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,

My first DotNetwork Cairo Code Camp in 2009 was a great experience, because it was one of the biggest events I’ve spoken at (in terms of audience count, similar to SilverKey Demo Day II). However, Cairo Code Camp `10 had a much different taste!

Not just that I met Scott Hanselman, one of the most popular Microsoft guys, and hold him down as you see in the picture (which I’ll never forget), the great person and popular guru…

Not just that I met so many great other speakers, many of them are my friends and some of my friends talking for the first time in such event or after long pause…

But also because we all (speakers and organizers – both volunteers) met so many great attendees. Some of them were interesting people I’ve followed on Twitter for some time and haven’t seen them yet. Some of them were old lovely faces that we meet very rarely (especially I no longer work  in Egypt). Some of them were totally new faces, bringing a lot of ideas and very useful discussions….

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…

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.

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:

Some of you who use Firefox (FF) might know about a Firefox plug-in called “IE Tab” which allows you to view a page/tab using the Internet Explorer (IE) rendering engine INSIDE Firefox (so, if some page displays better in IE, you don’t have to leave FF and go open an IE window).

Now, Google is doing something similar, but the other way around!

Google has recently released “Google Chrome Frame”, a plug-in for IE that allows you to view a page/tab using the Google Browser “Google Chrome” rendering engine INSIDE Internet Explorer.

This is interesting in two ways, first, it may decrease IE problems with crashes and such, and second, that Google maybe later will drop support for IE rendering engine in its products (like Google Mail, Reader, Video, Youtube, etc..), so that you have to use Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome (or Google chrome Frame) to use these applications.

Interesting enough, this is the case already with one of Google’s new products, called Google Wave!

They say the reason is supporting IE6!! They did much effort to get it to work with it but it didn’t. Of course the Chrome Frame plug-in is supported under IE 6, so, is supposedly solves their problem!

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

In a response to local company email about IE 8 RC, I took some time to write an email to the internal mailing lists of Raya about testing websites with different browser versions. I found it good to share with the blog readers here, and, I know the company policy in Raya emphasizes sharing knowledge and efforts with the community.

Here is the email I sent:

For developer and QA testing I highly recommend using IE Tester http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/

It enables testing the website against different versions of IE that users may be using to navigate to the website.

For testing Firefox, you can try the latest version only (because FF users usually update their browser and the rendering features are usually not that different), or you can have side by side installed versions, or different versions without installations by using Firefox Portable Edition http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

For Testing Safari, you can use Safari for Windows http://www.apple.com/safari/, and/or Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome/ (it uses the same rendering engine as Safari).

Download the BETA
http://www.google.com/chrome

More info on Google Blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

See this comic book about it too:
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome

· Everything You Wanted To Know About MVC and MVP But Were Afraid To Ask

· Functional Programming in C# 3.0: How Map/Reduce/Filter can Rock your World

· MbUnit 2.4 – Avoiding Crappy Data Resulted From The Test

· Managed Extensibility Framework

· IronRuby at Tech Ed 2008

· Velocity: A Distributed In-Memory Cache from Microsoft

· Must See WF/WCF Influencer MSDN Webcasts

· WCF Webcast Series (Old but good)

· Using CSS to Fix Anything: 20+ Common Bugs and Fixes (Found by Mohamed Tayseer)

· A jQuery Client Status Bar

· jQuery for Asp.net MVC preview 3

· Hands on Labs for Web Client and Smart Client (Web Client Software Factory, Smart Client Software Factory)

· Code Style Review Using Microsoft Source Analysis

· Did you know… You can use Tracepoints to log “printf” or “console.writeline” info without editing your code? – #237

· SOA: Making The Paradigm Shift Part 9 of N

· Functional C# – Learn from F# and LINQ