Dragan Panjkov

Novi dizajn pocetne stranice na sajtu Microsoft BiH

panjkov — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:28:45 GMT

Pošto od danas imamo nove Windowse, početna strana Microsoft web sajtova širom svijeta ima novu temu. Koju?

Silverlight 3 Firestarter – četvrtak, 17. septembar 2009.

panjkov — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:28:01 GMT

Firestarter koncept treninga podrazumijeva održavanje besplatnog tehničkog treninga registrovanim posjetiocima koji se istovremeno prenosi putem LiveMeeting tehnologije, te se snima za kasnije prikazivanje na zahtjev. U Firestarter seriji o najnovijim tehnologijama za developere do sada su održani događaji posvećeni SharePoint 2007, Internet Explorer 8, te prethodnim verzijama Silverlight-a. Najnoviji cjelodnevni događaj iz Firestarter serije događaja biće održan narednog četvrtka, 17. septembra 2009. , a njegova tema je najnovija verzija Silverlight-a – Silverlight 3. Predavanja će održati Scott Guthrie, Tim Heuer, Brad Abrams, Adam Kinney, Janete Perez, Justin Angel, Shawn Oster, Karl Shifflett, dok će moderator događaja biti (kao i za sve dosadašnje Firestarter-e) Mithun Dhar.

U fokusu ovog Firestarter-a biće tri oblasti:

Novosti u novoj verziji Silverlight-a
Novosti u Expression 3 alatima
Pregled tehnologija RIA Services i Silverlight Toolkit

Registracija za ovaj događaj je obavezna, a postoje dva linka za registraciju:

Ukoliko želite i možete prisustvovati uživo (u Redmondu :) ) : http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032422412&Culture=en-US
Za praćenje događaja putem LiveMeeting-a: Register for the online experience!

Sve novosti o ovom Firestarter-u možete saznati na blogu Mithun Dhar-a: http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund, gdje se nalazi i detaljna satnica događaja.

U znaku broja 3

panjkov — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:59:00 GMT

Nakon što je na konferenciji Mix09 kao beta predstavljena svijetu, treća generacija Silverlight-a je u petak, 10. jula dosegla release status. Pored toga, u četvrtak 22. jula je objavljena i RTM verzija treće generacije Microsoft Expression alata (Expression 3). Na adresi http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/seethelight/ možete vidjeti snimak keynote-a na kome su Soma [http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/] i Scott Guthrie [http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/] predstavili Silverlight 3 i Expression 3 uz demo Jon Harris-a [http://differentthings.wordpress.com] iz Expression tima. Na istoj strani možete vidjeti i end-to-end demo Expression Studio 3 pod nazivom Visual Kitchen, osmišljen i realizovan poput poznatih kuharskih šou emisija.

Silverlight 3

Silverlight 3 ima niz novih mogućnosti usmjerenih na poboljšanje kvaliteta razvijenih multimedijalnih i RIA aplikacija. Poboljšanja:

u oblasti podrške za HD multimediju

smooth streaming – adaptivni algoritam koji optimizuje kvalitet isporučenog videa u skladu sa uslovima na mreži i mogućnostima klijenta i omogućava momentalni nastavak videa prilikom premotavanja po vremenu, bez zastoja za buffering.
novi A/V kodeci za H.264 video, AAC audio, MPEG-4 kao i podrška za kreiranje custom kodeka
hadrversko ubrzavanje – grafički intenzivni zadaci mogu biti obrađivani od strane grafičke kartice
podrška za HD video

grafika

nova perspective 3D podrška i novi API-ji za bitmape i piksele

aplikacije izvan browsera i offline rad

SIlverlight aplikacije mogu da se instaliraju na klijentski računar te da se pokreću kao stand-alone aplikacije. Korisnik ima mogućnost da doda prečicu na desktop, start meni te taskbar
Aplikacija može da radi u offline modu na taj način da se otkači sa mreže. Pri tome joj nije potrebna veza prema internetu za ispravno funkcionisanje.

