Hey gang, I need some support here. I'm in the author review phase of ASP.NET 3.5 For Dummies . In a chapter on LINQ, an editor wants me to change 'Thingy' to "a more concrete noun". Here's an example heading: Narrowing the thingys with a Select clause Wait a minute! This is the For Dummies series where you even have an icon to mark 'Technical Stuff'. Is 'Thingy' not a synonym for 'Stuff'? What's more, we're dealing with LINQ here and especially anonymous types. Doesn't a vague 'Thingy...(read more)

The Road Code Trip is on. A few months ago I was hanging out at the ASP.NET User Group meeting in PHX ( www.azgroups.com ) and was brainstorming with Tim Heuer about a fun way to talk about new technology. There was all kinds of conversations about wild ideas, this and that.

It looks like the conversation continued, because now they have a site ( www.TheCodeTrip.com ) and an RSS feed for more information.

The Code Trip is a fun group of guys with a budget to entertain and the passion to teach. Spend some cash to draw geeks in to see/learn some new technology.

With all the new technology coming out these days, it seems like a great way for me to get an introduction into some of the things that I would otherwise not probably pay attention to. I try to stay up with asp.net - so the new stuff for me is 3.5 features, data fun with ado.net, and new services goop with WFC.

The schedule isn't posted, or even the route, but I have to assume they'll be cruising through PHX at some point, just because of the people involved.

This sounds like a fun ride. The site asks to submit ideas. I'm going to submit that they stop in Eloy and give away some sky diving packages :)

I'm also going to ask if I can ride along for a few portions of the trip. Not sure if there is room, those motor homes are usually pretty small, but hey - if you don't ask the answer is always "NO".

This application will bind search results from the Windows Live Search Webservice to a GridView Control and make use of AJAX 1.0 for searching and paging.

An article on how to create an AJAX enabled polling system using ASP.NET client callbacks.

This guy just posted a youtube video with the song I did from my session on continuous Integration during Teched Barcelona.

I wrote a song (along with Sting and the Police) called "Every Build You Break".

Here's the video. enjoy!

AdWeek.com - NEW YORK A year ago, when TV programmers were just beginning to put significant amounts of longer-form video online, pricing formulas were as varied as the deals and pretty much came down to the price a buyer was willing to pay. But now, with a better sense of the size and composition of online audiences, buyers and sellers say that, more and more, deals are based on eyeballs delivered, complete with guarantees, just like in the offline TV sector.

Sonu published a great article on DotNetSlackers today entitled An Architectural View of the ASP.NET MVC Framework by Dino Esposito.

This is a really great article for anyone who wants a quick, detailed overview of the up and coming MVC framework in ASP.NET.

SmartCode is a template-driven code generator that lets software developers automatically produce programs and components that interact with database system

If you get this surprise error after converting the asp.net project.
This is what you need to do

 Original
<%# Container.DataItem("ID") %>

Change to
CType(Container.DataItem, DataRowView)("ID").ToString

This solve your problem.

To set Option Strict in the integrated development environment (IDE)
On the Tools menu, choose Options.

Open the Projects and Solutions node.

Choose VB Defaults.

Modify the Option Strict setting.

To set Option Strict on the command line
Include the /optionstrict compiler option in the vbc command.

 

 

Suresh Behera

This article provides a way to use RSA public key encryption in scripts running on a webserver hosted by a shared hosting company. It also demonstrates how to use RSA in .Net to solve the 'real world' problem of signing license codes so that they cannot be forged.

Over the last few days, I've been trying to get my TFS system upgraded with some customizations that members of my team have requested. TFS is a very well-designed system, but unfortunately the out-of-the-box process of customizing your processes leaves a little to be desired.

It took me a couple hours of tinkering, but I figured out how to add some new statuses to the MSF for Agile templates, as well as new fields and UI for tracking the steps to reproduce a bug. I'll be posting those modifications in a bit, but in the meantime, I've assembled some of the resources that I found helpful on my Custom TFS templating journey. I hope they're useful.

• Bulk editing work items using TFS Power Tools "templates"
• One method of adding new statuses without breaking reports
• Dave McKinstry's Guide to TFS Process Customization

And some other cool TFS Stuff:

• Vista Sidebar Gadgets for TFS
• TeamDef - Time Management for TFS
• CoDE Magazine - Data Dude Meets Team Build
• Microsoft Office Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (using structured Word documents to populate a TFS database with requirements and work items)

I'm stepping up the use of TFS on my team for project management, so as I come across more resources that I find useful, I'll post them.

According to the MSDN Subscriptions WebLog we can expect to see Visual Studio 2008 to be downloadable early next week.

“Visual Studio 2008 is anticipated out early next week, with availability for Subscribers. Check out the "Top Subscriber Downloads" area on http://msdn2.microsoft.com/subscriptions for VS 2008 downloads.

You will also be able to access these downloads by clicking on the Subscriber Downloads and Product Keys links that take you to all of your downloads. ”

(source: Ken Cox)

That would be great and just in time for a session I'm doing Friday on 'what's new in Visual Studio 2008'. More details on that here: http://www.newhorizonslearning.nl/New-Horizon-s-Developers-day.554.0.html (it's Dutch).

update: RTM has been reached and VSTS 2008 can be downloaded (source).

I love property intializers, both in C# and F# and just think that they can be so useful and convenient especially with stuff like WinForms and WPF where you often find yourself newing up some element and then in the next 2 or 3 lines setting some properties to specific values.

Anyway, this post isn't about C# - I've talked a bit about C# 3.0 over the last 16 or so months and I don't really want to bore myself, however, not a new feature in F# but a little unknown feature is that you can do the same here albeit with slightly different syntax.

C#

Window w = new Window() { Title = "Tooo many properties!!", ...};

F#

let w = new Window(Title = "Tooo many properties!!", ...)

Note:  this is the first time I have created a WPF project in VS 2008 Beta 2 and it look's so much prettier than Cider did.  Its funny how during the CTP's and Betas of WPF I used it quite heavily and then it RTM'd and I've hardly touched it! Something wrong there!

We just published a WF Hosting Quickstart sample today and it shows a common hosting model for building WF programs and running them in either of: ASP.NET and IIS Your NT Service A Console Host Okay the third is just a debugging convenience for the second....(read more)

We just published some new whitepapers discussing high level concepts of .NET Framework 3.5 which I hope you will find useful. Introducing the .NET Framework 3.5 by David Chappell This paper drills into each of the new features added in the .NET Framework...(read more)

Get your new RTM bits now. I'm running Visual Studio 2008 on my box Soma announced it here today. The final RTM bits for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 are available. The trial editions of Visual Studio 2008 are online here . You can also get...(read more)

How to enable an exisitng asp.net application to work as asp.net ajax application