access FAQs through friendly URLs (for example /Faq/bidding-and-buying/how-do-i-buy-an-item)
FAQs Ratings

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Web Application Toolkit: Mobile Web Applications

Jonathan Carter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:04:00 GMT

This Web Application Toolkit is designed to demonstrate how to extend an existing ASP.NET MVC Web application to provide access from mobile devices. To enable mobile access, the Web application should have views targeting each of the mobile devices to be supported.

We use the MVC pattern to create several views targeting different kind of browsers reusing the same business logic. For this implementation, we use the ASP.NET MVC framework which provides an alternative to the ASP.NET Web Forms pattern for creating MVC-based Web applications. The ASP.NET MVC framework is a lightweight, highly testable presentation framework that is integrated with existing ASP.NET features, such as master pages and membership-based authentication.

For extending the Web application to use mobile specific views, this sample provides a reusable component called MobileCapableViewEngine that enables the Web application to show the appropriate view depending on the device's browser that is performing the request.

Download this toolkit here.

For screencasts about other Web Application Toolkits, click here.

To download other Web Application Toolkits, click here.

Web Application Toolkit: Template-Driven Emails

Jonathan Carter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:03:00 GMT

This Web Application Toolkit is designed to demonstrate how to generate and send dynamic, template-based emails from a web application. There are many common scenarios where notification emails need to be sent to end users. Examples of these common scenarios may involve notifying a user of their newly created account, sending a new password in respond to a forgotten password request, or emailing an alert under specific business circumstances, such as the creation of a order. Typically the E-mails sent from a Web application scenario are formatted as HTML, include CSS stylesheets, and images and need to be generated dynamically with custom or user-specific data.

This Web Application Toolkit provides a reusable component named TemplateDrivenEmail that can be used to easily generate and send dynamic, HTML-formatted emails based on templates that you can easily create and customize. The TemplateDrivenEmail component is a .NET Class Library that can easily be included in your solution and used with an ASP.NET Web Application, a background application such as a Windows Service, or any other type of .NET application. The email templates are based on a standard XML technology know as Extensible Stylesheet Language. This Web Application Toolkit also includes an example that shows how to use the TemplateDrivenEmail component.

Download this toolkit here.

For screencasts about other Web Application Toolkits, click here.

To download other Web Application Toolkits, click here.

Web Application Toolkit: REST Services

Jonathan Carter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:02:00 GMT

This Web Application Toolkit shows how to easily add REST service interfaces for an existing Web application. The Web Application Toolkit includes a sample of REST services based on a fictitious online auction site. It exposes an API using REST services built with the Windows Communication Foundation that can consumed by client applications. Two sample client applications are included, one using simple ASP.NET pages to consume the REST service and show a list of ending auctions, and a second Web application using AJAX to asynchronously invoke the REST service to show a list of most viewed auctions. The Web Application Toolkit also includes a custom project template for Visual Studio to make it easier to build new REST Services.

Download this toolkit here.

For screencasts about other Web Application Toolkits, click here.

To download other Web Application Toolkits, click here.

Web Application Toolkits: Make your website "Social"

James Senior — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:02:00 GMT

Adding social capabilities to your Web site allows you to attract new users, keep them on your Web site for longer and get them to come back more often. In this screencast we explore this Web Application Toolkit that shows how, using a few lines of code with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, it is possible to add social capabilities to a Web site with instant messaging from a website to various client endpoints like Windows, Windows Mobile, Xbox 360 and Mac. Behind the scenes is a powerful set of UI Controls and a JavaScript library that connect your website to the Messenger Service which is used by 330 million users around the world.

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Web Application Toolkits: Introduction

James Senior — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:01:00 GMT

Web Application Toolkits are small sample apps that solve common developer problems. We provide documentation and source code that lets you go from 0-F5 in under 60 seconds to understand what's going on behind the scenes and then use the same coding principles and code snippets in your own applications.

This screencast covers the anatomy of a Web App Toolkit and also where to go for all the tools too: www.microsoft.com/web

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