XML
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...
I'm a huge fan of RSS because it enables me to be lazy. How does it do that? Well, the simple fact that I don't have to go to your site to pull content is a HUGE time saver for me. It's nice that we have a mechanism (RSS) that allows you easily pull the content that you care about. I've been using FeedDemon for about +1 year now and I'm pretty happy with it. I actually bought the product back then, but now you can get it for free. The nice thing about FeedDemon is that it's just...
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...
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...
That's right, remember a while back when I blogged about FlickrNSurface? Well, since then, I've been showing people the demo code and some of them have been wanting to know how they can get their hands on it for their own website/projects. At that point, I thought to myself, what is the best way to share the code and any changes that I make to it? That's when I realized I should make this into an open-source project! What better way to share ideas and implementations with community than by allowing them to contribute directly to it! Again, I've...
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...
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...
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
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:...
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.
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!
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, 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!
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!
A couple of days ago at work, Fred found this great tool for editing MSBuild project files, it’s called MSBuild Sidekick from Attrice Corporation. It works pretty good, although there are some quirky things with the UI (mostly with the way the treeview behaves).
The tool does make it a lot easier to change a project file because it gives a graphical representation of the MSBuild tasks (the less you have to remember the schema, the better).
If you’re doing some work with MSBuild, you should check out the tool. It will be worth your time.
A couple of days ago I posted how I improved my blog search. Well, tonight, I decided to enhance it by using the MSN Searcn SDK. My http handler makes a call to the MSN Search web service and returns the found matches and transforms their XML to HTML through XSLT. I’m using the same mechanism I wrote about for calling a web service asynchronously from ASP.NET.
Let me know what you guys think!
This is a pretty sweet Xml Visualizer Add-in for VS2005. Go now, debug away your bad XML!
That’s right! Altova, creator of XMLSpy (one of the coolest XML IDE’s I’ve played with) has released the XML engines used within their applications to developers. The package is called AltovaXML and it offers COM, Java and .NET interfaces along with the kickass engines. You can read more about the news from the ServerSide.NET.
This article dates back a couple of months (seven to be exact), but topic covered is well worth it. There are other tools out there for code generation (such as CodeSmith) that help with the generation of basic objects. But the nice thing about the method described in the article is that you could use the same XML Schema to pull data from SQL Server and with a little XML Serialization magic you could populate the object in a flash!
Hopefully, I will have some spare time to write a simple article (maybe for CodeProject) that shows you how to do this.
While looking at this article on MSDN about the new features of ADO.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005, I was very pleased that finally we are started to look at XML as an independent technology rather than just data between < >.
This article gives a brief show of the new XML SQL Type and how it can be used by client/server applications to make future SQL Server '05-dependent applications even more kick-a**.