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

For those of you in the Tampa area come check out my session on Wednesday about Subsonic here.

Using Subsonic to rapidly build your asp.net applications

Learn how to get your project from idea to prototype in hours instead of days using a killer open source toolset called Subsonic.  Subsonic is a toolset / code generation tool that helps a website build itself.  It not only generates your DAL for you but creates a very productive framework inspired by ruby on rails for asp.net.  The databases supported are SQL Server 2000 or 2005, MySQL, and Oracle.  I will go through many of the features and learned best practices from projects where I have used this toolset.   I will also try to build an app from scratch in about 15 minutes, but don’t even think it will be pretty.

If you have not used subsonic before you definitely will want to come check it out and see how powerful this tool is.  You can go to http://www.subsonicproject.com/ and check it out before hand and come armed with questions.  I have been using this since last December and have standardized on it with every web project so far.  Once you use it, it is hard to go back to using other code gen tools or creating your own DAL from scratch.  Does anyone still do that anyway?

Hopefully see you there!

After I installed Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 (Orcas) and the new TFS explorer, I was trying to export my tasks to an excel file from Visual studio 2005 and encountered this error:

It says there is a problem with the installation of the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Office integration components.   Luckily I was able to export the tasks to excel using Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, but now when I want to integrate with office and TFS I need to use the new beta.  I hope this is the only issue I run into, but I will keep you all informed as I run into issues.  Overall, I like the new beta, but am having a hard time figuring out when to make a new project use it as I will need to have all of my developers use it also for a particular project since we can't open the projects in both instances.

If any of you write web applications for larger clients you are probably starting to see the same issues I am.  There are too many browsers to support now!  Welcome to browser hell.  It is beginning to drive me crazy.  Here are the latest stats from w3 schools on browser usage:

Browser Statistics Month by Month

This especially becomes an issue when you are are writing bleeding edge apps using Ajax and silverlight and developing on a vista machine.  Well first you need a way to test IE 6.  I have given up on IE 5, but there is a decent solution for testing with IE 6 on vista or any other machine where you are already running IE 7.  See you can't run both browsers at the same time.  So I run virtual PC 2007 which is free.  They have a A VPC hard disk image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, and either IE6 or IE7 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit: Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image.  The VHD expires August 2007, but I bet there will be an update to the expiration date soon.

Now you have IE 6 ready to test, but what about the others.  Obviously you need firefox and might as well download safari for windows and Opera.  Now I realize that safari only says 1.3% above, but many of you may have a client that works on a mac, which I do.  So now I have to support Safari 2. whatever on the mac OS x.  Now this one is a pain to support.  I am trying to figure out how to do this currently and have come up with a couple of solutions.  First you are not allowed to create a virtual image of mac OS x using vmware or virtual PC because apple does not allow it.  I guess they want you to buy and ibook and virtualize vista. But I think I may have found a way to virtualize mac os x on vista.  I am going to try it this week and let you know how it goes.  It looks kind of painful so I may just use a paid service, browsrcamp, which offers a vnc connection to a mac.

So now we know what browsers to test and how, lets look at what libraries we should use for Ajax.  ASP.NET Ajax is one obvious answer.  It comes with built in support for all the browsers I have mentioned above and is fairly easy to use.  Now I am a little biased, but I also have worked with jQuery which is also a nice Ajax library and has a strong community also.

When you are running your tests if you regularly validate your html, you will save hours ahead of time before you run your manual tests.

Good luck and may the browser be with you!

If you read my blog and are actually one of the few who subscribe to my blog, then you may be wondering what happened to me.  In a word, "book".  Taking on a few chapters in a book and then an additional few online chapters took it's toll on my writing.  I never knew I could write that many pages about AJAX, but apparently I can.  You can check out the book, Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX, on Amazon.  I was told it was out and printed, but have not seen one yet at the book stores, but it should be there soon.  We are giving a few away and Tampa Code Camp this year on July 14th, 2007.  So if you want to learn some things from great speakers for free and win a few books, then you need to come.  These are the best events to go to as a developer.  The connections alone are worth the Saturday spent inside. 

Hope to see you at code camp.  You know, last year at code camp, I learned some new stuff and met some cool people.  Some of you may get that from the movie.  I am not going to say which one.  If you don't get it, then I'm really sorry, but you are going to have to ask me at code camp.

I guess there has been a double booking of the Microsoft room for the 20th, so we had to move it to the 21st.  I hope you all can still make it.  we will all be speaking at Tampa Code Camp also on July 14th, so try to catch us there if you can also.  I will be showing some Silverlight and Ajax stuff at Tampa Code Camp.

 When connecting to my vista laptop or my vista desktop tonight using remote desktop, I kept getting this error. "The authentication certificate received from the remote computer has expired or it not valid."  This is new and could not find anything on it except for a comment left on a random blog post I found.  Luckily this worked.  Notice how it says my certificate expired on 7/1/2002.  Very strange.  For anyone else having this problem, this is how you solve it:

1. Start mmc.exe by typing in mmc in the search bar and open Certificates snap-in for local computer account.
2. Navigate to “Certificates\Remote Desktop\Certificates”
3. Delete certificate that’s in this store.

A few of us are having a Day of AJAX in Tampa, FL on June 20th, 2007 from 8:30 - 5:00.  This will be a fun day of learning ASP.NET AJAX for free put on by ASPSOFT, Microsoft and DevFish.NET. Join us for a deep dive into the intricacies of Ajax development using the Microsoft suite of tools. The agenda for the day will be:

8:30am - 9:00am : Registration and welcome
9:00am - 10:30am : Joe Healy ::  Introductions :: An overview of Microsoft Ajax
10:30am - 10:45am : BREAK
10:45am - 12:15pm : Jim Zimmerman :: Building controls and extenders
12:15pm - 1:00pm : LUNCH (pizza and soda)
1:00pm - 2:30pm : Jay Kimble :: Ajax Best Practices
2:30pm - 2:45pm : BREAK
2:45pm - 3:45pm : Joe Healy :: Ajax and JavaScript in Visual Studio "Orcas"
3:45pm - 4:00pm : Giveaways (including a Zune!)
4:00pm - 5:00pm : Open dialog with attendees

All topics are covered at a 200-level. Space is limited, so register early to get your seat at A Day of Ajax!

Go to https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=118815 to register.  I think there are only about 75 seats available, so you will want to register as soon as possible to get in.

Look forward to seeing you there.  Hopefully I will have a few copies of Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX to give away at the event.

MSDN has uploaded the Webcast I did last week.  It was my first one so there is some funny mess ups in the beginning.  I didn't know how to get back to the live meeting slides after switching to share my applications.  the host had to get on the line and tell me what to click.  Oh well.  I won't make that mistake again.

If you want to view it you can see it on-demand here, ASP.NET AJAX From Scratch MSDN Webcast.  I would love to hear any feedback you may have.

I got asked to help with a Webcast due to scheduling conflict and will be giving a Webcast on Monday May 14th at 12:00 p.m.  SDN Webcast: Russ and Joe Developer Show: ASP.NET AJAX from Scratch (Level 100) is where you can register online or download later.  I don't know when or if they will offer it as a download, but I will keep you posted when I find out.

I will be going over some basic stuff with UpdatePanel and some of the controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit.  I also will go over a cool demo using the Ajax Library to write my own class using Orcas Beta 1 and showing off intellisense with JavaScript.  It is truly amazing to reference my own JavaScript class and then see the properties and methods using intellisense when calling the class in the aspx page.