John Mandia's Points of Interest

AngularJs - Where to start?

2013-04-07T18:08:00Z

This blog has been way too quiet so I recently decided to do a post about one of the things I've been looking into and that's AngularJs. I thought about writing it here but I wanted to try a different approach to writing a blog post and have gone for the new Markdown approach which lets me easily add and edit posts. I decided to try out http://scriptogr.am/ and so far it's been quite a nice experience.

So long story short I may start using http://blog.whydoifollow.com as my main place for posts. The AngularJs post covers a lot of useful resources and so far feedback has been good.

If you are interested in JavaScript and AngularJs please check it out at:

http://blog.whydoifollow.com/post/angularjs-where-to-start

John

New ASP testing bundle being launched

2009-05-19T09:39:00Z

Yes this blog post is related to the promotion detailed below. Just thought I would point it out :) Why post it? Well:

(1) I have heard Typemock Isolator is a good mocking framework especially when it comes to testing legacy code so I don't mind promoting it in this way

(2) I've used Rhino.Mocks in the past and like it but would like to be able to also try out Typemock (beyond a trial) so this will give me a chance to compare both.

(3) I've used NUnitASP (http://nunitasp.sourceforge.net/ support ended in Jan 2008) in the past and wanted to see what the asp testing framework was like.

(4) This promotional offer may be useful to other developers who also wanted to use TypeMock but couldn't or wouldn't buy it.

What is this new bundle/promotion:

Unit Testing ASP.NET? ASP.NET unit testing has never been this easy.

Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle - and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers.

The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.NET unit testing solution, and offers both Typemock Isolator, a unit test tool and Ivonna, the Isolator add-on for ASP.NET unit testing, for a bargain price.

Typemock Isolator is a leading .NET unit testing tool (C# and VB.NET) for many ‘hard to test’ technologies such as SharePoint, ASP.NET, MVC, WCF, WPF, Silverlight and more. Note that for unit testing Silverlight there is an open source Isolator add-on called SilverUnit.

The first 60 bloggers who will blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Free Isolator ASP.NET Bundle license (Typemock Isolator + Ivonna). If you post this in an ASP.NET dedicated blog, you'll get a license automatically (even if more than 60 submit) during the first week of this announcement.

Also 8 bloggers will get an additional 2 licenses (each) to give away to their readers / friends.

Go ahead, click the following link for more information on how to get your free license.

Prism V2 - Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009 - Released

2009-02-17T00:38:00Z

I mainly do these short announcements via my twitter account http://twitter.com/jmandia but I have been looking forward to digging into Prism v2 but held off until it was released (which is now :D).

I am glad to see guidance come out that covers WPF and Silverlight and it has been good to see how Prism v2 has changed over the 10 drops they did (and the fact that they asked for feedback on their thoughts on naming conventions and the ideas they were investigating).

The prism team were also very responsive to queries (even ones sent over the weekend. Cheers!).

Anyway this should warrant some of your time if you are interested in Silverlight and/or WPF.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fa07e1ce-ca3f-4b9b-a21b-e3fa10d013dd&DisplayLang=en

John

Everything has its place

2009-01-14T23:46:00Z

I had resisted signing up to Twitter as I really didn't see the point and now that my little family has grown over the festive season I have even less time (I've heard that reading tweets can become addictive :D ).

I did however see how Twitter could fit alongside my other tools/sites. Twitter will be used for short tech posts instead of this blog (I'd like to keep the points of interest posts going and add some bigger posts in the future).

So if you are interested you can follow me on http://twitter.com/jmandia

Recent tweets:

Mono 2.2 has been released (unfortunately the fix that was going to be added in order to get CC.NET running apparently didn't make it :( )
A new version of Pex has been released (0.9.40105.0) and this one includes a change in license (So you can use it commercially with VS2008! [although there is no commitment to RTM Pex for VS2008])

John

Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Beta Released!

2008-10-16T05:45:00Z

Another release I thought would come during the PDC has been released:

Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Beta

Click the link above to go to the Microsoft download page.

