ShankuN's Blog

ASP.NET Whidbey Starter Kit Guidelines

This month, we're putting together the overall plan and guidelines for Starter Kits for ASP.NET Whidbey. Jeff King (Scott's PDC keynote demo buddy) is managing the overall Starter Kit plan for our team, and has been putting together some samples. Over the next few months, I'll use this blog to share some of the starter kit designs and ideas with you, and get your feedback. If you have any ideas at any time, feel free to shout!

Like V1, the aim of the starter kits is to have real world applications that work “out of the box”, but are easy and tempting to customize.  The first step is to put together a set of guidelines for consistency that apply to any starter kit; we'll then use these guidelines to create specs for each specific starter kit as we develop them. We'll also provide these guidelines for those in the community building projects that look like starter kits.

As you may or may not know, in Whidbey many groups in VS are shipping similar starter kits. One big goal of the starter kits in Whidbey is that you can install them into Visual Studio, and have them appear in File/New - in our case from the File/New Web Site menu item. We will then ship a set of starter kits right in Visual Studio. Of course, we will continue to provide them for free over the web, and we'll also use the web to provide updates for the VS starter kits.

Here is an outline of some of the current common requirements for ASP.NET Starter Kits:

What do you think? Anything you disagree with, or would suggest adding (or removing)?

Commodore 64

Duncan's post on the Commodore 64 brings back a flood of memories. 

The Commodore 64 was really my first major computer. Although I used several others at school or friends' (like the TRS-80, PET, TI-99/4A, the Atari 800, the Apple IIe, and the original Mac), the 64 was the first computer I owned.

I got my Commodore 64 for my 12th birthday - we forked out Cdn. $1500 for a system that included a C64, a 1541 floppy drive (170K!), and a 1526 printer. We added a 1701 monitor a few months later - it was the only component I still had by the time I entered university, because it had RCA jacks for inputs, which made it great for a dorm room TV.

Some random memories:

• The 1526 printer was a big mistake. It was billed as a near-letter-quality printer (and the default printout was definitely better than the 1525. But, unlike the 1525, where you could individually access dots on a line, the 1526 only let you define an 8x8 “custom character“ per line. So, when word processors and tools with better fonts (like Print Master) came out, they would support the 1525 well; but on the 1526 (if the software supported it at all), you'd have to print each 8x8 block, then do a carriage return (without a line feed), and then print the next block and so on. It was painful to watch. It's why I used Print Master instead of Print Shop

• I loved playing a game called Micro League Baseball, but I think the disk had a copy protection mechanism where the second track was bad (or maybe it was just my disk). Now, 1541 drives also had frequent problems with the heads misaligning, and it would cost $50 to fix. But I found that if I put the MLB disk in, and then used a tool to seek to the track from the right direction (from track 1 or 3), it would cause the drive to stutter around until it threw back into proper alignment. Scary stuff. Apparently, I am not the only one that loved MLB. Matt McEnerny, lead designer for Inside Pitch Baseball, counts it as his favorite game.

• I remember getting the monthly issue of Compute magazine (and, later, Compute's Gazette, which was dedicated to the Commodore). It was a lot like MSDN magazine, but each article came with a complete listing, usually in machine language, and you had to enter the program by hand into the computer. They had a couple of programs (like MLX) that would show checksums for every line you entered, so you didn't get any lines wrong. But some tools were better than others, and you could make mistakes and still get the right checksum (or worse, sometimes the magazine would print the wrong checksum). I still remember the thrill of getting to the end of typing in the long listing of hex byte sequences, followed by the pain of it not running. But the magazine was great, at least in its early years - they had an entire free word processor called SpeedScript, that fit in 6K!

• I didn't use SpeedScript though, I used a product called Paper Clip. It was a bit more complex, but it served all my needs through high school. And when my uncle wanted to publish a book, I did the entire manuscript in Paper Clip. Later versions came on two floppies, and you had to switch floppies to check spelling, or do a bunch of other things. The innovations you had to do to work within memory constraints in those days - Paper Clip had a dynamic module loading/unloading system.

• My favorite games were the Epyx sports simulations - Summer Games, Winter Games, World Games, etc. I remember sprinting fast by hammering the joystick back and forth as fast as I could.

• Late in its life, the 64 got a boost from a GUI OS called GEOS. I didn't have much of a need for this at the time (I had access to a Mac at school). But it had a whole new programming methodology, complete with a programmer's guide - I remember being drawn to it because of how different it was to write GEOS programs.

There's a real nice site on the history of the C64, including what happened to Commodore and it's leaders. If you really want to revisit memory lane, you can use one of the very good C-64 emulators. There's even a couple of web browsers for the 64!

Woohoo, I'm online!

It's been a while since Rob set this up for me, but I'm finally online and blogging. My only hope is that I can keep it updated with frequent entries!

For those of you who don't know me, here's a brief bio, from the February 2004 aspnetPRO magazine:

As the Group Program Manager of the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, Shanku Niyogi leads the program management team responsible for design of both ASP.NET and Microsoft’s web development toolset in Visual Studio.NET.

Shanku joined Microsoft as a developer in 1998, with several years of experience in the Windows software industry. He worked on both Windows and web versions of Microsoft’s chat software, before going on to be a development lead on the Adaptive User Interface team, looking at the problem of adapting user interfaces to different form factors. This work led to the design and development of the ASP.NET Mobile Controls. Shanku then joined the ASP.NET team as an architect in 2002, helping prototype and design several features of the next version (“Whidbey”) of ASP.NET, before switching to the PM role this year.

Outside work, Shanku is predominantly occupied with playing with his daughter Acacia. Shanku is Canadian, and a graduate of the University of Waterloo, but his Indian heritage accounts for his obsession with trains and cricket.