It’s not every day you write this sort of blog post. And you hope it’s not something you do so often that you ever get good at it. I’m certainly sucking up a storm here. Just last month I hit my four year mark at Microsoft . I reflected on the sheer joy I experienced working with such smart people on cool projects. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate to be able to speak about these projects at many conferences, meeting so many interesting attendees. It’s been a real blast. Today, I write a different sort of post. It was a tough decision to make, but I’ve decided to leave Microsoft to try something different. This is my last week as a Microsoft employee. On Monday, December 5, 2011 I’ll come into the office, hand over my card key, the launch codes...

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the performance of applications.  This feature can be used by all ASP.NET applications, including both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms solutions. Basics of Bundling and Minification As more and more people use mobile devices to surf the web, it is...

Donut caching, the ability to cache an entire page except for a small region of the page (or set of regions) has been conspicuously absent from ASP.NET MVC since version 2 . Mmmmm, donuts! – Photo by Pzado at sxc.hu This is something that’s on our Roadmap for ASP.NET MVC 4, but we have yet to flesh out the design. In the meanwhile, there’s a new NuGet package written by Paul Hiles that brings donut caching to ASP.NET MVC 3 . I haven’t tried it myself yet, so be forewarned, but judging by the blog post, Paul has done some extensive research into how output caching works. One issue with his approach is that to create “donut holes”, you need to call an action from within your view. That works for ASP.NET MVC, but not for ASP.NET Web Pages. What...

While attending Oredev 2011 , I had an interesting conversation with Corey Haines about his perception of the Ruby community as compared to the .NET community. One thing he suggested is that the .NET community is seems a bit insular and self-isolating. He noted that when he attended .NET user groups, he only saw folks he knew to be .NET developers. But when he attends Ruby, Scala, NodeJS, Erlang, etc. user groups, he sees many of the same people at these meet ups. While I’m not completely against identifying oneself as a .NET developer to indicate your primary focus, I do see what Corey is getting at. Rather than only seeing ourselves as .NET developers, it’s just as important to also see ourselves as software developers. We should recognize...

Once in a while folks ask me for details about the hardware and software that hosts my blog. Rather than write about it, a photo can provide all the details that you need. There you have it. Well actually TM , my blog runs on a bit more hardware than that these days. Especially after the Great Hard-Drive Failure of 2009. As longtime readers of my blog might remember, nearly two years ago, this blog went down in flames due to a faulty hard-drive on the hosting server. My hosting provider, CrystalTech (now rebranded to be the Web Services home of The Small Business Authority ), took regular backups of the server, but I hosted my blog in a virtual machine. As it turns out, the backups did not include the VM because it was always “in use”. In order...

This is the 5th post in the series of HTML5 for ASP.NET Developers Support for HTML5 in Visual Studio 2010 has been quite good with Visual Studio Service Pack 1 However, HTML5 Boilerplate template has been one of the most popular HTML5 templates out in the internet. Now, there is one for your favorite ASP.NET Webforms as well as ASP.NET MVC 3 Projects (even for ASP.NET MVC 2). And its available in the most optimal place, i.e. NuGet. Lets see it in action. Let us fire up Visual Studio 2010 and create a “File – New Project – ASP.NET Web Application” and leave the default name to create the project. The default project template creates Site.Master, Default.aspx and the Account (membership) files. When you run the project without any changes, it...

This week, we added a new way to get a management certificate set up to interact with the Windows Azure Service Management API. There’s a new page in the Windows Azure portal ( https://windows.azure.com/download/publishprofile.aspx ). Browsing there does two things: It generates a management certificate and adds it to all the subscriptions you have. It offers you a download of a .publishsettings file, which contains that certificate and the list of subscription IDs. With the new November release of the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio, you can simply import this file and then start publishing to Windows Azure. You can also use this file from your own code, since it contains the subscription ID(s) and management certificate you need to have...

The Devoxx conference is running this week in Belgium. Be sure to check out the Windows Azure booth there. I didn’t make it to the conference, but I volunteered to build a demo application for the booth that would show attendees a real example of running Java in Windows Azure. As I was brainstorming what to do, I browsed through the Devoxx schedule. I noticed that there are a few mobile clients for browsing the schedule. This observation quickly lead me to the schedule API . I decided it would be fun to build my own schedule browser in Windows Azure, but I didn’t know where to start. (I’m quite out of date with what’s happening in the Java world.) Reading the Devoxx schedule, I spotted a talk about the Play framework (which has an option for...

A little over 18 months ago I was talking to Stephen Toub (he of the Parallel Computing fame ) about parallelism and the kinds of problems it could solve. I said, naively, "could we solve the million monkey's problem ?" He said, "the what?" "You know, if you have an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of keyboards they will eventually write Shakespeare ." We brainstormed some ideas (since Stephen is a smarter than I, this consisted mostly of him gazing thoughtfully into the air while I sat on my hands) and eventually settled on an genetic algorithm. We would breed thousands of generations of (hypothetical) monkeys a second and then choose which ones would be allowed to perpetuate the species based...

Visual Studio 2010 is really extensible and that's allowed many folks on the team to try out new features for Web Development without having to rebuild Visual Studio itself. One of those "playground" extensions is called " Web Essentials " by Mads Kristensen. Mads handles HTML5 and CSS3 tools for our team. You might remember Mads from when we released the Web Standards Update a few months back. Web Essentials is Mads' playground and it's pretty awesome. It's so awesome that I think you should check it out and then, *ahem*,  leave a comment on this post encouraging Mads and gentle urging his boss(es) to get these features into the next version of Visual Studio. First, it adds a few nice touches to the...