Neil Hutson - Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 for developers

100 days to the Winter Olympic Games

neilhut — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:31:06 GMT

It amazing that we are now (just) less that 100 days to the Olympic days. The new, interactive Silverlight player was recently launched on http://www.nbcolympics.com so its worth going there to see what is being planned by NBC.

The site is going to broadcast the event in full HD using silverlight and taking advantage of Smooth Streaming which is part of Internet Information Server.

This follows on from the great experience that we built with Sunday Night Football on NBC, where we are streaming the match live in HD, and also providing many new angles of the game, effectively building a better experience than you would see on your TV. For the Sunday night game, I have now switched to the PC to watch it – its pretty amazing.

Sending EMAIL from your Web Application

neilhut — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:28:38 GMT

On my travels, one thing that I got asked a lot about is sending email from your web application. This is typically when you need to send a confirmation at the end of a transaction. I got a number of questions about how you do this without using Microsoft Exchange, etc, etc. While the full answer is here (including source code), below is some of the high level details.

The answer to the first problem is pretty simple. Using the .NET framework there is a class which handles the sending for you.

In C# you getting the following syntax, with Visual Basic below. They both use the System.Net.Mail namespace, plus you will probably need others such as System.Net.Mime to help with the encoding.

C# example

SmtpClient smtpClient = new SmtpClient();
MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();
mail.To.Add(newUserEmail);
mail.Subject = "Welcome to Sample App";
mail.IsBodyHtml = false;
mail.Body = string.Format(
"Welcome {0} to Sample App!\nNow you can log in to the site!",
newUserName);

smtpClient.Send(mail);

Visual Basic .NET example
Dim smtpClient As New SmtpClient()
Dim mail As New MailMessage()
mail.To.Add(newUserEmail)
mail.Subject = "Welcome to Sample App"
mail.IsBodyHtml = False
mail.Body = String.Format("Welcome {0} to Sample App!" & Constants.vbLf & "Now you can log in to the site!", newUserName)

smtpClient.Send(mail)

While this will create the email ( EML file ) and place it in a specific directory, you will probably need to format the message in a professional way, using some form of template based email. One option here is to use XSL to translate templates into specific mail messages, where you are taking a set of data represented as XML and rendering this into HTML using the XSLT. Below is a basic example.

XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<Properties>
<UserName>frankm</UserName>
<E-mail>frankm@contoso.com</E-mail>
</Properties>

When developing the XSLT templates, take into account the XML-serialized dictionary structure to retrieve the values using XPath in a value-of element. For instance, to retrieve the UserName value, use the following snippet in the XSLT template:

XSLT
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes" />

<xsl:template match="/">
    ...
    User Name: <xsl:value-of select="Properties/UserName"/>
    ...
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Rather than cutting a pasting lots of code, please go to the following example that I have placed on the web which contains all the source code and documentation to wire this up.

Debugging in Visual Studio 2010 - Enhancements and Improvements

neilhut — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:40:30 GMT

Jason Olson links up with Andrew Hall and Brad Sullivan as part of the Channel9 10-4 show to take a look at some new enhancements and improvements made to the debugger and debugging experience in Visual Studio 2010.

Areas include

Sticky Data Tips
Adding values (including notes) to data tips
Breakpoints Window enhancements
Export and Import of Breakpoints and Data Tips
Threads Window enhancements
Dump debugging improvements
Integrated IL Interpreter

For more details go here.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Training Kit

neilhut — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:01:00 GMT

Jason just announced the Beta 2 version of DPE’s Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit is now live (you can find it at http://tinyurl.com/Beta2Training).

A training kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize a variety of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 technologies.

The Beta 2 release of the Training Kit contains 15 presentations, 19 hands-on labs, and 13 demos. Many technologies are covered in this release, including: C# 4, VB 10, F#, Parallel Extensions, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow, Windows Presentation Foundation, ASP.NET 4, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, Managed Extensibility Framework, and Visual Studio Ultimate.