razvoj aplikacija

podrška za forward/back tastere browsera i bolje SEO mogućnosti
oko 100 kontrola na raspolaganju developerima kroz Silverlight SDK i SIlverlight Toolkit.
RIA servisi
bolje renderovanje teksta i podrška za fontove

Razvojni alati za SIlverlight 3 mogu se preuzeti sa http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

Expression Studio 3

Pored Silverlight 3, predstavljen je i Expression Studio 3 – najnovija verzija Microsoft alata namijenjenih UX i web dizajnerima. Expression Studio 3 obuhvata Expression Blend 3 (namijenjen dizajnu UX za WPF i Silverlight), Expression Web 3 (namijenjen web dizajnu), Expression Design 3 (za kreiranje grafičkih elemenata koji se koriste u drugim alatima), Expression Encoder 3 (pripremu i enkodiranje videa za razne namjene).

Expression Blend 3 sadrži još i SketchFlow – alat za kreiranje vizuelnih prototipa interfejsa, te podršku tokom čitavog procesa njegovog razvoja. Korištenjem SketchFlow-a se kroz jedinstveno okruženje mogu veoma brzo isprobati različiti koncepti u razvoju i dizajnu interfejsa, grafički, funkcionalno i vremenski efektivnije različita rješenja predstaviti naručiocu softvera te brže kreirati specifikacije i tehnička dokumentacija na osnovu gotovih prototipa.

Expression Web 3 sadrži i SuperPreview koji dizajnerima web interfejsa pruža mogućnost provjere kako kreirani interfejs izgleda u različitim browserima i in-place prilagođavanje web standardima.

Expression Studio se lako integriše u postojeće razvojno okruženje koncentrisano na Visual Studio. Integracija Expression Studija sa Visual Studiom omogućava bolju saradnju dizajnera i razvojnih inženjera i olakšava im lakšu razmjenu već razvijenih vizelnih koncepata i softverskih komponenata.

Expression Studio 3 može se kupiti kao samostalan proizvod ili kroz pretplatničke programe: Expression Professional Subscription i MSDN Premium Subscription. Preuzimanje probnih – vremenski ograničenih verzija moguće je sa stranice http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/Default.aspx.

Web Platform Installer u praksi

panjkov — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:50:00 GMT

Pošto mi se ukazala prilika da se malo poigram sa novim Silverlightom i Blend alatima, riješio sam da za instalaciju iskoristim Microsoft Web Platform Installer (skraćeno ću ga zvati WPI zbog bržeg pisanja) umjesto pojedinačnog download-a i instalacije svih komponenata. Instaliraću Silverlight 3 alate za Visual Studio te Visual Web Developer 2008 Express razvojno okruženje, pošto Blend 3 i ostali alati još nisu uključeni u WPI.

Osnovni zadatak Web Platform Installer-a je da se olakša instalacija i podešavanje Microsoft IIS servera na računaru, gotovih web aplikacija (Microsoft i open source) kao i razvojnih alata veoma širokom opsegu korisnika: web dizajnerima, web programerima te IT administratorima. Iz podužeg spiska uključenih alata i aplikacija izdvajam PHP, PHP drajvere za SQL Server, te Acquia Drupal.

Kao prvo, potrebno je preuzeti instalacioni paket sa adrese http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx. Instalacioni paket je veliki oko 1MB, a trenutno je aktuelna verzija 2.0 RC.

Nakon instalacije se WPI integriše u Start meni i pokreće se kao bilo koja druga aplikacija. Važno je napomenuti da WPI zahtijeva elevaciju permisija, pa ćete imati UAC popup prilikom svakog pokretanja. Elevacija permisija je neophodnajer se instaliraju novi programi unutar sistemskih foldera.

