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

If you are all interested in learning Silverlight here in Tampa, FL, you need to come to this event on October 17th from 9 - 5 p.m.!  Check out the details and sign up here:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032354162&Culture=en-US

They are giving away an Xbox 360 elite.  I am a little upset because since I am speaking so I can't win.  Not fair!

The session I am doing is called, How to build a dynamic database driven photo slide show viewer with Silverlight 1.0.  I am adapting the Silverlight Photoviewer open source project to work with dynamic data from the database.

I just saw that they put up my first session, "High-Speed Development with the AJAX Control Toolkit" , in 3 parts on the REMIX07 Videos page.  I have not looked at it yet, but there is nothing I can really do about it if I don't like watching myself talk. 

REMIX07 has been very educational and fun.  I am about ready to go to Miguel de Icaza 's session on Moonlight, "Silverlight for Linux".  Miguel is a really cool and smart guy.  It was pretty cool to see him speak at the keynote yesterday where he showed a demo of silverlight running on his Linux box.  I think that may be the first time a Linux laptop has shared the stage with vista and mac os x machines.  Pretty cool to see! 

I am going to be giving a few sessions in Boston on October 8th and 9th titled, "High-Speed Development with the AJAX Control Toolkit" and "Go Deep with ASP.NET AJAX".  You can look at all of the sessions at REMIX 07 Sessions and Agenda.  It will be a lot of fun, I am sure.  I am excited to speak at an event like this.  I went to MIX 06 in Vegas the first year and it was very cool to have a more design / web app centric crowd to hang out with and meet and learn from.  If you are even thinking about learning Silverlight, Ajax or ASP.NET development, you need to come to this event.  As cheap as it is, it is very worth it.

Here is a code , RM07EXTB they gave us to give you all to save $100 off of the registration of $299 for a total of $199.  And I just heard tonight that they are going to give a $120 online store credit at the Microsoft store according to Jeff Barnes post.  That is pretty impressive.

Well this is going to be a great event!  Hope to see you there!

Here is the info on the event:

What to expect at ReMIX07 Boston …

If you’re in the web business, learn about:

• Building a better user experience to unlock new revenue opportunities
• Forging tighter, stickier customer connections
• Building innovative media experiences into your site

If you’re a web developer, build:

• Silverlight applications quickly and easily
• Sites and applications that consume Windows Live services
• Rich, interactive sites made for the next web

If you’re a web designer, learn about:

• Using Silverlight to design gorgeous and highly functional user interfaces
• How a real-world application is built and the best practices associated with it
• The suite of Expression tools that revolutionize the way designers work with developers

If you attend, regardless of your job role, check out:

• Xbox Gaming Area where you can test your skills at Halo 3 and Guitar Hero among others
• Express Yourself Design Contest where key design agencies compete to solve a real-world design problem
• Stay tuned: We may feature some cool products and demos around XNA, Popfly, Robotics Studio and Surface

It’s Happening Here

Monday-Tuesday, October 8-9, 2007

October 8:             Registration & Breakfast from 7:00-9:00 am
Keynote & Breakouts from 9:00 a.m.-5:45 pm
Welcome Reception from 6:00-9:00 pm

October 9:             Registration & Breakfast from 8:00-9:00 am

                                Keynote & Breakouts from 9:00 am-5:00 pm

Hyatt Regency Cambridge

575 Memorial Drive,
Cambridge, MA 02139

For directions click here.

Sponsored by

Sometimes when I need to re-sync my project source files in team foundation server, I have to delete the workspace and then get the latest project source files, but have always been frustrated that I have to get all projects from that tree even if it was from different branches.  Well one way to avoid that, at least within vista, is to delete the cache in your application data folder which caches you data in the folder:

C:\Users\Jim\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\1.0\Cache

 You may not have the same nave Jim, but you get the idea.  I think in XP it is something like C:\Documents and Settings\application data\blah\blah\blah.

Anyway, when you delete all the data and then delete the files where they are stored locally you will get a fresh latest without having to mess up the rest of you tree for other projects in the same structure.

I was preparing for my session for Jacksonville Code tonight which is coming in a few days and noticed that my JavaScript intellisense no longer worked in Visual Studio 2008 beta 2.  Since part of my session requires that intellisense works and the fact that it is so much easier to write JavaScript, I was in a little bit of a panic.  I looked up the problem in Google and found this post, 

http://blogs.msdn.com/angus_logan/archive/2007/07/30/visual-studio-2008-beta-2-not-showing-your-javascript-intellisense-intellicode-syntax-highlighting.aspx

Basically two registry entries that must have gotten messed up when I uninstalled beta 1 and installed beta 2:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\CLSID\{014E9A41-54E5-44ED-B15E-EFFA8758BFFC}]

"CodeBase"=file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll

and

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\CLSID\{014E9A41-54E5-44ED-B15E-EFFA8758BFFC}\InprocServer32\9.0.0.0]

"CodeBase"=file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll

Gotta love the community! 

Thanks!

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!