visual studio 2012 and .net 4.5 expert development cookbook

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Visual Studio 2012

and .NET 4.5 Expert

Development Cookbook

Over 40 recipes for successfully mixing the powerful

capabilities of .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012

Abhishek Sur

PUBLISHING

professional expertise distilled

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

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Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert

Development Cookbook

Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

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Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: April 2013

Production Reference: 1050413

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-84968-670-9

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Cover Image by Siddhart Ravishankar ([email protected])

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Credits

Author

Abhishek Sur

Reviewers

Carlos Hulot

Ahmed Ilyas

Sergiy Suchok

Ken Tucker

Acquisition Editor

Kartikey Pandey

Lead Technical Editor

Susmita Panda

Technical Editors

Jalasha D'costa

Amit Ramadas

Project Coordinator

Anish Ramchandani

Proofreader

Claire Cresswell-Lane

Indexer

Tejal Soni

Graphics

Aditi Gajjar

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

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About the Authors

Abhishek Sur is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev since 2011. He is an architect in the

.NET platform. He has profound theoretical insight and years of hands on experience in

different .NET products and languages. Over the years, he has helped developers throughout

the world with his experience and knowledge. He owns a Microsoft User Group in Kolkata

named KolkataGeeks, and regularly organizes events and seminars in various places for

spreading .NET awareness. A renowned public speaker, voracious reader, and technology

buff, his main interest lies in exploring the new realms of .NET technology and coming up with

priceless write-ups on the unexplored domains of .NET. He is associated with the Microsoft

Insider list on WPF and C#, and is in constant touch with product group teams. He holds a

Masters degree in Computers along with various other certificates to his credit.

On the web, Abhishek is a freelance content producer, developer, and a site administrator. His

website abhisheksur.com guides both budding and experienced developers to understand

the details of languages and latest technology. He enjoys a huge fan following on social

networks. You can reach him at [email protected], or get online updates from

Facebook or Twitter @abhi2434.

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Acknowledgement

Writing this book would not have been possible without the help of many people. Knowledge

is a priceless alternative of time. While writing this book, I have spent a considerable amount

of time in reading a lot of online journals, documentations, and blogs to explain and present

concepts and ideas in a more lucid way.

First of all, I am extremely thankful to the entire Packt Publishing team for their continuous

help. I would like to thank Anish Ramchandani and Susmita Panda, who have been very

supportive and helped me to meet the deadlines. My most sincere thanks to my reviewers

Carlos Hulot, Ahmed Illyas, Sergiy Suchok, and Ken Tucker for reviewing every line I wrote

for this book, which resulted in bringing so many positive changes in this book. Last but not

the least, a lot of thanks to Amit Ramadas and Jalasha D'costa for editing the chapters of

this book.

I would also like to thank my colleague cum friends Shibatosh, Ranjit, Pallab, Ayan, Malini, and

other members of our group for their continuous support and motivation to write this book. I

am also thankful for being in touch with Mr. Raj Goswami, CEO and Mr. D. K Goswami, Director

of BuildFusion, India. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to Anoop Madhusudan,

Abhijit Jana, Kunal Chowdhury, Dhananjay Kumar, Karthikayan Anabarasan, Lohith, Abhishek

Kant, and Shivprasad Koirala for their continuous help and motivation.

I would also like to acknowledge my fiancée Riya for helping me and motivating me to write

better. I want to dedicate this book to her.

Being a community lover I used to write a lot of blogs and articles, but this is the first time

I am putting my experience and efforts in the form of a book. I am really thankful to all my

readers and followers all over the world who loved my blogs and hopefully they will love

this book too.

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About the Reviewers

Carlos Hulot has been working in the IT area for more than 20 years in different

capabilities, from software development, project management to IT marketing product

development and management. Carlos has worked for multinational companies like Royal

Philips Electronics, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Microsoft. Currently, Carlos is working as an

independent IT consultant. Carlos is a Computer Science lecturer at two Brazilian universities.

Carlos holds a Ph.D in Computer Science and Electronics from the University of Southampton,

UK, and a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Ahmed Ilyas has a bachelor's degree in engineering from Napier University in Edinburgh,

Scotland, and has majored in software development. He has 15 years of professional

experience in software development.

After leaving Microsoft, he ventured into setting up his consultancy company offering the

best possible solutions for a magnitude of industries and providing real-world answers

to problems. They only use the Microsoft stack to build these technologies, to be able to

bring in best practice, patterns, and software to their client base. Thus, enabling long term

stability and compliance in the ever changing software industry and also improving software

developers around the globe—pushing the limits in technology as well as develop themselves

to become better.

This went on to being awarded the MVP in C# three times by Microsoft for providing excellence

and independent real-world solutions to problems that developers face.

With the breadth and depth of knowledge he as obtained not only from his research but

also with the valuable wealth of information and research at Microsoft, the motivation

and inspirations come from this, with 90 percent of the world using at least one form of

Microsoft technology.

