Vlad Hrybok's Tech Notes

CodePlex.com - a relatively new open-source collaboration platform from Microsoft that came to replace old and cranky GotDotNet - has impressed me quite a lot. Of course it closely resembles SourceForge.net, with the main difference of CodePlex being underpinned by Team Foundation Server (TFS) for source control and issue tracking functionality.

People often don't realize that TFS client that integrates into Visual Studio 2005 can be downloaded and is completely free.

I currently host a couple of projects on Codeplex:

• MS AJAX 1.0 Setup Project Prerequisite for Visual Studio 2005.
  It makes MS AJAX redistributable by including it into the Setup.exe bootstrapper prerequisite manifest. The prerequisite integrates nicely with Visual Studio 2005.
  
  
• Simple ASP.NET 2.0/C# MP3 Player.
  This application demonstrates a possibility of building a web application for home users. It includes redistributable UltiDev Cassini Web Server for ASP.NET 2.0 to not make the application dependent on the presence of IIS on users machines. The app is AJAXed to minimize music interruptions and uses Flash player to playback MP3 to avoid dependency on any particular media player. 

After releasing build 1.7 of my open-source redistributable ASP.NET-based MP3 player application, I used it for a while and I am pretty happy with its stability and functionality. The design goal for the project was to demo a concept of an easily-redistributable web application for SOHO market. With unquestionable popularity of web-based applications in the business world, removing complexity of the web hosting infrastructure to make home web applications possible as a category is poised to be the next big thing.

MS AJAX is great, but if you wanted to make an installable application with it, there was no way of including AJAX into your MSI-based setup project. I made a Visual Studio manifest that makes MS AJAX Extensions a Visual Studio Setup Project prerequisite:

To AJAX-enable your existing ASP.NET 2.0 application follow this video. It takes only a few minutes and essentially makes you create a dummy new Ajax-enabled ASP.NET application and then copy & paste relevant pieces of its web.config file into your application's web.config.

If you are planning to use Ajax Control Toolkit, then instead of creating dummy project from the "ASP.NET AJAX-Enabled Web Site" Visual Studio project template, create the dummy project using "AJAX Control Toolkit Web Site" template. Its web.config has additional entry in the <controls> section of the web.config that will be necessary for your application.