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

So I decided to volunteer for the FOOTS program with Microsoft and help train and answer questions at the Best Buy in Clearwater, FL of of US 19.

Why did I volunteer to do this?  I thought it would be fun to be around the consumers during the day of the launch event and get to see what people think about it.  

Well I just got back from showing the retail sales people at Best Buy and quite a few customers tonight and they were all very impressed.  In fact after talking about it so much, I am pretty impressed.  You see, I have only used it for email, writing code and blog posts.  I haven't gotten to use Word, Excel, Media Center, Photo manager, create movies, use Flip 3D, etc. very much. :)  People were generally very impressed and were only disappointed because they could not even buy what they were seeing.  Definitely an awkward sales position to be in.  "Look what you can have, but you have to wait until tomorrow".  All in all I think people are anxious to have a new version of windows on their computers.  Seeing all the good deals, I want to buy a new one for home.

If you want to see me in a Vista Polo shirt and give me a hard time at the Best Buy, please stop in.  I will be there on Tuesday, Jan 30th in the evening.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 has just released!  We can now start to write great AJAX applications that will be fully supported.  They may have taken a while, but that is too be expected when they create a massive base framework that will be supported across multiple browsers.  This is not an easy task. 

This is a huge step to great things with using AJAX with ASP.NET 2.0.  I know there are a lot of frameworks out there, but this is one that will be around for awhile and is easily contributed to.  They have also extended the JavaScript language so that it feels a little bit more like C# and wait until they release the new Visual Studio where we will get intellisense for JavaScript.  I am so excited to see this in action.

Be sure to check out ajax.asp.net and watch some of the video demos they have and implement their code samples.  While we have all seen demos like this before, we can actually implement these scenarios in a supported environment.  Have fun!

I just got a slingbox because my neighbor is moving to London, U.K. and he wants to watch American TV over there and I guess there is not that much selection.  He said he had heard of something called a Slingbox and ironically my boss had just installed one and I thought it was pretty cool.

So being the nice guy that I am I offered to let him use part of my bandwidth, I have plenty to spare with my Verizon FIOS (fiber to the house) with 15 MB down/ 2MB up.  He just bought a slingbox to put in my house and I am going to add a third DVR and put it in the garage along with the slingbox.  He can control it from anywhere and record shows and then watch them later.  You know with a technology like this, it will be a big disrupter in the next few years.  Especially with their announcement of their new products at CES with the sling catcher so you don't need a computer. 

Also I just got this stuff to work on my Treo 700w.  So now I can watch any show I recorded or want to watch in real time anywhere here in Tampa.  We have EVDO everywhere which is about 400 kbps - 700 kbps which is really good for this stuff.

So as I was not planning on buying one, I still get to play with it because of my friend who is moving to the UK.  Now we will see if he kicks me off of it when he is trying to watch TV from over there.  It only allows one connection at a time.  I Hope I don't like it too much.

I just read a nice post from Jim Allchin on the Windows Vista Team Blog about some new data features in Vista that help you find data easier.  There were a few things I didn't really consider using the way he suggested and he had some very good pointers like using the search right above the windows new start icon to find not just programs but any kind of file.  Very productive tip.

I have been using Vista for over a month now and had not thought of using some of these features in the way they had intended.  I will let you read his post since he has a much better way of saying it than I would. Cool stuff.

While I have not used ZoomIt yet in any presentations, I plan on it.  I just downloaded it and it is pretty cool stuff.  I just watched a Continuous Integration for Team System Demo from ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog and he was using it.  He gave a great talk on some very cool continuous integration tips for team foundation server that I plan on using.  He did warn about how people in the front row got a little dizzy from the zoom.

I just came across this list of issues with Visual Studio and Vista.  For those of you that dared to jump on Vista on your development machine you will like this list. 

One thing to note is that to debug properly in Visual Studio you will have to run the application as administrator.  I pointed this out in an earlier post, but also pointed out how to run as administrator all the time form the user access control property.  Well this is fine, but it is nice to have the access control turned on.  I turned it off so that id did not have to remember to right click and select "run as administrator" every time I launched a new instance of VS2005.  Anyway, here is a way to make Visual Studio and just about any other program run as administrator automatically.  Right click your shortcut and you will see this window.

Click the advanced button and then make sure the checkbox for Run as administrator is checked. Now whenever you launch VS 2005 then debugging will work without having to remember to right click the shortcut every time you launch it.

So today I ran into my first real gotcha since switching every machine I have at work and home to Vista.  

For about an hour today, a fellow developer and I could not figure out why an SSIS package with a script component was getting this error on the script control:

[Script Component [311]] Error: System.BadImageFormatException: An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B) at Microsoft.VisualBasic.Vsa.VsaEngine.Compile() at Microsoft.SqlServer.VSAHosting.Runtime.LoadSource(String project) at Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.ScriptComponentHost.CreateUserComponent()

I did a google search "0x8007000B ssis" and was lucky, only one page in result and it was the answer I had been looking for.  Not the one I wanted, but what I needed to know on the following post.

This is a known issue, which (together with other Vista compatibility issues) will be fixed by SQL 2005 SP2 early next year. For now, please don't use Vista machines for SSIS development.
P.S. There is a preview (November CTP) release of SP2, it fixes many Vista compatibility problems, but it does not fix this issue yet.

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Michael Entin, IS team // This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

Ok, well at least we know now.  We still used SSIS Development the rest of the day, but had to be creative on how to change some of the data with clean up SQL after the integration.  I still love SSIS and can wait for a fix.  But I hope it is soon.  I am sure it is very tough work being a developer at Microsoft right about now.  They have to rush to make all these fixes and everybody is watching.  Good luck guys! 

It looks as if NVIDIA spends more time creating mp3's, videos and marketing about Vista than actually creating drivers that a worth a crap.  I want to know what kind of video card they were using and with what drivers for their demos. 

They still are only offering a driver for Vista RC2 from October 17 which really sucks.  I went out and bought a new NVIDIA card as soon as I downloaded and installed the RTM of Vista in November.  I was thinking that NVIDIA would of course already have decent drivers ready.  I was wrong.  Kind of a let down to not even be able to view 3D very well.  The drivers even choke on 3D screensavers.  My xp laptop works better for 3D.

I will give the benefit of the doubt to NVIDIA in case something drastically changed from RC2 to RTM, but at least give us a beta for RTM.