Some points about the release (Headings taken from the What's New section):

MvcFutures.dll is not included in the beta (as it wouldn't be included in the final release)
The Beta installer installs the ASP.NET MVC assemblies (System.Web.Mvc.dll, System.Web.Routing.dll, and System.Web.Abstractions.dll) into the GAC.
New Simple Membership Features in the Default Project Template
New Filter Types for Authorization and Exception Handling
New Output Cache Filter
Changes for ASP.NET AJAX
Namespaces in Routes
New Interface for Enhanced Testability of TempData
ActionInvoker Extensibility Improvements
ViewDataDictionary (minor change)
ViewEngine Improvements
Helper Improvements
Controller and Filter Improvements

Bug fixes:

Fixed a bug in which the ignore-routes setting (created by using the IgnoreRoute extension method) affected URL generation.
Fixed a view engine caching bug when the application is not in debug mode (that is, when debug="false" is set in the Web.config file). This bug occurred if different action methods in different controllers had the same name. In that case, an action method could render the view for the wrong controller.
Fixed a bug in OutputCacheAttribute in which cached authenticated content did not require authentication. Even though the content is cached, if it requires authentication, the user should be required to authenticate first before seeing the cached content.
Fixed a bug in which RenderPartial does not work when tracing is turned on.
Fixed a bug in the Html.TextArea helper method in which an overload was not looking in ViewData for its value when the provided value is null.
Fixed the OutputCacheAttribute.CacheProfile property so that it works in Medium Trust.

If you haven't looked at ASP.NET MVC before because it was a preview I would have a look at this release to see if ASP.NET MVC is for you (or your current/future project at least :D).

Thanks to Tomoharo Nagasawa for spotting this.

John

Flash Player 10 is out. A co-incidence perhaps?

2008-10-15T12:41:00Z

It looks like Adobe have just released version 10 of their Flash Player with a bunch of enhancements. Now that Silverlight 2 is out the competition really begins.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Adobe-Releases-Flash-Player-10/?kc=rss

Now that the foundation is laid (a subset of the .net runtime across browsers and operating systems) it will be interesting to see how regular future releases are as the competition heats up. The introduction of Silverlight is good for us but also good for Flash developers as it encourages Adobe to continuously look at ways in which they can improve their Flash/Air offering. Will we see Silverlight enhancements every year (e.g. announced at Mix) or sooner? The fact that the Silverlight player updates itself may make this more likely than not.

I’m looking forward to the PDC to see what is planned for future releases (printing support would be nice ;-) ).

John

Silverlight 2 is out, a question and the BBC iPlayer

2008-10-14T16:22:00Z

Well I think most blogs already have this covered but Silverlight 2 is out!

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released.aspx

One question I asked (after I said congratulations on the release of course :D) was:

I have a question regarding a point made in the press release:

"Improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support. This includes new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and next-generation in-stream advertising support."

My question is about the "superior search engine optimization techniques" part. I am assuming you mean superior to Flash? I don't really care if it was meant to imply Flash or something else (don't want to kick that discussion off :D) but I can imagine that a lot of thought was given to what should be included in the press release and I was just wondering if there was more information about these superior search engine optimization techniques?

This is an area that interests me a lot so I was just wondering if something new has been added recently to Silverlight or if a document/whitepaper/article was published that I somehow missed?

Anyone else know if there is something I missed (I know there are ways of making Silverlight SEO friendly and I have mentioned them in the past but I was wondering if I missed something new)?

http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2008/10/14/bbc-partners-adobe-make-iplayer-platform-agnostic/

So the bbc iplayer will be a Flash/Air based implementation (The bbc got complaints that the iplayer only worked on certain operating systems). It is a shame Silverlight wasn't picked as that would have been a great win (in terms of increasing the installed base of Silverlight and in terms of a great case study on the power of Silverlight). The one thing really missing I guess is Linux support (I don't think the BBC could go with Moonlight for that side of things just yet). Who knows maybe everything isn't set in stone yet :D

John

Silverlight 2 RTW out tomorrow - October 14th!

2008-10-13T16:32:00Z

In my last points of interest post I mentioned that an announcement was going to be made today. I thought it would either be a release date announcement (if they were going to miss the PDC) or that Silverlight was actually released. Well it appears it is not out now but will be by the end of tomorrow.

Looking forward to it.

Thanks to Ken Cox for spotting this first.

Press Release available from here.

John

Points of interest #11 - Silverlight, Open Source

2008-10-12T14:54:00Z

I've decided to restart my "Points of interest" posts. To get the ball rolling I'll start off small:

Open Source

Old news but Jitterbit 2.0 was released in August. http://www.jitterbit.com

The Jitterbit Integration Solution combines intuitive integration design with robust functionality and scalable performance. Jitterbit is designed to handle the most complex integration challenges between legacy, enterprise and On-Demand applications, including Business Process Fusion, ETL, SaaS, and SOA. The Jitterbit Solution enables organizations to unite their independent applications and data in record time and for the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.

Not specific to .Net but may prove useful for those looking for a way of performing an integration between multiple systems without having to create something yourself or purchase a licence.
In September Solr 1.3 was released. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat.

Again not specific to .Net but very useful. Was just thinking about the possibility of a database (whatever your preference), Jitterbit, Solr and a Silverlight front end.........talking about Silverlight.............

