Robert Robbins

I regularly browse the ASP.NET Weblogs for hot tips so when Hosam Kamel and Jose R. Guay Paz announced the release of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP I decided to give it a try.

The download includes a compiled help file SQLServerDriverForPHP.chm with installation instructions and sample code. I won't repeat anything you can already find there but below is a screen shot of a new section that appears when you call phpinfo:

I already had some sample code to export data from SQL Server to JSON using PHP so I just converted it to use this new driver:

   1: /* Specify the server and connection string attributes. */

   2: $serverName = "(local)";

   3: $connectionInfo = array( "UID"=>"sa",

   4:                          "PWD"=>"password",

   5:                          "Database"=>"Northwind");

   6:                          

   7: /* Connect using SQL Server Authentication. */

   8: $conn = sqlsrv_connect( $serverName, $connectionInfo);

   9: if( $conn === false )

  10: {

  11:      echo "Unable to connect.</br>";

  12:      die( print_r( sqlsrv_errors(), true));

  13: }

  14:  

  15: $tsql = "SELECT * FROM Customers";

  16: $stmt = sqlsrv_query( $conn, $tsql);

  17: if( $stmt === false )

  18: {

  19:      echo "Error in executing query.</br>";

  20:      die( print_r( sqlsrv_errors(), true));

  21: }

  22: $data = "["; 

  23: while($row = sqlsrv_fetch_array( $stmt, SQLSRV_FETCH_ASSOC))

  24: {

  25:     $data = $data . json_encode($row) . ", ";

  26: }    

  27: $data = $data . "]";   

  28: echo $data;

  29:  

  30: /* Free statement and connection resources. */

  31: sqlsrv_free_stmt( $stmt);

  32: sqlsrv_close( $conn);

Since we have not moved to Visual Studio 2008 at work, I have been unable to keep up with the progress in ASP.NET technology. I can't get into Silverlight 2.0 or ASP.NET MVC without Visual Studio 2008. 

I won't be blogging much here for awhile because I'm studying CakePHP and Flash which have nothing to do with ASP.NET. CakePHP is an attempt to bring MVC to the PHP community. Sometimes CakePHP seems half-baked to me. Sorry, I could not resist that joke. Actually CakePHP is a very promising way to rapidly prototype web applications. By studying CakePHP I'll get many of the concepts behind Model View Controller. I'm really not interested in architectural patterns used in software engineering but MVC takes a lot of the drudgery out of web development and even I can appreciate that. At the very least, you can use it to get a basic CRUD application up and going in minutes. CakePHP supports scaffolding and unit testing. I imagine it is based on Ruby On Rails and emulates many Rail features but I'm more familiar with PHP than Ruby.

I'm studying Flash because it is used for animation. There is a lot of material available on how to animate in Flash. Ultimately I may do all my animation in After Effects though because it is far more versatile than Flash. Flash animation is only the standard for online animation because its vector graphics make it light weight. However, if you are doing all your animation for video then there is less reason to use Flash. Flash is also used to deliver video on the Internet and I'm heavily involved in online video so I should learn all aspects of the technology.

There are some interesting features in Flash that designers don't seem to be taking advantage of. For instance, there is a web service component for Flash but I have not seen many web service clients done in Flash. You can also automate the Flash authoring application using JavaScript and I suspect very little has been done with that.

Over the weekend I went to Philadelphia for a YouTube gathering. I shot lots of footage of historical sites and colonial buildings. This gives me plenty of material to use for my editing experiments.

I've been exploring the world of the web designer and noticed that ASP.NET does not exist in that world. I've been reading web design blogs and browsing through articles on http://www.designfloat.com/, a sort of DIGG site for the design community, and I don't encounter any mention of ASP.NET at all.

I have observed that web designers are somewhat aware of PHP because they are heavily involved in developing custom themes for WordPress. Creating skins and themes for open source web applications seems to be a good gig for web designers. But a lot of the attention is on WordPress, Joomla, and OsCommerce. I don't find any articles, guides, or other resources on designing for DotNetNuke or ASP.NET Master Pages, etc. Of course, I could find that through a targeted search but I'm trying to get a overall sense of what the design community is focused on.

Web designers are urged to increase their "coding skills" but this usually means CSS and XHTML.  They are not pressured to learn PHP and they certainly aren't being asked to know anything at all about C# or VB.NET or even ASP.NET.

It is not clear why web designers are so ignorant of ASP.NET. The complete absence of any mention of ASP.NET means there is also an absence of criticism. It could be that ASP.NET was dismissed by the design community because it fails to generate HTML code that meets the design community's standards, i.e. layout through CSS rather than tables, cross browser support, etc. Of course, you can solve some of these problems with the CSS Friendly Control Adapters but that is too technical for a web designer. I suspect ASP.NET is too technical in general for web designers. They are very adverse to code and programming.

On the other hand, the ASP.NET community is surprisingly focused on esoteric programming and software engineering topics. I wonder if this explains why ASP.NET initially had such poor support for proper CSS layout and browser compatibility? The engineer mindset seems to govern its development rather than a pure web developer's perspective.

Since I am not an ASP.NET evangelist it does not trouble me that web designers aren't interested in ASP.NET. From my perspective this just means there may be an opportunity here to bridge the gap. I have had easy projects that merely involved applying a design to an ASP.NET web site because the designer couldn't do it without messing things up. Web designers do have a lot of trouble working with ASP.NET. They don't understand a page directive and they delete web controls that are referenced in the code behind, causing the familiar "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error which baffles them. I'm considering a transition from programming to web design and I suspect I would find the least competition in developing DotNetNuke skins.

The web design community is not preparing for Silverlight. I did not come across any mention of Silverlight or Expression Blend while idly browsing web design articles and topics. Of course, if you are totally uninterested in ASP.NET then you are not going to be following the developments in Silverlight. This may create a brief opportunity in a tight market for Expresion Blend designers. I'm not a technology or business pundit so I'm not going to speculate on the fortunes of Microsoft's technology bids. I'm actually studying Flash right now, not Silverlight, because Flash has become very important for online video and Flash is used for a lot of animation which is a type of content I could create.

I plan to continue to infiltrate the web design community and gauge their interest in ASP.NET and Silverlight. It may be advantageous for me to collaborate with a professional web designer and get some feedback on my efforts to apply design to ASP.NET web sites.