The ASPSmith's Blog

Touchgraph GoogleBrowser

Check out this cool tool to map out where your website is in the Internet space, according to Google.

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser

PDC 2003: Caching Birds of a Feather : Summary of Tips

I hosted a Birds of a Feather Tuesday night at PDC 2003 and we had about 25 or 30 people attend, including Rob Howard of the ASP.NET team (responsible for the caching featureset).  I've published a summary of the tips along with some resource links we discussed at the meeting on AspAlliance.com:

Caching Tips from PDC 2003

PDC ASP.NET Panel Discussion - Non-Postback Callbacks to Pages

A new feature in Whidbey will allow controls to make calls directly back to page methods without making full postbacks.  This features uses XMLHTTP behind the scenes and allows controls to talk to the server in an optimized fashion without requiring a full postback.  In the 1.x timeframe, a solution for this which you can use today (and which actually may be simpler to implement based on what I've seen), is remote scripting.  Remote scripting was available in ASP 3.x but wasn't widely known to most ASP developers.  Jonathan Cogley of AspAlliance has written up a toolkit that makes implementing cross-browser remote scripting (non-postback callbacks to the server) very easy to implement in ASP.NET, including 1.x.

Cross Browser Remote Scripting Client

ASP.NET Remote Scripting

ASP.NET Whidbey Discussion Lists Launched

AspAdvice.com now has about a dozen lists set up for the discussion of ASP.NET Whidbey.  If you've got the PDC bits, this is a great place to look for help if you get stuck with something.  Many of the members of these lists will be folks who have had access to the bits for some time and of course Microsoft employees themselves.  You'll find the full list of signups here:

AspAdvice Whidbey Lists (http://aspadvice.com/category.aspx?c=30)

Tuesday at PDC

Managed to get to some sessions today, including the morning's keynote, which was lucky since I was out pretty late with a bunch of Codewise community members and Microsofties.  The keynote was pretty cool, and included an excellent demo by Scott Guthrie as well as a fun demo of mobile control support by Batman.  I spent most of the middle of the day in the expo hall talking to various vendors about what they're doing in the .NET space and how ASPAlliance and AspAdvice can help them reach the developer community.

Right now, I'm sitting in Rob Howard's advanced caching session, where he's going through the new caching features that will be available in ASP.NET Whidbey.  You can find an overview of these features on AspAlliance.com, in an article I whipped together during the session:

ASP.NET Whidbey Caching Overview

PDC2003: 1623 on Day One

Ok, this post will be of little use to most people - I apologize.

I got in at 10am or so, one of the few people unaffected by the airport delays caused by all the fires.  Managed to get checked in at hotel and to the convention center by noon, just in time for lunch.  Met Scott Swanson and Serge from VbCity for lunch, then hit the expo hall for a while.  Talked to a bunch of vendors, saw Andrew Duthie, the Junkies, Rob Howard.  Alex Lowe's stuck in Chicago as of 2pm and Neil Rowe from SAMS is stuck in Denver.  Spent some time talking to Erik Sink of SourceGear Vault.

Anyway, the expo hall closed around 4pm and I headed back to my hotel to meet with Codewise Community people at 4:30.  So, with 5 minutes to spare, I'm shooting off this email.  I'll post pictures and maybe add some links to this post later.

SourceGear Vault Review Published

I've been using SourceGear Vault for a while now and have been pretty happy with the product.  I've published a review on AspAlliance.com.

Review: SourceGear Vault

Hope LAX Is Open For me...

Well, I'm leaving Ohio in about 4.5 hours for Atlanta, then getting into LAX (in theory) at 10am local time.  Hopefully the airport won't be burned down or closed or anything.  See everyone in PDC if I make it there.

34 Hours to Departure for PDC 2003

My flight leaves at 0535 Monday morning from Akron-Canton, getting me into Los Angeles at 0951.  I figure I'll probably make it to the hotel by 11am and the convention center by noon, which means I'll miss the keynotes.  :(

I'm looking forward to meeting a ton of folks at PDC this year.  I think I've got more meetings set up than sessions to attend, so I guess I'd better order the DVD with the slides.  I can't wait to be able to write some articles about Whidbey on AspAlliance.com.  I got the latest issue of aspNetPRO, in which I wrote an article for this month's issue (being released at PDC and devoted to Whidbey), and there is a lot of great content in it (Paul Wilson, G. Andrew Duthie, Stephen Walther also contribute, and there is an interview with Scott Guthrie that should definitely not be missed.)  So anyway, reading that has me itching to publish some v2 stuff on AspAlliance.com, so look for some good stuff next week.

Stop by Wednesday in the exhibit hall from 2pm-2:45pm.  Rob Howard and I will be signing copies of our book, the ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook.  You can sign up for the 2.0 cookbook, which will be full of all-new recipes for Whidbey, and receive a discount when it's published.

I also got an 'I'm Blogging This' T-Shirt for PDC which reminds me quite a bit of the McDonald's 'I'm Lovin' It' campaign that they're running now.  I'll be sure to wear the shirt at least one day this week.

I'm in town until Thursday night - my flight is at 2255 (10:55pm), which gets me home at 0950 Friday.  Humorously, I have an appointment Friday morning at 1030 that I'm supposed to be awake for - we'll see how that goes.

PDC Countdown: Come to My BOF Session on Caching