Silverlight

Big news coming this Monday about Silverlight!!

Can't remember the source (sorry! please add it as a comment and I'll add your link) but someone mentioned that he monitors Microsoft's press pass releases and came across this:

Microsoft Corp. will hold a teleconference with Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. Guthrie will make a significant announcement related to Microsoft Silverlight.

Now this could be that Silverlight is released or a date is announced. I'm not 100% sure on it being a release announcement as it has only been a few weeks since RC1 came out and people are still busy updating their beta 2 projects. I hope if it is a date announcement it isn't something along the lines of December 08 (or Mix 09 :D). I assumed it would be released at the PDC but if they are running late then this would make a date announcement essential in order to manage expectations. Out of the two options I think I would prefer it to be an announcement that Silverlight is now live. The argument for that is that they want to make sure other PDC announcements do not get drowned out with news that Silverlight has been released.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-10GuthrieSilverlightMA.mspx

That's all for now.

RIA and Search Engine Optimisation......Adobe leading the charge

2008-07-01T12:51:00Z

I've often commented on my wish for the Silverlight team to focus a little more on Search Engine Optimisation (and printing support....but that's a topic for another day) as I feel that this is one area that could put off a lot of business users (yes you can argue that it is an application and if your application is content rich then possibly your application should be built in asp.net with occassional use of Silverlight to add "islands of richness"). There are ways of having a search engine friendly Silverlight application (my plan was to have something more solid by now but life has been busy...it is however still on my todo list :D) but I was/am hoping that it does get some attention either now or in the near future. Looks like Adobe are aiming to do this ...(read more)

Tip for those of you using CruiseControl.Net (CC.NET) with Perforce - error: Request too large

2008-04-03T10:29:00Z

I use CC.Net quite a lot now with Perforce and ClearCase and I was recently asked to help out a team who were having some problems. A CI project had been setup on CC.NET and it "seemed" to be running fine. Someone would checkin the file and the project would detect the changes. Unfortunately the files on the build server were not actually being updated :S Checking through the logs led me to this error message: error: Request too large (over 200000); see 'p4 help maxresults'. This post covers this issue in more detail, suggests a possible fix and describe how this fix can be applied as a CruiseControl.Net Plugin. John ...(read more)

Spoiler (Perhaps) - Silverlight to run on Symbian phones!

2008-03-04T09:17:00Z

Microsoft is working with Nokia to get Silverlight running on Symbian mobile phones. Would this help influence your decision to use Silverlight for UI over other technologies. It seems like the build up to mix is starting to happen with more and more news coming out as we get closer to the event. ...(read more)

For those of you on the lookout for more information about MIX 08 and Silverlight, IIS or MVC

2008-02-16T20:41:00Z

Now I usually aim to have either my own content or a collection of links (a points of interest post) instead of a single link to another site but I know a lot of people are on the lookout for anything they can find out about Silverlight 2.0 and Mix so I thought I would post this links. DNR have just done a podcast with Scott Guthrie (well the first part is with him) where he provides more information about MIX (sounds like SL 2.0 will also have a calender control etc).......(read more)

Sandcastle January 2008 Release Available

2008-01-16T10:36:00Z

It looks like Sandcastle has now moved to codeplex.

http://www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=9921

I've been looking at CI (primarily using CC.NET) a lot over the last few months and have been encountering issues with NDoc (given that it is no longer developed and there was never a proper .Net 2 release). I looked at Sandcastle a while back and wasn't happy with it (it seemed like it needed too much work to get working and it was slooooooooow).

I tried the last release and thanks to community projects like Sandcastle Help File Builder was able to easily hook it up to CC.NET. I ran it against a codebase that took 4 hours to generate documentation and that time was cut down to 20 minutes (so some definate improvements on that end).

Some things that still cause me some pain (could be Sandcastle Help File Builder):

It doesn't like interop assemblies (fails on my setup)
It requires your projects to have xml generation on (not a big deal I know but can be to some people)
Dependencies list (I wish there was an option to automatically detect this)
Speed (It still seems slower than NDoc)

Anyway haven't tried this latest release so let's see if things are even better (Msft have introduced a GUI in this release but mention it is not intended to compete with community projects).

John

UPDATE: Sandcastle Help File Builder (http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB) are coming out with an update for the latest release on the 22nd. I've not tested the latest version of Sandcastle yet (waiting on SHFB as the old version isn't compatible with the January release) but I hope that the BuildAssembler.exe improves as right now it is using up 837MB of memory and 50% CPU utilisation on a build server as I write this!!

Silverlight SEO (Search Engine Optimisation / Search Engine Optimization)

2008-01-04T00:45:00Z

One of my new resolutions was to look at Silverlight more closely, especially with regards to search engine optimisation which is something I raised back in May in my "Points of interest #6" post.

What are some of the things I like about Silverlight (this is not a complete list but some quick points in relation to this post):

The browser / browser version is taken out of the equation (to a degree). I should hopefully no longer need to worry about html, css and JavaScript support across different browsers and different operating systems. If something looks good on IE 6 on XP it should look and behave the same on Firefox on the Mac.
Easily enhance the user experience (I know Ajax and Flash can achieve this as well)
Develop every aspect of your application with C# (or any other managed supported language) - yes I eagerly await Silverlight 2 Beta 1 (although I know you can still achieve a lot with Silverlight 1).

Now this is a reduced list (there are many posts out there explaining the benefits Silverlight 1.0 / 2.0 will bring) but point 1 and 2 add a lot of value and if you are not sacrificing seo then you are onto a winner (although in cases where you are building a pure application e.g. an insurance quote application seo plays a lesser role).

I thought I would gather links, posts and my own stuff under a custom domain so I bought http://www.silverlightseo.net and just before the new year (30th December) I knocked up a Silverlight page and uploaded it to see if I could get it indexed by the search engines.

Less than a week later I am glad with the initial results:

Search Term	Google	Yahoo	Live
silverlight seo	no 2 out of 408,000	no 12 out of 3,210,000	not yet indexed
silverlight search engine optimisation	no 11 out of 95,000	no 46 out of 482,000 (not as good)	not yet indexed
silverlight search engine optimization	no 42 out of 782,000	no 14 out of 481,000	not yet indexed
silverlight search engines	no 65 out of 215,000	no 43 out of 855,000	not yet indexed

Now it surprised me how quickly I got in there (initially I added http://www.silverlightseo.net to my signature for my forum posts on asp.net/silverlight.net and recently I added a link to my blog and posted about it but other than that there are no links pointing to this site that I know of) but I'm glad to see that the approach was accepted and the content indexed.

Now two useful posts about SEO and Silverlight are Michael's October post where he talks about using xslt to extract the content from Xaml and put it into html and Nikhil's May post (I know there are more out there which I will be adding to www.silverlightseo.net as time goes on).

When I did this test I had the following in mind:

If I generate content (at the moment it is a hard-coded text) where should I store it in the generated Xaml or the host html page?

- I selected to have the content rendered in html and have Silverlight extract the rendered text from the host page.
How would a search engine view what I was doing (am I trying to show one thing to search engines and something completely different to users)?

- The content that is rendered on the html page (in the future by asp.net) is the same content that is displayed within the Silverlight application (consider Xaml as a different form of CSS. CSS can be used to style html tags and Silverlight is providing a style and displaying it using xaml tags).

- Now you wouldn't want to display the same text twice so I altered the Z index of the Silverlight control and made the height and width 100% (I thought I might get my hand slapped for that but it isn't being used for keyword stuffing or anything sinister so I would hope it continues to be accepted).
Should I go Silverlight all the way or look for a hybrid asp.net/silverlight solution (now by this I do not mean an asp.net app with a silverlight control e.g. a slideshow or video player?

- Since Silverlight is so new I would say start off with a hybrid approach and take the lessons you learned developing asp.net sites and see if you can apply them to Silverlight. Now since this was a demo I haven't decided what I think the best approach would be (I've also not looked at Silverlight in enough depth to even pretend to know what the best approach is when Silverlight is concerned) but I am considering trying the following approach:

a) A Xaml file per view (instead of having everything within one file) that loads additional pieces of xaml (controls) if and when required.
b) For each view render the content in html and have Silverlight intelligently extract it. At the moment each textblock calls a JavaScript method that checks the host page for any content with the same id as itself (Loaded="contentdisplaycontrol_loaded").
c) Use either the new ASP.NET MVC Framework or Castle's MonoRail to navigate around the Silverlight Application/Site.

I've not tried this out fully yet but intend to in order to see if the hybrid approach presents the best of both worlds (yes moving from one view to another means a page load but you can still have a nice user experience for view related actions and it could still look very slick).
What about accessibility or printing?

- Screen readers will be able to read the html text and as far as printing is concerned hopefully there will be a printing solution for Silverlight 2.0 but until then you can style the html text via css to look nice when it is printed in Firefox (I've not done that yet so it looks unsightly). Unfortunately IE print preview shows a skewed picture of the Silverlight content.

Now the Xaml/Javascript can easily be pulled from www.silverlightseo.net if you want to look under the covers but the description I've given covers the concept.

If you have any Silverlight / SEO related content please let me know and I'll look to add it when I have the site fully up and running.

John