Development
Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting at DevConnections at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV. I had a total blast interacting with attendees, fellow speakers and checking out the vendor hall. The logistics for the conference were remarkable given there was approximately 2,800 people in attendance! For those of you that attended my presentations, thank you! I hope you were able to get something out of them; I had a blast presenting and interacting with you in each of them. Also, I had a great time with the open spaces sessions. There was lots of good...
One of the new features of the Dependency Inject (DI) components from MVC3 is something called a IFilterProvider. The purpose of this component is to provide a simpler way for MVC applications to interact with filters (action, exception, result, etc.). In the previous versions, trying to achieve something like providing DI support to filters was doable, it just required deeper integration into the MVC runtime. The IFilterProvider interface is defined as: As you can see, it’s a pretty simple interface that can enable lots of opportunities if used in the right context. The MVC bits ship with an...
I’ve been getting different questions via emails, DMs, IMs, etc. that can be summed up by this question: Once MVC3 comes out, will I need MVC Turbine anymore to provide Dependency Injection (DI) support to ASP.NET MVC? There is really no clear answer for this, so all I can say is, it depends :) For those of you that are not aware, MVC3 has added better support for using Dependency Injection (DI) within different parts of your application. This newly added support applies to: Controllers ...
Recently MVC Turbine has had a lot attention, so I wanted to take the time to say “Thank You!” to those of you that have help promote it, use it, provided feed or giving it a look. Artwork In particular I wanted to say a HUGE THANKS to Hugo Bonacci (@hugoware) for donating his artistic talent and creating these awesome logos for the project. Thanks for putting up with my many draft changes and requests. The logos are awesome and I thank you for providing such a great asset to the project! ...
Last week, it was tweeted that MVC Turbine v2.1 had reached RTM. Release Notes The released bits can be downloaded from the main project site; the features it provides are (same as v2.0 RTM plus these): Instance Registration to IServiceLocator You can now add an instance of a type to the underlying container so you can address the single instance context. IServiceLocator is registered into the container ...
First of, I would like to give a huge thanks to Phil Haack for his awesome blog post, Sending JSON to an ASP.NET MVC Action Method Argument, which shows how really flexible the ASP.NET MVC can be. Also, I owe him a beer next time I see him for saving my behind and providing an actual solution to my original POSTing JSON Data to MVC Controllers post.
Namaste, Phil!
Client-side JSON ‘Serialization’
In Phil’s post, he mentions that using a model binder falls short because of the lack of validation support:
There’s one key problem with using a model binder to accept JSON....
I’m sure that some (if not many) of you know this little approach for posting data from a JSON POST action (through jQuery) to an MSMVC Controller. If you don’t, keep reading otherwise go read something more important :)
Note:
As Phil noted, what the title should read is Receiving JSON Data from An Action Method, so my apologies for being misleading on the title. To see how you can actually post JSON data, check out Phil's Sending JSON to an ASP.NET MVC Action Method Argument post.
What are you trying to do?
While working on MSMVC sites, I (like many of you) find...
Great minds think alike … or is it that fools seldom differ? I forget… In any note, all I can say that in this case it took three people’s work to make this possible in order to bring simplicity to the masses. Please note that this piece is a work in progress and we’re still trying to figure out how things will be at the end for these two frameworks to interact. Also, if you want more code, I suggest you check out the Fubu sample for MVC Turbine. What does it all mean, Basil? I’m not going...
The MVC Turbine bits are now compiled against ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 which runs on .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008. You can get the bits by going to the CodePlex site. Please note that this the same feature release as MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM. The following is compiled and upgraded to work with .NET3.5 in VS2008: VS2008 Templates Runtime binaries Feature Samples Nerd Dinner Sample Okonau Sample Again, as I mentioned before, the main...
The MVC Turbine bits are now compiled against ASP.NET MVC 2 RC which runs on .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008. You can get the bits by going to the CodePlex site. Please note that this the same feature release as MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM. The following is compiled and upgraded to work with .NET3.5 in VS2008: Runtime binaries Feature Samples Nerd Dinner Sample Okonau Sample Again, as I mentioned before, the main development will take place onVS2010 and...
A few days ago, I blogged a response to Rob Conery’s question entitled, Why MVC Turbine? Since then, Rob has been so kind to send me an email saying Thanks for the blog post, but…Dude, I still don’t get it. Help me reach the ‘aha!’ moment. As I told Rob, after I re-reading the blog post and the tone it had, I whole heartedly agree with him: The post did not answer his question. So Rob… My apologies, mea culpa, lo siento. I really appreciate your feedback and your assistance with developing a valid message for MVC Turbine...
I would like to thank Rob Conery for posing the question:
As the project’s portal states:
MVC Turbine is a plugin for ASP.NET MVC that has IoC baked in and auto-wires controllers, binders, view engines, http modules, etc. that reside within your application. Thus you worry more about what your application should do, rather than how it should do it.
Let’s see how this plays out for your application…
Plain Old MVC Application
If you create an MVC application by using File –> New, you get the full power of the MVC framework but your application is not yet setup to take full advantage...
The MVC Turbine bits are now compiled against ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 Beta and Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2. You can get the bits by going to the CodePlex site.
Please note that this the same feature release as MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM. The following is compiled and upgraded to work with .NET4 in VS2010:
Runtime binaries
Feature Samples
Nerd Dinner Sample
Okonau Sample
From here on out, the main development will take place onVS2010 and MVC2 as I get things setup for v3...
Since the release of MVC Turbine, I’ve been getting lots of questions about the design decisions I made around the interaction with the Service Locator that ships with the plug-in. The two main questions are: Why didn’t you use the Common Service Locator project from CodePlex? Why are we forced/constrained/etc to use generic component registration API? These questions are very valid and could be easily explained if I ever write the documentation for the project (which, I’m working on by the way). So in this post, I hope to...
I’ve blogged in the past about the extensible component model for MVC Turbine, this post is a continuation on that concept, except with views as embedded resources. Virtual Path Provider: The Secret Sauce Not sure how many of you know this, but a VirtualPathProvider (VPP) is a way to provide the ASP.NET runtime with resources from a virtual file system. In other words, you can provide files such ash web forms, scripts or anything else that’s served to the ASP.NET run time to process. To learn how to this more in detail, check...
Well, here’s the official blog post for the tweet I did last night: I figured, I should tweet the release and have people get an early access to it, then blog the same (plus more) information here. :) What is MVC Turbine? I’ve been asked many times for the 140 char description of Turbine, so here it is for the record: MVC Turbine is a plug-in for ASP.NET MVC that has IoC baked in and auto-wires controllers, binders, view engines, http modules, etc. that reside within in your application. Thus...
The whole purpose of MVC Turbine is to make the development of an MVC application easy and streamlined. This can be done through the use of a new feature of V2 called “Blades”. Essentially, a Blade is nothing more than a component (or slice) of a Turbine application since it provides a layer of abstraction to a concern of the application. For example, a Turbine MVC application ships with three core blades out of the box: MvcBlade – Performs all ASP.NET MVC related work, i.e., setup of Controller factories, View Engines, etc. ...
I’m sure it’s nothing earth shattering but I’m blogging this for myself as documentation. :)
I have MVC Turbine hosted out on CodePlex, which means I can either access the source via Team Explorer or the SvnBridge endpoint the site provides. After talking with some people yesterday during lunch, I decided to try this simple proof of concept: Accessing TFS with git via SvnBridge. Sounds crazy but it works…and here’s how.
Your favorite Git client
This works with either msysgit or cygwin with git installed. So pick whichever you want to use. :)
Clone your CodePlex SVN Repo
Using your favorite Git client, it is...
This past weekend while working on my talk for the Heartland Developer's Conference, I toyed with the idea of showing multiple ASP.NET MVC View Engines (VE) ‘co-existing’ within the same application. Why do that? Well, I wanted to show how using open source tools like MVC Turbine, MVC Contrib and Spark within your application, you can assemble some pretty cool stuff. And most important, it made for a really cool demo. :) Please note that this concept is not anything new. Phil has blogged about a similar topic in the past. However, this approach extends what Phil...
