I have finally decided to rebuild this web site - imar.spaanjaars.com in ASP.NET MVC 2.

A number of people have asked me if I have written articles on using my N-Layer architecture together with ASP.NET MVC. I haven't written anything on MVC yet, but Mike Brind (also an ASP.NET MVP) has done a great job in covering MVC using an N-Layer approach.

If you're following me on Twitter, this is old news. But if you don't, then I am happy to announce that I finished writing my latest book for Wrox: Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB.

As some of you may already know, I recently left the company Design IT where I worked as the Technical Director for the past couple of years. I am not entirely leaving Dynamicweb - the other company I worked for - but won't be working for it on a day-to-day basis anymore. Instead, I'll hang around "behind the scenes" and contribute what I can when necessary.

Visual Studio (2005 and later) has a nice feature to create your own templates that appear in the Add New Item dialog of a web site. This feature enables you to create new files, such as a Web Form, to your liking and then export it as a template so you can base new items on it.

In my (quite possibly very short) series on "things I discovered today in ASP.NET 4", today I am discussing disabling links in ASP.NET 4.

The cool thing about working with beta technology such as Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4 is that you discover something new every day. Today I found the Sorted Styles that enable you to define the looks of sorted columns and headers in an ASP.NET GridView control.

A while ago (actually a long while ago but I didn't have the time to post this earlier), I was approached by Amanda Myer with a question about comparing and sorting BusinessBase objects in collections that inherit BusinessCollectionBase, discussed in my article series on N-Layer design in .NET 3.5.

I am working on an application that ships with documentation in the form of a Windows Compiled Help file. To build the help file I use Sandcastle and the excellent Sandcastle Help File Builder. Building the help file is part of a continuous integration plan so the help file is always up to date.

I was pleasantly surprised when the other day I received a package containing three copies of my book Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 - in Hebrew!

Due to some confusion and delays at the publisher, I ended up with two review copies of Professional Enterprise .NET by Jon Arking and Scott Millett, the book I recently reviewed on this web site.

Prior to reading Professional Enterprise .NET by Jon Arking and Scott Millett, I read Scott's Wrox Blox titled "NHibernate with ASP.NET Problem–Design–Solution" which I found to be an excellent introduction to using NHibernate. If you haven't read that eBook yet, and you're interested in learning NHibernate, check it out at the Wrox web site; at a price of under 10 dollar, it's money very well spent. Considering Scott's writing style and the depth of information found in the Blox, I was having high expectations of the book Professional Enterprise .NET. Having read it now, I can say I am certainly not disappointed.

Some of the Login controls that ship with ASP.NET, such as CreateUserWizard, ChangePassword and PasswordRecovery enable you to send e-mail to your users without writing a lot of code. You just drag and drop a control, assign a mail body template and you're pretty much done. However, as soon as your mail server requires you to use SSL (as, for example, GMail does), things become a little trickier. In this short article I'll show the code and configuration needed to send mail to servers that require SSL.