Interfejs WPI je veoma jednostavan za korištenje, a sastoji se od tri osnovne grupe alata:

1. What’s New? (Šta je novo?) meni prikazuje najnovije dodate komponente, plugine, alate i aplikacije u WPI.

2. Web Platform omogućava instalaciju komponenata web servera, dijelova .NET Frameworka, baza podataka te razvojnih alata

3. Web Applications omogućava instalaciju third-party web aplikacija na već konfigurisani IIS (Acquia Drupal, BlogEngine.NET, DasBlog, WordPress…).

Prilikom pokretanja, WPI provjerava šta je od aplikacija/komponenata koje sadrži već instalirano na računaru, odnosno IIS-u, i te aplikacije označava na odgovarajući način, dodajući tekst installed sa desne strane imena aplikacije.

Korištenje WPI…

Kao što sam već napomenuo, instaliraću Visual Web Developer 2008 i Silverlight 3 Tools koji mi trebaju za razvoj Silverlight aplikacija. U dijelu Web Platform odabrao sam Tools, te selektovao alate koje želim instalirati. Još jedna stvar koju želim napomenuti je da se za svaku komponentu unutar WPI, klikom na “i” sa desne strane otvara prozor sa više informacija o samoj komponenti: Opis aplikacije, autor, veličina downloada i verzija.

Klikom na Install, prikazuju se informacije o alatima koji će se instalirati, te o veličini downloada

A evo i prikaza samog toka instalacije

Naravno, ukoliko se instalacija uspješno završi, na kraju se dobija ovakva poruka

Instalacija third-party alata sa eksternim komponentama

Ukoliko željena aplikacija zahtijeva neku od eksternih komponenata koju WPI ne sadrži, WPI automatski upozorava korisnika o tome, te ga upućuje na dalje korake neophodne za rješavanje nastale situacije.

U narednom koraku se prikazuje spisak svega što će se downloadovati i instalirati kako bi odabrana aplikacija mogla ispravno da funkcioniše.

Umjesto zaključka

Web Platform Installer ima prvenstveno namjenu da programere i administratore poštedi zamornog posla traženja, downloada i pojedinačne instalacije za serverske komponente, aplikacije i alate. Pored toga, softverski paketi koji su neophodni za pravilno funkcionisanje tog softvera automatski se detektuju. Na ovaj način se postiže brži rad i bolja kontrola nad komponentama koje se instaliraju na Microsoft IIS.

Lakoća upotrebe koju pruža WPI omogućava i korisnicima koji nemaju iskustva sa administracijom IIS servera na Windows klijentskim i serverskim operativnim sistemima, a žele da se bave web programiranjem, da brzo i jednostavno instaliraju i podese razvojno okruženje bilo za PHP, ASP.NET ili SIlverlight web programiranje.

Web Platform Installer se može preuzeti sa adrese preuzeti instalacioni paket sa adrese http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx. Pored toga, na sajtu Microsoft /web http://www.microsoft.com/web možete pronaći i mnoštvo drugih resursa namijenjenih web programerima, web dizajnerima i administratorima: od tutorijala, third party aplikacija do studija slučaja.

Internet Explorer 8 Firestarter live chat - 26.03.2009

panjkov — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:13:00 GMT

Here is a live chat window for Internet Explorer 8 FIrestarter that is is currently happening in Redmond, and is simulcasted using LiveMeeting. Check Mithun Dhar's blog for links and details, http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund

PS. I'm abusing some tags in order to keep people informed about the event. Sorry

Writing IE8 accelerator in 15 minutes (bookmark on Delicious)

panjkov — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:11:31 GMT

Being teased from my colleague Radenko (http://blog.developers.ba) that IE8 accelerators are not so useful as FF addons, and that he can’t find appropriate accelerator for Delicious, I decided to find him one on internet using search and www.ieaddons.com. I couldn’t find anything than this (yes, it has more options and no, I haven’t read it’s source code before I wrote my own), created to IE8 while it was in beta 2. However, I wanted to see how difficult it is to create simple one, and decided to try writing it.