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Ahmed Ilyas has worked for a number of clients and employers. With the great reputation that

he has, this has resulted in having a large client base for his consultancy company, Sandler

Ltd (UK) which includes clients from different industries from, media to medical and beyond.

Some clients have included him on their "approved contractors/consultants" list, which

include ICS Solution Ltd and he has been placed on their "DreamTeam" portal and also CODE

Consulting/EPS Software (www.codemag.com, based in the US).

Ahmed Ilyas has also been involved, in the past, in reviewing books for Packt Publishing and

wishes to thank them for the opportunity once again.

I would like to thank the author/publisher of this book for giving me the

great honor and privilege in reviewing the book. I would also like to thank

my client base and especially Microsoft Corporation and my colleagues over

there for enabling me to become a reputable leader as a software developer

in the industry, which is my passion.

Sergiy Suchok graduated in 2004 with honors from the Faculty of Cybernetics, Taras

Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine), and has since then been keen on

information technology. He currently works in the banking area and has a PhD in Economics.

Sergiy is the coauthor of more than 45 articles and has participated in more than 20 scientific

and practical conferences devoted to economic and mathematical modeling. He is a member

of the New Atlantis Youth Public Organization (newatlantida.org.ua) and devotes his

leisure time to environmental protection issues, historical, and patriotic development and

popularization of a grateful attitude towards the Earth. He also writes poetry and short stories

and makes macramé.

I would like to thank my wife and my young daughter for their patience and

understanding while reviewing.

Ken Tucker is a web developer for Sea World, and has been a Microsoft MVP since October

2003. In his spare time he enjoys writing Windows Phone and Windows Store apps.

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Table of Contents

Preface 1

Chapter 1: Introduction to Visual Studio IDE Features 7

Introduction 7

Identifying the various components of Visual Studio IDE 8

Working with Solution Explorer and Class View 14

Working with the main workspace area of IDE 18

Navigating between code inside the IDE 22

Extending Visual Studio templates 29

Using Code Snippets in Visual Studio 39

Using Smart Tags and Refactor in Visual Studio 45

Chapter 2: Basics of .NET Programs and Memory Management 51

Introduction 52

Inspecting the internal structure of a .NET assembly 53

Working with different types of assemblies 60

Inspecting the major components of a .NET program 70

How to work with custom configurations for an application 75

How to disassemble an assembly 81

Securing your code from reverse engineering by using obfuscation 89

Understanding .NET garbage collection and memory management 96

How to find memory leaks in a .NET program 104

Solutions to 10 common mistakes made by developers while writing code 115

Chapter 3: Asynchronous Programming in .NET 123

Introduction 123

Introduction to Threading and Asynchronous Threading patterns 125

Working with Event-based asynchronous pattern and BackgroundWorker 135

Working with thread locking and synchronization 139

Lock statement using task-based parallelism in concurrent programming 147

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ii

Table of Contents

Working with async and await patterns 155

Working with Task Parallel Library data flows 165

Chapter 4: Enhancements to ASP.NET 173

Introduction 173

Understanding major performance boosters in ASP.NET web applications 174

How to work with statically-typed model binding in ASP.NET applications 185

Introduction to HTML5 and CSS3 in ASP.NET applications 189

Working with jQuery in Visual Studio with ASP.NET 205

Working with task-based asynchronous HttpHandlers and HttpModules 211

New enhancements to various Visual Studio editors 214

Chapter 5: Enhancements to WPF 223

Introduction 223

Getting started with WPF and its major enhancements in .NET 4.5 226

Building applications using MVVM pattern supported by WPF 234

Using the Ribbon User Interface in WPF 260

Using WeakEvent pattern in WPF 272

Chapter 6: Building Touch-sensitive Device Applications

in Windows 8 275

Introduction 275

Building your first Windows 8 style tiles application

using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS 278

Writing a library for WinJS 294

Building your first Windows 8 style tiles application using C# and XAML 297

Working with storage files in Windows 8 style tiles applications 306

Understanding the application life cycle of WinRT applications 312

Chapter 7: Communication and Sharing using Windows 8 325

Introduction 325

How to enable app to app sharing inside a Windows 8 environment 326

Working with notification and services 330

How to perform background transfers of data in Windows 8 style tiles

applications 348

Index 355

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Preface

Moving through the last few decades, from being the new kid on the block, .NET has turned

itself into the most talked about young thing on the IT horizon. More and more people are

getting inclined to use .NET, to make a mark in their career and also, more and more, clients

are coming to .NET to accomplish their dreams. The recent buzz about C# being the best

programming language has now made the world of developers very eager to build .NET

applications. As the crowd is growing in the developers arena, there is always a need to

have a clear perception on how things work and ways to make things better.

