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:

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).

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.

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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.

I was going to put this on twitter but it’s a bit longer to tweet.

Last week I shared some videos on Google Reader and twitter from Microsoft’s MSDN Chopsticks video website. If you don’t know it, it’s a VERY nice videos website with much content on very interesting topics and very recent products as well as different experience levels of content.

http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/

Today, some other friends on twitter noticed the Chopsticks site and were wondering why it doesn’t allow downloading the videos (you can only view them online).

Well, there is a work around to download the videos though:

1. Go to the video web page (you need to have Silverlight installed, and a .NET passport login, like Hotmail account).
   I’m using a sample here: “Using ASP.NET MVC Model Binder” http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=798
   
2. [Update: Skip this is step. Go to Step 3>1]
   If you hover on the video player, you find some icons/buttons that were not showing.
   1. Click the 2nd icon/button from the left, which has the tip “EMBDE”.
       
   2. When you click it, it shows like this:
      

1. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10434 ( Update: This is the only official provider made by Microsoft itself)
   This is the URL I originally posted (from which the below screenshots come): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12205 – Of course you are recommended to go to the official URL above.
   
2. Check “Let me install this experimental add-on” and click “Add to FireFox”
   
   Now the add-in is there.
3. In the search bar, click the little triangle at the left and choose Bing.
   
4. In your browser it may not the first item nor bold as in the pic here. Click “Manage Search Engines…”.
    
5. Click “Move Up” to have it the first item
   
6. If you have Google Toolbar, you need to check more settings:

1. Go to Google Settings. In the “Layout” tab, make sure to choose “Classic Toolbar Layout”. Save that.
   
2. In Firefox address bar, type:
   about:config
   without “http://” or anything, and click the button that appears then.
   
3. In the “Filter” field type: “browser.search.defaultenginename”
   
4. Double click the only result that will show, you get a message box where you should  enter text. Replace the existing text “Google” with “Bing” instead, and click OK.
   

If you are not on Twitter, let me spread this by @bing:

Ladies and Gentlemen, www.bing.com is live. :) (rollouts will continue however to partners and other mkts, more to come) ^betsy

Bing, if you don’t know, is Microsoft’s new search engine, also known as “Decision Engine” since it has features that help answer what you are wondering about rather than just display links.

For those wondering about Live Search. I think I read somewhere that both search engines will remain there for a while, then Live will be brought out to Bing. Nothing to confirm yet though. In Bing homepage you read “Live Search is Evolving. Welcome to Bing”.

For quick video of what Bing can give to you, check this.

For an official introduction about what Bing is, check this.