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This year we're evolving mvcConf into something bigger and better. After many discussions and planning around everyone's busy schedules, we came up with aspConf - The Virtual ASP.NET Conference.
As the main site states:
aspConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: showcasing
the ASP.NET stack as the platform for great web applications.
We've revamped the popular mvcConf
conference to serve all of ASP.NET,
...
We’re getting ready for the next version of MvcConf on Tuesday, 2/8/2011 from 8AM-5PM CST! What is MvcConf? MvcConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: writing awesome applications on top of the ASP.Net MVC framework. Your brain will explode from taking in so much hard core technical sessions. Sounds fun eh? This is a community event and we want the best and brightest sharing what they know. We intend to record each session and make them available online for viewing. We intend to make the videos available free of charge, depending on conference sponsorships. ...
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...
The other day I was working on some features for MVC Turbine when I got a random idea about how we can use a new feature that comes with the Razor view engine (VE). This blog post hopefully will help out some of you in your development or least get your creative juices going. @View with Razor Views One of the new features that ships with the Razor VE is the ability to set ViewDataDictionary values through the use of a DynamicObject property. The following code shows how to do this: The ViewModel.Message call is the...
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...
Lately, I’ve been working a lot with applications that expose JSON-based services to clients that care to consume their data. All of these services are nothing more than plain Controllers that return a ViewModel that’s rendered as JSON. You might be saying to yourself, “Big deal! All you’re doing is returning a JsonResult to the client! Tell us something new…” Well, as a matter of fact, that’s the whole purpose of this post. ;) How Do Things Currently Work? Right now within MVC, you have a explicit convention that a controller must follow for any action it exposes;...
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 my good friend and fellow C4MVC junkie, Eric Hexter blogged about an event the ASP.NET MVC community is putting together called, MvcConf. What is MvcConf? MvcConf is a online conference where you can learn about real experiences creating MVC applications as well about what the future holds for creating asp.net apps based on MVC. We have scheduled community members to present on intro and advanced topics using MVC2 and we have some Microsoft product members who will talk about some of the new stuff coming out soon. Why should I care? If you’re interested in...
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. ...
That’s right, get the v2 RC release while it’s hot! Version 2 of MVC Turbine, is a complete re-write of the plug-in that allows these features: New runtime framework that allows extensibility Blades (components) that are auto-registered and loaded at runtime. Introduced the Core Blades to setup the basic runtime of an MVC application: MvcBlade -- wiring for MVC related components (Controllers, 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...
Now, I know a few days late on this blog post. Granted, at the time, I was doing a webcast on ti! :) Any way, be assured that I’ve already congratulated Phil and team on getting ASP.NET MVC released! To find out more about the intricate details, check out Phil’s post on it (remember, he’s the PM).
Now, during the time I’ve been talking with people about the MVC bits, I’m still surprised that they ask these questions (just to name a few):
Are Web Forms going away?
How do I convert my Web Forms...
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...
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...
Yeah, I know...been really, really quiet here. Reason? Busy with work, work and life. Going to try to get back into the "frequent blogging" mood, I promise!! Any way, for those of you that attended my talks at VSLive NY! and HDC Minneapolis, I just want to say, "Thanks!!" The code as been updated slightly to help clarify some of the interactions between the different projects (and logic). So, go check out the latest bits at http://jglozano.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ Please note that the PPT deck is also in that location for you guys to get. Again, thanks for coming to...
A couple of weeks back, I recorded a podcast with, our community MS Developer Evangelist, Jeff Brand for his Spaghetti Code series. I was informed by Jeff, today that he finally posted it! I had a heck of a time recording this podcast with Jeff, the hour just flew by! If yo have the time, download the podcast and check it out!
Links:
Direct Download - click here
Subscribe - click here
iTunes - click here
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...
Well, I had a great time meeting old friends and making new ones at this year's summit. There were so many things going on and so many people to see and talk to, that it's next to impossible to consume everything at once! So, to keep things simple, here are of the highlights per day: Sunday Although, I was not there until late (way late), it was a lot fun hanging around the Westin's lobby and talk about how a chicken takes a dookie. Yeah, that's right. Keith Elder had the great intentions of recording a podcast that...
twitter is a funny thing. Not only is it a web application but also a way interacting with people both on/off-line. The thing that I find most interesting about it is how people tend to user it as a verb (have you twittered?) and a noun (my tweeps)...like another thing that's just part of their things to do. Another interesting thing is how people here in Des Moines have managed to organize a monthly physical meeting where other fellow DSM tweeps can meet. Definitely something I really need to check out next month. Not sure how many of you...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
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 was looking at my blog posts numbers and I must say, they're pretty sad. In the past three months, I've had 15 posts...For those of you that are regular readers, thanks for sticking around. Honestly, I've been pretty busy with my workout routine and with my new job, that I've had little time to do interesting blog posts. Don't worry, I have some really good posts that I need to finish up and publish. Another reason, which is a little less obvious, is that twitter is taking up most of my "random" blog posts. If you follow my tweets,...
On Wednesday, November 7th, I will be presenting about Silverlight to our user group in Des Moines. Here's the info:
Abstract:
This is an overview presentation of the feature set that both Silverlight v1.0 and v1.1 have to offer to developers.
We will also cover some of the current tools available for both designers and developers to create Silverlight applications.
What is Silverlight?
Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#,...
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...
Today Microsoft is announcing that Popfly will be going into public beta. So for those you that had requested to sign up for the beta, no worries! You can automatically login without a hassle! (Pretty sweet, huh?) And for those of you that haven't signed up or don't know anything about it, just to go http://popfly.com and login with Passport.
Here's a brief description of what Popfly:
It's a Silverlight 1.0 application to create a really slick UI that allows you to use drag-and-drop tools to build some cool things. It also includes support for Vista Sidebar and Live Gadgets. For those...
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
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...
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:...
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.
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?...
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,...
Yesterday Nick sent me a link to these videos on YouTube that have the old "Hi, I'm a Mac. Hi, I'm a PC." gestalt to them. If you have the time, check them out they're pretty hilarious. RubyOnRails vs PHP - Migrations RubyOnRials vs PHP - Organization RubyOnRails vs Java
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...
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.
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
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!
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...
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, 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...
I've decided to give Soapbox on MSN a try to host some of the videos of Dominic. Check out the first video of many to come on my soapbox: Video: Dominic First Snow Experience The video was taken using our Sony DCR-HC48 MiniDV Camcorder and re-rendered from AVI to MPG-2 using Vegas Movie Studio+DVD. Reason for the re-rendering? Well, the AVI file as 587 MB and Soapbox has a limit of 100MB for uploads, so the file format had to change to accomodate this requirement.
When I first read Scott's post on it, I decided to give ISAPI_Rewrite a try. I've been thinking for a while to re-direct the end-point of my blog from http://lozanotek.com http://www.lozanotek.com to http://blog.lozanotek.com Why? Well, I've always been a fan of subdomains that define a purpose rather than the typical /InsertYourAppNameHere. Technically they're the same, but it's just nice to "package" your web application under it's own subdomain. I mean, come'on, you spent the time working it, why shouldn't it have it's own spot? Remember, when you buy a domain name, you buy *.mydomainnamehere.com not just the www subdomain. I agree...
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.
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!