dougturn's WebLog : Technology

.NET University - Video Recordings of .NET 3.0 presentations are now available

dougturn — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:40:00 GMT

Many thanks to Todd Fine (WPF recording), Mark Dunn (WF recording), and Brian Hitney (CardSpace recording). Yours Truly did the WCF recording.

All material is freely downloadable, and may be used as presentation material throughout the software community. Please feel free to learn, or re-present, the material, which is available at .NET University. It's a great way to get started learning .NET 3.0.

Nice article by Shawn Wildermuth - 10 things you should know about Silverlight

dougturn — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:56:00 GMT

While we're on the *Silverlight* and *10 things* topic, Shawn has a very informative article per the link below:

http://adoguy.com/2007/08/07/New_Article_10_Things_You_Should_Know_About_Microsoft_s_Silverlight.aspx

Getting Silverlight 1.0 RC working with VS 2008 on a Vista Box

dougturn — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 04:37:00 GMT

I can't promise it will work for you, but if you’re interested, here is the order of install that I did, along with links for the bits, to build a box from a base Vista image to a VS2008/Silverlight demo machine :-)

My experience has been good so far. Of course, let me state the obvious. Don't do this on a production box, as it's betaware. I hope you know that already, though.

(security updates - get current on that first)

1. Silverlight 1.0 Windows (1.4MB)

2. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh Windows (4.49MB)

3. Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (can do Professional or Team Suite) (3.2GB)

4. Visual Studio Add-ons for Orcas Beta2 (3.1MB)

5. Silverlight 1.0 SDK RC (19MB)

6. Expression Media Encoder – Free 30-day Preview (6.1MB)

Use this product key to make it 180 days: YVJ79-XQ8CM-8YKWF-GKRKH-83X8G

^^^^ the site says that, but I never saw a chance to enter this code. ^^^^

7. Expression Media Encoder – updates - (1.2MB)

8. (step 8 is optional) You can include either

Expression Web (full product if you have it)

Expression Web Trial – 60 days

9. Expression Blend 2 August Preview (24MB)

10. (step 10 is optional) You can include either

Expression Design (full product if you have it)

Expression Design Trial – 60 days

Silverlight Resources

dougturn — Mon, 14 May 2007 23:08:00 GMT

Many thanks to Asli Bilgin, DE extraordinaire, for pulling almost all of this list together.

· silverlight

· Telerik RadControls – 3d virtual rooms using control based framework

· DLR & IronPython

· Silverlight developer reference “poster”

· Forums – installation, troubleshooting

· Electric rain harmony (coming summer 2007) – flash to silverlight converter

· Silverlight 1.0 Beta QuickStarts

· Silverlight 1.1 Alpha QuickStarts

sites

· Main Microsoft site.

· Community site.

· Mix conference

experiences & demos

· Getting started with silverlight - Scott Guthrie demos how to build an app from scratch

· "How Do I?" with Silverlight 1.0

· "How Do I?" with Silverlight 1.1

· Using Blend with Silverlight 1.0

· Community gallery

· Top 3 samples in community gallery

o Silverlight Pad

o Page Turn

o Video Library

· Beijing Olympics Use Silverlight

· Channel 9 screencasts

· Watch movie trailers & videos via Silverlight

· How to do Rich media advertising - example using eyeblaster

blogs

· Scott Guthrie – no intro needed

· Jim Hugunin - chief architect of the DLR

· Mike Harsh – Silverlight team

· Lutz Roeder – Expression Blend team

Shawn Wildermuth - Silverlight guru

· Delay of silverlight airlines demo

· Ironpython

tech talks

· All recorded mix07 sessions

· ScottGu’s mix keynote and great overview

· ScottGu’s Channel9 interview

· Building Rich Web Experiences using Silverlight and Javascript for Developers

· Deep Dive on Silverlight Media Integration

· Developing ASP.NET AJAX Controls with Silverlight

· Creating and Delivering Rich Media and Video on the Web with Silverlight, Expression Studio, and Windows Server

· Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Part 1)

· Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Part 2)

· Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight

· Just Glue It! Ruby and the DLR in Silverlight

papers

· Getting started whitepaper

· Silverlight Architecture Overview

MacWorld article says Vista more secure than Mac OS.

dougturn — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:31:21 GMT

I was a bit surprised to see this in MacWorld.

I'll offer zero opinion, as I think the article and it's presence in MacWorld somewhat take care of that for me.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/04/30/daizovi/index.php

What is the .NET Framework?

dougturn — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 03:50:00 GMT

This has to be one of the most commonly asked questions of me over the last 5 years. And much like Godfrey Saxe's wonderful poem on experiential perspectives, the answer varies highly by who you ask.

Many of us who have been rolling in the .NET Framework for 7 years tend to forget that the basic question is of interest to those who haven't used it. And trying to find a simple definition can be maddening. Having stumbled up against most of the elephant, I'll give it a shot :-)

Physically speaking, it is a handful of libraries and files that serve as a platform and API. If you've never looked for it before, check out

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework

(or whatever mutations your installation/OS may impart on that templated path)

In a marketing sense, we used to slap the *.NET* suffix on products that took advantage of this platform. We've stopped doing that for the most part, but other people still do it, so you may see that on a product name.

From the developer mindset it's a layer over Win32 and the physical platform that allows you to build solutions more rapidly. In this sense, it serves a similar role to MFC, ATL, or even VB.

We use the term .NET Framework SDK when we include compilers, some tools, and a bunch of docs. The toolset does not include Visual Studio, which is our flagship IDE for the .NET Framework.

Many Java people ask if the .NET Framework is just the MS response to the Java virtual machine. I would disagree with the premise of that. Sun did not invent the concept of a runtime, nor did MS. The first mainstream runtime that I can think of was SmallTalk's runtime. The .NET Framework is no more an MS response to the JVM than the JVM was a response to the VB Runtime. But I digress....

In some ways, the .NET Framework is similar to the Java virtual machine coupled with its class libraries. Both take intermediate instruction sets (in .NET it is IL - Intermediate Language, in Java it is byte code), and translate it down to the platform instruction set. Java interprets the instructions (HotSpot and other technologies notwithstanding), while .NET compiles individual methods on the first invocation. It's hard to say one is better or worse than the other. JIT-ting almost always performs better, but you can do JIT-like things in Java if needed.

There is a philosophical difference in focus between the two technologies, though. It's almost comical: while both technologies have a specific distinguishing philosophy, few of the developer audiences ever apply the *advantage* of either one. Java emphasizes Write Once, Run Anywhere. Fascinating concept, but you rarely find a successful and sizeable occurence of it anywhere. On the other hand, .NET's Common Language Runtime is about one runtime for any language. You could say Any Language, One Runtime, I guess. Great concept, but I find most companies are standardizing on one .NET language. If they are not standardizing on one language, it's a matter of factions, not standards, that is driving this.

Perhaps you could say Java is one language, many platforms, while .NET is many languages, one platform. And in the end, most dev audiences I have experienced do one language, one platform, regardless of *which* technology choice they make.

At its core, the .NET Framework is 3 things:

1) A Type System (CTS - Common Type System) that spans languages

2) A Library (FCL - Framework Class Library) that spans languages

3) A runtime (CLR - Common Language Runtime) that spans languages

It is a virtual platform that manages the allocation and cleanup of its types, spans languages, and offers a rapid way to build applications. It is versioned (4 releases - 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0), and it is free, as are the flagship compilers (C#, VB.NET).

I won't argue whether it is better than Java or worse, as the debate spills way beyond facts to political, emotional, and perhaps even religious debates. I do enjoy it when Java developers try out the .NET Framework, though. I'm sure the other way around is interesting as well, but since I work for Microsoft, I don't usually see that side of things.

Anyway, if you believe I'm leaving any gaping holes around the simple definition, by all means, leave a comment, and I'm happy to discuss further.

Why it is better to run your applications on Vista

dougturn — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:13:00 GMT

I did this whitepaper back in November. I have no idea why I never blogged it. Well, I guess better late than never :-)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188739.aspx

It's called *The Advantages of Running Applications on Windows Vista*.

