MrDave's (David Yack) WebLog

Teach yourself WPF in 5 days...

2006-08-08T07:07:45Z

Karsten has a great post on learning WPF in five days. This isn’t a go to Dallas for trianing, this is a how to use the resources online to learn WPF. Check it out here.

Avoiding ASP.NET 2.0 Conversion Gotchas

2005-11-02T03:24:00Z

One of my last few posts talked about a gotcha that occurs when converting web projects that had files that were no longer in the project file but still in the project folder.

After exchanging e-mails with Scott he pointed out a couple of things I thought were worth mentioning. First, in the RTM release (which just got uploaded to MSDN recently!) the migration wizard will list all the files found in the directory that were excluded or not part of the projects. You can find this in the ConversionReport.txt file.

The even better news is that an update to the migration wizard (based on all the latest feedback the ASP.NET team has received) is in the works. The updated version as I understand it will attempt to exclude those files by marking them as excluded in the converted folder. In case you haven’t seen in ASP.NET 2.0 Sites if you mark a file excluded it actually renames it by adding an excluded extension to the file. This is done because there is no longer a project file to maintain that information. It’s also important to understand that excluded files do get checked into source control.

The continuous improvement that has been seen in the migration wizard over the last year, and the fact that attention is still there to make it better is great!

Widbey Blast - Fort Collins Colorado - October 3rd

2005-09-24T22:48:00Z

I will be up in Fort Collins, Colorado on October 3rd speaking at Widbey Blast which is sure to be a full day of good stuff all for free! Last I heard it was filling up so if you want to go I would hury up and get registered!

There are two tracks - a fundamentals and an advanced track. I’m doing the ASP.NET talk in the advanced track - so if your going and have specific things you want to hear about - drop me an email or a comment! I will be in good company that day with Don Kiely, Keith Brown, Kathleen Dollard, Doug Gregory and Tim Colton.

You can find out more info and register for the event here Widbey Blast Web Site

Looks like a busy week coming up, 2 days of giving a training event in Denver, MVP Summit in Redmond and back to Fort Collins for this event. Come to think of it this last month has kind of been like that!

Go Live updated to include Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, RC

2005-09-23T14:04:00Z

Looks like today the Go Live was updated to include Team Suite, RC.

You can find the full Go Live details at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/golive/ or the amendment
for current Go Live users at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/golive/amendment/default.aspx which is dated as of today!

VS2005 Template Parameters

2005-09-11T03:45:00Z

One of the cool features of Visual Studio is the ability to do project and item templates. Prior to these it used to be a real pain to package up your best practices.

Scott G recently posted on using them with ASP.NET you can find that here

Buried in one of his comments is the link to this MSDN page that has a wealth of information on the parameters that are exposed for use on the template pages.

Using the template capability is a great way to promote consistency across your team.

Rob Howard and Free Copy of Code Smith

2005-08-27T05:58:00Z

Do you need any other excuse to visit Colorado Springs?

Read the full details here

Changes to ASP.NET 2.0 from Beta2-->RTM

2005-08-20T20:31:00Z

The following is from Brian Goldfarb’s post about changes between beta 2 – Keep the info coming knowing these types of things can really help the early adopters move on to RTM quickly!

It is time to start preparing for the RTM of ASP.NET 2.0 and in order to do that I've had the team prepare a great paper that outlines the major changes that we've made since Beta 2. Find it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/beta2/beta2rtmchanges/default.aspx

Next week, we will be posting detailed API x API changes since Beta2 which should help give even more insight. I hope you find this useful!

Looks like Virtual Earth is live!

2005-07-25T10:26:00Z

If you didn’t get a chance to play with Virtual Earth when it was up last night for testing – it appears to be back alive now.

Everyone from Scoble to Chandu who is on the Virtual Earth team has been talking about it.

If you are looking at how to create your own Virtual Earth application that leverages the power of the VE engine you might find Dr. Neil Rodyn’s site interesting ViaVirtualEarth he has a couple of good articles on how to get you started.

I happened to catch the late night testing last night and got to experiment with it and prototyped a Commercial Real Estate application. With any luck you might get a peak of it in the future.

Check out the Virtual Earth blog which has already jumped right to the punch line of Why would I use VE – Isn’t it just like Google Maps

The new locate me function is pretty cool – I haven’t tried the one that requires software but the IP Locate gets you close to the region your in.

Here’s my IP Locate – Where are you?

What language should book samples use?

2005-06-27T09:59:00Z

I figured this would be a great way to start off the week with a little debate and energized discussion!

If you’re writing technology books about .NET you really can’t avoid the question of what language to do you use for the code samples?

Read more and share your opinion here now!

