Jackie Goldstein's Weblog : ASP.NET

Just Released – Visual Basic QuickStarts and How-to Topics for PrismV2 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight)

Jackie Goldstein — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:55:18 GMT

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices group just Released a set of Quick Starts and How-To documents for using Prism in Visual Basic - Visual Basic QuickStarts and How-to Topics for PrismV2 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight) This...(read more)

The Official Release Version of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is Now Available

Jackie Goldstein — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:31:34 GMT

The official version of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is now available for download here . I’ve already suggested that you check out the free 184-page book chapter on building an app with MVC by Scott Guthrie....(read more)

Free Scott Guthrie ASP.NET MVC chapter download

Jackie Goldstein — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:42:52 GMT

If you want an amazing hands-on look at the new ASP.NET MVC framework, you must download this free 184-page book chapter Scott's NerdDinner.com chapter . This chapter is written is Scott’s usual clear and graphic style – lots of screen shots and clear...(read more)

MSDN Screencast Library

Jackie Goldstein — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:03:19 GMT

The MSDN team over in the UK has put together a huge collection (279 at the time of this post) of short screencasts for .NET developers. Each video is only about 10-15 minutes long, but packs a lot of useful information. Here is the full List...(read more)

Renaissance Case Studies Now Available

Jackie Goldstein — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:03:23 GMT

A few weeks ago, The Renaissance Computer Systems web site was updated with a set of case studies describing our roles in several recent projects. Check out Renaissance Case Studies and let me know if you have any comments....(read more)

User Interface Patterns Explorer

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:22:00 GMT

Infragistics has just launched an interesting site for UI designers at http://quince.infragistics.com Now that that the concept and need of design patterns for software architects and programmers is pretty much mainstream, it is time to develop a similar...(read more)

February 2009 Meeting of Israel Visual Basic User Group

Jackie Goldstein — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:36:03 GMT

This month we return to take a look at some of the web development technologies from Microsoft - Dynamic Data Controls (DDC) and Model View Controller (MVC). The new technology of ASP.NET DDC (Dynamic Data Controls) help us to build a presentation layer...(read more)

Microsoft Developer Academy II

Jackie Goldstein — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:56:00 GMT

Following in the footsteps of last year's event, Microsoft Israel is repeating the Microsoft Developer Academt event (tomorrow, November 27, 2007). This full-day event offers 6 parallel tracks of presentations and panel disucssions, across 5 time slots. Lots of of real-world and new technology sessions for the MS developer to choose from. More information and links can be found here.

Personally, when I am not sitting in on sessions, I'll be doing a repeat performance of the session I recently did at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona. It is a fun session, that covers some usefull tools and technologies from MS that developers aren't as aware of as they should be and tries to trigger your imagination for the next great killer app!

Mashups and Windows Live - Not Just for Browsers
Although there is a lot of "Internet" in a "Mashup" application, that does not mean that it must be a browser-based application! Find out what a mashup really is and how to use some of the common tools, techniques and resources to build a rich client mashup application. These applications will use services and data from Windows Live, Yahoo, as well as other sources and show you how easy it is to build smart client (as well as browser) mashups that combine heterogeneous data and services.

If you are at the event be sure to find me and say "Hi"

Also in the "Check it Out" Category...

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:58:00 GMT

Check out our new web site at www.renaissance.co.il

This is one of the projects that really hampered by blogging output over the past 2 months...but it was well worth it. We have a brand-new logo and look, updated and clearer messaging, and migration to take advantage of ASP.NET features.

Check out The Region

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:53:00 GMT

Although it has been around since this past TechEd US, The Region has now moved to ists permanent home at http://www.theregion.com/

The Region is basically the public global center for the 140 Microsoft Regional Directors around the world. It is a single view into the blogs of all of these technical and community leaders, along with a calendar of upcoming events.

Check it out and post your thoughts and comments here.

Mashups For The Masses !

Jackie Goldstein — Wed, 30 May 2007 19:06:00 GMT

As I have mentioned previously, I have recently been researching and playing with mashups and various sources of online data sources, such as Windows Live. Well, this is obviously something that has caught wider interest in Microsoft as well, as they recently released an alpha version of a tool/technology called "Popfly" (http://www.popfly.com/). This is a very cool, visual and interactive tool, for combining various building blocks and data sources, to build your own mashups, without all of the coding.

There are some heavy-hitter developers and marketing people on the Popfly team, but they haven't lost their sense of humor - this is from the Popfly FAQ page :

Q: Why did you call it Popfly?
A: Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.

Progress Notification for Web Service Calls

Jackie Goldstein — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:33:00 GMT

In one of our current projects, we had a need to provide progress indication for web service calls that could take a long time to execute (by design - alot of data being transferred). It turns out that this is a perfect scenario for using SOAP extensions, in order to get into the processing pipeline and provide the necessary information. Kim Major, our senior developer, wrote a great article that clearly explains and shows how to do this.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Impressions From Mix 07

Jackie Goldstein — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:30:00 GMT

As I am working my way back home from the MIX 07 conference, I have had time to reflect on the conference and whether it was a good use of my time and money:

I did not attend MIX last year, but very much enjoyed and benefited from it this year. I actually walked away with it having exceeded my expectations – but given how many conferences I attend and speak at over the course of a year, I am somewhat jaded and my level of expectations is not that high J

Here are some specific comments, in no particular order:

(1) I attended a few sessions that I really learned from and got a lot out of.

(2) I found it interesting to sit in on a few sessions and think about stuff that I don’t normally think about, e.g. marketing and content.

(3) Had some good conversations with people besides my usual crowd – some MS people and some different people that I met.

(4) Keynotes – I thought that both were excellent, but I’d give a big “thumbs down” to the respective Q/A and panel discussion. The keynotes ended on real highs, but the attached discussions took the air out, in my opinion.

(5) Several of the sessions I attended had a few customer speakers / case studies embedded in the talk – a different and interesting approach (if it was laid out as such in the session description - I do not really remember if it was or wasn’t)

(6) As far as specific technology, Silverlight was clearly the star of the show. However, another interesting observation is the swing (back) away from strong/static typing - as you can see from the development of the DLR (Dynamic Language Library) and the additional support for loosely-typed web service calls instead of only SOAP calls.

All in all – sign me up for next year !

Download videos of all sessions, including kenotes, from here.
You can download session contents as they are available from here.

Another great set of How To Videos for ASP.NET AJAX

Jackie Goldstein — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Several months ago, I pointed out the great series of videos on Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0. Well, the ASP.NET web site has outdone itself again, with a series of 23 "How To" videos on ASP.NET AJAX. Download the videos by Joe Stagner of the ASP.NET team from here.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is Released and Available for Download

Jackie Goldstein — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:37:00 GMT

If you have been waiting for the released version of the Microsoft AJAX offering, you can now download it from here. This page has separate downloads for the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions as well as for the AJAX Control Toolkit. Congrats to Microsoft !