For those of you that follow me on twitter, you’ve noticed that I’ve been tweeting a lot about a new side project called MVC Turbine.
MVC Turbine is a simple way to provide flow and plumbing within ASP.NET MVC applications, or as its tag line suggest, it converts flow into useful work. A few weeks ago, I had a quick poll on twitter that asked:
As you can see, from the results, 50% of the responses where “Yes, always!” which means that you’re wanting more out of your MVC application.
Please, don’t get this the wrong way: I’m not saying that Phil...
My original title for this blog post was going to be HttpIoC - Find Out What It Means To Me, as Steven Smith suggested via twitter, but I figured it wasn’t going to be as searchable. :) So I went with the boring title. Sorry Steven! A while back, Tuna Toksoz and I were having a conversation on twitter about how he does registration of any modules his application will need/use. After playing around with the concept for a little, I was able to get something that will work for our any ASP.NET application with minimal effort. ...
I know I’ve been quiet for the past couple of weeks, so hopefully this post makes up for some of the silence. :)
A while back, I voiced my opinion on how actions within should be small and to the point. After this post, I started to think on how we can make ASP.NET MVC do more for us based on a convention. Take the following code as example:
1: [HandleError]
2: public class HomeController : Controller
3: {
4: public ActionResult Index()
5: ...
Not sure how many of you out there use a URL redirection service such as tinyurl, is.gd or snurl. They come very handy when you’re trying to take a long url like: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=des+moines+iowa&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.879582,87.714844&ie=UTF8&z=12&iwloc=A Into something that's a bit more manageable: http://tinyurl.com/nzqn5f How can you do this within your ASP.NET application? Well, check out miniurl on CodePlex. :) What is miniurl? The miniurl MVC application is a very simple example on how to use MVC and URL Routing to create a URL Redirection service. That means you’re...
Recently, fellow MVP and ASPInsider, Jeffrey Palermo blogged a pretty interesting idea called ActionController. Within his post, he states: My interest in this space is purely practical. I really don’t care how patterns are published. I don’t care about “being true” to the MVC pattern or any other pattern. I’m more interested in being effective with web applications on .Net. After have experience with MvcContrib, CodeCampServer, and a much larger ASP.NET MVC implementation (200+ screens), I have come to see how controllers end up searching for an identity. What is a ProductController anyway? That’s just about...
In my previous post, I talk about how the problem with sessions and NHibernate (NH) can get pretty tricky to deal with; specially within ASP.NET web applications. This post shows how you can use a pretty nice feature within NH that simplifies this problem. A Solution NH supports a mechanism of providing a ‘current’ session via the ISessionFactory.GetCurrentSession method by using a concept called Contextual Sessions. This is what the NH documentation says about the feature: Most applications using NHibernate need some form of "contextual" sessions, where a given session is in...
As with any piece of software development, there is more than a million ways to skin a cat. Working with NHibernate in a multi-threaded environment is no different. :) To help with the illustration of the interaction of NHibernate and ASP.NET, I’ve created a sample application out on Google code. Please feel free to check it out and run it locally. The only requirement for the sample is to have a local install of SQL Server Express. The Problem Those of you using NHibernate in a multi-threaded environment (say ASP.NET) have probably written code to maintains an ISession...
As some of you already know, I blogged about my reaction to the Oxite MVC sample from the MIX Online Labs. Also, I started blogging some of my ideas for refactoring the source to make it a bit more streamlined. More importantly, I want use these posts as a way to share my ideas on how to use the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Not that I am “the source” for the right implementation, but I do want to provide another insight to the problem. Anywho…
Instead of keeping my source in zip files and bits and pieces, I created a fork...
Not sure how many of you read my first post on my thoughts on Oxite. Well, here's my offering on trying to make things a little closer to MVC by offering my perspective on the code. Please note that I want to keep these simple refactorings as conversational as possible, so if you see something that offends or upsets you with my interpretation/implementation, PLEASE COMMENT. :) Let's examine the SignIn action under the AccountController: [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult SignIn(string username, string password, bool rememberMe, string returnUrl)
{
PageTitle.AdditionalPageTitleSegments = new string[] { "Sign In" };
...
This past weekend some discussion sprung up around a new blog engine called Oxite. This blog engine is put out by the MIX Online team and it's used to power their blog. Now, I'm not going to rehash some of the statements made by other members of the community since there is no point in beating a dead horse. However, if you want check them out I suggest that first see Rob Conery's thoughts on Oxite as well as Scott Koon with TLC for Oxite post. The thing I do want to point out is that the team...
That's right! If you're free this Saturday and get to get some free content and a great way to interact with the developer community in Central and Eastern Iowa, come check out the Iowa Code Camp at the DMACC West Campus! Here's more info: Iowa .NET and CRIneta.org are hosting the second code camp to Iowa on November 8, 2008 at DMACC West inWest Des Moines. You might be asking, what's a code camp? Well, here are some of the basic ideas: Community driven High quality ...
Can't make it to the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in LA? Well, we've started a new group called NotAtPDC! Chris Love is the genious behind this movement! Here's some info from him:
We are going to have live meeting sessions, links to Blogs, Podcasts and any other .NET related content featured this week. Right now we are trying to get things organized better. We will have a site live in the morning. If you want to schedule a session or something DM http://twitter.com/NotAtPDC.
Chris is in the process on getting a website up to aggregate some of the content that the...
For those of you doing MVC out there you've probably noticed that every time you create a new view within your project, the template that VS uses creates a both a .aspx.cs and a .aspx.designer.cs file for your view. A group of mvps/insiders have been talking about this topic for a bit. A small group of us feel that providing this file is a temptation that can lead to world of hurt. To us, the this code behind file is a honeypot asking for bad practices. The fact that you have a codebehind file and that you can put...
For those of you that attended one or both at of my talks at VSLive Las Vegas or HDC Omaha 2008, I just want to say, thank you! And for the VSLive folks, I do apologize for cutting my open source tools talk short by 10 minutes. I had to jet out of the Mirage so I can make the plane back to the Midwest!
As promised, I upgraded my code to run with Beta 1 of the ASP.NET MVC Framework! So, if you want to get the latest bits go to: http://jglozano.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/presentations
You will find my slide deck as well as...
Well, I was tagged by Jeff earlier to talk about how I got started in software. So, here's my stab at answering these questions... How old were you when you started programming? I was either 11/12 years old. I got into it a little late since, well, I never had access to a computer when I was living in Mexico. I knew what they were and I was intrigued by them, but to ask my parents to get me one was completely a ludicrous idea since they were 10x more expensive in Mexico. What was your first...
Great job to the IronRuby team on getting this done! This just freakin' rocks!
So, here's a little shameless self plug for a book that Bryan Sampica and I are writing...also, I'm using this blog post as a warm up for my writing this evening! Yes, like I just mentioned, I'm co-authoring a book for Wrox with Bryan entitled, ASP.NET 3.5 Programmer's Reference. The purpose of the book is to get you the novice/beginner introduced to the features of ASP.NET 3.5, and hopefully teach you a few tricks things along the way. The book is due out in November, so that means that my summer (evenings) is pretty much booked up. I must...
For those of you that attended my Silverlight presentation yesterday at the Twin Cities Code Camp, I just want to say, "Thanks for coming! I hope you enjoyed it!" As promised, you can download the presentation slides and source code from Google code using TortoiseSVN. Again, thanks for coming to my presentation and thanks to Jason Bock for allowing me to come up and be part of a great event!
That's right! We're having another ASP.NET Expert Live Chat on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 6 PM PST. Here's more info on the event: Get your tough development questions answered by Microsoft MVPs, Regional Directors, and other industry experts. Community experts will be on hand to answer your .NET- and Visual Studio-related questions. No off topic questions please. Please note that questions regarding upcoming products and future product specs might not be answered. Would you like to participate as an expert? Contact Ryan Olshan at Ryan[dot]Olshan[at]strongtypes[dot]com. MSDN Online Chats - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx Chat Room...