Sharing Code for user group website

2005-05-06T11:14:00Z

I’m looking for good ideas on how to share source code for a user group web site. We want to get more members involved in learning via the process of building it but the thought of just having a free for all with managing the code scares me!

What I’m looking for is ideally something that will integrate with Visual Studio 2005. It would be nice if we could not have to exclude users that could only have Visual Web Developer.

Ideally it would not require check in/out from a separate application other than Visual Studio.

Anyone doing this now – any one have ideas?

We have considered gotdotnet workspaces but everyone I talk to says they have too many problems – Anybody want to convince me otherwise?

SouthColorado.NET User Group tonight!

2005-05-03T11:15:00Z

Wow, April flew by and we are already to our May user group meeting.

Jeff Rhodes on Dynamically Creating JavaScript and Other ASP.NET Tips and Tricks

Dynamically Creating JavaScript and Other ASP.NET Tips and Tricks

This session will look at how you can use JavaScript to reduce postbacks as well as create user interactions. Better yet, it will show you how to add only the JavaScript you need for a particular page design. Along the way, we'll also examine tips & tricks like creating a "soccer team schedule" web site, saving your page to Word or Excel, adding properties and events to user controls, play media, loading content from a database, and more.

More info at http://www.southcolorado.net

See everyone at the meeting!

Beta 2 ASP.NET Project References - Where are they?

2005-05-01T06:07:00Z

Help I have lost my mind again….In 1.x applications you can see the references your project has via solution explorer and even drill down to properties on the reference and remove it.

In 2.x beta 2 you can do the same for non web site projects but it seems as though they are MIA for ASP.NET sites.

I opened a Feedback Ticket quite some time ago, and they just marked it resolved as review for next release

Am I the only one that can’t find the references on web site projects?

Am I the only one that looks at references all the time to see what they are / remove them and likes to know what a site is dependent on?

View the ticket here

Invalid ViewState and AppPool Recycles - Ever See it?

2005-04-08T08:53:00Z

We have been helping one of our clients with an issue where users are reporting Invalid View state on their servers.

It appears that we can track this back to occurring when the AppPool recycles.

In testing, we were also able to force this to happen if you modify the user from Network Services to another custom user or vice versa – Any user with view state from prior to the change is out of luck and will receive invalid viewstate

You might be wondering some of the common reasons for this type of error – inconsistent validationkeys in a server farm, server transfers with a second param of true, posting back to a different page, client side truncation of the viewstate field among others.

I’m curious if anyone else has seen Invalid View State errors that might be related to App Pools on IIS6 / Windows 2003?

Share your invalid view state thoughts! I’m convinced a few of these errors is enough to convince anyone to store view state server side!

Grokster Wrap up

2005-03-30T10:50:00Z

Today the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Grokster case – attendance apparently looked more like a sleep over waiting for concert tickets.

Camping out at the Supreme Court

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring05/cos491/writing/index.php?p=242

Wired Magazine’s Perspective

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67060,00.html?tw=wn_story_top5

NY Times caught a great quote from Justice Ginsburg

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/technology/30bizcourtcnd.html
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected, noting that the 1984 decision "goes on for 13 more pages" after articulating the test that provided Sony's defense. "If the standard was that clear, the court would have stopped there," Justice Ginsburg continued. "I don't think you can take one sentence from a rather long opinion and say 'Ah-ha, we have a clear rule.' "

SCOTUSblog

http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2005/03/court_conflicte.html

Several members of the Court -- but especially Justices Antonin Scalia, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter -- seemed troubled about the potential impact of a tightening of copyright law on small inventors -- "the guy in the garage," as Souter put it.

I’m glad to see the Justices have a grasp and care about the smaller companies that simply don’t have the bandwidth that companies like Microsoft, IBM, Sun etc. have.

Tim Armstrong’s has a great first hand review of the arguments

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tka/2005/03/29#a53

Here’s the AP News Report

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050329/D894OTE80.html

Why is it that in year 2005 I cant simply go to the Supreme Court website and download a audio of today’s arguments?

Too much .NET can make you brain dead

2005-03-17T09:21:00Z

I spent most of today preparing for a half day session tomorrow on ASP.NET. It was fun to take the opportunity to spend a good amount of time exploring. I have spent a good amount of time on the beta’s but recently I have been able to devote significantly more time to them.

You can really tell that things are starting to come together, fewer things are breaking, and less weird stuff is happening.

I managed to pull over our company foundation library a few weeks ago, and we have been starting to build out our 2.0 specific features. Today I spent some time getting our code generator onto 2.0 and starting to add some of the 2.0 specific capabilities that we want to have support for.

There is sure a lot that has changed in 2.0, all for the best.

If you haven’t started learning it – what the heck are you waiting for?