There’s a lot of content covered here. See for yourself:

Presentations

What’s New in .NET Framework 4
What’s New in Visual Studio 2010
Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
Introduction to Managed Extensibility Framework
Introduction to .NET RIA Services
Introduction to “Velocity”
Parallel Computing for Managed Developers
Web Deployment with Visual Studio 2010
What’s New in ASP.NET AJAX 4
What’s New in ASP.NET Web Forms 4
What’s New in C# and VB
What’s New in ADO.NET Data Services
What’s New in Entity Framework 4
What’s New in Windows Presentation Foundation 4
What’s New in Windows Workflow 4

Hands-On Labs

Introduction to ADO.NET Data Services
- Exercise 1: Creating and Consuming ADO.NET Data Services
- Exercise 2: Consuming ADO.NET Data Services using ASP.NET AJAX
- Exercise 3: Extending Data Services with Service Operations and Interceptors
- Exercise 4: Adding Client-Side Paging with Row Count
ASP.NET AJAX 4
- Exercise 1: Leveraging a Client-Side Template
- Exercise 2: Using the DataView Control
- Exercise 3: Creating Custom Markup Extensions
- Exercise 4: Declaratively Instantiating Behaviors
Creating Plan My Night – ASP.NET MVC Application
- Exercise 1: Creating an ASP.NET MVC Application, Plan My Night
- Exercise 2: Creating Entity Framework Data Model
- Exercise 3: Adding AJAX For Searching Activities
Enhancing Plan My Night – ASP.NET MVC Application
- Exercise 1: Adding Caching using “Velocity”
- Exercise 2: Structuring an Application using MVC Areas
Introduction to ASP.NET Web Forms 4
- Exercise 1: Controlling Server Control ClientIds
- Exercise 2: Enabling Bi-Directional Routing Support
- Exercise 3: Granular ViewState
Microsoft Office Programmability in C# and Visual Basic
Introduction to F#
- Exercise 1: Types in F#
- Exercise 2: Using the Let keyword
- Exercise 3: Functions
- Exercise 4: Lists
- Exercise 5: Pattern Matching and Recursion
- Exercise 6: Types and Discriminated Unions
Introduction to the Managed Extensibility Framework
- Exercise 1: Using MEF To Dynamically Add Modules to an Application
- Exercise 2: Dynamically extending a form
Introduction to “Velocity”
- Exercise 1: Setting up and running “Velocity”
- Exercise 2: Programming directly against “Velocity” as a generic object cache
- Exercise 3: Using Velocity’s SessionState provider with ASP.NET
- Exercise 4 (Optional): Configure “Velocity” Cache in a cluster
Introduction to Workflow 4
- Exercise 1: Hello Workflow
- Exercise 2: Refactoring Workflows
- Exercise 3: The CodeActivity
- Exercise 4: Dynamic Workflows with XAML
- Exercise 5: Testing Workflows
- Exercise 6: WorkflowApplication
- Exercise 7: Adding If/Else Logic
- Exercise 8: Error Handling
- Exercise 9: Activity Designers
- Exercise 10: Hosted Designer
Introduction to Parallel Extensions
- Exercise 1: Parallelize existing algorithm using static Parallel helper class
- Exercise 2: Create and run parallelized Tasks
- Exercise 3: Using the Task<T> class to create and run tasks that return a value
- Exercise 4: Parallelizing LINQ queries using PLINQ
Test-Driven Development in Visual Studio 2010
WCF Service Discovery
- Exercise 1: Ad-Hoc Discovery
- Exercise 2: Metadata Extensions
- Exercise 3: Announcements
- Exercise 4: Discovery Proxy
- Exercise 5: Legacy Discovery
Web Development in Visual Studio 2010
- Exercise 1: Using HTML Code Snippets
- Exercise 2: Web.config Transformations
- Exercise 3: Packaging and Deploying Web Applications
- Exercise 4: Packaging and Deploying Web Applications for IIS
Building a Data-Driven Master/Detail Business Form using WPF 4
Multi-touch Gesture – MFC
Multi-touch WMTouch – MFC
Ribbon – MFC
Taskbar - MFC

Demos

ContosoAutomotive (Parallel Extensions + MEF + WPF)
AdventureWorks AJAX
ASP.NET AJAX Ten-In-One
Managed Languages Ten-In-One
Barrier
CountdownEvent
Hello Visual Studio 2010
Introduction to the Managed Extensibility Framework
Parallel Baby Names
Parallel For Loop
Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)
Parallel Tasks
“Velocity”

Installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 :

neilhut — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:03:00 GMT

Brian in the team walks everyone through downloading and installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Beta 2. This is episode 33 of the 10-4 show on Channel9.

