GuruStop.NET

A friend I know has been developing desktop applications with .NET for quite long time. He wanted to improve himself even more by going out of his comfort zone learning more stuff he’s not familiar with. So, he spent some time learning client side web technologies and wanted to add some “non” .NET server technologies to the mix. He emailed me asking for recommendations on what to learn,: “Ruby, Python, or PHP ?”.

After sending the answer, as with other previous emails, I thought maybe I’d share it with you here.

Python

Let’s start with Python, since it’s the language I know least about (take that as a disclaimer against everything I claim about it next). Note that Python also has similar options to Ruby (maybe even earlier than Ruby had for some of them) even the MVC application frameworks (like django), but they aren’t booming as much as, say, Ruby..

Python’s real power is that it’s one of the old languages with great standard library doing networking and several pieces of functionality, in a way closer to C++ than it is to .NET or Java. I think also it’s runtime is historically has better performance and wider platform support than, Ruby.

MvcConf

Assuming some of you have attended live or watched the recordings for the past MVCConf conference. It’s a virtual conference concerned (as the name tells) about everything related to Web MVC Frameworks in .NET (ASP.NET MVC, FubuMVC, Spark, …).

Videos from the previous MvcConf event can be found at:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/mvcconf/videos/ and http://tekpub.com/conferences/mvcconf

MvcConf 2

They plan to have a second event after the great success of the first one. And they started a call-for speakers. See:

http://www.mvcconf.com/

Quoting Details

When:

Tuesday Feb 1st 8AM – 5PM CST

Where:

Virtual

Register:

Check back 1/17

Call For Speakers

If you would like to speak at this years conference. Fill out the Speaker Proposal form.

An Awesome Conference

MvcConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: writing awesome applications on top of the ASP.Net MVC framework. Your brain will explode from taking in so much hard core technical sessions. Sounds fun eh?

This is a community event and we want the best and brightest sharing what they know.

We intend to record each session and make them available online for viewing. We intend to make the videos available free of charge, depending on conference sponsorships.

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