Levi Fleischman's Blog

One of the handy features of IIS7 is the ability to manage users from within IIS Manager, via the ASP.NET Membership, Roles and Profile providers. This doesn't work if your application is running under an ASP.NET 4.0 application pool, however. To work around this, an administrator can create a virtual application which runs under an ASP.NET 2.0 application pool; this application will inherit the provider settings from the parent website, while still being able to load the user administration a

A particularly overlooked and, for its simplicity, useful feature of ASP.NET AJAX is the WebMethod, which is a server-side method that can be called by client script. The .NET compiler automatically adds client-side methods that take care of the AJAX request, JSON encoding and, to a degree, data type conversion. Sure, you COULD do this using a web service and XmlHttpRequest - but this is a quick-and-easy way of AJAX-enabling standard web form pages.

Microsoft has a long history of misnamed and mis-marketed developer tools. My favorite example is .NET, a relatively simple concept complicated by an initial decision to attach the label to Microsoft's upcoming generation of servers (e.g., "Windows .NET Server 2003"). The latest blunder is ASP.NET AJAX, a useful suite of technologies only partially related to "AJAX" development. Unfortunately, as a result of this some of the more useful aspects of the technology have been overlooked.