Darryl Burling @ Work : Web

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

SQL Server for PHP driver CTP released

dburling — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:47:10 GMT

If you happen to be building sites in PHP and want to take advantage of SQL Server, we've just released a drive for SQL Server 2005 for use in PHP sites.

This is not final code, but it is scheduled for release in February. In the meantime you can download the CTP of the driver and try it out

And in good form the team that wrote the driver have a blog, meaning you can ask them questions and even send the team email :-).

Visual Studio Express Betas released

dburling — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 21:07:58 GMT

We released Beta 2 of the Express editions yesterday as well as the other Visual Studio 2008 SKU's.

You can go to the pretty download page here.

The express editions include some of the cool new features of the full version including the O/R Designer (for LINQ), RSS support via WCF and WPF integration with Windows Forms.

If you dont want to go through the full 3-4Gb download, or you are hanging out until Tech Ed to get the DVD, This is a good download to get into.

IIS7 and Windows Server 2008 Core

dburling — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 02:43:10 GMT

Did you know that IIS7 will ship out of the box on Windows Server Core? That means you can run a stripped down server on Windows Server 2008 Server Core and have it running as part of a web farm or just as a web server on its own.

Server Core doesn't have a GUI, so you'll be managing via commandline or WMI/COM. Given the new distributed web.config, it should be pretty easy to manage sites.

More information is available in this video and here.

If you watch the video, Eric Woersching (the Microsoft IIS guy) is coming to Tech Ed Australia and New Zealand. He has a session titled "Whats new in IIS7 for developers".

Expression Suite and tools now available in NZ

dburling — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:42:40 GMT

I've missed the boat on this one (Nigel and Sean beat me to it), but if have been watching the expression stuff, you'll be interested to know that it is now available in New Zealand.

From Seans blog:

The full family of Microsoft Expression products is now available for purchase in New Zealand.

Expression Web. The professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web.
Expression Blend. The professional design tool to create engaging web-connected experiences for Windows.
Expression Design. The professional illustration and graphic design tool that lets you build compelling elements for both Web and desktop application user interfaces. Available as part of Expression Studio only.
Expression Media. The professional asset management tool to visually catalogue and organise all your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation.
Expression Studio. Contains all of the above products! Expression Studio takes your creative possibilities to a new level. The professional design tools and innovative technologies in Expression Studio give you the flexibility and freedom to bring your vision to reality—whether you are designing standards-based Web sites, rich user experiences on the desktop, or managing digital assets and content.
To purchase any of the Microsoft Expression suite of products, contact your Microsoft reseller.

Good stuff :-)

MSDN Flash - Focus on Orcas

dburling — Mon, 28 May 2007 00:50:46 GMT

Over the last week or so our team has been planning what we will be working on over the next 12 months. One of the big deal things that is coming out in the next 12 months is Visual Studio “Orcas” – the next major version of Visual Studio. I thought I’d take the opportunity to highlight some of the high level features of Orcas so that you can start to get your head around the loving that is coming your way.

Before you ask, yes Visual Studio “Orcas” will work well on Vista and will understand the Vista Security model, meaning you wont need to run as administrator or deal with UAC prompts.

Of course, Visual Studio “Orcas” will ship with .Net 3.5 which will include Visual Basic 9, C# 3 and LINQ, however, while this is very cool and developers can get in and take advantage of these new features, we also realize that customers are not always ready to take advantage of new .Net features straight away, so something that is a break from the norm with this release of Visual Studio is the ability to target multiple versions of .Net from the one IDE. That’s right, with Visual Studio “Orcas” you’ll be able to write for .Net 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 without having to switch between Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio “Orcas” – one IDE to rule them all so to speak.

With WPF well out in the market there has been a strong focus on building designer support for XAML into the next developer tool. This will do two things – firstly it will obviously mean that you’ll be able to build your .Net forms applications using XAML, but secondly it means that when you are working on solutions with designers you’ll be able to share project files with the designer and be able to see what they’ve done to the interface and work between the code behind and the designer interface seamlessly. And speaking of pretty interfaces, if you are a C++ developer and thinking about adding Vista goodness into your app – all you need to do in Orcas is recompile and viola – your app will light up!

If you’ve developed or considered developing for Microsoft Office, you’ll know that you need to get Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and install it. In Visual Studio “Orcas”, if you purchase the Professional edition you’ll get VSTO as part of the product. Building VSTO into the product means that you’ll be able to build Office applications – custom task panes, Ribbon extensions and document add-ins out of the box rather than paying extra for the privelege.

There is lots of goodies in Orcas for web developers too. You can start with the new web design surface (shared with Expression Web), but then you’ll also get great AJAX support without any configuration. If you use JavaScript, you’ll also get full intellisense support for JavaScript, and rich support for ASP.Net AJAX. Not only this, but you’ll be able to debug JavaScript really easily too.

If you want to know more about Orcas (and there is lots more to know) watch the videos on Channel9, take a look at the Orcas Roadmap, read the Orcas posts on Scott Guthries blog and check out the Visual Studio “Orcas” downlaod page for more. If you want to have a more in depth look at Orcas, you might want to download the Orcas Virtual Machine. We will be working to get Beta 1 DVD’s out to the user groups over the next month, so get along to a user group from the middle of June if you want to save yourself a 3.5Gb download (yeah I know…).

I’ve just downloaded the VHD, so I’m off to play

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.

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