Darryl Burling @ Work : ASP.Net

Beginning .Net development?

dburling — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:19:16 GMT

In the deluge of email from the last week or two from corp around VS2008 (there was lots of excited emails with information about the new product in it), I missed one about the Express suite.

The Express team have taken the Visual Studio Express site and moved it to http://microsoft.com/express.

There is also a new site for beginners on MSDN that has a heap of learning resources depending on whether you are interested in learning to develop for Windows or for the Web.

If you are a beginner (or know someone who is), you should direct them to http://msdn.microsoft.com/beginner

Background Motion - now live!

dburling — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:35:00 GMT

Over the last few months the guys at Mindscape have been dotting i's and crossing t's in order to get BackgroundMotion up and running. This has meant getting a solid hosting solution up (thanks to ZeroOne for pitching in!) as well as ensuring things like the terms of use and such things are in place.

The great news is that this is all now done and http://BackgroundMotion.com is now up (Mauricio got the scoop on this yesterday).

What is it?

Backgroundmotion.com is two things.

Firstly it is a community website to allow you to share backgrounds and background video for the DreamScene features of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Secondly it is a great example of a modern web application built on .Net 2.0. When I say example, I also mean sample - the source code for the site is available on codeplex for you to download and pull it apart.

There is also a "Code" tab on the site to help you get up and running with the source code. The developer section of the site includes sample code, short introduction videos and resources to lower the bar to use these technologies.

Technologies used

One of the things that the guys did was to build in all the latest technologies and making the code available means that you can go and see how they did it. Specifically, the technologies and tools they used include:

.Net Framework 2.0
.Net Framework 3.0
ASP.Net 2.0
ASP.Net AJAX 1.0
Silverlight
NUnit
LINQ (May CTP)
Web Client Software Factory (Composite Web Block)
Lucene.Net
RSS Toolkit (which was extended for the solution)
Virtual Earth
Sidebar Gadgets

The guys also made sure that it is XHTML 1.0 compliant.

If you went along to the Technical Briefings we did back in March you'll remember that JB and JD presented at those sessions on BackgroundMotion. The code tab on BackgroundMotion also has links to the videos of their sessions from the events, all nicely polished with demos and decks integrated into the video (dont forget you can get the decks here).

Nigel tells me he's planning to do a screen cast on getting started with BackgroundMotion, so watch his blog for that too.

Go check out the site, click the code tab and take a hunt around. We are keen to know what you think - so click the feedback link on the site or post a comment on one of the blog posts that you'll see today.

Visual Studio "Orcas" March CTP now out

dburling — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 06:53:00 GMT

The March CTP of Visual Studio "Orcas" is now out. You can get the VPC with all the installed bits from here. If you'd rather install it on your own computer, the self extracting install is here.

Full details of whats included can be found at the download page, but interesting things include:

Full support for all the C# 3.0 features,
AJAX and javascript debugging support for ASP.Net Development
Cross framework web development support (target .Net 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 in your web dev)
WPF Designer
Click once for Office Applications
Peer networking class API's in the CLR
and lots more...

Go get it :-)

Adding RSS to ASP.Net pages

dburling — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 01:48:19 GMT

Dmitry Robsman from the ASP.Net team created a RSS toolkit for ASP.Net last year. Its a great little toolkit that makes adding RSS to your website nice and easy.

I use it on a number of my sites, including this one where I take all my blog posts from my three blog type sites and collate them into a single RSS feed using the toolkit.

I was just reading on ScottGu's blog that its now up on Codeplex.

Very cool, and an ideal project for codeplex too.

Technorati tags: RSS, ASP.Net, Codeplex

Adding ASP.Net AJAX to existing websites

dburling — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 02:17:21 GMT

I'm sure this has been posted a thousand times on other blogs, but I thought I'd put it up here anyway.

If you want to add Microsoft ASP.Net AJAX (v1.0 RTM) to an existing website assuming you've installed the RTM edition you can do it by adding some stuff to the web.config file:

Firstly - in the system.web section add the following line:

    <pages>
      <controls>
        <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
      </controls>
    </pages>

This will save you having to have the following directive at the top of each page:

<%@ Register Assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
    Namespace="System.Web.UI" TagPrefix="asp" %>

If you find you are getting the nasty "'Sys' is undefined error on your pages, putting the following into the System.Web section will fix this:

    <httpHandlers>
      <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx"/>
      <add verb="*" path="*.asmx" validate="false" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
      <add verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" validate="false" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
      <add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false"/>
    </httpHandlers>

    <httpModules>
      <add name="ScriptModule" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
    </httpModules>

Thats it! All you should need to do now is just drop a script manager and update panel on the page and throw the controls you want to AJAX-enable in them and you are locked and loaded.

Technorati tags: ASP.Net, ASP, .Net, Web Development, AJAX, Microsoft, Visual Studio