That's right, we're having another IADNUG meeting this evening with Chris Sutton from the CR Ineta user group talking about ASP.NE MVC! If you're free this evening, come check us out! Intro to the ASP.NET MVC Framework Chris Sutton, CRIneta.org The ASP.Net MVC Framework is a new project that the ASP.Net team is working on to give developers an alternate and potentially better way to do web development in the ASP.Net environment. Model View Controller(MVC) is a well known presentation pattern that has been used in many environments with a variety of different...
Long blog title, I know. Yesterday, I ran into a issue/bug that I've never encountered during my years of being an ASP.NET developer. The error message is below:
The interesting thing about this error, is that it's occurred so often that there's a KB article (KB896181) for it that tells you how to fix it. Fortunately for me, I didn't have to apply the fix in the KB. I just had to change some of my security settings to give the account hosting the website the right permissions.
Here's how the errors occurs:
So you have an ASP.NET page that calls a...
This is just too funny: We all know we've been there!
For the past two weeks our team here at work have been heads down working on getting a project out the door. I will omit the answers to the why did the project get there? and how did you let it get there? questions since, although they're important, they would deter from the core reason for this post. All I have to say that last week was just awesome because of the team synergy (yes, buzzword) that was built around this project. Essentially, last week was treated as week-long Sprint. We met on Monday morning for an hour and...
As you recall, we cancelled last month's UG meeting due to weather. For this month, we're having Bryan Sampica, an ASP.NET MVP from Cedar Falls, come talk to us about WPF! The info for the meeting is below. Hope to see you there! Utilizing WPF as a Business Application Platform Bryan Sampica, ASI Computer Systems With the emergence of WPF and XAML as a UI framework, we've seen lots of demo's and examples on animating birds, and playing video clips. In this session we'll examine the business...
That's right, there will be a HEROES happen {here} event in Des Moines on 4/24! Here's some info on the event: The Des Moines event will celebrate the launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The event will bring together IT Pros and Developers to get an in-depth, up-close look at the new products and will give attendees an opportunity to meet with our Partners as well as members of the development teams who created the cutting-edge technologies. And all attendees will get a promotional pack containing all three new products....
I'm not sure how many of you out there have heard of Video.Show, a ready to run solution for hosting video on the web. It's a great video sharing web site blue print built by the guys at Vertigo. I've been looking at this app since it's RC (or beta) release and it's pretty sweet. The display and interaction of HD video is pretty awesome!
Jon Galloway, one (if not the) developers, of the application has a great write up of the features of this application out on his blog. If you want more detail info on the features of...
Earlier today, Scott provided us with, what I think is, a pinnacle post on getting people to understand the Zen of the new ASP.NET MVC framework. Scott says, This is a not just a different tune, but a whole different band playing all new music. Not everyone will like the music, and that's why the world has more than one band. This is a Good Thing. I like to think of ASP.NET MVC as the raw, acoustic version of the more heavily produced and multi-layered ASP.NET WebForms we use today. ...
I just finished reading the article Computer Science Education: Where Are The Real Software Engineers of Tomorrow? and I must that I'm pretty impressed with its very compelling argument: Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. As some of you know, I attended ISU for my CS degree. During the latter part of my tenure (junior/senior years) there, I started to realize that the "boring" stuff that professors were pushing down our throats, actually had a meaning! In particular, my OS theory, algorithms,...
Wow! I stumbled into this "blast from the past" the other day, I just had to share it with you. Here's the background story...
A couple of years ago, I encountered some source for a C# compiler written in pure C# by Mike Stall. I downloaded the source and started messing around with it seeing how it worked. At around the same time, I had a conversation with Nick about how English is the dominant language for technology and that most (if not all) programming languages are written in English. Granted, this is a good thing since it establishes a convention...
For a while now, we've been using "hot" backups for our SVN repositories using the hot-backup.py Python script file that is part of the Subversion tools and contrib project. A "hot" backup is a way to take a complete snap shot of the repository so in case your repository goes awry, you cake take the hot back up and drop it straight in! For those of you interested in learning more about the backup features of SVN, check out Repository Backup section of the online SVN Book.
Here's an excerpt from the SVN book that describes what hot-backup.py provides for you:
This...
I've been using my MacBook over 4 months now and I must say that I'm pretty impressed with the experience. By no means do I consider my self an expert on the Mac, it's still a journey. ;-)
For those interested, here's a list of my top tools that I use everyday on my Mac.
VMWare Fusion -- This is a most have for those of you doing WoM (Windows on Mac)! If you have a bootcamp partition, then it's just as easy as pie to get Windows up and running on...
That's right! The University of Iowa:ITS, CRIneta and Iowa .NET user groups are joining forces to bring the first code camp to Iowa on 5/3/2008 at the University of Iowa Conference Center in Iowa City, IA!! You might be asking, what is a code camp? Well, here are some of the basic ideas: Its for and by developers Free (for attendees) All about code, not PowerPoint presentations What you present on should be available to share with people who attend Never during...
Thanks to Mitchel Sellers from IowaComputerGurus for presenting to our user group last night! We had a pretty great turn out and some really nice swag to give away! For those of you that were there, thanks for your support! As I mentioned during the meeting, we're going to try something a little different for distributing demo materials (code, ppts, etc.). I've setup a iadnug, a Google Code open source project, to host our code. (yeah, clever name I know...) So for those of you that have SVN or TortoiseSVN installed, you can check out the code. If you...
Running a user group is not easy. It takes quite a bit of coordination to get sponsorships, line up the venue, line up speakers, find swag, schedule the logistics and the most important, order pizza...just to name a few. At times we've been contacted by our members asking when the website will be updated with the meeting info or when will Levi send out the email blast reminder. Well, I'm sorry to say, but we get busy with our jobs/families and we end up dropping the ball at times. Wouldn't it be nice we had a tool to...
Well, it's a new year which means new exciting challenges both in my personal and professional life. I wanted to use this post so I can share with you my (three) readers, what my plans are for the content for blog for the upcoming year.
Theme for 2008: Simplicity
That's right, simplicity. For those of you that know me personally or have worked with me, are now saying, "Simplicity, WTF?!? You?" Just kidding...well, not about the simplicity theme. ;-) Over the past year, I've learned that the "best" approach to a problem does not mean that it has to...
A couple of weeks ago, I spent a good part of a day troubleshooting an issue with creating persistent cookies from ASP.NET 2.0 and how they're handled by IE7. Fortunately for us (specifically me), this occurred in our test environment so only developers in the project were affected by it. Background Info Our application is using a custom authentication cookies to help reduce the request overhead to our database (pretty common scenario). This can be done by implementing your own IHttpModule and within it's Init method, register to the HttpApplication's AuthenticateRequest Event. My good friend Heath Stewart wrote...
Well, we can finally get our hands on the ASP.NET MVC bits! They're being released as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP. This release includes: ASP.NET AJAX Improvements: New ASP.NET AJAX features in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release include better browser history support (back/forward button integration, and server-side history management support), improved AJAX content linking support with permalinks, and additional JavaScript library improvements. ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes...
Well, it's been over a month since the I did my Silverlight presentation at the IADNUG November meeting and I've realized that I've forgotten to post my demo code. Well, sorry about that. For those of you that are interested, you can download it from the link below. Sorry! Files: silverlight_presentation.zip (~20 MB - it include videos).
That's right, PDC has been rescheduled to Oct. 27-30 2008 in Los Angeles, California. Here's the info from their site: PDC 2008 October 27–30, 2008 Pre-conference October 26, 2008 Los Angeles, California OK, OK. We are delighted to announce the date and location of the next Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC): October 27–30, 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. Mark your...
Well, as I previously blogged about it, the details are done for our demo contest during the VS2008 InstallFest in Des Moines are finalized. Here they are: Visual Studio 2008 Demo Contest! Want to show off your VS2008 or .NET 3.5 skills? If you answered, yes, this is your opportunity to strut your stuff! During the Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest & Holiday Party on December 12, 2007 at the DMACC West Campus, we'll be having a demo contest in the auditorium. Here's the scoop ... What do I need to...
