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Features in ASP.NET 3.5

May 2, 2011 | Posted by: admin | Asp.net, Programming language | 1 Comment

List View Data Control

The List View control combines many aspects of existing data controls. The List View control is useful for displaying data in any repeating structure, similar to the Data List and Repeater controls. Unlike those controls, the List View control supports edit, insert, and delete operations as well as sorting and paging. The paging functionality is provided for List View by the new Data Pager control.

The List View control is a highly customizable control that enables you to use templates and styles to define the control’s UI. Like the Repeater, Data List, and Form View controls, templates in the List View control are not predefined to render specific UI in the browser.

DataPager Control

The DataPager control is used to page through data that is displayed by a control that implements the IPageableItemContainer interface, such as the ListView control. The DataPager control supports built-in paging UI. You can specify the paging UI by using the NumericPagerField object, which lets users select a page by page number. You can also use the NextPreviousPagerField object, which lets users navigate through pages one page at a time, or to jump to the first or last page. Alternatively, you can create custom paging UI by using the TemplatePagerField object.

LinqDataSource Control

The LinqDataSource control exposes Language Integrated Query (LINQ) through the ASP.NET data source control architecture. You use the LinqDataSource control when you are creating a Web page that retrieves or modifies data and you want to use the programming model that is provided by LINQ. You can simplify the code in a Web page by enabling the LinqDataSource control to automatically create the commands for interacting with the data. By using the LinqDataSource control, you can reduce the amount of code that you must write to perform data operations when compared to performing the same operations in the SqlDataSource control or the ObjectDataSource control. When you use the LinqDataSource control, you also benefit by learning only one programming model to interact with different types of data sources.

You can use declarative markup to create a LinqDataSource control that connects to data from either a database or a data collection such as a collection. In the markup, you can specify the criteria for displaying, filtering, ordering, and grouping data. When the data source is an SQL database table, you can also configure a LinqDataSource control to update, insert, and delete data. You do not have to write the SQL commands to perform these tasks. The LinqDataSource class provides an event model that enables you to customize display and update behavior.

ASP.NET Merge Tool

The ASP.NET merge tool (Aspnet_merge.exe) lets you combine and manage assemblies that are created by the ASP.NET pre-compilation tool (Aspnet_compiler.exe). (The merge tool was released earlier as an add-on for Visual Studio 2005,) The merge tool creates single assemblies for the site. You can create an assembly for the whole Web site, for each Web site folder, or for just the files that make up the Web site UI (pages and controls).