GuruStop.NET

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.