Jim Zimmerman - ASP.NET, MVC, Ajax and ORM

I have to admit, I was skeptical as to what good Live Writer might do.  Why would you just not log in to your blog and add drafts in there?  Well I found out it is very nice to have a free rich text editor that I can save my drafts locally and then preview them on my blog before publishing them.  I am using DasBlog1.9 and Windows Live Writer connects to it right out of the box.  It took literally 10 seconds to connect to my blog.  Pretty cool stuff and it also supports most of the top blog engine out there like:  

You can also write plug-ins to it and can see some examples at the Windows Live Gallery - Writer .  And you can find more info on Windows Live Writer SDK at the live.com blog. 

Here is a picture of Live Writer using Live Writer to add it.  Nice.

Here is a map of where I live, well close to where I live.  Wow, that was easy.  Very cool!

 

This is the first time I have used those features, and I must admit that would have taken much longer in the admin for any blog. 

And now I just downloaded an Event plug-in.  I don't have an event to add right now, but I will soon.  There aren't too many plug-ins available yet, but you know there will be a lot soon.

If you have a blog, try this out.  It has saved me some time and made blogging much more enjoyable.

I was just awarded Microsoft's MVP award this week and am very grateful to many people for helping to make that happen.  This is a great honor and feels good that the work that i have done in the community for the last 12 months is acknoledged. I really have enjoyed speaking at Code Camps and look forward to doing much more next year.   I have learned so much this last year from others in the community.

It all started when I went to my first DotNet Users Group meeting here in Tampa and met Ambrose.  We started to chat about things and I asked him about how one would speak at a Code Camp.  Well Tampa code Camp 2005 was coming up in 3 weeks and he forwarded my info to Joe Healy who has since helped me to become a confident speaker at Code Camps since last year.  Joe has definitely influenced me a lot and has introduced me to people I would not have met otherwise.  I also want to thank Shawn Burke, who has helped me be part of a very smart software team on codeplex with the Atlas Control Toolkit.  They really have taught me what it's like to be part of project bigger than just your own.

I also want to thank Keith Kabza, who is president of the DotNet Users Group here in Tampa.  Working with him has taught me some very useful tips and tricks for C# development.  We helped build a Code Camp starter Kit that has yet to be put into beta, but it has worked for at least Tampa Code Camp last July.  If there was only more time in a day.

Now that I have control over my blog using DasBlog, I plan on blogging a lot more and adding some quick demos to this site, so keep in touch and subscribe to my feed.

I finally figured out how to set up dasblog and import all of my posts from blogger to Dasblog.  I will add a post later on how i did this and what other ways there are to do this.

This is my first post on my new blog engine and am very happy with it so far.  I love the control.  Thanks so much to the dasblog team for making the software so easy to install and configure.  I am anxious to start posting from live writer also.  but i better get some sleep first.

.NetTiers has just released it's 2.0 version and it is the best architecture / code generation template ever released. For those of you who do not know about the whole code generation thing, I feel sorry for you. You will not believe the amount of time you will save generating code. I have been writing my own code generators since 1998 when i used Lingo to write html and perl. No joke! Anyway, I have been writing a vb and c# code generator the last 3 years for my own good, but ever since I stumbled across nettiers template for codesmith, I have stopped my own development. These guys knock it out for you. It is the best code generator template out there for .net 2.0. I religiously use this for every project i have had for 6 months now. The new release fixes many things and is very easy to use. You can definitely take extreme programming to the next level with this stuff.

Well as you can see I am pretty excited about this stuff and so much that I asked if I could help with nettiers. I was lucky enough to be added as a developer to the open source project. I am going to focus on adding some atlas / ajax to the admin since it is what i have the most passion for and experience playing around with the atlas control toolkit for the last 4 months.

Well the guys at Microsoft released the September release of the Atlas Control Toolkit. This is a great release with some cool features like animation and nobot along with some cool sliders. My balloon did not get in this time around because of some unforeseen bugs. Those guys are fun to work with and they work very hard. I see code check ins at midnight and sometimes 3 in the morning. They really worked hard to get this release solid and you can tell when you look at it. Have fun! The animation stuff is really amazing. You would swear its flash.

I don't know about you all , but I think the biggest ajax problem is the "back button problem". For example, I built this cool build a car application and my wife would click the next button and then when she wanted to change something and go back she would hit the back button and say, "What happened? Where did the car go?". That was when I realized that we had to come up with a solution for the back button browser problem in ajax. Well it looks as if Nikhil has come up with a good solution for this problem here: http://www.nikhilk.net/BackButtonSupport.aspx . I haven't had time to implement his stuff, but he is the father of Atlas, so I am sure it probably works as advertised. He has some great stuff on his site on how to implement it.

Scott Guthrie just announced Atlas 1.0 Naming and Roadmap. This is great because it will be released to work with vs 2005 and be fully supported. They listened to alot of people that want the new technology now and they are delivering. Here is a little excerpt of what he said:

"Many people have asked us to deliver a fully-supported 1.0 release of �Atlas� before the next release of Visual Studio. �Fully supported� means that Microsoft product support services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and that any customer can obtain hotfixes if they encounter a bug affecting their application. It also means that the product has a committed servicing product lifetime of 10 years � which provides companies with the ability to depend on it for mission critical applications.

I am excited to announce today that we are going to ship this fully supported �Atlas� 1.0 release on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and ensure that it works with Visual Studio 2005. Our goal is to ship the �Atlas� 1.0 release around the end of this year. The plan is to first have a Beta, then an RC, and then decide on the final date based on customer feedback."

Good stuff!

Here is a great post on how to increase the speed of you javascript in IE from the IE Blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/28/728654.aspx
It has some very valuable information on how to optimize your javascript. I am already changing some of my code.

Also here is a good post from Nikhil about Script Loading Tips. He has some good info on how to load scripts sooner than window.onload. It's some pretty cool stuff.
Have fun!