I am not sure how many of you out there were planning on attending the VS2008 InstallFest in Des Moines next week. I completely neglected the fact that because I had registered for the event I would "take" a VS2008 license from the pile. Well, I already have VS2008 (through MSDN subscription) so I don't need my free license. So if anybody wants it, be the first to comment on this post and it's yours. Yeah, it's that simple.
Joel Spolsky posted today his second part of the talk the gave to the Yale Computer Science Department on Nov. 28th.
In this part he talks about perils of internal software development at non-software shops. Here's a glimpse,
... New York was the first place I got to see what most computer programmers do for a living. It’s this scary thing called “in house software.” It’s terrifying. You never want to do in house software.
You’re a programmer for a big corporation that makes, oh, I don’t know, aluminum cans, and there’s nothing quite available off the shelf which does the exact...
That's right, the InstallFest event in Des Moines has SOLD OUT! As of today, there are 13 people on the waiting list. For all of you that signed up, thanks! It is because of you that this event will be a success! Also, if you're interested, you should sign up to do a demo during the event! Those of you on the waiting list, you will be notified of an open spot if someone on the main list cancels. So if you're on the main list but can't make it, please cancel so somebody on the waiting list can...
Alright, earlier this evening I blogged about the Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest that our Des Moines .NET UG is hosting on December 12th, 2007. If you're interested in coming, please sign up!! If you would like to ensure a copy of VS2008, it is REALLY IMPORTANT that you sign up at
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032360733&Culture=en-US
Now the contest info! Have you been playing around with VS2008 beta1/beta2/RC1 or .NET 3.5 for a while? If you answered yes, then I recommend you strut your stuff by coming up with a 10-15 minute presentation you can share with the group during the InstallFest!
What do I need to...
Everyone in the Des Moines, sign up for this great event our UG is hosting in conjunction with Microsoft! We're also planning on having a presentation contest to see who can show off the best features VS2008. More to come on this, so stay tuned!!
Visual Studio InstallFest - Des Moines
Event Registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032360733...
ATTENTION DEVELOPERS! Are you ready to be one of the first to get their hands on Visual Studio 2008 when it RTMs? Join Microsoft and the Iowa DNUG for a Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest and Holiday Party on December 12th, 2007 at the Des Moines Area Community College!...
That's right, you can now download the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 RTM. Get it while it's hot!! One thing to notice is that this release does not work with the Express Editions.
I would like to apologize for those who wanted to attend my presentation on Software Factories at Tulsa TechFest, but unfortunately due to technical difficulties, I missed my stand-by flight into Tulsa. When I spoke with the nice people at American Airlines they couldn't guarantee me making into Tulsa into sometime late this evening. However, for those of you wanting my slides, you can download them from the link at the bottom of this post. Also, as I mentioned on my HDC post, I will be doing a webcast series on the Software Factories on Code To Live.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the opening of Popfly beta to public use. One of the first things that I thought about Popfly is how are other people out there (both technical and non-technical) are going to use it. I've been looking at Yahoo! Pipes for a while and thought it was a pretty cool way to gather information. To me the one thing it lacked was the presentation of the information (what good is the info if I can't get to it effectively?). So last night I decided to do a little video that compares both Popfly and Yahoo! Pipes trying to "solve" the same...
First, to all of you that attended my HDC presentation on Software Factories, THANK YOU! I hope that as promised, the "Ah, Ha!" factor was high. Also, I would like to apologize for the issues I ran into with the VPC and the demos. I had tried the demo before with only two VS2005 instances running and had no issues with it...Apparently, four instances of VS2005 running concurrently is too much for VPC. Right after my presentation, I confirmed with Steve Loethen, a co-host of Code To Live, about coming up with the webcast series on Software Factories. I still to work out...
That's right, you heard it! Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman have both talked about it (Scott even has a podcast on it). Microsoft will release the source code & debug symbols for debugging purposes for the following .NET libraries under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL):
Base Class Libraries
ASP.NET
Windows Forms
ADO.NET
XML
WPF
They plan on adding more libraries in the months to come, such as WCF, Workflow, LINQ.
I'm not sure about you, but this IS HUGE! Way to go, MS! Taking...
Dave Bost, DE for IL, IN, WI and former golfing partner, invited me through Facebook to the SilverlightDevCamp in Chicago, IL. For those of you in the area or interested in attending this FR-EE event, here's the info from Dave's blog post:
On Friday, September 28th and Saturday, September 29th, Clarity Consulting will host a Silverlight DevCamp at their offices in the Loop. This is a great opportunity for people interested in Silverlight to come together and hack out an application or two.
DevCamps are similar to BarCamps in that it’s a casual gathering of like minded individuals. BarCamps tend...
That's right, John Lam has his team have put the latest release of IronRuby out on RubyForge (this took place on 8/31/07). Fellow rubydoes.net blogger, Aaron Junod, has a great post on getting IronRuby from RubyForge with TortoiseSVN. I'm personally looking forward to this evening's coding "festivities" as I try to integrate some code into the project. Good times!
Just a reminder about the live ASP.NET "ask an expert" chat this Thursday, the 23rd of August at 7 PM CDT (5 PM PDT). Come join the fun. Here are the links. Main announcement - http://community.strongcoders.com/blogs/ryan/archive/2007/07/24/august-23-2007-ask-an-expert-live-chat.aspx Prize announcement - http://community.strongcoders.com/blogs/ryan/archive/2007/07/26/august-23-2007-ask-an-expert-live-chat-prizes.aspx Chat experts - http://community.strongcoders.com/blogs/ryan/archive/2007/07/30/august-23-2007-ask-an-expert-live-chat-experts.aspx
For the past couple of weeks, I've been looking for the "right" laptop to use for home/work/dev/play. I started to look at the Dell XPS M1330, their new slim 13.3" laptops, and was not too satisfied with their hardware/price ratio ... good hardware but too high of a price. So then I started looking at refurbished Dells and quickly came to the same conclusion. I was looking for the following things on a laptop: Fast CPU - I want to do software virtualization (aka, VPCs). Lots of RAM - (same reasons as above) Descent size HD - (same reasons...
A while back, I blogged some examples on how you can use .NET types within your IronRuby (IRuby) applications. So after playing around with it a bit, I wanted to do something pretty basic, inheritance. Here's what I tried:# Basic inheritance from a dynamic type
# to a static type.
class MyForm < System::Windows::Forms::Form
end
When you try running this through the interactive console, you get this error:
System.InvalidOperationException: superclass must be a Class (DynamicType given)
Nice and descriptive, huh? Well, essentially this means that your superclass needs to be a type that IRuby can understand, that is a class-type of DynamicType. While looking around at the source...
That's right, if you have a question that needs answering come check out our "Ask An Expert" live chat on August 23rd, 2007 at 5 PM PDT. Please note that this chat is not being hosted by Microsoft and as such questions regarding upcoming products and future product specs may not be answered. To see the main announcement, check out Ryan's blog for the info. Also there seems to be a prize give away for this chat! How cool?! Here's the list of experts involved in the chat. It's quite the line up! Calendar: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx ICS: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/vcs/07_0823_msdn_aspnet.ics Hope to see...
Anybody? Let's start this conversation and see where it goes? David, I'm really interested on what you have to say about this!
Brian Harry has a great post with all the links you will need to download the latest bits for VS2K8 beta2. Also, in this related post he lists some of the nice features they've added to TFS 2008. One interesting thing about the "new" TFS options is the VSTS Web Access (aka TeamPlain) that they're planning to release here shortly (Yes, it works both for TFS 2005 & 2008).
Looks like Nick has also posted his findings on IronRuby ... what can I say, it was just released today!! Anyway...I was playing around with IronRuby earlier this evening trying to see how it handled generics...well, currently it doesn't (remember, the code is alpha...but pretty sweet!). I created a sample C# class (cleverly) called, MyClass:using System;
namespace CSharpClass
{
public class MyClass
{
// Currently this event type cannot be called from IronRuby.
public EventHandler<CustomArgs> Custom;
...