This video references several important URL's. Those URL's, as well as some other handy links for beta 2, are as follows:
- Download instructions for all files in this video
- Compatibility hotfix for Team Explorer 2008 connecting to Team Foundation Server 2010
- More information about the Windows Server 2008 VHD
- Beta 2 home on MSDN
- Information on "Go Live" license
- MSDN Forums
- Visual Studio Connect site (report bugs / suggestions)
- Team Foundation Server 2010 Deployment Guidance
- Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit

You may also be interested in viewing 10-4 Episode 20, which provides more details on configuring your base operating system.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Released

neilhut — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:26:57 GMT

Today we are releasing VS2010 Beta 2 to all MSDN subscribers with general availability on the web to follow on Wednesday. Beta 2 has a huge focus on increased stability, improve performance, and meeting many of the customers scenarios which they have been requesting in this release.

The other thing you might notice is the new branding. This is similar to the branding for the .NET framework and a little cleaner that the old logo ( which I think has been around for all my Microsoft career ).

From a language perspective, .NET Framework Beta 2 will be released in English, Japanese, German and Arabic, and Visual Studio Beta 2 will be released in English, Japanese, and German.

In addition to shipping the new (81% smaller) Client Profile of the .NET Framework, Beta 2 is the first version of Visual Studio to ship the new simplified product line up. This means that we now have

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN: the comprehensive suite of application lifecycle management tools for software teams to ensure quality results from design to deployment.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN: a complete toolset for developers to deliver scalable, high quality applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN: the essential tool for professional development tasks to assist developers in implementing their ideas easily.

This release also allows partners and customers to “Go-Live”, with details about this on Jeff’s blog.

You can find all the new information at the following location.

Microsoft Ajax Library ( Preview 6 ) released

neilhut — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:48:37 GMT

We have just released a significant update of the Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6). This provides a set of new capabilities to the client-side AJAX library, and can be used with any version of ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC projects.

The major new capabilities are:-

Better Imperative Syntax: A new, simplified, code syntax for creating client controls.
Client Script Loader: A new client-side script loader that can dynamically load all of the JavaScript files required by a client control or library automatically, and executes the scripts in the right order.
Better jQuery Integration: All Microsoft Ajax controls are now automatically exposed as jQuery plug-ins.

To get started, you can download the Preview 6 release from CodePlex or you can access the Microsoft Ajax Library scripts directly from the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN), by adding the following script tags to your ASP or HTML pages.

Happy scripting

Getting trained on Windows HPC Server

neilhut — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:19:44 GMT

If you want to get trained on how to support, deploy and develop for Windows HPC Server and you are based in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, or Mexico, please go to the following link

October 2009 Security Bulletin

neilhut — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:15:00 GMT

The Trustworthy Computing security response communications team has just released this months Security Bulletin to TechNet EDGE

This Bulletin contains details about the 13 released bulletins, 8 being critical and 5 being important, plus other advisories.

For bulletin details, please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security
or
http://www.microsoft.com/security

IIS Media Services 3.0, including IIS Live Smooth Streaming, has been released!

neilhut — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:59:50 GMT

We just released IIS Media Services 3.0, a set of extensions for Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) that provide an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. This includes the new IIS Live Smooth Streaming and the separate IIS Advanced Logging package.

So how did we get here? Well over the last 6 months key broadcasters have been using beta versions of IIS Media Services 3.0 to successfully broadcast some of the world’s premier live events. These include the Tour de France, Roland Garros 2009 International French Open Tennis Tournament, IAAF Athletics World Championships, FINA Swimming World Championships, FIFA Confederations Cup South Africa 2009 as well as events such as the Michael Jackson Memorial. Also in a combined effort with Microsoft, NBC Sports and others, Wimbledon Live delivered more than 6,500 minutes of live and on-demand Smooth Streaming video via a high-definition (HD), interactive online video experience and each Sunday this Fall, NBC and Microsoft are broadcasting Sunday Night Football on-line in HD, utilizing live DVR controls, multiple camera angles, slow motion, ad integration, analytics, and other cutting-edge features. 26 such trial deployments are currently highlighted on the Smooth Streaming Showcase.

