Last night I gave my presentation at this month's NUFW Meeting. As unprepared as I was, I think it went pretty well. Before showing up for the meeting, I had the slides done, but had no demos at all. This actually turned out pretty well. I decided to just do two demos. One was ASP.NET w/ C# and the other was WindowsForms w/ VB. Basically I just played around with both, showed everyone what I could at the time and answered any questions that came up. Originally I had thought that this would be a short presentation since I was not very prepared (time crunch, busy life, etc), but I had to hurry and almost cut the last demo short to keep the meeting under 2 hours! Take this as a hint to never get me talking about all the cool new stuff in VS 2005 ;) Event at 2 hours, I felt bad that I didn't really do anyone one section justice, but hopefully everyone there got a good idea about the new stuff coming up!
Here are the slides for anyone interested...sorry there aren't any demos...enjoy!
The AppUpdater Component is sexy. Check out the article on it to get a good start on getting it working. It's a little goofy at first, but works fantastically and is very flexible to fit your needs. For a recent project I did, I set it up to call a WebService to check for updates checking who the user is (a custom forms authentication) and checking a versions database to see what the latest version for that user is. This allows you to do some neat things like have beta versions that only some people get.
One of the big hurdles I've mentioned before (and have seen other people have problems with) is getting it to work with Windows Server 2003. As we all know it's very locked down from the get go which is great, but sometimes makes it hard to get things working. The following steps will help you setup what you need in IIS 6.0 to get the AppUpdater component to work with a Win2K3 Server:
- Open up IIS
- Click on the Web Service Extensions node
- Click on WebDAV
- Click the Allow button
- Under Web Sites, navigate to the folder that will hold all the different versions of your applications, in my case, a folder called “versions“.
- Right mouse click on the “versions” folder and click Properties
- Click the Create button to make it an IIS Application
- Click the Configuration button
- Select .config in the application extensions list
- Click the Remove button and hit OK
- Check the “Directory browsing” checkbox and hit OK
Hope this helps! :) Again, these instructions are only for the changes necessary for the versions to be housed on a Windows Server 2003 box. For the rest of the “How-To” on getting the AppUpdater Component to work, check out the link above.