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development Cookbook mainly focuses on things

that you need to know in those crunch situations as a developer. It also tries to feed you

with as much details as it can, and covers as much technological domain in the world of

.NET. The book is written in the form of recipes with step-by-step tutorials on every topic

where the developer accompanies the author in this wonderful journey into the known and

hitherto unknown realms of .NET. The recipes in the book, which are mostly sought out by

developers on the Internet, are chosen in such a way so as to practically demonstrate them

and not restrict developers only to them, but to also expose the other unexplored domains on

the same topic to give them a clear view of the whole picture. There is a special section for

each recipes bearing the heading There's more…, which always focuses on giving you extra

knowledge on things that you might have missed without it. By the time you come to the end

of this journey, you will feel the comfort and enjoy the confidence that a clear understanding

of the insight of .NET gives you.

The book is a practical handbook that could give you optimal utilization of time for knowledge.

It separately presents the topics very precisely and elaborates the same which you can rely

on for a deeper look. It explains the recipes with proper sample code blocks that might make

the usage of each topic very clear and make you utilize the final source code while writing your

real-world applications. The examples taken for this book will clear your understanding of how

things exactly work for that particular recipe and also adapt you as a developer to make use

of the same source code in your production environment efficiently and quickly. If you want to

utilize your busy schedule to explore all the necessary ongoing technology in the market, this

book is best suited for you.

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Preface

2

The book focuses on giving you:

f Maximum utilization of time for learning

f Major insights into ongoing technologies such as Visual Studio 2012, .NET 4.5, ASP.

NET, Windows 8 Applications, Windows Presentation Foundation, HTML5, jQuery,

memory management, and so on

f Practical examples on procedures to create real-world applications

f Step-by-step examples to create simple applications based on heads

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Visual Studio IDE Features, starts with a basic introduction to Visual

Studio IDE and gives the developer insights into how to increase productivity of development

using a common set of tools and features present inside the IDE.

Chapter 2, Basics of .NET Programs and Memory Management, introduces the intersection

of a .NET program and its core components. It dives deep in demonstrating the .NET

infrastructure with detailed explanation of memory management and related techniques.

Chapter 3, Asynchronous Programming in .NET, focuses on introducing all existing techniques

to deal with threading in .NET followed by the newer patterns that takes over the existing

working principles with in-depth explanation on their working principles.

Chapter 4, Enhancements to ASP.NET, gives you an introduction to latest enhancements of

ASP.NET 4.5 with HTML5 and jQuery. It also introduces some of the performance boosters

available in .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 with ASP.NET.

Chapter 5, Enhancements to WPF, introduces the enhancements to WPF 4.5 and the major

components of WPF. It gives a practical implementation of MVVM based WPF application

covering all the facets required to program in WPF environment.

Chapter 6, Building Touch-sensitive Device Applications in Windows 8, introduces the new

programming model for developing Windows 8 style tiles application. It gives a step-by-step

introduction in how to program using HTML5 and JavaScript as well as WPF and C# for

developing Windows 8 applications.

Chapter 7, Communication and Sharing Using Windows 8, focuses on how to implement

network-enabled applications in Windows 8 with step by step implementation on how sharing

and searching works inside the Windows 8 environment.

Appendix, .NET languages and its Construct, focuses on giving insights on how languages

work in the .NET framework and C# with details explanation with examples of various features

of C# language.

You can download this Appendix from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/

files/downloads/6709EN_Appendix_NET_Languages_and_its_Construct.pdf

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Preface

3

What you need for this book

The basic software requirements for this book are as follows:

f Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 and higher

f Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express or higher editions

f Windows 8 Operating System (especially to work with Chapter 6 and 7)

f Latest web browsers

Who this book is for

The purpose of this book is to give you ready made steps in the form of recipes to develop

common tasks that, as a developer, you might often be required to access. The book utilizes

its chapters skillfully to provide as much information as it can and also with as much detail

as necessary to kick start the subject. The book also delivers in-depth analysis of some

advanced section of the subject to get you to expertise level. If you are a starter in the

development environment and want to get expertise on ongoing technologies in the market,

this book is ideal for you. Even for architects and project managers, the book can be a guide

to enrich their existing knowledge.

The book uses C# and Visual Studio 2012 with Windows 8 (as the operating system) in the

examples. Even though the book does not require any knowledge to start, it expects some

basic theoretical and practical overall experience on the subjects to understand the recipes.

The book bridges the gap between a normal developer to an expert architect.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of

information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The requestValidationMode attribute

of httpRuntime defines how the request is validated to the server before calling

HttpPipeline."

A block of code is set as follows:

(function($){

$.fn.extend({

Value1 : 20,

myMethod : function(msg){

alert(msg + "value : " + this.Value1);

}

});

})(JQuery);

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Preface

4

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Install-Package Microsoft.Web.Optimization

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in

menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "you can also open Nuget

package manager by right-clicking on the references folder of the project and select Add

Library Package Reference".

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to [email protected], and

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