March 2009 - Posts
I was very happy to get a chance to look through my copy of Essential LINQ today. While there are a number of books out there on LINQ , this one from Dinesh Kulkarni and Charlie Calvert is a must read! They do an excellent job of explaining the core philosophy behind LINQ as well as its practice in a number of different domains including Linq to Sql, Linq to Entities, Linq patterns, etc. Dinesh and Charlie were both intimately involved in the design of LINQ from the very early days. Dinesh now leads our efforts on .NET RIA Services where we continue to carry the LINQ vision to its logical next steps and Charlie continues to keep be an expert in listening to the C# and LINQ community! Essential LINQ Enjoy...
In the work we’ve been doing with Rob on the Kona commerce app , our quest for extreme pluggability has led us to look at quite a few interesting features of ASP.NET compilation. Features I didn’t know about before Dmitry and David pointed them out for me. I thought I’d share… It starts with the <%@ Assembly src= %> and <%@ Reference virtualpath= %> directives which you may have seen show up in IntelliSense when building a page. But what are they doing exactly and what differentiates them? They both enable you to reference code that is in a different file in the site. With both of them, you get full IntelliSense on the referenced code, but they don’t reference the same kinds of files. @Reference is meant to reference a specific class...
One of the reasons I love going to Mix is getting a chance to watch really world-class technical speakers. As I watched the keynote and a few sessions this year one theme really stood out to me: The audience seems to remember how the speaker handles their mistakes\crashes more than the content of their presentations! Obviously it this is a pretty hard thing for a speaker to prepare for. If you can prepaid for it, then I’d suggest avoiding it all together ;-). So how do you prepare for the unprepareable? It seems to me it is all about attitude. For me, my learning on this started when I arrived a day early for Mix. I had a chance to talk to one of my favorite speaking coach Richard Klees Read...
Today we have a guest post from Kit George who is the keeper of much of our internal Framework Design Guidelines. This is the stuff that Krys and I based a the book on. I asked Kit to post this internal information so you can get a feeling for what our guidelines are and why…. and so you can call us on it if we mess it up ;-) As always, feedback and comments are welcome! It is clear that there’s a bit of confusion over the namespace guidelines . Here is our attempt at make this clear. We know this will remain a contentious issue, but the goal of these guidelines is to clarify: The .NET platform is not limited to any one single redistributable. Types in the System.* namespace define the .NET platform. We of course carry...
All great RIA applications have a meaningful client and server component to them. Supporting SEO, or Search Engine Optimization in a RIA is an excellent example of using the client and server components. It doesn’t mater how cool your applications are, if potential users can’t find your site via their search engine of choice (Google, Yahoo, Live, etc) then you are out of luck. So it is important to plan for that upfront. It is reasonably simple to do this for static text, even in a RIA application, but most of the really interesting information in many applications is dynamically loaded and data-driven. Luckily .NET RIA Services has some SEO support built right in that can be used with RIA...
Some folks that could not make it to Mix have asked about Scott’s coding demo this year. You can watch the full keynote to find it or, I clipped out just the coding bit.. As you can see we have added a lot of great support to Silverlight with Silverlight 3’s , Navigation, DataGrid, DataPager, DataForm, Charting (all from the Silverlight toolkit ) and the .NET RIA Services support for great N-Tier data access. Enjoy! Read More...
Internet Explorer 8 is a unique release in the history of Internet Explorer in more than one way, but the decision to make standards mode the default means that authors of existing sites are impacted by it, if only to set the compatibility mode to IE7. But what if your site is built using components that render out markup and script over which you have little control, such as ASP.NET WebControls? Well, if one of the controls fails in IE8 standards mode, you need to either switch to compatibility mode (ouch!) or you need the component developer to ship an updated version. During the whole IE8 development cycle, we monitored the behavior of existing controls. Most ASP.NET built-in controls have been doing just fine in IE8, or the faulty behavior...
A hotfix is now available for issues most commonly described as " I make changes in Design view but Source does not get updated " and " After certain actions designer inserts a lot of in the page" . http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=17185 Please do not be surprised that update is named Office2007-xxxxx since designer (aka Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component) uses Office 2007 components, similar to Expression Web and SharePoint Designer 2007 and hence update comes as Office 2007 update. The update addresses the following Connect bugs: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=362593 : DropDownList ListItem Collection...
Stephen Walther just published links to the video, slides and sample code for his Ajax talk at MIX09: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2009/03/22/mix-slides-code-and-session-recording.aspx It’s pretty cool to see all the work we put into Ajax this past year or so presented at MIX. This is a really nice presentation, like Stephen’s always are. Another presentation I had lots of fun watching (not just because the speaker is making an incredible impression of me but also because I’ve been spending a good part of my time lately contributing to the application he’s showing) is Rob Conery’s. Rob is showing an interesting way to develop ASP.NET applications, aimed at ease of use and customization rather than architectural purity. Check it out...
earlier this week, as part of MIX09, we launched an official Silverlight team blog. Subscribe now! We’ll push out new technical content, videos, and use it as a venue to respond to critical industry events that require our voice. You can use it as a direct conduit to us and the team with feedback (both good and bad!). We’ll cover our entire UX platform including Expression Studio with a focus on Expression Blend (and the newly announced SkethFlow functionality which has had rave reviews), Silverlight, Visual Studio, and anything else we think is important. Spread the news – http://team.silverlight.net/ I kicked us off with this post: http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/introducing-the-new-silverlight...
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