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: .NET Blog.NET on the NET March 2-9: MIX Hangover Edition
On the really off chance that you missed it, MIX08 has come and gone. I posted some reflections here and here. Definitely make sure to check out the webcasts [NB: install Silverlight 2 first] if you get a chance. Lots of great stuff was released to the web at the show—Matthew Podwyoski has a good list of the ASP.NET specific ones. Working around the release of IE8 Beta 1, the involved teams tell us about IE8 and IP licensing, Activities and Web Slices, IE8 and JScript, CSS 2.1 Testing, and the IE8 Developer Tools. A bit more mundane, but more important in my life is the torrent of releases from the IIS team. Highlights include IIS7 admin tools for XP, 2003 and Vista, configuration extensibility x2 and a very strong article on IIS7 diagnostic tools for developers.
Given that a rather significant hunk of the ASP.NET world was busy schmoozing and boozing in Vegas, there was not a lot of activity in the dotnetosphere. LINQ and other fancy, schmacy stuff …
MIXing It Up: Day Two
Sorry for the belated post—I got a bit tied up with, well, MIX and couldn’t even start pulling this together until I hopped on the plane. Anyhow, I survived TAO and the horrible dryness of the desert—I can’t sleep past 5:30 am in Vegas it seems—to make it to MIX day two. And what a day it was.
First post-bacon stop was an enlightening panel called “The Open Question” which turned into a very open and rolling discussion between Mike Schroepfer ,(Mozilla), Andi Gutmans, (Zend), Miguel de Icaza, (Novell/Mono/Moonlight), Rob Conery, (Microsoft/SubSonic) about how the world is pushing towards an open model and how intellectual property, developer culture and economics play into this. I can’t really do it justice in prose, you should really check out the webcast if you are at all interested in these sorts of questions.
Next up was a very, very, very interesting keynote between Guy Kawazaki and Steve Ballmer. No, there was not a fist-fight on stage, but Steve did almost smash Guy’s MacBook Air. And—before you ask—Steve did do Monkey Boy part 2. But, compared to Ozzie’s buzzword-laden soothsaying …
MIXing It Up: Day One
MIX 08 kicked off this morning with a multi-headed keynote that had loads of “wow” factor. Far and away the biggest takeaway: Microsoft is very serious about connected systems and open standards. The old embrace-extend-extinguish model is largely dead. Ray Ozzie kicked the thing off, but his buzzword density made me want to puke. If you watch the video, feel free to fast forward until you see Scott Guthrie. Unless you like watching senior executive types babble. Once we got past that, we got into the good stuff: IE8 and Silverlight 2.0.
IE8 highlights include:
- IE8’s main focus is on improving the life of web developers. Unlike IE7 which was focused on user experience and security.
- Full CSS 2.1 support. Moreover, Microsoft will be releasing a BSD-licensed CSS 2.1 test kit with more than 700 tests.
- Significant performance improvements in the javascript stack.
- The kernel of HTML 5 support. Demoed improvements were improved handling …
MIXing It Up: Pre-Keynote Note
Morning update: nothing much to report other than the blog zone is a really awesome idea. Free booze with 360s is very, very nice. Why did they have to make the Maker’s Mark so pure? That and, if you can clear 2.5 hours on your schedule today, you can see the MIX08 keynote live. Furthermore, webcasts of all sessions and panels will be available on a 24-hour delay. Keep an eye on the MIX08 site for details.
.NET on the ‘NET Feb 22-March 1: PreMIX Edition
It was a pretty quiet week as I suspect most of the ASP.NET world is busily preparing to mix it up at MIX08 in Vegas starting today. Speaking of which, I’m about to head to Vegas myself. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t bite. At least after the 2nd drink. So, if you’ll be there, see ya there. If you won’t, well, watch the blog. I’ll be a postin’ between breakouts, open spaces and the craps tables.
