SubSonic 1.0.6 Released

Merry Christmas... SubSonic 1.0.6 was released on Tuesday.

No change log yet but we'll just have to wait and see.

Taking your ASP.NET app offline

Something really interesting and useful for ASP.NET is the ability to take your application completely offline. As a matter of fact when you publish your website Visual Studio 2005 takes your application offline. So even if you go to mysite.com/here/there.aspx you will still get an "application offline" message. The best part is that you can customize the message.

All you have to do is upload a "app_offline.htm" file to your website. Thats it! You can create your own custom message in the htm file. There's no special tags to use, the file itself lets .NET know you want your app offline. Just remember to take it off ;)

If you want more details, including an example file, check out the 15 Seconds article: Taking an ASP.NET 2.0 Application Offline.

ASP.NET AJAX under the hood

Great article by Omar Al Zabir on some advanced tips & tricks using AJAX. Omar is the architect behind Pageflakes.com and uses ASP.NET / AJAX as the foundation. If you're using AJAX, much like I am, you will find the article very useful. It goes into batch calls, timeouts, caching, javascript tricks, and a few other items.

One thing I found very useful was how Omar implemented a "retry" feature when doing an AJAX call. This is exactly (or very close to) what I have implemented in my StickTo application. So go on and take a look. And in the near future I'll be posting some AJAX tips of my own including: displaying a progress bar without an update panel and how to use JSON de/serialization from client/server and back.