GuruStop.NET

Another internal company email I sent today and found useful enough to share in the wild (after few modifications)…

Hey all,

There is an online conference (streamed over the Internet, you don’t have to go to physical place) tomorrow called MVCConf; in addition to the MVC in the name it’s related to so many .NET and SQL and jQuery related stuff.

 

You may want to attend as many sessions as you can.

http://mvcconf.com

 

The conference is going to be TOMORROW  July 22 from 8 AM to 5 PM CDT (that means UTC – 5 time, considering Abu Dhabi is UTC + 4, the mentioned time is 9 hours late than Abu Dhabi, so, 8 AM CDT  = 5 PM  for us, 5 PM CDT = 2 AM for us).

 

Of course you do not have to attend all the sessions. Actually you cannot, because they have 3 parallel tracks. (3 sessions at a time).

The conference is streamed over Microsoft Live Meeting.

 

Register from:

http://mvcconf.com/attend

 

See you online :)

Let me add here that the conference agenda can be found at:

This post gets enough said about how the Razor parser works.

http://blog.andrewnurse.net/CommentView,guid,89b7bd90-52d7-4d49-b87d-4e888f285b4c.aspx

The guy, Andrew Nurse, is the one who wrote the parser!   (from Haack’s note)

After reading it and a quick chat with @Haacked on twitter, it seems all your “escape” kind of Razor expressions (that is meaning: when mixing code and text without spaces etc…) will look like @(someCode)someText. This is coming from an example, to escape a C# identifier that’s also a keyword, say “class”, you’d be using @(@class). The @(…) style is the new <%: … %> but only required for escape situations.

Also, it seems that switching from being equivalent to <%: … %> to being equivalent to <%= … %> by using some Razor notation is not gonna make it. You need to do it through doing some classes implementing IHtmlString interface.

Of course I’m not so sure that’s exactly the case. Anyway, Razor is only available now in WebMatrix mini-IDE, not much MVC love yet (pretty soon).  Just thought it might be interesting…

Hey all,

Just in case you have not noticed it already, early last night (before I woke up near midnight our time!) Microsoft released public betas of some new and fancy stuff…

1- IIS Express

Remember when I mentioned it before? A nice alternative to Visual Studio built-in dev server.

Supports SSL and other nice stuff, works even on Windows XP but simulates IIS 7.5, no admin privileges required

2- SQL Server Compact Edition

A file-based database engine, just like SQL Server Express, except that when you develop your website with it, you don’t need it to be installed on the server to get running (or anything else installed)

3- New ASP.NET Pages Syntax code-name Razor

This is a new syntax that is going to replace the old <% … %> ASP-Classic-like style we write ASPX/ASCX pages

It’s going to be mainly for ASP.NET MVC, but watch out, I smell like it’s may reach web-forms also

This is something I have posted to a private mailing list before, and thought since I have only fixed number of keyboard strokes to death, I should be sharing it with larger audience…

Before Beginning

I know some of the audience of this blog may have not even tried ASP.NET MVC, so, you may need to bare with me for a while ((and those familiar with it just bypass this section please).

In ASP.NET MVC, the request goes to a specific method (commonly known as Controller Action) to handle it (choosing which method/action is based on something called Routing, we don’t care about that for now).

Once the method is executed, typically it ends with calling a page or user control (commonly called a View) to send some markup to the browser. Usually this is an ASPX or ASCX file without code behind. It has some special properties to interact with the data coming from the controller action, and some special shortcut methods to write HTML markup (called HTML helpers).

Just wanted to give you a quick update on our next gathering today.

We’ll have the meeting in the same time like last week.

Today, Friday, April 16, at 11:59 PM.

The gathering will have the same style as the last one:

- The first 30 minutes will be a session: Jquery for ASP.NET Developers, by me

- The following 30 minutes will be an open talk, mainly around: Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements

So far we agreed to have the gathering the same way like last week (Using WEBEX website).

We’ll send you the URL by the exact time or the gathering, via the newly created EgyGeeks twitter account.