Now, quite don’t quite mean dead, so here is a quick round up of the postings and musings this writer found profound. First off are Rob Conery’s back-to-back posts on LINQ. First, he walks through the hows and whys of creating IN queries in LINQ; then he shows off some neat LINQ gymnastics. Keeping on the LINQ theme, don’t miss Matt Berseth’s foray into building a LinkedIn style address book. If you play in the ThreadPool, be very aware that there are some breaking changes with .NET 3.5.
Moving onto more mundane matters, first, the GridViewGuy gives us a good guide to handling drag and drop …
.NET on the ‘NET Feb 15-22: Silverlight 2 is Sweet
First, an abbreviated Windows 2008 Server trip report: it is freaking awesome in too many ways to enumerate at the moment. Now, on to the regularly scheduled foray into the DotNetosphere.
Today Scott Guthrie gave us a very impressive first look at Silverlight 2. Don’t miss the tutorials on building the Digg application at the end. On the IE 8 front, Dean Hachamovitch notes a milestone and announces that an IE 8 beta would be available in the first half of this year, and Eric Lawrence gives us the beta’s user agent string. For tools, the Microsoft Visual Web Developer Team posted a preview of the new tooling features for the MIX preview edition of ASP.NET MVC. And on IIS 7, make sure to check out the MSDN Magazine article on extending the IIS 7 pipeline.
Moving on to architecture, Alik Levin of the Microsoft Application Consulting & Engineering Team explores why one needs a distributed architecture. Don’t miss the links to the case studies on some of the biggest sites on the net. Udi Dahan posted a pointed piece …
.NET on the ‘Net Feb 8-14: Windows 2008 Server Made My Valentines Day
Hey ladies and laddies. It was a very, very significant week in .NET. First and foremost, Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing and it is currently available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The most significant offshoot, for us ASP.NET types, is that this opens the door to production IIS7 hosting. Which oftentimes translates to “no more calling the sysadmins to tweak some IIS setting because I can set them in my web.config” or “holy smokes Batman, this integrated pipeline is awesome!” Also, for those of us crazy enough to be developing on Vista, Service Pack 1 was also released to manufacturing this week and should hit widespread availability by March 18.
In addition, Microsoft also released a Visual Studio hotfix aimed at significantly increasing performance and quashing some bugs in the web design tools. One very significant offshoot is that JQuery now works with Visual Studio 2008 intellisense. Finally, Scott Guthrie updated the ASP.NET MVC roadmap while, for the poor souls stuck working in SharePoint, the Visual Studio Team released a significant update.
In arguably the coolest release of the week, Tim …
.NET on the ‘Net Feb 1-7: DataContext Dilemmas & Versioning Databases
In the running for “post of the week” there is an outright tie between Rick Strahl’s brilliant post on strategies to handle Linq to SQL’s DataContext dilemma. Her threw in a set of sample business object wrapper samples for good measure. K. Scott Allen posted an equally brilliant series of articles on database version management.
Honorable mentions start with Rob Conrey posted the Subsonic 2.1 beta for public consumption. While you are there, make sure to check out his excellent post on hacking legacy applications for fun and profit. If you are having .NET TDD nightmares, you might want to comment on Phil Haack’s plea for Unit Testing horror stories. From a technical perspective, Derek Whittaker reminds us to take out the trash. Also interesting is Dave Ward’s explanation of some neat tricks to remotely load user controls. Rounding things out, make sure to check out Steve Herbert’s examination of performance implications of Linq to Objects, it’s sweet.
As for upcoming events, if anyone is in the DC area, there is the Rockville …
Visual Studio 2008 Review
I know it’s a bit late, but as promised here’s a review of Visual Studio 2008. I’ve had it for a while now, but I wanted to wait until I’d worked on a few projects with it before I offered my opinion.
Overall, it’s a solid improvement over 2005. The guys at Microsoft have made some good changes that actually improved the development experience rather than just adding a bunch of fluff.
Keep Your Template Logic in the Template
Why keeping your template logic in the template is next to godliness. With a concrete example.