The components available are as follows

With this release, the key elements of the IIS media server platform now include:

· Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP

· Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events

· Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, for creating custom clients

· Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player

· Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content

· Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging

· Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching

Download the latest IIS Media offerings

You can download all of the IIS media server platform components, and the Smooth Streaming PDK, using the Web Platform Installer button on the IIS Media page (http://www.iis.net/media).

Can you believe its only 35 days to the next PDC?

neilhut — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:27:56 GMT

Nov 17th seemed to be a long way away…then... Now we are into October and in practically 5 weeks we will be off to the races!! There are lots of exciting things that I can’t talk about obviously, but there are a lot of things that I can start to share.

Firstly we just announced on Friday that the Scott Guthrie would be keynoting, along with our senior VP of Office and SharePoint, Kurt DelBene.

Secondly, we also published many new Windows sessions which will help this event, together with the Windows 7 bootcamp to become the place to learn how to build amazing applications for Windows 7. There are a number of sessions that we can’t announce prior to the PDC, and these will become available after the keynote announcements.

We have also finalized a lot of the work to bring together a large majority of Microsoft’s Technical Fellows and Distinguished Engineers for our “Technical Leaders” series which will bring together some interesting industry perspectives. There is also all the usual things that make the PDC “the PDC”. These are all here again.

The best thing to do to keep up-to-date with what is happening is to subscribe to the PDC RSS feed.

Interesting Commentary into MySQL and why Oracle want to Keep it

neilhut — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:20:49 GMT

Both articles point to an interview which Larry Ellison had with Ed Zander, who was once president and COO of Sun.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10365128-16.html

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/data-driver/2009/09/why-larry-ellison-will-not-spin-off-mysql.aspx

Web Application Toolkits

neilhut — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:39:00 GMT

Last week we announced a number of Web Application Toolkits on the Web. The goal for the Web Application Toolkits is to provide Web Developers with resources such as project templates, controls, and code samples along with simplified documentation all in a consistent packaged format that is easy to download and run in a very short period of time. One of the key criteria around the Web Application Toolkits is to enable Web Developers to get to an F5 (Run) experience very quickly to ensure that this is the right solution for their problem; How many times have you heard developers trying for hours to get a sample to work only to find it does not do what they expected. The expectation is that with the correct prerequisites installed using the Web Platform Installer, a Web Developer can have a Web Application Toolkit sample application installed and running in 5mins.

We have had some good feedback from the community, especially around some requested security changes that they would like to see in the FAQ example and this is being worked on at the moment for a update later this week. If there is other feedback, please, please comment through the “Send Feedback” alias and we promise to respond.

We created an introduction to the Web Application Toolkits on Channel9 by James Senior and Jonathan Carter. The scenarios were selected based on feedback from community developers with the first 7 being detailed below.

