Latest Microsoft Blogs

Warning, this is long but full of info. Read it all. Often folks want to dynamically generate stuff with ASP.NET. The want to dynamically generate PDFs, GIFs, PNGs, CSVs, and lots more. It's easy to do this, but there's a few things to be aware of if you want to keep things as simple and scalable as possible. You need to think about the whole pipeline as any HTTP request comes in. The goal is to have just the minimum number of things run to do the job effectively and securely, but you also need to think about "who sees the URL and when."   This diagram isn't meant to be exhaustive, but rather give a general sense of when things happen. Modules can see any request if they are plugged into the pipeline. There are native...

No matter how well you know a topic, or a codebase, it's never to late (or early) to get nailed by a latest bug a over a half-decade old. DasBlog , the ASP.NET 2 blog engine that powers this blog, is done. It's not dead, but it's done. It's very stable. We had some commits last year, and I committed a bug fix in February, but it's really well understood and very baked. My blog hasn't been down for traffic spike reasons in literally years as DasBlog scales nicely on a single machine. It was 10:51pm PDT (that's Pacific Daylight Time) and I was writing a blog post about the clocks in my house, given that PST (that's Pacific Standard Time) was switching over soon. I wrote it up in Windows Live Writer, posted it to...

First, let me start that if you want a lot of people to download something, make sure that the words "HTML5," "Support" and "Update" appear in the title. I'm sure if the folks that are making Diablo 3 called it "Diablo 3 HTML5 Support Update" that a metric buttload more people would download it. That said, a bunch of folks in the Web Platform and Tools team created the Web Standards Update package with HTML5 Support for the Visual Studio 2010 Editor . This Web Standards Update is something that anyone in the community could have released, just extending Visual Studio in a standard way. Like many other (most) extensions in Visual Studio Extension Gallery, it was not "signed." It was not a...

Do you like a big pile of source code? Well, there is an imperial buttload of source in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit . It's actually a 178 meg download, which is insane. Perhaps start your download now and get it in the morning when you get up. It's extremely well put together and I say Kudos to the folks that did it. They are better people than I. I like to explore it while watching TV myself and found myself looking through tonight. I checked my blog and while I thought I'd shared this with you before, Dear Reader, I hadn't. My bad, because it's pure gold . With C# and VB, natch. Here's an outline of what's inside. I've heard of folks setting up lunch-time study groups and going through...

  ScottGu announced Microsoft WebMatrix Beta today. It's a small (15 megs if you have .NET 4, 50megs if you don't) lightweight IDE for making ASP.NET or PHP websites. It has a small embedded file-based SQL Database, and a web-server called IIS Express that's compatible with the full version of IIS. It uses a View Engine called "Razor" to make Web Pages, and your sites can be later be expanded to use all of ASP.NET MVC. It's a simple syntax that is easy to learn It uses the WebDeploy engine to deploy apps to hosts, setting up permissions, copying databases, etc. WebMatrix also has the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit built in, so you can spider your own site and see how Search Engines see it. It'll make recommendations...

Remember good developers don't just write source code, they also READ it. You don't just become a great poet by writing lots of poems. Read and absorb as well. Do check out the Source Code category of my blog here , there's (as of today) 15 pages of posts on Source Code you can check out. Recently my friend Jonathan Carter (OData Dude, my name for him) was working with a partner on some really weird stuff that was happening with a LINQ to SQL query. Remember that every abstraction sometimes leaks and that the whole port of an abstraction is "raise the level" so you don't have to worry about something. Plumbing is great because it abstracts away water delivery. For all I know, there's a dude with a bucket who runs...

Remember good developers don't just write source code, they also READ it. You don't just become a great poet by writing lots of poems. Read and absorb as well. Do check out the Source Code category of my blog here , there's (as of today) 15 pages of posts on Source Code you can check out. Recently my friend Jonathan Carter (OData Dude, my name for him) was working with a partner on some really weird stuff that was happening with a LINQ to SQL query. Remember that every abstraction sometimes leaks and that the whole port of an abstraction is "raise the level" so you don't have to worry about something. Plumbing is great because it abstracts away water delivery. For all I know, there's a dude with a bucket who runs...

My two-hundred-and-thirteenth podcast is up . Scott talks to AOP expert Philip Laureano about Aspect Oriented Programming . Is it the missing piece of the Object Orient Programming puzzle? It sounds scary but is it? Should I start using IL Rewriting and Dynamic Proxies on my next project, or is it too dangerous? All this and more as Scott and Philip learn about LinFu, an Open Source project that enables these scenarios and more! (Ya, I know, I'm late to post this.) Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show Philip Laureano on Twitter LinFu - A framework that adds mixins, inversion of control, DbC, and other language features to the Common Language Runtime. Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF...

It's a big day at Microsoft today as Visual Studio 2010 officially releases. There's a lot going on with this release and I thought I'd do a big rollup post with lots of details and context to help you find your way to the information and downloads you're looking for. Download Visual Studio 2010 First, if you want it, go download Visual Studio 2010 now. If you're an MSDN Subscriber or WebSiteSpark / BizSpark member, you can download the final release now. If not, you can download a free trial or one of the free Express editions . Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional Web Install ISO (DVD-9) Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Web Install ISO (DVD-9) Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server ISO (DVD-9) I'm...

A few years back I wrote a post on the size of the .NET Framework . There's historically been a lot of confusion on the site of the .NET Framework. If you search around on the web for ".NET Framework" or ".NET Framework Redistributable" you'll often get a link to a 200 meg download. That download is the complete offline thing that developers redistribute when they want to install the .NET Framework on any kind of machine without an internet connection. The .NET 3.5 Client Profile is more like 28 megs and the .NET 4 Client Profile is a looking smaller that than, in fact. Back then I made this website, SmallestDotNet.com to help out. It'll sniff your browser's UserAgent and tell you want version of .NET you...