And we have a new release of Ajax Control Toolkit. I didn’t work on this one but there are some nice things in there nonetheless :) First, new controls! SeaDragon : I’ve blogged before about Seadragon , the JavaScript-only way to do Deep Zoom . It became a lot easier to use a few month ago when the need for tools disappeared and you can just point to any image on the web and immediately get the URL and script tag to put on your page: Now with this release of Ajax Control Toolkit, including and controlling Deep Zoom from an ASP.NET page is also very easy : < ajaxToolkit : Seadragon ID ="Seadragon" CssClass ="seadragon" runat ="server" SourceUrl ="sample.xml"/> James Senior just released a screencast...

The design view in Visual Studio can display glyphs and borders for the hidden non - graphic elements (such as div, span, form, and script elements). This feature helps you to see where the elements are and avoid inadvertently deleting the non-graphic...

Visual Studio 2010 improves .NET framework multi-targeting by applying framework-appropriate filtering to the property grid and Intellisense. For example, if you select a button on a web form of a .NET 2.0 web project, in the Property Grid you will see: If you go to the Project Properties and change the Target Framework version to 4.0: ...the Property Grid display will change to display 4.0-specific properties: While this looks simple and straight-forward, there's actually an illusion at work! Only one framework can be loaded into an AppDomain at a time, and Visual Studio uses .NET 4.0 specific capabilities. So the actual controls displayed on the design surface are always 4.0 controls. Their properties are filtered for display in the Property...

I had a great time at ReMix in Helsinki .  I had a chance to give the Silverlight 3 overview today and it was a lot of fun.   I used a this Silverlight 3 deck and did some fun demos: IIS Smooth streaming The Beatles Rockband site  (recently site of the day on FWA site of the day ) Silverlight 3 Control Toolkit Samples Silverlight SEO Silverlight 3 Navigation Application Themes Slidentity The next session I did was on .NET RIA Services..  You can find the demo i did http://bit.ly/4tmJA3 and the full series . Read More...

One area where using MoQ is confusing is when mocking successive calls to the same method of an object. For example, I was writing some tests for legacy code where I needed to fake out multiple calls to a data reader. You remember data readers, don’t you? Here’s a snippet of the code I was testing. Ignore the map method and focus on the call to reader.Read . while (reader.Read()) { yield return map(reader); } Notice that there are multiple calls to reader.Read . The first couple times, I wanted Read to return true . The last time, it should return false . And here’s the code I hoped to write to fake this using MoQ: reader.Setup(r => r.Read()).Returns( true ); reader.Setup(r => r.Read()).Returns( true ); reader.Setup(r => r.Read()).Returns...

I had a great time at ReMix and the Architect Forum in Belgium.    I had a chance to cover build an application end-to-end with Silverlight 3 and RIA Services which was basically the this application .    At the Architect Forum I had a chance to talk in more depth about the general application pattern we are thinking about for RIA applications.  I shameless stole some slides from Nikhil Kothari for this one.     Check out out the slides ( direct link to slides ) Check out the completed demo .    Read More...

In the previous post we had examined on getting access to SQL Azure, creating your first database, accessing it with SQL Server Management Studio and then migrating the Northwind database schema to SQL Azure using the SQL Azure Migration Wizard Beta. As explained earlier, the SQL Azure Migration Wizard migrates the schema of your database after tuning it for working with SQL Azure. However, we would still need to migrate the Data to our SQL Azure Server. At the moment, the step I took was to open the instnwnd.sql script in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMO) and copy the Insert statements alone to execute. Note that, you cannot run all the scripts directly onto the SQL Azure portal like I explained earlier due to the limitations / formats supported...

SQL Azure is the latest buzz around Cloud Computing and the ability to take relational database to the cloud as is, is something most would welcome compared to the earlier model of ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) that was there when SQL Azure was SSDS. Well, like others, I also got interested and wanted to explore the SQL Azure. SQL Azure is currently in CTP and offers token based access. I would briefly outline the steps here on getting the SQL Azure Token, although Jim O’Neil has a nice post on this Visit SQL Azure Registration at Microsoft Connect Sign in with your Live ID (Passport, Hotmail, MSN, Live) Fill in the details and submit the form You should receive the invitation code in an email from an alias “SQL Azure Talk” or something...

If you answered “Yes” then it might be interesting to you that there is an opportunity on our team for a person who has passion for making web development easier and exciting for everyone… This job posting is the unofficial job posting  describing a person whom I am looking to refer to my team to consider for an official job posting which exists somewhere on Microsoft.com… :-) Our team is chartered with building Web Developer Tools based on web standards and so we are looking for someone who knows HTML, CSS, JavaScript/AJAX… We would love if this person knows PHP and/or ASP.NET too… If you know someone who loves building Web Sites and is passionate about web development technologies then please pass on the word… The person will most likely...

I had a great time at the the Belgium Visual Studio User’s Group meeting.  The turn out was excellent.  Thanks especially to Gill Cleeren   and Pieter Gheysens for hosting it.  Gill asked me to talk about Framework Design Guidelines – I subject near and dear to my heart.   I decided to do a bit of a look back over the last 10 years of framework design (we started  what would later become the CLR about 10 years ago)..    It is really fun to look at what has changed and what has not.      Thanks to the great folks at Addison-Wesley i was able to give away a few copies of the book as well.     Afterwards, we got to talking about how this stuff is actually the easy part...