	Web Application Toolkit for Internet Explorer 8 Extensibility Today users can access rich information and services while they are browsing a site; it's not a trivial task to expose this content to the same users when they are not on that site. The goal of this Web Application Toolkit is to leverage the new features in Internet Explorer 8 (Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search Providers) to extend the reach of your web site and services also to those users that are not on your site. The Web Application Toolkit includes a set of ASP.NET Web Controls that you can use to take advantage of these IE new features in your own Web application. Check out the accompanying screencast.
	Web Application Toolkit for Bing Search Bing is a powerful new Decision Engine designed to help consumers accomplish tasks and make faster, more informed decisions. The Bing Application Programming Interface (API) provides developers programmatic access to Bing, offering flexible options for building or enhancing your site or applications. This Web Application Toolkit shows how to take advantage of the Bing API to add search capabilities to your Web site by leveraging the various search results that the Bing API provides, including Web content, images, news and videos, among others. Through this Web Application Toolkit you will also discover how to use ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery to provide an enhanced and more interactive end user experience when using the Bing API.
	Web Application Toolkit for REST Services Many Web applications today are starting to expose data as REST service interfaces, so it can be accessed through APIs by other tiers of the application or even by other applications. A RESTful web service is a simple Web service implemented using HTTP and the principles of REST. REST Services focus on resources; each one is represented by a unique URI, and users interact with them via their URI using the HTTP uniform interface. This Web Application Toolkit shows how to easily add REST service interfaces for an existing Web application. The Web Application Toolkit includes a sample REST service, two sample client applications that access the REST services, one using simple ASP.NET Web Forms and a second Web application using AJAX to asynchronously invoke the REST service and finally a custom project template for Visual Studio to make it very easy to build new REST Services. Check out the accompanying screencast.
	Web Application Toolkit for Mobile Web Applications This Web Application Toolkit is designed to demonstrate how to extend an existing ASP.NET MVC Web application to provide access from mobile devices. To enable mobile access, the Web application should have views targeting each of the mobile devices to be supported. The MVC pattern helps you create applications that separate the different aspects of the application (input logic, business logic, and UI logic), while providing a loose coupling between these elements. This Web Application Toolkit provides a component called MobileCapableViewEngine that enables the Web application to show the appropriate view depending on the device's browser that is performing the request. It also includes a sample site that provides different views for Windows Mobile, IPhone, and Blackberry devices. Check out the accompanying screencast.
	Web Application Toolkit for Template-Driven Email This Web Application Toolkit is designed to demonstrate how to generate and send dynamic, template-based emails from a web application. There are many common scenarios where notification emails need to be sent to end users. Examples of these common scenarios may involve notifying a user of their newly created account, sending a new password in respond to a forgotten password request, or emailing an alert under specific business circumstances, such as the creation of a order. Typically the E-mails sent from a Web application scenario are formatted as HTML, include CSS stylesheets, and images and need to be generated dynamically with custom or user-specific data. This Web Application Toolkit includes samples that show how to use templates to generate these dynamic email bodies. Check out the accompanying screencast.
	Web Application Toolkit for making Your Web Site Social Adding social capabilities to your Web site allows you to attract new users, keep them on your Web site for longer and get them to come back more often. This Web Application Toolkit shows how, using a few lines of code with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, it is possible to add social capabilities to a Web site with instant messaging from a website to various client endpoints like Windows, Windows Mobile, Xbox 360 and Mac. Behind the scenes is a powerful set of UI Controls and a JavaScript library that connect your website to the Messenger Service which is used by 330 million users around the world. Check out the accompanying screencast.
	Web Application Toolkit for FAQs The majority of web sites have the need to display a list of frequently asked questions to their users. Although it's not difficult to create a simple set of FAQ pages, creating a great user experience that supports searching for FAQs, filtering, and paging, can become more difficult. Furthermore, this is often common functionality that has to be implemented repeatedly in multiple Web sites. This Web Application Toolkit is designed to provide a starting set of code including ASP.NET pages, data access logic, and database schemas, for integrating Frequently Asked Questions into your own ASP.NET MVC Web application. Check out the accompanying screencast.

First Windows 7 Arcade Machine

neilhut — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:30:00 GMT

For all the people that are compelled to get an arcade machine installed in their house, here is another option by using Windows 7 to power it.

Andrew Dugdell is best known for his technical talks, but in this interview on EDGE, he talks about another concept, “Windows 7 After Dark”. This is about all the stuff in Windows 7 that's fun for you at home.

In the interview Andrew shows a quick rundown of some of the things he is talking about. These include Media Center and touch screen integration, and even cooler, Andrew showed off the arcade unit he built on Windows 7 as a hobby project.
Andrew's next project is a cocktail style arcade unit, which means retiring this stand up unit, so we got to witness that, too.

Details of how to build an arcade unit can be found at http://www.tinyurl.com/buildwin7

WebsiteSpark, Web Platform Installer RTM and the Web App Gallery RTM

neilhut — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:29:26 GMT

Today, we announced the RTM of Web PI (Platform Installer) and Web App Gallery. We also introduced a new offering called WebsiteSpark.

To introduce this, Scott Guthrie, VP of the .NET platform and web technologies talks about these on the home page of Channel9.

For people that can not see the screencast, WebsiteSpark is a new global program, designed by Microsoft to help small professional Web development and design service companies succeed, by providing new business opportunities through connections with global partners and customers, support and training, and software tools – at no upfront cost. For more details you can go to http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark