ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 is coming soon, but one of the features of ASP.NET that you can use TODAY is support for Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Facebook logins out of the box with ASP.NET templates. I show how OAuth in ASP.NET works in this 5 minute video. We are also continuing to look at ways to make membership easier in coming versions of ASP.NET like including things like this out of the box.

I've talked before in presentations that the ASP.NET and Web Tools team has been slowly externalizing pieces of ASP.NET. You've seen it in many pieces of the ASP.NET runtime moving into NuGet while also being open sourced, and you've seen it as we've moved big chunks of the "tooling" (that means the menus and dialogs you interact within Visual Studio when using ASP.NET) into external installers.

I really enjoy working on and thinking about mobile websites. There's something about making an experience great on a pocket supercomputer phone that is so much more satisfying than a desktop. I actually got this blog looking nice on mobile devices back in 2006 when nobody was mobile except doctors and, well, all of us techies here on the blogs.

Did you notice the release of WebMatrix 2? WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool introduced in 2010. It's focus is on simplifying the web development experience for ASP.NET and PHP, and more recently node. Rob Conery actually turned me onto WebMatrix and we use it for the This Developer's Life Podcast website. I recommend it for students, designers, and web pros that either don't need or don't want the whole Visual Studio experience. It's also a nice companion to Sublime Text 2. There's even Git extensions, LESS, easy deployment and more for the front end developer.

Did you enjoy my recent post on ASP.NET MVC DisplayTemplate and EditorTemplates for Entity Framework DbGeography Spatial Types and it's associated GIANT URL?

Modeling Binding and EditorTemplates...for ASP.NET Web Forms?

DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplates are a great way in ASP.NET MVC to keep things DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself.) That means I can just write EditorFor() calls like this:

@Html.EditorFor(model => model.Location)   

See how I didn't say "TextBoxFor" or "MapFor"? You say EditorFor and it makes the right choice. If the type is called DbGeography then it will look for a Editor Template at ~/Shared/EditorTemplates/DbGeography.cshtml. It's a nice feature of ASP.NET MVC that folks don't use enough.

A few people have said that they have noticed problems the new iPhone/iPad Google Chrome apps as well as trouble with applications that use hosted Safari inside of UIWebView (which is what Chrome is) or apps that host a website in PhoneGap. If you're using FormsAuthentication (in WebForms or MVC, doesn't matter) then Google Chrome for iOS might switch FormsAuth to Cookieless mode, which sucks for everyone.

This has been fixed in .NET 4.5 and you won't see this problem if you have .NET 4.5 installed, even if you're running a .NET 4 application. For example, Bing.com is running .NET 4 applications under .NET 4.5 RC and wouldn't see this. If you install 4.5 (now or later) ASP.NET will always assume clients support cookies.

If you want to tell ASP.NET 4.0 or earlier that EVERY browser supports cookies for FormsAuth you can do ONE of these things:

1. Change Generic.Browser for your app (or machine)

Make a file called generic.browser in a folder called App_Browsers and put this in it:

I talked about some new features that have snuck made their way into the free version of Visual Studio for Web. One of the more useful ones is the Browser Chooser that allows you to quickly launch debug sessions with different browsers from within VS. I've actually been pushing on this for about 18 months, and even blogged about it in August of 2010 in "how to change the default browser in Visual Studio programmatically with PowerShell and possibly poke yourself in the eye."

In Visual Studio 11 Beta you get a nice dropdown with all the browsers (plus the new Page Inspector).

However, I got a good comment from blog reader Abhijit who said:

Site Specific Browsers aren't a really new idea. In 2005 there was an app called Bubbles I ran for a while that would let you run a website with minimal "browser chrome." Mozilla Prism (né WebRunner) is a Firefox add-in that does a similar thing. Google Chrome includes the idea of Application Shortcuts. The idea of all this is that some web apps are really applications and you think about them as applications. For me, I think of Gmail and Facebook and Twitter and Basecamp as applications not necessarily as browser tabs. The notion of Site-Specific Browsers is definitely arriving.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta (IE9) is out now and includes a featured called "Site Pinning" which is a effectively Site Specific Browsers. It's integrated nicely with Windows 7. It's easy for you as a developer or site owner to add these features to your site.

Here's the basic idea from a markup perspective from a Channel 9 example:

I've heard and seen lots of complaints about how it's hard to set the default browser that Visual Studio launches when you launch a debug session for a website.

Step 0 - Adequate

Folks spend time hunting around the Tools|Options dialog in Visual Studio looking for setting. They eventually realize it's not in there at all, but instead you have to right-click on an ASPX page within a Web Project and click "Browse With..."

From this dialog you can click Set Default, which is totally obvious, right my daimies? Um, no. This doesn't work for ASP.NET MVC people who use other view engines and might not even have a .ASPX file in their solution. Plus, it's slow and irritating. Sa da tay.

Do you like a big pile of source code? Well, there is an imperial buttload of source in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit. It's actually a 178 meg download, which is insane. Perhaps start your download now and get it in the morning when you get up. It's extremely well put together and I say Kudos to the folks that did it. They are better people than I.

I like to explore it while watching TV myself and found myself looking through tonight. I checked my blog and while I thought I'd shared this with you before, Dear Reader, I hadn't. My bad, because it's pure gold. With C# and VB, natch.

Here's an outline of what's inside. I've heard of folks setting up lunch-time study groups and going through each section.