@EgyGeeks

Also, follow this account for all upcoming gatherings’ news and announcements.

A great VIDEO series on all the nice effects (and functionality) you can achieve with jQuery JavaScript library for those who know NOTHING about it.

jQuery is a very powerful library. One of the first things I do when creating new project is to include the library in it. Microsoft is going to include it by default in ASP.NET web projects (All ASP.Net projects, not just MVC) starting Visual Studio 2010.

Here are some few examples of what you can do with it (VIDEO):

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/jquery-for-absolute-beginners-video-series/?awesm=fbshare.me_EIez#

Have fun jQuerying…

If you heard about Microsoft Oxite CMS, this is the new one, created as a different project to avoid previous developer comments.:

From Press:

Microsoft’s open-source CMS platform is (re)born | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4506

Project Homepage:

http://orchard.codeplex.com

Quote From Press:

The guesses (by me and others) look like they were on target. The “Orchard Project,” which is getting its debut on November 11 at Tech Ed Europe is, indeed, the successor to the Microsoft Oxite content-management system (CMS).

Microsoft made available the first the open-source Oxite CMS bits at the end of 2008. Like Oxite, Orchard will be a free, open-source CMS platform — plus a set of shared components for building ASP.Net applications and extensions. The Orchard code is licensed under an OSI-approved New BSD license.

From the Orchard page on the Microsoft CodePlex code-repository site:

“(T)his core (Orchard) team will use their experience working with ASP.NET and Oxite to deliver a fundamentally new architecture that is the Orchard CMS. We have deliberately chosen to start development, with the guidance and contribution from the community. Over time we expect this project to become a viable successor to Oxite v1 and we know that providing a migration path for users of that existing application will be a high priority.”

Microsoft has released a new Facebook SDK Version 3.0 (other than their old not-so-great one) and it looks to have not just updated APIs but also wide range of features supported in many application types.

Quoting a related blog post from c|net “The web services report” blog:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10393823-26.html

Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications.

A screenshot showing off the NewsFeed control for WPF.

(Credit: The Silverlight Team Blog)

The SDK comes complete with samples and tools to develop Facebook applications in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, and WinForms. It also features the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples.

There are currently other libraries available that allow Facebook developers to develop with other technologies, such as JavaScript, PHP, ActionScript, and the iPhone. There are a variety of others as well, which can be seen here, but these are the ones that Facebook officially provides support for.

Some cool guys (all working in ITWorx I guess, one of the biggest Egyptian Software houses) have created a new website:

http://www.sharepoint4arabs.com

The website, as the name implies, is dedicated for ARABIC resources related to SharePoint.

It originally contained the technical blogs of the site founders (Founders’ Blogs) which are very useful for posts about SharePoint, then very recently they have also lunched Screencasts (Also in Arabic) that start from the very beginning until further advanced stuff.

I think you’ll enjoy them!

• SharePoint 4 Arab Homepage
• Founders’ Blogs
  • Ayman El-Hattab
  • Marwan Tarek
  • Mohamed Yehia
• Screencasts

I hope you like them,

Few minutes ago a colleague and friend asked me about some problem he was having with ASP.NET themes. He was using a theme and including a CSS file in it, the CSS file was linked in the generated HTML but clearly it was not applied. Putting the URL of the CSS file in the browser address bar would return an empty result in Firefox, and a crappy DOCTYPE,HTML,HEAD,BODY tags in IE. The same website works normally with other developers running Windows XP or Windows 7.

Going further to the problem, I tried checking the file access, giving extra permissions and so on, checking web.config and global.asax for any ASP.NET HTTP Handler or HTTP Module that might be handling all requests. None of this existed. Then, I switched to IIS, trying to change the website from custom Application Pool to default integrated pipeline one to default classic (IIS 6 like) one, but no use.

Now I started thinking, images in the website didn’t show also! I didn’t know whether this was a DB/code issue or related to not showing the CSS, well, maybe something is wrong with IIS installation, right? Well, exactly!!!

Here’s what the problem was: