Latest Microsoft Blogs

I’ll be presenting at the upcoming Belgium and Dutch TechDays next month.  I’ll be doing three tech talks at each of the events: Overview of Windows Azure A look at ASP.NET MVC 4 ScottGu Unplugged I’m particularly excited about the “A look at ASP.NET MVC 4” talk as it will be the first time I’ve presented on it (and it is shaping up to a really great release – more blog posts on that soon). For more details on how to attend the event visit the Belgium Techdays and Dutch Techdays websites.  Hope to see some of you at the conferences! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu Read More...

This is the second in a series of posts I’m doing on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform. In today’s post I’m going to cover how to sign-up and get started with Windows Azure using a no-obligation 3 month free trial offer.  This free trial costs nothing and doesn’t obligate you to buy anything at the end of it.  It provides an easy way to try out and get started with Windows Azure. Windows Azure Website The http://www.windowsazure.com web-site provides everything you need to get started with Windows Azure – including overview content, developer tutorials and documentation, account management, and more: On the www.windowsazure.com home page, as well as in the top-right hand corner of every page of the site...

This coming Monday (Jan 16th) I’m doing another online LIDNUG session .  The talk will be from 10am to 11:30am (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic is fair game: technical, strategy, community, college basketball, etc. You can learn more and register to attend the online event for free here . I’ll update this post with a download link to a recorded audio version of the talk after the event is over. Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging...

A few minutes ago Microsoft released an advance notification security bulletin announcing that we are releasing an out-of-band security update to address an ASP.NET Security Vulnerability . The security update we are releasing resolves a publicly disclosed Denial of Service issue present in all versions of ASP.NET.  We’re currently unaware of any attacks on ASP.NET customers using this exploit, but we strongly encourage customers to deploy the update as soon as possible.  We are releasing the security update via Windows Update and the Windows Server Update Service.  You can also manually download and install it via the Microsoft Download Center.  We will release the update on Thursday, December 29th at approximately 10am...

As some of you might know, I’ve spent much of my time the last 6 months working on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform (I also continue to work on ASP.NET, .NET, VS and a bunch of other products). Next Tuesday, Dec 13th we’ll be holding a special Learn Windows Azure training event for developers.  It will provide a great way to learn Windows Azure and what it provides.  You can attend the event either by watching it streamed LIVE online, or by attending in person (on the Microsoft Redmond Campus).  Both options are completely free. Learn Window Azure Event During the Learn Windows Azure event attendees will learn how to start building great cloud based applications using Windows Azure. I’ll be kicking...

This is the seventh 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 runtime and tooling 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 improvements we are adding to the next release of Visual Studio to make working with CSS and CSS3 even better with ASP.NET projects.  CSS Color Picker In previous versions of Visual Studio, the intellisense engine within the CSS editor provided a hard-coded dropdown list of named color values. The new release of Visual Studio replaces this with...

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...

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next releases 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 is the third of three posts in the series that talk about the new Model Binding support coming to Web Forms.  Model Binding is an extension of the existing data-binding system in ASP.NET Web Forms, and provides a code-focused data-access paradigm.  It takes advantage of a bunch of model binding concepts we first introduced with ASP.NET MVC – and integrates them nicely with the Web Forms...

I'm in the process of moving the Orchard documentation site from ScrewTurn Wiki to a Mercurial + Markdown system, where revisions are managed through source control tools instead of a fully online wiki. We see quite a few advantages in doing that, but that's a story for another post. Today, I just want to post on that quick and dirty tool that I've built to translate the ScrewTurn Wiki markup into Markdown. It's not a masterpiece in any way, it's not exhaustive, but I thought it may be useful to others, so here it is… https://bitbucket.org/bleroy/screwturn2markdown/src Read More...

I've written several times before about image resizing in .NET and how the various built-in solutions (GDI, WPF and WIC) compare in terms of quality, speed and size. I'll put the links to my previous articles at the end of this post for reference. Several readers have since pointed me to the imageresizer library, which is pure .NET and thus has no problems running in medium trust. Medium trust is an issue that has plagued existing options, preventing many people from using the best available approach. I was doubtful though that a purely managed library could come anywhere near the native Windows libraries in terms of performance. The best way to find out, of course, is to run a benchmark. Fortunately, I still had the code for my previous...