ASP.NET 4.5 offer many great feature. Previously, we have discussed about one of new feature on ASP.NET 4.5, Key HTML Editor Features in ASP.NET 4.5. In today post, we will discuss about how to use ListView Control in ASP.NET 4.5

ASP.NET ListView Control has a great features that GridView and Repeater controls had control over the markup. The ListView Control allows you to display the data in various formats including grid format, bulleted list format and in flow format.

How to Insert and Delete Data with the ListView Control

OK, let’s get started

1. Drag the ListView control from data category of the toolbox to default.aspx page and choose the datasource for the control as shown below

2. Configure ListView option from ListViewControl smart tags as shown below

Provide the template information by selecting the desired template and also it allows you to select style for control. It also allows you to enable operations such as inserting and updating.

3. Add some custom styling to the control by adding a class as shown below

<LayoutTemplate>
            <ul id="itemPlaceholderContainer" runat="server" class="ItemStyle">
                <li runat="server" id="itemPlaceholder" />
            </ul>
</LayoutTemplate>

4. Remove the Id columns from ItemTemplate as these mark-ups generated automatically when you configure the control and columns. Repeat the same for InsertItemTemplate.

5. Add the custom styles to item containers as below

.ItemStyle
{
  width: 800px;
  list-style-type:none;
  clear:both;
}

.ItemStyle li
{
  height: 300px;
 width:250px;
 float:left;
}
.ItemStyle li img
{
 width:180px;
margin: 10px 20px 10px 0;
}

6. Run your application and you’ll see the result

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This articles describe one of the newest runtime features in ASP.NET 4.5. I will describe about Muticore Just-In-Compiler (JIT) in the .NET framework 4.5.

Multicore Just-in-Time (JIT) 

In the .NET framework 4.5, Microsoft has introduced an enhancement of the pervious JIT compiler by making it a Multicore JIT compiler, that runs on the two cores and supports parallelism in the compilation process in order to improve the launch performance during application startup.

From the developer point of view the Multicore JIT is a very cool runtime feature in .NET Framework 4.5 to improve their productivity and speed up the overall performance of an application. Now the developer can benefit from multicore processors to speed up the application compilation process.

The Multicore JIT compiler works in parallel with two cores. Because of the two cores, Multicore JIT can make your application start the process faster at startup. Multicore JIT provides significant improvements to Web based applications as well as Desktop Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications.

Working of Multicore JIT

Nowadays, every PC has at least two cores, so the JIT compiler is built to make the investment worthwhile. Using the Multicore JIT, methods are compiled on two CPUs so that the application is able to reach the end of its startup execution quickly.

The compilation process is done in two cores that run in parallel executing the Multicore JIT compiler. The more effective Multicore JIT will reduce the startup time of an .NET application. 

Multicore JIT uses the two modes of operation.

Recording mode: It is the first mode, when JIT compiles the entire program and creates a JIT profile using a profile optimization class and saves the profile that was executed to a given folder to disk.

Playback mode: This mode is used when the application is launched subsequently. Playback mode is used to load the profile that was saved during the Recording mode from the disk using the background JIT thread in order to support the main thread.

The feature works by the JIT compiling the methods likely to be executed based on profiles created during previous compilations, that will runs on a separate processor core taking care of the JIT Compilation while the main execution thread runs on a different core.

In the ideal case, the second core quickly gets ahead of the mainline execution of the application, so whenever a method is required it is already compiled. As a result, the main thread doesn't need to do as much compilation, and your application launches faster.

In order to know which methods to compile, the feature generates profile data in the Recording mode that keeps track of the methods that are executed. Then the next time the application runs the call will look for that profile and when it finds it then it plays back; that means it starts compiling all the methods that was saved for that profile.

Note: MultiCore JIT requires a multicore machine to take advantage of its algorithms otherwise the CLR will ignore it on single core machines.

How to enable Multicore JIT in an .NET 4.5 application.

You can use this feature of the runtime to significantly improve the startup times of both client applications and Web sites in .NET framework 4.5.

