I've been talking with Interface Technical Training  about joining their staff for quite awhile and have finally decided to make the switch from running my own company (Wahlin Consulting) to focusing my efforts on all of the great training and related initiatives they have going on. 

As of February 27th I'll be working at Interface as a full-time employee which I'm really excited about since they have some super sharp people there like Mike Palermo and Simon Allardice (to name just two).  Plus, the president/owner (Mike La Gioia) is probably one of the coolest (and most patient) people I've met especially given that I've been dragging my feet on making the move for over a year.

I'm working on an ASP.NET site that consists of many government departments each having their own IIS application off of the root of the server so that they can have complete control over their own web.config file, etc..  Each department site inherited an XML template framework I wrote for .NET version 1.1 (http://www.xmlforasp.net/codeSection.aspx?csID=102) to provide a consistent look and feel (header and footer) across all departments even though they each have their own IIS application created.  The XML template solution worked great but wasn't as powerful as Master Pages by any means since it didn't support code-behind files and had no designer support (to name just 2 of its short-comings).

As more and more Web Services are made available additional flexibility is needed when calling them. Applications that call Web Services may need to do so in an asynchronous (parallel) manner especially when calling multiple services or services that may take a longer amount of time to complete.

.NET version 2.0 adds many enhancements to the System.Xml namespace and its related classes. This sample code demonstrates how several of these enhancements can be used to consume RSS feeds for display on ASP.NET Websites in an efficient and scalable manner. Different techniques are shown including caching feeds, randomizing feeds, plus more using the XmlReader and XPathNavigator classes. Other alternatives such as the DataSet and XmlDataSource control are also shown.

Version 1.1 of the .NET framework supports today’s mainstream XML technologies including DTDs, XML Schema, XSLT, XPath, SOAP 1.1, DOM Level 2, and XML namespaces. While version 2 of the framework continues to support these technologies (and newer versions where appropriate), it also adds significantly more perfomant XSLT transformations, enhanced XmlReader and XmlWriter APIs, plus a more powerful XPathNavigator class (to name a few of the enhancements). I've put together some code that shows how to leverage several of the new XML APIs found in .NET version 2.  You'll find the code available at the following URL:

I just got back home from speaking at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas and had a great time.  For those that haven't been, it's a fun conference loaded with great material that is just the right size in my opinion.  I believe they had around 3000 people there this time around.  I spoke on migrating from Web Services to SOAs, new XML features in .NET V2, Synchronous and Asynchronous Web Services in .NET V2 and mastering RSS feeds using .NET V2 APIs.

I finally had a chance to meet Dino Esposito (.NET trainer and writer guru) as well as a few others that produce some great .NET related content.  The next conference is in Orlando and I'd definitely encourage anyone who may have considered going to attend (no...I didn't get paid to say that...I just really enjoy the conference :-)). 

For those who may be new to Atlas (or AJAX techniques in general), I've put together a video tutorial that demonstrates some of the features available in the framework.  The sample code shown is also available for download if you'd like to play around with some of the features:

http://www.xmlforasp.net/codeSection.aspx?csID=116

I'll be presenting a free online Webinar for Global Knowledge on October 19th at 11 AM EST titled "Databinding in ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0".  I'll spend an hour talking about the "old" way of databinding and the "new" way of binding without writing as much code as in the past.  I'll present several demos during the course of the talk that show how to use some of the new data source objects and expression statements in ASP.NET 2.0.  Click the link below to register: