Yesterday I were working on a ASP.NET project and needed to add a new Web User Control. I right clicked the project and went to Add New Item. I looked for the Web User Control, but couldn’t find it. I looked again, I asked a co-working, I search for “web” and “user control” and nothing were found.

I then started googling for the problem and found a simple post that told me exactly how to fix this.

Close all your instances of Visual Studio.
Open Visual Studio Command Prompt.

Type in the following and hit Enter.
devenv /installvstemplates
Wait for this to complete.
When it’s done, open VS2010 again and you should now have all your control templates again.

Happy coding!

I just saw a discussion on my WebMonitor application on Codeplex, that a Chris Blankenship had asked me some questions and wrote an article on how he had improved my application.

His observation is really good. Normally WebMonitor uses a GET request to see if the web site is up. The reason I did that originally were because, as Chris also writes, that I sometimes need to look at the actual HTML on a particular web page.
What Chris has done is to change this to a HEAD request, as it saves data traffic and is more friendly to the server. In his article he writes how he did that, which is actually pretty easy.

Go and read his article, it pretty good and take a look at WebMonitor of cause :)

I will try to find the time to include this fix and make a new release.

- Enjoy!

I came a cross this competition the other day and it’s actually pretty interesting for many reasons. Apparently Dr. Dobb's and Microsoft Silverlight have teamed up to launch a game competition called Dr. Dobb's Challenge Deuce. http://dobbschallenge2.com/
Users can win cash and prizes for submitting new in-game levels or creating a new game by modding the code. This is actually one very interesting part, both coders and non-coders can participate. Non-coders can make new levels in the browser by using a build-in game editor (haven’t tryed it my self yet), and normal game developers can download the source code and start modding it.

This is a really great idea and when you have tryed the game out, you will notice that it runs pretty smooth and cool which, by it self, is reason enough to download the source and see how they do it.

It’s things like this that will make Silverlight (as a plugin) and Silverlight as a gaming platform a success.

- Enjoy!

I just found these really nice tips from Scott Hanselman himself. It's sort of a "check-list" for what you need to know before going to the stage.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TipsForPreparingForATechnicalPresentation.aspx

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/11TopTipsForASuccessfulTechnicalPresentation.aspx

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TechnicalPresentationsBePreparedForAbsoluteChaos.aspx 

Enjoy - and thank Scott for the tips :)

Microsoft just published the source code for the controls that ships with the Silverlight 2.0 runtime. This means that you can now create your own versions, which means that you can modify them and fix bug (if any) of the real "native" silverlight 2.0 controls.

Sweet!

See more at SilverLite