Mark Brown's Web Platform Blog : ASP.NET

New Windows Web App Gallery Release - AmpliFeeder

mjbrown — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:52:53 GMT

It’s a busy day at the office as we have another new application up in the Windows Web Application Gallery today, AmpliFeeder. AmpliFeeder is a distributed social activity aggregator. In their own words…

You are no longer defined by your activity on just one website, message board or social network. Every photograph you upload, every page you bookmark or share, every tweet you twitter helps to define you just a little bit more. AmpliFeeder pulls all of your online activity into one place to display a new aggregated you, redefining ideas of what a blog or personal page should be.

Simple. Powerful. Flexible

Combine and archive your activity from lots of different services. Adding new services is a complete breeze. It's easy.

Easy to style and personalize

AmpliFeeder is built to make theming and personalisation as simple as possible with standard XHTML & CSS. Be unique

Pull yourself together

Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Shared Items, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, LastFM, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Upcoming, Mixx & more

Open Source and AGPL Licensed

Runs on industry standard ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server Express and IIS: A rock solid foundation for exceptional web applications

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Web PI,AmpliFeeder

New Windows Web App Gallery Release - nopCommerce

mjbrown — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:34:20 GMT

The good times just keep on rolling over here on the Web Platform team here at Microsoft. We have just released a new application out onto the Windows Web Application Gallery, nopCommerce.

nopCommerce is the leading ASP.NET online shop e-commerce solution. nopCommerce can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic web site building and computer skills. nopCommerce is a secure, scalable and extendable e-commerce platform. It has user friendly administration tool to manage your storefront and customers, wish lists, discounts, coupons, flexible tax support, multi-lingual support, and hundreds of other features. Support for most popular gateways: Authorize.net, PayPal, Google Checkout, 2Checkout, and more. nopCommerce also runs in Medium Trust.

Check it out.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,Web PI

Microsoft Web PI Delivers 1.5M Product Downloads

mjbrown — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:03:48 GMT

On May 12, 2009 we announced that the Microsoft Web Platform Installer has downloaded over 1.5 million products since January 2009.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 1.0 and 2.0, and the Windows Web Application Gallery, which has received more than 100,000 application downloads, are all part of our broader Microsoft Web Platform, which includes core free Web products that help developers, designers, and end-users achieve success in developing for the Web. The Web Platform Installer is a download manager offering packaged Open Source applications to maximize productivity, making it easier for Web developers to install, and offers essential Web products and tools for building next-generation Web applications.

The Windows Web Application Gallery enables you to install the most popular community Web applications with just a few clicks,such as: WordPress, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Gallery and SilverStripe, which integrate with the Microsoft Web Platform. The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta and Windows Web Application Gallery were all recently released in Las Vegas during the MIX ’09 event and explained in Scott Guthrie’s keynote.

If you haven’t yet checked out the Web PI and the Application Gallery you can check them out here, www.microsoft.com/web

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Web PI,PHP,MIX09,ASP.NET

Samples from VE 6.2 Technical Webcast

mjbrown — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:19:06 GMT

Hey everybody, Mark Brown here. I hope you enjoyed our technical webcast today. I wanted to provide you with the demos I showed during our presentation. These should give you a leg up in exploring the features from both the Virtual Earth 6.2 Map Control and our Virtual Earth Web Services 1.0.

Download from SkyDrive

I would also encourage you all to stay tuned to http://dev.live.com/virtualearth for all new goodies that come from me or the Virtual Earth community as well.

Enjoy.

Videos and Samples for Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control (CTP)

mjbrown — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:47:10 GMT

John O’Brien from Soul Solutions in Australia has posted a whole slew of video tutorials and samples for the recently released Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control. These are pretty comprehensive and a must see for anyone who wants to get their hands dirty building mapping applications quickly in ASP.NET. Check them out.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,ASP.NET

Announcing: Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control (CTP Release)

mjbrown — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:14:00 GMT

At long last it is FINALLY HERE. I’ve been talking about this control for a long time. We’ll we finally have the CTP release of the new Virtual Earth ASP.NET control. ASP.NET developers can now integrate Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps simply by dragging and dropping an ASP.NET Server Control in Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer.

Integrating interactive, immersive maps no longer requires JavaScript, it can be done by ASP.NET developers simply. For smooth interactions this control can be combined with ASP.NET AJAX capabilities to provide the power of ASP.NET Serverside processing without the development overhead of coding JavaScript. I’ll provide all the relevant links here at the top but you should check at the bottom to make sure you have all the prerequisites.

Key Links

To download: http://dev.live.com/tools and download the Windows Live Tools July CTP release.
For a Developer Evaluation account (to access Traffic): https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup/ (requires Live ID)
Channel 9 Screencast: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Mark+Brown/Virtual-Earth-ASPNET-Control-CTP-Release/
To give feedback: https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=505

Feature Overview

· Visual Studio toolbox - Map control is available right in your toolbox of Visual Studio

· Drag and drop control onto your web page - You can drag and drop the control from toolbox onto your web page and set some properties and you are ready to go.

· Server side events - Server side events for panning/zooming, find/directions are available in addition to client side events for the map control.

· Display and control the map - You can control how map displays on your web page with standard functionality like MapMode (2D/3D), MapStyle(Road/Aerial), displaying dashboard and setting its size, setting the zoom levels, zooming in/out, panning etc.

· Adding shapes to the map - You can add shapes to map from ASP.NET Server Side using provided methods. You can query different shapes/layers in the Map and delete them as well.

· Using directions - You can get the directions between multiple points using methods GetDirections. You can specify different routing options like distance unit, color etc. Once the direction information is received, Map control raises event OnServerDirections where you can process/render the returned information in way that suites your scenario.

· Using local search and mapping results - Map control provides with find method where you can search for local businesses in a specified location.

· Working with bird's eyes - Map control has support for bird's eye view similar to JavaScript control.

· Getting Traffic information - You can get traffic information and display on your web page. For this, you need to have an account with Virtual Earth Platform. You first need to get a client token:

Important: To get a Developer Evaluation account for Virtual Earth go to this link here and request one, https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup/

· You can then use this client token to display the traffic of the location you are interested in:

Development stage

The suite of tools is currently a community technology preview, which means we would love feedback, but strongly discourage any web site from going live using these controls.

Requirements for Using Windows Live Tools

This CTP release only targets English (United States).

Operating System

Microsoft Windows XP SP 2 or
Microsoft Windows Vista

Development Tools

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or
Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 (already installed if you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or .NET 3.5 Framework installed)
Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008

Key Links

To download: http://dev.live.com/tools and download the Windows Live Tools July CTP release.
Channel 9 Screencast: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Mark+Brown/Virtual-Earth-ASPNET-Control-CTP-Release/
For a Developer Evaluation account (to access Traffic): https://mappoint-css.live.com/mwssignup/ (Requires Live ID)
To give feedback: https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=505

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth

Building Virtual Earth Apps with ASP.NET AJAX

mjbrown — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:41:46 GMT

My good friend and Virtual Earth guru, Marc Schweigert has just published a great two part video on how to build Virtual Earth v6.1 applications using JavaScript. Marc then goes into some details on how to leverage the ASP.NET AJAX and also Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). As a kicker he also shows how to build a VE application as a desktop application.

This is a great video to watch. Marc is an excellent presenter and has deep knowledge on Virtual Earth. If you were at Tech Ed North America this year and picked up a Virtual Earth Developer Resource Kit at my session or at our booth this year you already have this so definitely check it out.

Even better, Marc has posted the deck and the code for this presentation so definitely check it out.

Enjoy.

Tech Ed is Awesome

mjbrown — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:45:39 GMT

I'm having a great time at Tech Ed this year. There are TONS of developers here and they are really enjoying themselves. I had my session yesterday on Virtual Earth. The room was packed, standing room only with probably close to 200 people in there. Among some of the things I announced yesterday includes:

A CTP release of our Virtual Earth ASP.NET control in July. Stay tuned here for an announcement on downloading.
A Virtual Earth Web Services Framework in our next release this fall. Currently you have two options for Virtual Earth. An AJAX control and our Map Point Web Services. We're getting ready to release a completely new SOAP-based web service that includes the best features from both offerings. This will also give developers more choice if they are currently creating map applications using Flash.
A Staging environment for our customers. Customers today create their applications using our production environment. This is a bit of a pain because this is metered against their production usage of Virtual Earth. Coming soon customers can develop and test their applications using our staging environment and also develop applications with our advanced new features there first.

So stay tuned here. I'm working on putting up some of the demos I showed at Tech Ed including an ASP.NET website that demonstrates Walking/Driving Directions, Reverse Geocoding and some other cool uses for Virtual Earth built in Visual Studio using the Virtual Earth JavaScript Intellisense Helper that was released on Code Plex by the Virtual Earth community a couple of months ago.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Virtual Earth,TechEd

Virtual Earth SDK in Visual Studio

mjbrown — Fri, 02 May 2008 23:52:58 GMT

I don't know if I have mentioned this before but Marc Schweigert from our Developer and Platform Evangelism team is AWESOME. Yesterday he posted a blog entry about how he took the entire Virtual Earth Interactive SDK and rewrote it as a solution inside Visual Studio and is providing the code for everyone to download.

Check it out.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Earth