Accelerators are XML files that let you act on data in a web page (from MSDN):

Accelerators let you act on data in a Web page. You can select a few lines of text and send it to a blog or email it with a click. Using a previously installed Accelerator, this action "executes" the desired activity by navigating to the desired Web site with the selected portion of the article already available in the edit field. You can also act on data without going to another Web site using "preview" Accelerators; for example, you can translate a word or map an address. Hover over an Accelerator with your mouse to view the preview window.

First, I found “OpenService Accelerators Developer Guide” on MSDN, that is very detailed, contains fields description and one full sample. Then, I found page on Delicious blog that contains code for “Bookmark this page” button.

Basically, it’s needed to pass page URL and Title to “Save a new bookmark” page on Delicious, and of course, you need to be logged in to your account.

Code for this accelerator:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<os:openServiceDescription
xmlns:os="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
<os:homepageUrl>http://www.delicious.com</os:homepageUrl>
<os:display>
    <os:name>Add to Delicious</os:name>
    <os:icon>http://www.delicious.com/favicon.ico</os:icon>
    <os:description>Add this page to Delicious</os:description>
</os:display>
<os:activity category="Add">
    <os:activityAction context="document">
      <os:preview action="http://www.delicious.com/save?url={documentUrl}" />
      <os:execute method="get" action="http://www.delicious.com/post">
        <os:parameter name="url" value="{documentUrl}" />
        <os:parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle?}" />
      </os:execute>
    </os:activityAction>
</os:activity>
</os:openServiceDescription>

This is a simple proof of concept, but you can use it before Delicious publishes official version. It wears “Works on My Machine” seal:

Accelerators are added to IE using javascript code, that, in most cases, is attached to a button onClick event: <button id="myButton" onclick="window.external.AddService('http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/draganpanjkov/IE8/addDelicious.xml')">Add to Delicious</button>

Here is a button you can use to add this accelerator to Internet Explorer 8 RTW

I hope you’ll find it useful :)

Dragan

ASP.NET MVC has reached beta stage

panjkov — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:49:00 GMT

UPDATE 17.10.2008: Here are more detailed blog posts by

Scott Guthrie

Phil Haack
Scott Hanselman

Last night I reviewed Twitter, as usual, and one tweet take my attention. Kevin Dente posted this status:

I jumped immediately on this link and downloaded readme and binaries of ASP.NET MVC beta release.

What was strange, MSFT-ies are completely silent regarding this, although I tried to tweet to @Haacked and @Scottgal and to get more info on this. It seems that @shanselman demoed some beta bits on VSLive in Las Vegas.

This morning, there are some new articles that describe possible source of this information: From DotNetSlackers I found a link to this article on VS Magazine that outlines Robert Shelton as possible source of this DL link.

Beta…

I tried this beta last night – updated my UG demo from P5 to beta. Changes are not so big, and I’ll only list some of biggest:

Binaries are now GAC-deployed. Binaries are now both in GAC and saved in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC Beta and they are not automatically saved to Bin folder inside MVC web app. However, you can change this behavior by setting Copy Local property to TRUE for all 3 binaries
HTML Helpers are in separate namespace similarly to AJAX Helpers. You need to reference both System.Web.Mvc.Ajax and System.Web.Mvc.Html namespaces in your web.config
Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll is not included. As part of MVC team to make this beta as close to RTM, they’ve decided not to include MVC Futures binaries in this release. However, you can use them when by downloading from www.codeplex.com/aspnet
Form helper method is renamed to BeginForm.
Scripts now reside under root folder instead of Content, and jquery is included in project template in both .js and .min.js(minified) versions.

Besides that, there are improvements in VS template from which I already outlined some in my UG presentation:

Add View from controller code
Add View in Views folder

Readme file is listed on Download page . It contains very useful information about changes in this release, and I recommend reading it.

