Visual Studio comes with some handy (and some not-so-handy) code snippets, but for some reason there isn't one for declaring a method. It isn't that big of a deal, but after a while you might start resenting finishing your method header, then having to type Enter, {, Enter, }, Up, Enter to start the method body. Here's a snippet that will automatically put an open and closing brace after your method declaration, with the cursor ready to go in between:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
  <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">
    <Header...

There's a fascinating little article "Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques" by Ray Djajadinata that delves into how JavaScript implements objects, inheritance, anonymous methods, and even a bit about simulating private properties and namespaces.  This may be relevant if you want greater depth in AJAX, particularly the Microsoft flavor ASP.NET AJAX.  There's a sidebar (by Bertrand Le Roy) about the ASP.NET AJAX OOPS implementation and use of JavaScript to add reflection and other .NET familar constructs including properties, events, enumerations and interfaces.

I recently ran into an unexpected behavior of SSRS while writing a complex report. The report required various calculations that would refer to specific previous groups and details, and I had decided to solve the problem by writing a custom report function that would evaluate on each detail row, saving the information I would need later in a dictionary. My solution worked fine, as long as my custom calculation in a group footer didn't depend on the contents of that group's details. Upon further investigation, I learned something very interesting about the order in which SSRS evaluates group headers, footers, ...

We recently completed a self-paced tutorial for Telerik RadControls.

You can download the self paced tutorial from the Telerik site at:

http://www.telerik.com/support/self-paced-tutorial.aspx

The tutorial addresses the entire suite of RadControls, AJAX, client-side scripting, and custom data-binding techniques.

If you need to monitor your transactional replication with a custom monitoring service, Microsoft has provided some useful tools to help. Recently I was having trouble reliably monitoring my replication, and then I discovered this page.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms146951.aspx

If you’re using transactional replication there is no better way to monitor its health than using your own tracer token. This is just like inserting a tracer token using the replication monitor utility in SQL Server Management Studio.

First you need to create a connection to the server.

   server = new ServerConnection(sci); 

then create a TransPublication ...

You can support docking in your web applications using Telerik's new control suite "Prometheus".  Prometheus is completely redesigned to use Microsoft's ASP.NET Ajax.  The Prometheus docking controls make it easy to define objects that may be dragged and areas where objects may be dragged to.  With docking support you can create web portal sites, "PageFlake" style web pages (where the user can dynamically add controls and drag them around on the page), or even "post-it notes" can be added to the page.  The current state-of-play is that the controls are in beta and have a few quirks, but the performance is very responsive and the look and feel is ...