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

I just got done reading Rob Conery's recent post on what's coming in Subsonic 2.0 and I am so excited.  I already use this stuff everyday in all of my projects for the last 3 months and am sure that many will in the future once they understand how powerful this is.  For those that do not know what SubSonic it, check it out at CodePlex.

For those of you at the Sarasota User's Group on Tuesday, I am pretty impressed at how many of you have emailed me telling me about your experience and asking additional questions on how to use it already.  I guess it made quite an impression.  I know it did for me when I first stumbled across it and I think it will for most asp.net 2.0 web developers out there.

I am speaking on Tuesday, February 20, at the Sarasota .NET Developers Group on Code Generation with ASP.NET.  I am excited to meet the group down in Sarasota and visit another users group.  If you are going to be around the area, stop down and check out my session.  It will be at 6 p.m. at the Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

Here is the session description:

Code Generation with ASP.NET

Learn why there is no need to ever write 1000’s of lines of code again for your Data Access Layer. I will examine the different open source and commercial choices out there for code generation including SubSonic, .NET Tiers using Codesmith, and the new BLINQ stuff coming out with Orcas. I will show practical uses for code generation and also how to best set up your team and / or yourself to become successful when using code generation with your projects.

Look forward to seeing you there!

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.