Deven Kampenhout's Tech Blog : MicrosoftWebExperience

Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Sandbox

devenkamp — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:40:29 GMT

At the Microsoft PDC today, I attended a talk entitled, "Web Application Packaging and Deployment". It went into detail about how the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool can significantly ease deployment for ASP.net applications onto a supporting Windows platform. The idea is that the tool will programmatically enable one to deploy all aspects of their application, which addresses some typical challenges of these deployment scenarios, such as configuration modifcations, GAC entries, etc. It will integrate into Visual Studio 2010, and as of Beta 2, now has the ability to create and manage application packaging, and integrates into the IIS7 manager.

During the presentation, Takeshi Eto from DiscountASP.net showed how they have created a developer sandbox for people to try out the new Microsoft Web Deployment tool. This is a great way to see how this technology will work, especially since it is deployed in a shared hosting environment. Anyone can sign up for the sandbox for free, but it is limited to the first 2000 participants. You can sign up at http://labs.discountasp.net.

CSS Editing is SOOO Much easier now!

devenkamp — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:37:06 GMT

Any of my regular blog readers may note that I recently updated my blog design. I know it was long overdue.

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to voice my opinion on how much easier it is to modify CSS settings now! Community Server (which is the software which powers MSDN blogs) gives me the ability to choose a CSS theme, but also to provide my own custom CSS overrides. Using Microsoft Expressions Web 2, I was easily able to suck in the code for my blog. I had to manually change the code from relative to absolute links for the CSS style-sheets that are provided with the MSDN blog site, but once that was done, all of the appearance within the tool looked exactly how it should. Then it was an easy matter to figure out what styles were applying to which piece of code. I could easily detect which rules were being applied and in what order. I'm so happy I didn't have to waste tons of time playing the "I wonder if I can guess which rule is being applied to this area" game. Kudo's to the Expression team for making a great web design product!

One more time: Come to the Microsoft Web Experience events in LA and Denver!

devenkamp — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:36:00 GMT

Microsoft is hosting free Microsoft Web Experience events at the Los Angeles Microsoft office
on June 8th and the Denver Microsoft office on June 15th. They will be presenting information
on building the next generation user experience on the web.

They are providing breakfast and lunch, hosting a reception with beer and wine, and attendees are
automatically registered in a drawing for an XBox 360 and a Zune that will be given away at
each event. For more information, visit
http://kaevans.sts.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/webexperience.aspx