Since ASP.NET applications run in a hosted environment, this feature is turned on for these applications automatically. Therefore JIT compiling using multiple cores is enabled by default in ASP.NET 4.5 and Silverlight 5.

But, if you want to disable this feature in your ASP.NET 4.5 applications then write the following code in the web.config file.

<system.web>
  <compilation profileGuidedOptimizations="None" />
</system.web>

But in a Windows based application, you will need to enable Multicore JIT feature explicitly.

Let's see how.

It is simple to use Multicore JIT, there is a class in the .NET Framework named "System.Runtime.ProfileOptimization" that you can use to start profiling at the entry point of your application. 

Optimization Profilers

The ProfileOptimization is a new type introduced in .Net 4.5 to improve the startup performance of application domains in applications that require the just-in-time (JIT) compiler by performing background compilation of methods that are likely to be executed, based on profiles created during previous compilations.

See the MSDN documentation for more information.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-IN/library/system.runtime.profileoptimization.aspx

The two methods that you can call at the entry point of your application.

SetProfileRoot: This method is used to specify the root path, where to save the JIT profile compiled information for optimization.

StartProfile: This method is used to start Multcore just in-time compilation.

You must write the following code in your application constructor in order to enable Multicore JIT.

public App()
{

 ProfileOptimization.SetProfileRoot(@"C:\MyAppFolder");
 ProfileOptimization.StartProfile("Startup.Profile");

}

Now that's all to enable the Multicore feature in your application; the rest of the work will be handled by the CLR automatically.

Here I will discuss with you one of them, the feature of new the FileUpload control in ASP.NET 4.5. The FileUpload control in ASP.NET extends it's functionality by supporting the upload of multiple files at once.

Prior to this latest version, the FileUpload control only supported a single file at a time, but version ASP.NET version 4.5 solves this issue very well.

Now, the FileUpload control is built to support HTML 5, therefore it is only supported in browsers supporting HTML5. For other browsers it will work like a normal file upload control in ASP.NET.

A new attribute that comes with the ASP.NET 4.5 FileUplaod control is that:

AllowMultiple: It takes either true or false.

In order to support multiple file uploads, set AllowMulitple="true" other than false.

This attribute is for the browsers that support multiple files to be uploaded and for this purpose it renders the necessary HTML5 attribute.

In addition to this control, some new properties have been included to support code-behind coding.

HasFiles: Check whether FileUpload control has multiple files or not.

PostedFiles: Basically used to get all the files from the FileUpload control in the iteration.

Both properties will help to work with the mulitple selected files in Code-Behind coding (C#).

After the preceding overview of the theory, let's proceed to implement this cool feature in an application.

First, in the ASPX page declare a FileUpload control.

Remember: Set the AllowMultiple attribute to "true" to enable the multiple file upload feature.

<asp:FileUpload runat="server" ID="UploadImages" AllowMultiple="true" />

Now, the following HTML is rendered in the browser:

<input type="file" multiple="multiple" name="FileUpload1" id="FileUpload1" />

The AllowMultiple attribute renders multiple attributes in the HTML 5.

The complete code for .aspx file will looks like:

<div>
    <asp:FileUpload runat="server" ID="UploadImages" AllowMultiple="true" />
    <asp:Button runat="server" ID="uploadedFile" Text="Upload" OnClick="uploadFile_Click" />
    <asp:Label ID="listofuploadedfiles" runat="server" />
</div>

You will see that I have attached a button's click event. So, now start to write C# for this.

In the following code I will use HasFiles and PostedFiles properties that we will see in the preceding section.

protected void uploadFile_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   if (UploadImages.HasFiles)
   {
       foreach (HttpPostedFile uploadedFile in UploadImages.PostedFiles)
       {
           uploadedFile.SaveAs(System.IO.Path.Combine(Server.MapPath("~/Images/"),
           uploadedFile.FileName)); listofuploadedfiles.Text += String.Format("{0}<br />", uploadedFile.FileName);
       }
   }
} 

In the code above I have saved each image in the Images folder of the web application from the PostedFiles collection.

Now, run the application and see the output.

Select multiple files and click on the Upload button and it will show you the list of files that have been uploaded.