50 Useful Tools and Resources For Web Designers

Smashing Magazine, once again collected 50 most useful tools for you if you are a web developer/designer. This is another great effort by Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine.

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Authenticate ASP.Net application using Social Sites Credentials

James Senior's blog details the new social API Web Application Toolkit for .NET web developers. If you’re not familiar with Web Application Toolkits (WATs) then here’s a summary:

FREE Web App Toolkits help ASP.NET web developers complete common web development tasks and quickly add new features to your apps. Whether it’s Bing Maps integration or adding social capabilities to your site, there’s a toolkit for you. For the full list of Web Application Toolkits check out this website.

 Here is a summary of the work they've done in this release:

• Added a new Social API Web Application Toolkit
• Updated all the WATs to be compatible with Visual Studio 2010

The code examples can be found here.

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WebMatrix and a PHP tutorial

During the last week, MS announced the launch of all new tools for developers to ease them creating and deploying websites.

• IIS Developer Express: A lightweight web-server that is simple to setup, free, works with all versions of Windows, and is compatible with the full IIS 7.5.
  
• SQL Server Compact Edition: A lightweight file-based database that is simple to setup, free, can be embedded within your ASP.NET applications, supports low-cost hosting environments, and enables databases to be optionally migrated to SQL Server.
  
• ASP.NET “Razor”: A new view-engine option for ASP.NET that enables a code-focused templating syntax optimized around HTML generation.  You can use “Razor” to easily embed VB or C# within HTML.  It’s syntax is easy to write, simple to learn, and works with any text editor.
  

Together they are termed as WebMatrix, the all new tool for development and deployment integrating the above mentioned technologies. This new tool, WebMatrix, and the first preview beta of it is now available for download.

As usual ScottGu's blog is detailing the use of WebMatrix and creating simple applications utilizing these tools. While Brian Swan is leveraging the power of WebMatrix to another step by explaining how to create PHP websites using WebMatrix.

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