If a whitepaper is published, and you forget to promote it, does it still have meaning? :-)

Nice writeup of .NET 1.1 to 2.0 migration here

dougturn — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 03:26:00 GMT

http://blogs.msdn.com/peterlau/archive/2006/06/19/637033.aspx

Peter Laudati did all the work, so I made a slide deck out of it. Kind of says a lot about both of us, I guess.

Hey, it's not as easy as you think to be the Vanna White of technology :-)

Interesting article on a hacker's experience with the Mac OS X

dougturn — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 05:17:00 GMT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060306/tc_nf/41948

Deciding between Interfaces and Inheritance

dougturn — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 23:25:00 GMT

So often, I talk to developers who know how to do interfaces and inheritance in .NET, yet don't seem to have consistent rules around when to use which.

If you're anywhere near Huntsville, Alabama on September 13th, I'll be speaking on this topic at the Huntsville New Technology User Group. I could probably term this as extensible OO design.

It's been my experience that when you get into the trenches with developers, there is a huge disconnect between the theoretical tenets of OO (encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism, and inheritance) and the day to day coding of applications. Developers can usually spout definitions for each of these concepts, but when you ask them to point out where they do this in code, there is often confusion. Furthermore, if you try to ask a developer whether an interface or base class is best suited for a particular boundary, the answers can be all over the map.

There really is a reason to choose one over the other. If you want to hear the bloody details, come to the talk. If not, the quick and rough answer is this: Interfaces are better for those places where extensibility is the highest requirement. Inheritance is better for those places where reusability is the highest requirement.

You can screw up your software by doing too much of either one, or by neglecting either one. I've heard people say that inheritance is bad. If misapplied, I agree. However, inheritance is very good when applied properly. Can you imagine how much code you would need to write to display a simple Winforms window, if you couldn't inherit from the base class?

On the other hand, the corporate graveyards of America are littered with the bytes of non-extensible software, where interfaces could have easily saved the day.

There is much to be said for understanding how to balance the use of interfaces and inheritance. After the talk, I'll post the slides here.

Memory Management in C#

dougturn — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 16:12:00 GMT

If you're interested in learning about memory management best practices in C-Sharp, I'll be doing a talk tonight at the Microsoft Alpharetta offices:

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/southeast/alpharetta.asp

... at this months the C# user group meeting:

http://www.atlantacsharp.org/

If you want to check out the slides for this talk, I uploaded them here:

http://www.aggelos.com/mmcs.zip

and if you're sitting there thinking "It's managed code, what in the world do WE need to manage?", well, here's the short answer. As long as you stay in managed space, the only things you need to understand are ValueTypes, Ref Types, and Boxing. If you call out to any unmanaged resource (think COM, databases, synchronization primitives, files, etc.) you need to do some cleanup yourself. This talk will cover that kind of stuff.

If you haven't attended a C# UG meeting yet, they're really good because it's not a presentation so much as a discussion. Very informal, and a lot of smart people show up, and just discuss technology.

Look forward to seeing everyone there.

A little fun with threading and VB.NET

dougturn — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 01:18:00 GMT

I put together a little demo that shows how to do simple multithreaded code in VB.NET. Rather than bury a simple demo with synchronization to the nines, I'll tell you to just accept this as an learning sample of how to use the thread pool and how to kick off a new OS thread. It does not imply any best practices. You should synchronize your multithreaded code as appropriate. This sample is just meant to show people the basic mechanics of multithreading with VB.NET. Thought it was interesting, so I decided to put it up here.

Also, the MessageBoxes are simply in place to give me a cheap block on a thread. Uncomment the message box in DoFileSearch to see it. In production code, you should not touch UI from a worker thread. Rather, use a WinForm's Invoke method to push the work request back onto the UI thread that created it. You'll see an example of this in the code...

Also, the program searches for a file in a directory. obviously, you'll want to choose a file and directory that are actually on your machine ;-)

http://www.aggelos.com/demos/Threading-VBDemo.zip

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.