GuruStop.NET

SitePoint, a well-known publisher of nice easy-but-deep books in web design and web related stuff, has celebrated the end of the world cup (and the fact that Spain has won) by putting an ebook of one of their titles for FREE (“jQuery: Novice to Ninja”, 407 pages) – only for 24 hours (which I don’t know starting what hour, so, go quick!)

Get the book by putting your email here (you receive the PDF link by email):
http://sale.sitepoint.com/

Thanks Scott Hanselman (@SHanselman) for spreading on twitter, hence getting me to know about the book!

Have fun,

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,

.

Microsoft has released a final version of its book “Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition”.
The book is described as:

This guide is available online here in the MSDN Library and will be available in the Fall of 2009 as a Microsoft Press book, ISBN# 9780735627109, that you can purchase through local and online booksellers.

The guide is intended to help developers and solution architects design and build effective, high quality applications using the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework more quickly and with less risk; it provides guidance for using architecture principles, design principles, and patterns that are tried and trusted. The guidance is presented in sections that correspond to major architecture and design focus points. It is designed to be used as a reference resource or to be read from beginning to end.

The guide helps you to:

• Understand the underlying architecture and design principles and patterns for developing successful solutions on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework.
• Identify appropriate strategies and design patterns that will help you design your solution’s layers, components, and services.
• Identify and address the key engineering decision points for your solution.

This was originally an email I sent to .NET team in my company, then decided to share as a blog post.

The problem:

• Let’s say you have a complex application, and this application (or part of it) runs very slowly. No bug s in results, no errors or exceptions, but it just so slow! Now you want to know which part of your code is the reason, which method(s) you need to go and modify., which methods take so long to execute or consume so much memory/CPU. How would you know that?
• Let’s say you want to improve the performance of your application in general (say add caching or such), so, you want to identify which parts of your code deserve your attention and will really make difference (so that you don’t waste your time on optimizing something that will not have big effect in performance), for  example, you might want to identify which methods are called more than others from different parts of your code. How would you do that?

Here’s another email from the internal mailing list of Injazat .NET Ninjas (Ninjazat, AKA  as we call ourselves), that I’m sharing with blog readers as well.

Just a place holder, until I move one of my 18 (just discovered the number now – terrifying!) drafts in my Windows Live Writer into a published post, or delete them all!

Subject: [Learning] Some very interesting videos

Some videos from NDC 2009 event (Norwegian Developers Conference 2009) – about software design and related issues:

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – S.O.L.I.D Principles of OO class design

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – Craftsmanship and Ethics

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – Component Principles

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – Clean Code III – Functions

· NDC Video – Michael Feathers – Working Effectively with Legacy Code

· NDC Video – Jeremy D. Miller – Convention Over Configuration

· NDC Video – Michael Feathers – Seven Blind Alleys in Software Design

· NDC Video – Ted Neward – WCF Patterns

· NDC Video: Michael Feathers – Design Sense

For the complete list of videos from this event check videos from:

Yet another internal .NET Team email in my current company, Injazat Data Systems, that I sent yesterday, and am sharing with you as well.

jQuery:

· Simplify calling ASP.NET AJAX services from jQuery

· Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater

· Reordering invoice lines using jqGrid and TableDND extension

· LA.NET jQuery Posts/Articles

Agile

· Implementing Scrum

ASP.NET

· Web Development With ASP.NET Learning Material (Course – Source: MSDN Ramp up Learning Program)

· ASP.NET Articles on CodeGain (Many Articles)

WCF

· Posting Twitter Tweets from ASP.NET using the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2

WF

· Migration Guidance for the WF Developer

o Part 1

o Part 2

Office Open XML

· Embedding Any File Type, Like PDF, in an Open XML File

Fun

· YoutTube: Windows Live Messenger 10th Anniversary Celebration Video

· 99 Amazing Widescreen Wallpapers To Spice Up Your Desktop

As usual, those and others are all originally shared on my Google Reader Shared Items:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/08221036579558509505

Regards,

Happy weekend,

Allow me to quote here some emails I sent to the the Dot NET developers group in my company, Injazat, or, as we call ourselves, Ninjazat. I thought it’ll be useful to share some with you as well.

·         ASP.NET MVC – 20 Hours of FREE Video Tutorials

·         LINQ FAQ

o   LINQ FAQ for Newbie’s

o   LINQ FAQ Part 2

·         How we handle application configuration

·         ScottGu ASPNETMVC Session Video Available Now (Part 1/2 & 2/2)

·         Web Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials

·         Building a Single Sign On Provider Using ASPNET and WCF

o   Part 1

o   Part 2

o   Part 3

·         NxtGenUG Cambridge: Creating extendable applications using MEF slides and code

·         Dynamic Languages and .NET – Developer Day Scotland slides and code samples

·         patterns & practices: Data Access Guidance (VS 2010 Stuff)

·         Refactoring challenge

o   Part 1 – Examination

o   Part 2 – Preparation

·         LINQ is not LINQ To SQL