That's right, John Lam and ScottGu have blogged about it! So go get it while it's hot!!! THIS IS SOO FREAKIN' COOL!!!
Ok, so I'm really, really, really stupid! I like other people out there suffer from the always popular I-have-too-many-passwords (IH2MP) syndrome. Earlier this past weekend, I was trying to administer my blog and managed to forget the editor password so I could access the website. After several failed attempts, I searched the application folders of Windows Live Writer to see where my password was kept. It appears that by default, Live Writer stores its configuration information under the registry. To retrieve the configuration information correctly, you need to use their API. Here's a sample on how you can accomplish this:using...
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about David Anson's surface-like Silverlight application that functions like Microsoft Surface. Well, earlier this week, I created what I call FlickrNSurface (pronounced: "flickering surface"). Essentially, it's a mashup of flickr and Anson's Silverlight application. To retrieve the images from flickr, I used FlickrNet and an interesting post back mechanism. I will have more posts talking about the design of the application and how you can do the same thing with your Silverlight applications. For now, take a look at it and let me know what you think! You can download the code by going here:...
I don't know about you but I think we had a great turn out for last night IADNUG meeting on Regular Expressions. Jon von Gillern did an excellent job tackling the topic. I particularly liked the demo presentation-style he used to demonstrate the harder parts of the presentation. Thanks Jon for taking the time to step up in front of the group and share your finds. That's what we're all about! Sharing and community! Also, thank you to all of you that signed up for the event through ClickToAttend. Like we mentioned during the meeting, we're in the process of trying...
A Non-Coding Architect (NCA) can be detrimental to the success of a project. These Word/IvoryTower architects can be pretty dogmatic when it comes to standards and back-in-the-day methods. A couple of weeks ago, I read this really great post that outlines ways you can spot out the dreaded NCA and gives you some pointers on how you can help alleviate the situation. It's a pretty good read so go check it out! Before I forget, the blog author, Frank Kelly, is a java developer so he uses some J2EE that you might not be familiar with and should check out if you...
Alright, here's one way off left field...I guess that's how you start thinking once the architecture-side dominates your life. ;-) My 15th-month old loves Sesame Street. One of the segments of the show is called Elmo's World. Here's a description of the show from Wikipedia: Elmo, a small red monster who speaks in third person and is perpetually 2 1/2 to 3 years old. The show also features Mr. Noodle, a human mime character, and Elmo's pet goldfish, Dorothy. The segment was first introduced the beginning of its 30th season on November 16, 1998. The segment takes place in...
I submitted the title and abstract for my HDC presentation. Here's the info: The Taming Of the Oracle: A .NET Developer's Guide to Working With Oracle In this session you will learn how you can use the Oracle Data Provider for .NET, Oracle Providers for ASP.NET, and Visual Studio tools to get the most out of your experience with Oracle. If you're a .NET developer that needs to work with Oracle as your primary database, this is a session that will getyou up and running in time for your project. Is there anything else you guys want to find...
No, I did not decide to un-install IE7 and re-install IE4 ... although, it would be cool to reminisce the old days ... but while re-installed Visual Studio 6.0 (yeah, we still have VB6 applications), I encountered this screen: (Yeah, I know it's fuzzy) Oh, let the good times roll... Alright, I confess!! I'm doing some Visual J++ on the side!! I CAN'T KICK THE HABIT!! ;-)
While playing around with Silverlight during lunch, I ran into this plugin for Windows Live Writer (WLW) called JetFuel. It takes the creation of Silverlight applications to the next level. It's a nice little package of the steps outlined in the SDK into a wizard.
Well, it looks like Nick and Jeff have beat me to the punch of announcing ReSharper 3.0. For you VB.NET-ers our there, GET THIS TOOL! OMG, it's the sweetest thing that ever happened to VB since .NET!!
That's right, I received word from Phil Wolfe earlier this week that I've been accepted to be a speaker (this is my third year!) for the Heartland Developer Conference in Omaha, NE on Oct. 18-19th. If you check out the speakers page, you won't see my info there but I'm sure it's coming. For those of you that like my presentations, here's a list of topics I've been kicking around: .NET Tooling for Oracle - There's some applications out there that need talk with Oracle. How do I make things as easily as possible to get my work done?...
Alright, how many of you when unit testing your entities and Data Transfer Objects (DTOs), provide an interface for them? For example, if you have the Person entity, do you have a corresponding IPerson interface? Or do you leave the type as is? I'm just curious to see what people are doing out there while doing TDD/Unit Testing. Please use the comment section to post your responses! Thanks!
I just ran into this pretty nice tool called eScrum for end-to-end Scrum management that runs on top Team Foundation Server (TFS). Pretty nice for those of you out there doing (or trying to do) Scrum and have adopted TFS. Here's the info from the download page: eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for...
I'm curious to see what other people that I know have as a progammer personality type (PPT). If you have the time take the test (be honest!) and let me know how you scored (Got this link via Scott Hanselman). For now here are my results: Your programmer personality type is:DHTB You're a Doer.You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money. You like coding at a High level.The world is made up...
I'm not sure how many of you have heard of the new Microsoft Surface product (if you haven't, are you living under a rock?!?! ;-) ), but in one of the demo videos, they show how you can take images and resize/rotate them by using your fingertips. Well, the same thing can be done using Silverlight through a web application. Delay has posted a great sample Silverlight application that does the same thing! It's pretty awesome app that shows the power of Silverlight! If you have the time, check out the live demo or get its source code (you'll need Orcas...
I've been reading the blog entitled, Coding the Architecture, for quite sometime now and I really enjoy the its content (you should definitely check it out). Recently there are two entries dealing with responsibility and authority (from an SA's point of view) which hit close to home. Unfortunately for me, I have responsibility without authority ... which as some of us know, that's not a good combination. How can you be responsible for something you have no saying (authority) over what happens to it? Do any of you out there suffer from the same fate?
Yesterday, Levi sent me a link to this add-in for Reflector that disassembles a Silverlight applications and shows your the JavaScript to run it. I must say, it's a pretty nice little add-in (that includes its source) for Reflector. Below is a picture of the disassembled Silverlight Airlines demo given at MIX '07:
Check it out if you have the time, it's pretty sweet!
From the looks of it (via Phil Haack), CodePlex will be supporting SVN (both svn.exe and TortoiseSVN) for all of their projects. Here's the converstaion Jim Newkirk and Phil had: Haacked wrote Mon at 8:24 PM So I can download svn.exe from http://subversion.tigris.org/ and manage my CodePlex source code repository, yes? So are you rolling out Subversion? Or a Subversion facade into TFS? Anything you can reveal? :) jimnewkirk wrote Mon at 7:41 PM To clarify: it's our intention to support the functionality of the command-line Subversion client as well as TortoiseSVN. jimnewkirk wrote Mon at 7:40 PM Phil,...
I would like to thank Denny, our breadth AE, for doing a great job at our first ArcReady event last Friday in Des Moines. During the event, Denny mentioned that Des Moines will be a regular stop on the quaterly ArcReady visits. If you would like to attend, please post your email on this post (through comments) and I'll make sure that Denny gets you added to the list. Also, after the event, we held our first ArcCouncil event. ArcCouncil is an open forum were we discuss various topics dealing with software development. For example, the meeting started by...
I'm not sure how many of you out there are aware of the ASP.NET Futures section of the ASP.NET website. Here's the description of the section from the website: ...contains an early developer preview of features providing a wide range of new functionality for both ASP.NET and Silverlight. The Futures release includes early experimental versions of features currently being considered for future versions of ASP.NET and the .NET Framework. The May 2007 Release contains the following components: ASP.NET AJAX Futures Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls for ASP.NET ASP.NET Application Services Dynamic Languages Support for ASP.NET (sans IronRuby,...
Ok, so I've just posted my current non-technical reading list so now here's my techinical currently-reading list:
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition - Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt
I've been playing around with Ruby for quite some time now but I need a good reference book for it. What other book to read than main source of Ruby knowledge out there! After the announcement of the DLR (which I've downloaded already), I can't wait to do more of Ruby natively on .NET!
Programming WCF Services - Juval Lowy
Another great master work by Juval. If you're currently doing WCF...
That's right, it's that time again...yep, when I post my currently reading list so you can get a closer look at my thought process. Here are the books in no particular order:
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership - John C. Maxwell
One of my friends from work let me borrow this book from him so I get more acquinted with the qualities of a leader. I'm at chapter 8 and it's pretty good...it takes me a while to go through the book since I have to pause and re-think of the different times when I had such "leader" experience...whether if it was me...
Alright, so for our applications we have a couple of forms that use the DataGridView control to display tabular data (kinda of a common scenario for many business applications). The data is returned from our services as an IList<T> in which we can just then bind directly to the grid by using the grid's DataSource property. Pretty easy task...unless when it comes to sorting. From the looks of it, Ayende has the similar problem that he's trying to overcome... At that point, our IList<T> doesn't cut it. You could say, well, use an BindlingList<T> and override the ApplySortCore...
First, I would to apologize to my three blog readers for the lack of blog posting I've done the past couple of weeks. Why have I been missing in action (MIA)? Well, I've been too busy helping management pay for the blank checks they signed earlier this year. Huh? Ok, I'm totally lost, you say? Well, a while back our management started to sell the idea for the project of the year to our business partners. After the initial sale pitches, we were asked to come up with a time line that would guesstimate how long the project would take...
Denny Boynton, our regional Architect Evangelist, has just blogged information on how you can get free MS eLearning passes valued at $159. If you have the time, and don't want to miss out on this opportunity, go check out his post.
As an architect/developer/software professional I strive to produce the best product I can create within my environment. In particular, I see myself as having two customers to please: the person who will use the product and the one that will maintain it. The person that will use the product day-in and day-out (should) cares about: The product meets her/his expectations Usability (is it easy to use?) Has little (or no) flaws/errors during operation It is delivered to them within the expected time Are involved with feature priorization & negotation As for the person that will maintain the product (should) cares...
Wow, it appears that "WPF/E" has a better RTM name than the other W*F parts. That's right, "WPF/E" is now called Silverlight (via Soma's blog). Also, don't let the name confuse you, if you have already the "WPF/E" Feb CTP, you already have Silverlight installed. They've just renamed the install packages.
That's right, we're at it again! We're signed up to answer your ASP.NET related questions for two hours on April 19th at 11:30 PST (1:30 CST).
The chat format is as follows: You post your questions and the panel of experts answers them. We're using the Microsoft Chat Software (MVP’s only, sorry!) to grab questions and answer them. The first chat did not have this software working well and was kind of chaotic (MSN Messenger & Conference Call). The software is now working, so it should be a very smooth flow of questions and answers. We're still doing the conference call so that when...
That's right! ScottGu has blogged about a new hot fix (Microsoft KB #934839). I've ran into this problem in the past (and blogged about it here). Scott posted a quick fix you can use without installing the patch: <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="false" batch="false"></compilation> </system.web></configuration> I'm glad to see an official fix being released after a year since the issue emerged.
I've been meaning to blog about this for a while, but for some reason I keep forgetting (sorry, I've been busy at work). If you're wondering on how WCF compares performance wise to existing distributed communication technologies (ASMX, WSE, Enterprise Services, .NET Remoting) you should definitely check out this white paper on MSDN: A Performance Comparison of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) with Existing Distributed Communication Technologies
While downloading a Novell client for one of our servers (don't ask), I bumped into this "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC..." like commercial campaing from Novell. What's their product? Linux. I must say that their spoof of these commercials are pretty hilarious. If you have the time you should check them out.
We have this document generation app that uses WCF for connecting to our middle-tier server. In order for users to run the application, they need .NET Framework 3.0 installed on their machines. To accomplish this task, I decided to use ClickOnce since it will download the pre-requisites during the installation process. However, when I tried publishing the application, to our intranet, I ran into this issue with the process: No 'PublicKey' or 'Hash' attribute specified for file 'NETFX30\Dotnetfx3.exe' in item '.NET Framework 3.0'. No 'PublicKey' or 'Hash' attribute specified for file 'NETFX30\Dotnetfx3_x64.exe' in item '.NET Framework 3.0'. Yeah,...
That's right, if you're interested in learning about becoming a more effective architect, you should check out the ArcReady event that will at the Embassy Suites on May 18th (5/18/2007). The theme for this ArcReady is entitled "Architecting for the User Experience", how does the role of user experience take part in architectural designs? More specifically, how you can use WPF, WPF/e, XAML and the Expression suite to enhance your applications. If you have the time, you should check it out. I'll see you there!
<sarcasm> Another lesser known of the *DD approaches for design and development. Essentially, the design of your application is driven by the ineptitude of the people developing it (aka, your employees). It's a sad realization when you (as the employer) realize that you could've gotten the same product if you would have applied the Infinite Monkey Theorem with a time constraint. </sarcasm>
First I would like to personally thank Evan Hennis for having the courage to step to the podium and present WPF to the IADNUG. Also, for those of you that attended, I will like to apologize for the technical difficulties we had with the projector and demos. I'm very glad that at least we could get one laptop to work (although, it was hard to read at times). Also, if any of you out there are interested in presenting to the UG on any topic, please let me know! I would like to start a community serving community series for the...
Well, I've finally had it with my current install of .Text (.9.4.something) that I decided to upgrade to SubText. The SubText engine has a lot more features (and available code base) that I can definitely use going forward. Unfortunatelly, I was not able to use the .Text Import feature of SubText to pull my data in. I kept getting an error during the import process. So instead, I just whipped up some T-SQL scripts to pull the data over. I still need to fix the referral data, but that's for another day. What do you guys think about the new...
Today, I spent the better part of my morning trying to troubleshoot a problem with COM interop within a WCF service. Here's the situation... We currently have a legacy COM (VB6) component that creates a CSV file containing data needed to generate a PDF. Unfortunately, we don't have the time to re-write this component to .NET, so we have to make due for now. I first tried the component within a standard WinForm, and I was able to create/invoke it with no problems. With this success, I proceeded to use said component within a WCF service so it could be exposed within our intranet (netTcpBinding). ...
Thanks to the MVP Award Team and my lead Steve Dybing for recognizing me for another as a ASP/ASP.NET MVP. I'm thinking of a lot of good content to present/create this up-coming MVP year. Once again, thanks!
I know this is old news, but I'm extatic that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz and consequently, TeamPlain for TFS. You can read more about it over at Brian Harry's blog. Back when I was evaluating TFS for work, I installed TeamPlain and was pretty amazed what the application did. Back then, the licensing was ~$100 per client, but now that MS has acquired it, it's now FR-EE!! Check out the screen shot below to see TeamPlain's coolness:
So, as some of you have noticed, I haven't blogged in about 10 days...and that's a little unsual for me. After getting back from the MVP Summit, I tons of work that had piled up during my absense plus the work that I need to get done that week. Needless to say, I was pretty swamped. To make matters worse, an enhancement that I had deployed prior to leaving for the summit had stopped working and no one could figure out why. So, alas I spend the first half of Monday trying to dig through all the failed steps to...
So, a couple of days ago while sitting at the lobby of my hotel for the MVP Summit, I decided to come up with a simple Smart Client shell for the LOB Windows application my company uses. So there I am minding my own business when along comes Jean-Paul Boodhoo, James Kovacs, David Laribee, DonXML and ask what I was working on. After some explaining of my intentions for replacing our legacy VB6 application with a brand new .NET one, JP couldn't resist the opportunity to do some TDD and Pair Programming. I must say, that I've always been of the...
That's, right I've summitted the How to Start A .NET User Group BoF session. Last year, Nick, Eric, Levi and I were moderators for this same session and had a great turn out (10+)! If you have time, you should vote for it so it can make it for the final cut! Voting Link: https://www.msteched.com/BOF/voting.aspx Here is it's bio: How To Start a .NET User Group This BOF session will be a round table for anyone interested in starting and maintaining an active .NET user group within their local community. We'll share common success and challenges that attendees have experienced. Audience: Developer
Thanks all that attended my CRINETA presentation Applied .NET 2.0 Programming! I'm pretty impressed on the level of interaction we had throughout the presentation. To me, this is what made it really memorable for me! Once again, thanks for attending!
That's right, on Monday March 5th, I will be presenting for the Cedar Rapids .NET User Group about .NET 2.0 programming. Here's the info: Applied .NET 2.0 Programming Are you tired of the same old boring "collection demos" for generics? Ever wondered how anonymous delegates really work? Tired of playing with System.Xml clasess to a grip of your .config file? Or how about adding basic transaction support to common .NET types? In this session I will show you how you can take some of the new features of the .NET Framework 2.0, (Generics, Anonymous Delegates, Configuration, and Transactions) and apply them to your current development with minimal...
I was asked today if there's a metric for determining whether an business application should use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) or roll its own workflow plumbing. Here's my extended answer... As far as a metric of qualification, I can't say there is one (or that I have found one). Besides deciding whether or not to use a technology (or any type of plumbing) as an aide for development can't be (and shouldn't be meausered) by a number. It's not the number of lines of code, methods, classes, assemblies, etc. that decide whether or not you should use workflow. It all comes down to...
That's right! It's hard to believe that such an awesome tool it's on version 5.0! Scott has a pretty awesome blog post talking about the new/existing features of Reflector. I'm totally hooked into the .NET protocol handler feature! This is reminiscence of what MSDN has done with the .NET 2.0 documentation through the VirtualPathProvider class. Lutz Roeder, you're the man!
Last night's ASP.NET MVP Live Chat was awesome! Thanks to all you that attended. Currently, Microsoft is working on posting the full transcript and answers to their sites. But for the mean time, Ryan Olshan is hosting it over at StrongCoders (Please note this requires registration). Thanks for doing this Ryan! If you have the time, check it out!
By the way, I posted about this chat a while back....
but if you don't recall and are free tonight from 7-8 PM CST (8-9 PM EST, 5-6 PM West Coast Time), come check out our ASP.NET MVP Public Chat! Check out the line-up of MVPs that are ready to answer your ASP.NET questions!
You can join the chat by going to the MSDN Chat Center.
PluralSight's own Fritz Onion will hosting 8 ASP.NET webcasts next week. If you're interested in checkin them out, you can register here.
ScottGu has blogged about the new features of the next version of Visual Studio (codename Orcas). Right now if you can get access to the bits (they're available through MSDN) you can start playing with it. I'm looking forward to see what kind of bult-in support they have for LINQ (released with .NET Framework v3.5). The web (CSS, Multi-Target .NET Frameworks, JavaScript & Ajax) support sounds pretty cool too. I will make another post as soon as I get a chance to play with the bits.
Last night, we had the privelege of having Billy Hollis present about Smart Client design at our monthly UG meeting. We were able to book Billy through our membership with INETA. The presentation was pretty good since he covered alot of spects of smart client design, development and deployment. The crowd was somewhat interactive and over all had a good time. Thanks Billy for talking to our group!
I'm proud to announce that I will helping out on the first ASP.NET MVP Live Chat on Feb 16th, 2007 from 8:00 - 9:00 PM EST! If you have any questions, regarding ASP.NET development, come and join the free live chat! Check out the info below (from community.strongcoders.com) Join the Strong Coders Community, Scott Guthrie, General Manager, Microsoft Developer Division, and Microsoft MVPs for the continuation of the 1st MVP Live Chat on Friday, February 16, 2007 from 8:00pm-9:00pm EST. Get your tough questions answered by experts. No question is too hard. The chat will take place on MSDN Chats. See details...
On Wednesday, I headed up north to help out at the Minneapolis Vista Launch key city event (KCE). One of my tasks was to help people by answering questions, showing them demos at the "Vista Trial Area." Surprisingly, I was also able to answer a couple of development related questions in regards to WPF, Gadgets and running Visual Studio on Vista. Another nice thing about the event is that I got to talk and hang out with Jeff, Mike and Farhan. Also, I made a new MVP friend with Bill Smith (Windows 2003 MVP and a Mac guy!!). The cool...
Here's the list of books that are currently on my nigh stand: Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid Douglas R. Hofstadter Yep, it's that time again. I read GEB once a year to keep in touch with my inner ComSci geek. If you're interested in theoritical concepts of Computer Science, then you definitely check it out! Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters that will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity Joel Spolsky I've been...
So, this is an 'archaic' method of doing a silent MSI install/uninstall but it worked for us! We have an "updater" VB6 applications that checks files on our test server and compares them to the files on your hard drive. If the application detects a change, then it updates your file with the version on the server. This application only deals with OCXs, EXEs and DLLs. Since our new environment is all .NET, I needed to add MSI packages to the list (I know I could've done a straight copy but I need to do some COM registration for interop). ...
It's nice to know that your efforts can make a difference or help a fellow developer. Today, I received an email that read, I was wanting to do an article for Code Project. The article that I wanted to write would be based on the code that you wrote in your article Extending Web Controls With Custom HTML Attributes. What I was wanting to do is to build a plug-in architecture for these "Custom HTML Attributes", where if you wanted, you could add a new attribute simply by dropping a dll into your applications bin folder. I was just...
That's right! ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 is now live! So if you've been doing work with any of the CTPs, stop! Go the final bits and start enjoying the RTM goodness!
For those of you that are interested in this kind of stuff, there is a list of the bugs (398 of them) fixed by installing SP1 for Visual Studio 2005. Go and see if any bugs that you have experienced has been fixed.
When system design is based on the can we get it done in the given time factor. Common conversations start out like
If we only had a week to design the system, how would I...
Nick posted a really good read that covers some of the same topics. I particular like point that Getting Real makes on building half a product, not a half-ass product.
Check out this cool Channel9 video interview with Rory and ScottGu. Should help light up some of the future paths the technology (ASP.NET and other MS Web Techs) are taking on the near future.
If you're in the Des Moines area, you can check out the "local" Vista launch over at the Polk County Covention Center on January 16th. Pick the correct event that fits your needs: Partner Developer IT Pro Small Business IT Executive Also, you would like to experience the "full effect" a key city launch, you can always go to Minneapolis.
I just downloaded the PowerToys for the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer and Distributed System Designers. The Class Designer has the following enhancements: Export Diagrams for Web Display Xml Comment Command Documentation Tool Window Filtering Appearance Filtering Lines Filtering Members Fast Navigation Interface Lollipop Labels Commands Inheritance Visualization Commands Show Type Command Association and Inheritance Line Dongles Type Creation Commands Add Member Commands View Class Diagram Command Improvements Go download this powertoy and start enjoying its goodness!
I'm psyched that there's a PDC this year! Save the dates, Oct 2-5 2007. With a pre-conference from Sept. 30th - Oct 1st. Where? It's in LA, again!! <sarcasm>Does Microsoft have anything new to show?</sarcasm>
That's right, it's out! Microsoft has released SP1 for Visual Studio 2005, Team Foundation Server, Express Editions and Vista Beta. Here's some info from Microsoft: Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 continues Microsoft’s investment in market leading development tools. Service Pack 1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customers and partner feedback, as well as internal testing. The issues addressed range in severity from places where the syntax coloring was incorrect to customer reported crashes in various scenarios. In some areas, more than 50% of the bugs addressed were reported by customers through the MSDN Product...
Once again, Nikhil has out done himself. Check out his WPF/E Flickr Photo Viewer. You will need to download WPF/E December CTP to view it... WOW!
Come join us tomorrow at our monthly .NET User Group meeting! We'll have Richard Hundhausen, Team Foundation MVP & RD, present on SQL Server 2005! Also, we'll be discussing on severals ways the UG can get involved in helping keep the memory of Eric Jacobs alive. Hope to see you there!
<sarcasm:MyReality> This is the lesser known of the *DD approaches for design and development. Essentially, all logic lives within your stored procedures (sprocs) within your database. And by "all logic", I mean, ALL LOGIC. That's right, ALL validation, business rules, persistence, workflow, etc. resides within sprocs that interact against your database. What makes it challenging is when you try to implement some object oriented techniques with a strictly procedural language. That's what I call, "exercising your tech-muscle." </sarcasm:MyReality>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee What's your take on it?
Thanks to those of you that attended the meeting this evening! We had 29 people that made for a pretty good crowd. Please note that we WILL take into consideration the moving of the meeting place to West Des Moines. Like I mentioned several times, we just need a home that is not willing to charge us for the room. To get the slides and demos for the meeting, go here. Some one after the meeting asked, Why would I store my pages in the database? Well, all I can say is that it depends. If you need to interact with...
First and foremost, thanks to all of you that attended my presentation! We had a great crowd that was eagered to learn more about the inner workings of ASP.NET. Second, I would like to apologize for my buggy demo. Like I mentioned during the error, I moved the database file containing the content from my desktop to a folder under the C-drive so my connection string got hosed. I didn't take the time to check the demo to its entirety before showing it. My apologies. If you would like to get the demo code for the presentation, you can do...
Ted Neward is creating a new colun on MSDN that outlines the content of his presentation on Pragmatic Architecture. You can check out an intro for the series, here. I was able to see this presentation at TechEd this past summer and it was pretty good. If you would like to see the webcast, you can do so here.
Oracle Develop is the "developer"part for the OpenWorld conference. Remember, when I blogged about it couple of days ago? Yeah, I was pretty much in the same room for hours listening on how I can use their .NET tools to make things easier for developers. Verdict? Un-impressed. Why? Well, most of their content was the same content you can find on their website. The only things that made it ok was that I was able to talk with the developers of the product and discuss some of the issues/enhances with the product. I was also pleased to find out that they're planning...
So, I'm at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week to learn more about how we can leaverage our Oracle backend through .NET. As some of you might now, MS provides a "built-in" Oracle ADO.NET provider within the .NET Framework. If you didn't know, Oracle also provides their own managed ADO.NET provider that communicates natively with your Oracle db resources. They also provide something called Oracle Tools for VS.NET (OTDN), that is a series of add-ins for VS2005|2003 that allow you to connect, modify, debug and query your Oracle database. The ADO.NET provider and OTDN are free for download. So,...
I'm sure that I'm going to get a lot of crap from this, but here it goes... <RANT> While talking with a potential candidate today about what .NET language we were using on building our business layer & common library with, I mentioned that we will use C# for the common library and VB.NET for the business layer. He asked, "Why? You're current staff is mostly VB developers, wouldn't you just use VB.NET for all?". That's when I re-iterated that we're planning on using VB.NET for some of our business layer development. Since there's a small team (2 people) right now that...
So yestereday I'm reading my daily RSS feeds when I encounter Ted Neward's post on a comment that Scott Hanselman made during the p&p Summit in Redmond. After reading this post, I shot Nick a message asking him to read it and see what his toughts were on this...you can find his response here. I couldn't agree more with Scott, Ted and Nick. Here's why ... In my old Java dev days, we utilized a lot of open source technologies (Http Commons, log4j, Bouncy Castle, etc.) to help speed up our writing of code (just as Scott did with log4net). The company I...
Mike Stall has a really sweet post in he discusses some differences between conventional calls using the Object type and generics to casting for you within factory methods (Type CreateType() ). Worth the read if you're using generics beyond the traditional collection samples.
My good friend (and former manager) Heath Stewart has a couple of great posts covering different issues (multiple installs, high disk space and long install time) customers have encountered while installing VS 2005 SP1. This is great stuff, way to go Heath!
That's right, the folks at Fresh Logic Studios (check out this sweetness), are giving away some great goodies...their JavaScript Framework! All I can say is that you need to check it out, pretty sweet stuff...I'm speechless.
Microsoft has released a beta version of SP1 for Team Foundation Server through Microsoft Connect. In SP1 there are a lot enhancements to the system, specially when it comes to performance. The TFS team has updated a lot of the sprocs dealing with version control, workitem tracking and the datawarehouse components. In this post, Brian Harry has listed some (if not all) of the bug fixes in TFS SP1. Check it out if you have time. Also, go and sign up to get SP1 (for both TFS and VS2005) and try it out...hopefully on your TEST TFS box!
Roy Osherove has a great comparison of the popular unit test frameworks for .NET (MbUnit, NUnit and Team System Unit). I have to agree that for general testing purposes the standard is NUnit. Once you've grasped NUnit, MbUnit is a logical transition.
Do you have legacy VB6 applications that need a little .NET in them? Don't want to mess around with the fun of COM interop? Now, you don't have to with the Interop Forms Toolkit! The toolkit allows you to have a phased upgrade of your VB6 applications to .NET by allowing your to have both VB6 and VB.NET forms running within the same VB6 process. I downloaded the toolkit earlier this week to check it out and I was pretty impressed in how it made the accessing of .NET objects within VB6 pretty easy. Go check it out!
Well, looks like Nick beat me to the post! If you're doing Unit Testing or TDD, this is a great installment of Hanselminutes you should not miss! Scott has always done a great job with putting just the right amount of content to keep the listener interested and productive. This is not just me saying it, but Chris Sells too!
If you want to learn more about unit testing and being test driven, you should also check out this other Hanselminute.
I just stumbled into this project, CCNETConfig, while looking through CodePlex earlier this evening. I have not looked into this tool (since I don't have CC.NET installed on this laptop) but seems like something that could be very useful to those using CC.NET at their shops.
I've been doing a lot of playing around with Team Foundation for the past couple of weeks and in the mean time I've created a lot of test* Team Projects.
When I decided to clean up some of these test project, I thought the logical thing and went to delete them through Team Explorer. Well, as soon as you do that, you will run into this nice little message:
Use the Project Creation Wizard in Team Explorer to create a project or the TfsDeleteProject tool to delete one.
Being a huge fan of the command line, this is not an issue for me. ...
Today I started to setup Continuous Integration (CI) with Team Foundation Server (TFS). Unfortunately, TFS does not support it out of the box; however, it does support functionality for you to hook-up into event sinks for comment server operations (Checkin, WorkItem assignment, etc). So, I Googled for "continuous integration team foundation" and ran into two really good posts by Jeff Atwood [post] and Daniel Cazzulino [post]. I particurlaly like solution that Jeff's post gives you, because he has added the page that kzu (Daniel) created and incorporated into his CI webservice. I wanted to take the solution even further by adding the automatic addition...
How many of you out there are running Team Foundation Server? If you are, have you done anything to customize work items, policies or processes?
That's right, if you've like IronPython before ... you'll love it even more now since it's gone RTM. Go get it from CodePlex.
Where does/should it live? Middle tier (.NET/Java/Other technology) or data tier (SQL Server/Oracle/DB2)? Talk amongst yourselves. I'm curious to find out what you have to say!
David Chappell has posted his latest opinari entitled SOA and the Reality of Reuse. Over all a pretty good read since it helps to demystify theoretical SOA from applied SOA. While reading the opinari, I came to the realization that people considering SOA should we asking the question: what are you really trying to do now? As an added bonus, David Ing has posted his own thoughts on the opinari; also a very good read.
That's right, Scott has updated his ultimate tools list! Check it out, and see what you've been missing (or if your tools is on his list).
FYI. I've created a CodePlex project or LightBox.NET. To find the latest source, please go check it out there!
Someone asked if I would post the source code for LightBox.NET. Well, here it is. Enjoy! If you have any ideas for extending it, please let me know!
The development blog for Ablogin.NET is up! Running .Text under ASP.NET 2.0, I should be able to post information on my development efforts for Ablogin.NET. Keep tuned in!!