Dragan

Follow me on Twitter: @panjkov

Customizing font in VS intellisense

panjkov — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 01:02:23 GMT

This evening I was playing a bit with my VS editor environment (I use Roy Osherove dark theme with slight modifications) and tried ScottGu’s dark VS editor theme. One thing I noticed is that intellisense text is slightly bigger and I liked it.

After some research (read: random browsing), it all went to one blog post that shows something similar, but with data tips window that behaves in similar fashion. After that I noticed that small dropdown at the top of the Fonts and Colors window.

Here are those two values you can use to change intellisense font and text size:

1. Statement Completion – for changing font in list box that appears on CTRL+SPACE

2. Editor Tooltip – changing font for tooltips in editor window.

I only set them slightly bigger thus making them (much) more readable for me.

I hope you’ll find it useful!

Dragan

Talk: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC

panjkov — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:47:00 GMT

Yesterday I was speaking on Banjaluka INETA User Group Meeting about ASP.NET MVC. It was introductory presentation where I tried to address only basic functionalities of ASP.NET MVC. PowerPoint I created is compiled from Stephen Walther, Scott Guthrie, Peter Laudati and Jeffrey Palermo presentations and presentation about Routing from .NET FX Enhancements Training Kit. It also contains two demos where second one is “Photo Albums” application with basic functionalities. In this demo I use some free photos taken from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/. Presentation PowerPoint and demo are on my SkyDrive storage(due to the some weird error that struck me every time i tried to upload it on asp.net weblogs, probably file is too large)

LANACO sponsored this event with presentation room, which was filled entirely, and Microsoft Bosnia and Herzegovina sponsored us with drink. We also have exclusive to be first displaying book “Beginning ASP.NET MVC” written by Simone Chiaretta and Keywan Nayyeri. Here is a followup by Simone.

Here are some photos from this event:

New ASP.NET MVC related videos and tutorials

panjkov — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:10:00 GMT

As Stephen Walther announced on his blog, there are 15 new videos and 8 new tutorials in ASP.NET MVC posted on ASP.NET website. Videos are separated in 2 different tracks:

"How Do I" videos
"ASP.NET MVC Pair Programming" videos

and have separate target audiences. "How Do I" videos are targeted to beginners in the ASP.NET MVC Framework and their purpose is to describe basic tasks and features of ASP.NET MVC. Second set is targeted to developers that want to learn ASP.NET MVC in TDD-based approach, and in this series Stephen is doing pair programming sessions with Charlie Poole, developer of NUnit framework (http://nunit.org/), developing blog sample application.

Besides these videos, 8 new tutorials in VB or C# on ASP.NET MVC are covering (stolen from website):

I already watched two videos from "How Do I" series and my first impressions are excellent. Both videos code was in VB. Although I am C# developer, I had no difficulties to understand code and philosophy behind those videos. Stephen is really a excellent teacher and his explanations alre concise and understandable.

I already created sample code in C# for "Creating Model Classes with LINQ to SQL" video and posted it to my website http://panjkov.qsh.eu/. (It is on freehosting, so if I encounter high amount of requests, I'll transfer it somewhere else).

My general impression is that things around MVC are rolling, and it seems that Microsoft has directed ASP.NET MVC ship in the right direction. We'll see what will happen in the future, but today is excellent :) I only hope that they will not change its name to something long and recognizable, as pointed by Scott.

Avoiding tag soup - sample files

panjkov — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:24:00 GMT

I just read Rob Conery's blog post "ASP.NET MVC: Avoiding tag soup", and following his steps (except last one) I created some sample files in one of my existing MVC sample apps. He didn't post sample code on his blog, so I created zip archive with only files needed this sample to run. Archive is posted on my website:

http://panjkov.qsh.eu/files/folders/aspnetmvc/entry68.aspx

I hope it will be helpful to others

Dragan