January 2010 - Posts
It’s the week-end, which is the perfect time for a slightly off-topic post. It’s still engineering of sorts though in that it provides what I think is an original and cheap solution to a real problem. 3D movies are all the rage recently. But they are not comfortable for everyone. A friend of mine recently went with her family to see Avatar in 3D and instead of enjoying this rather good movie experience, she had to leave the theater after 20 minutes, suffering from a terrible headache. Of course, removing the glasses is not a solution because you then see both of the images –the ones destined for your left and right eyes– at the same time, blurring most of the screen. Before I explain my solution to this problem, let me explain how modern 3D...
I apologize for the neologism. What I’m going to demonstrate in this post is a technique I prototyped a few months ago to make it very easy to embed an ASP.NET page’s content in another page, even if it’s using another server technology. This of course works cross-domain. The reason why you would do that is to enable people to embed badges with your contents on their own sites. Examples of such badges can be found in the margin of this blog: there’s the ad badge, a Twitter badge, a Facebook badge, an Xbox Live badge, a Zune badge, and there used to be a Flickr badge. There are even full commenting systems that you can include on your blog this way. All those are Flash or JavaScript, and in both cases there’s a short JavaScript stub that includes...
[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] I’ve been working on a series of blog posts the last few months that cover some of the new features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010. Earlier today someone pointed me at some nice “quick hit” videos that have been published that also provide quick first looks at some of the new features coming with ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010. These videos aren’t an exhaustive list of everything new – but do provide a great way to quickly learn about many of the cool new things coming with the release. ASP.NET 4 Videos You can learn more about some of the new ASP.NET 4 features by watching these 22 ASP.NET Quick Hit Videos . VS...
[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the fourteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers some of the output caching extensibility improvements being made to ASP.NET 4. These can be used by all ASP.NET 4 applications – including those built using both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Output Caching Today ASP.NET 1.0 introduced the concept of output caching, which enables developers to capture and store the generated output of pages, controls, controllers, and HTTP responses in an in-memory cache. On subsequent web requests, ASP.NET can then serve content faster by...
[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Technical debates are discussed endlessly within the blog-o-sphere/twitter-verse, and they range across every developer community. Each language, framework, tool, and platform inevitably has at least a few going on at any particular point in time. Below are a few observations I’ve made over the years about technical debates in general, as well as some comments about some of the recent discussions I’ve seen recently about the topic of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC in particular. General Observations About Technical Debates Below are a few general observations independent of any specific technical debate: a) Developers...
I was writing a wiki page when it happened. The system restart dialog from Windows Update had been blinking helplessly in the task bar for a few hours as I didn’t have time for a reboot yet. And then, right in the middle of a sentence, the effing dialog decides that I’ve been ignoring it for too long, puts itself in front and gives itself focus . You can see what happened then. My fingers were continuing to type, not realizing that the wiki page had gone to the back. Now the thing is, space is a fairly common key to hit when you’re writing English. But in dialogs, that’s also the key that triggers the default button. Which, in the case of that particular Windows Update dialog, is “Restart”. So before I realized what was going on, I was seeing...
I’ve shown before how to generate thumbnails from ASP.NET server code using the WPF media APIs instead of GDI+ (which is unsupported when used in server code). In the previous article , I’ve been generating the thumbnails as PNG files. The reason for that is that PNG is a lossless format and I wanted to isolate as few variables as possible that impacted output quality and performance. Adding JPEG artifacts and the variable of the quality setting would have just muddied the water. One commenter (Victor) pointed out that the PNG API in WPF does not compress the output though. That is clearly a problem for a web application. This is why I decided to write this follow-up post. The previous one is still useful for establishing that the decision to...
Dan Wahlin has a great introductory article on RIA Services in Dr. Dobbs . Enjoy! Read More...
[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the second in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming ASP.NET MVC 2 release. This blog post covers some of the validation improvements coming with ASP.NET MVC 2. ASP.NET MVC 2 Validation Validating user-input and enforcing business rules/logic is a core requirement of most web applications. ASP.NET MVC 2 includes a bunch of new features that make validating user input and enforcing validation logic on models/viewmodels significantly easier. These features are designed so that the validation logic is always enforced on the server, and can optionally also be enforced on the client via...
Dear readers, if you haven’t checked out the SEO Toolkit yet, you owe it to yourself to go there now, download it and start using it. Point it to your sites and it will explore them and give you a full report of all the little problems that are getting in the way of search engines. I’m 99.99% sure you’ll discover problems in your site. Lots of them. You’ll be surprised. But it doesn’t stop there. In may cases, it will show you how to fix the problems you find. It’s pure, distilled awesomeness. It is a priceless debugging tool that works at the site level. And the best thing is, it works on any web site, you don’t have to be running Windows Server, IIS or ASP.NET. LAMP users everywhere rejoice! http://www.microsoft.com/web/spotlight/seo/ Read...
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