Latest Microsoft Blogs

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...

WebMatrix is now available in final release form. :)   What is WebMatrix? I first posted at the debut of WebMatrix beta back in July, describing WebMatrix as a complete Web development stack for pragmatic developers.  WebMatrix elegantly integrates a Web server (IIS Express), database (SQL Compact) and programming frameworks (ASP.NET and PHP) into a single, integrated experience.   Learn More and See it in Action You can learn more and see it in action on the WebMatrix home page .  A list of some of the cool features is also online.  Laurence Moroney also wrote a great tutorial for those who are new to Web development and want to get started with WebMatrix .   WebMatrix makes it very easy to start a Web site...

I just got off stage at TechEd Europe in Berlin where I announced the availability of the final beta of WebMatrix and MVC 3!  What a blast!  If you haven’t checked out WebMatrix or MVC 3 yet, now is a great time to do it.    WebMatrix Beta 3 I had the pleasure of giving the “Lap Around WebMatrix ” talk and show off a bunch of new features available in this, the last beta for v1.  It is amazing to think that development really started in earnest just this year, the first beta was just a few months ago and here we are nearing feature complete.  My hat is off to the team for innovating so quickly and working so hard to bring such an awesome product to market.  My talk was almost all demos, but here are some highlights...

Ever since IIS7 shipped in Vista I’ve been asked the question: how can I install it on Windows XP?  Until now, that hasn’t been possible.  With the recent release of WebMatrix , you can now install IIS Developer Express – which is based on the latest IIS7x codebase - on any supported Windows operating system including Windows 7, Windows Vista SP1+, Windows XP SP3+, Windows Server 2003 SP2+, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2.  IIS Developer Express supports all of the latest IIS7 modules, including URL Rewrite, FastCGI, etc.  It support Classic ASP , PHP and of course ASP.NET development, including integrated pipeline.  WebMatrix provides more than just the IIS7x Web server, it also includes a lightweight tool...

Today my team launched an exciting new project called WebMatrix .  Seamless, small and best of all free, WebMatrix includes a complete Web development stack that installs in minutes and elegantly integrates a Web server, database and programming frameworks into a single, integrated experience. Use WebMatrix to streamline the way you code, test, and deploy your own ASP.NET and PHP Web site, or start a new site using the world’s most popular open source apps like DotNetNuke, Umbraco, WordPress, or Joomla. WebMatrix is the easiest way to learn Web development and makes it simple to build and publish Web sites on the internet. Start with Web standards including HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then connect to a database or add in dynamic server...

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform.  This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out.  Here is a quick overview:   IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release! The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines .  It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines.  This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI .    ASP.NET MVC 2 beta! The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available...

The ASP.NET and Web tools for Visual Studio teams have been cranking away on this release all year long and we’re excited to launch Beta 2 today!  MSDN subscribers can download it today …it will be available for everyone on Wednesday.  There are a ton of new features in this release, this MSDN page gives a good overview.  Here are some highlights for Web developers: Numerous improvements to Web Forms including more control over viewstate, meta tag control, new browser support, routing support for clean URLs , more control over HTML with FormView and ListView controls, filtering support in data source controls, better Web standards support and accessibility New Dynamic Data features including a RAD experience for quickly building...

The ASP.NET team has been cranking away on more AJAX goodness…this time with a significant update to the Microsoft Ajax Library – Preview 6.  This update includes updates to our client-side AJAX library that can be used with any type of Web application as well as deep support within ASP.NET for AJAX across ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0…for both Web Forms and MVC style projects.  In addition to the updated AJAX support, the team is shipping a cool new AJAX minifier tool which reduces the size of your JavaScript files to improve performance.  You can download the release from the CodePlex project and read more information on the team blogs below: Scott – Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library… Bertrand – Entirely unobtrusive and imperative...

Just ran into this and thought I’d share.  If you are trying to connect to SQL Server from your Web application running on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and you’re getting a message that looks like this: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to failure in retrieving the user's local application data path. Please make sure the user has a local user profile on the computer. The connection will be closed. I can probably help you out.  The IIS team made a change to the default identity of the worker process.   Starting with IIS 7.5, Application Pools run with a unique identity based on the Application Pool name, rather than NetworkService – the default identity for IIS6 and IIS7.  The primary reason for...

Today we’re launching a number of really cool things for Web developers.   WebsiteSpark WebsiteSpark is a program designed to jumpstart Web development for individuals or small companies who make a living on the Web.  The program is free to join and runs for three years with no cost obligations other than a $100 program fee, payable on exit.  What is in it for you? Windows Web Server 2008 R2 – 4 processor licenses for production use! SQL Server 2008 – 4 processor licenses for production use! Expression Studio 3 – 1 license including Expression Web, Blend and Sketchflow Expression Web – 2 licenses Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – 3 licenses DotNetPanel control panel (to manage your servers, and allow your customers to...