April 2007 Entries
I was reading Julie Lerman's post today about her discovery of some things ASP.NET does and found this:
2) You can develop ASP.NET sites (and with AJAX) for free. Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is free and the .NET Framework is free and the AJAX extension are free. And if you want to do data access, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is free.
OK, so I knew that, but I am betting that the general mass populous of developers and other people who want to break into development don't.
But what about getting "free" hosting... can you even really do that anymore even on LAMP? You can, but not with any real quality or without heavy restriction.
This blog is hosted at Webhost4life who charges a whopping FIVE dollars a month to give you ASP, SQL and an assortment of plugins to use. For a few dollars more you can get dedicated SQL and Sharepoint. It's completely affordable for anyone to do garage based development in. For the price of a single Starbuck's Latte a month I can host a site... Amazing. Even more amazing, I can get the absolute latest features of even the most sophisticated hosts. I think I have been down a few minutes in the last 5 years - that's more reliable than a T1.
So if someone tells you that developing with M1cro$haft is too expensive... Tell them they are completely out of touch with reality and need to come out of the cave and look around a bit. Microsoft has an incredible developer support arsenal. From MSDN to the Empower Program to the Dev Team Blogs to the Online Training resources to GlidePath and other projects as well as the Forums and Lists; there simply is no other single company on the planet offering you as much support in your development endeavors as Microsoft. And by the way... MOST OF THEM ARE FREE! (as in Free Lunch, Free Beer, Freedom or any other spin you want to put on it)
If you are running the RTM of Vista and If you want to start programming for Vista then you will be needing this:
Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit Update for Windows Vista™ available as a Web Install or an ISO
First of all, it can be hard to find so the above link helps you find it among all the Betas, CTPs Service Packs and other content specific SDKs (WF, WCF, etc.)
The key is to find the one that is released AFTER Vista went into RTM, not one of the SDK releases from back in November of 2006.
You also need the VS 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Vista, but you should already have that or opening VS2005 will nag you every time you start it.
Installing this is not difficult, run the Setup.exe that downloads (Can't we get specific filenames for these things by default already?!?)
I recommend USING THE ISO, otherwise you will sit on this screen with absolutely no feedback for hours.
What sucks is that I had to use Filemon to keep checking to see that it was actually doing something and not hung up somewhere. I also particularly like the effective use of space in the Status field... Try resizing the Dialog, the Image Aspec Ration is not locked... lovely example of what one can do with an SDK...
Cancelling the Web Install will only cancel what is currently downloading and not what is already installed, so it leaves you in an unknown state of the installation process since there is no feedback. This is most likely due to the fact I was presented with this lovely screen:
The Web Install will continue where it left off, but it's not very intuitive, it forces you to either Uninstall or to Change the installation. Changing the installation will lead you to a screen to pick components with all the stuff that it has not installed unchecked. Check them all and continue... I was afraid to uninstall actually because it may have tried to remove some critical component for booting Vista. (It probably won't but why have to go through a whole retore if you can avoid it.)
Save youself a lot of hassle and uncertainty; installing from the ISO is much easier and you don't sit on the download screens wondering what the heck is going on. It's going to take about the same amount of time to download so don't waste your bandwidth with the Web Installer. Installing from the ISO literally took 5 minutes.
I don't plan on updating these links as they change, so as this post ages it will probably stop working. Hopefully someone will actually do some better Quality Control and the relavence of this post dies.
This is quite useful. I am forever forgetting what they are.
I may be a little late to the party talking about this, but last month Dan Appleman created a very useful site for finding developer related content that specifically targets .Net development. So useful in fact it has become the Home Page on my development machines.
The greatest challenge facing .NET developers today is discoverability - finding information and answers that already exist. Like most developers, I find myself spending a great deal of time searching for answers or solutions online, much of that time on Google. SearchDotNet is based on Google Custom Search technology to search the very best .NET related sites and forums to help make searches more effective, while filtering out unrelated or duplicate content.
Finding filtered DotNet content has always been a little frustrating, this site helps to tremendously narrow the signal to noise ratio. Thanks Dan!
I really love it when someone inspires me to actually THINK about how to do something better, I remember a problem I specifically had in a project last year when I need to use FindControl to get something on a MasterPage from a SubPage.
I came up with a solution, but it was nothing noteworthy...
My friend J. Michael Palermo, IV posted a recent entry about doing this in C# (as well as VB, but somehow I only saw the C# version before I started into the conversion process). The idea was spawned originally by Steven Smith, Mike's version put a Generics spin on the code.
I thought about this for several reasons. 1. It was done with Generics. 2. It used Recursion and 3. It is something that I have to do all the time. I generally frown on using FindControl for obvious reasons, it just scans everything and is pretty much a performance pig. However, there are a few times when you really do need to do it. Then there are other times, when you can extract a starting point (or already know it) and just want to look down into some control that you know has what you need, but you have to get the name from Generated output.
Eventually, I arrived at this conclusion:
Public Shadows Function FindControl(ByVal id As String) As Control
Return FindControl(Of Control)(Page, id)
End Function
Public Shared Shadows Function FindControl(Of T As Control)(ByVal startingControl As Control, ByVal id As String) As T
Dim found As Control = startingControl
If (String.IsNullOrEmpty(id) OrElse (found Is Nothing)) Then Return CType(Nothing, T)
If String.Compare(id, found.ID) = 0 Then Return found
For Each ctl As Control In startingControl.Controls
found = FindControl(Of Control)(ctl, id)
If (found IsNot Nothing) Then Return found
Next
Return CType(Nothing, T)
End Function
So with this Code There are a couple of things to point out. The Generics routine belongs somewhere in your utility code. You don't need to have more than one copy of this in your App.
Generics are cool, but... Most people don't seem (myself included) to want to call functions using the "Generics Way" in VB. Not because it is particularly hard to remember, it just so happens that sometimes, I want to override some basic Framework method with one with more functionality. So, I can drop down this nice Generics Routine into my Utility Class and then set a wrapper (or 2) in my Base Page to call it. The only reason to wrap it, is to shadow the built-in routine for Controls, which can cause confusion unless you name this Function FindControlRecursive... or something similar. I personally prefer not to, and to add insult to injury, I prefer to override all the places in my App that is using the built-in FindControl() method. Why? Well, for consistency and to provide a way for a development team to see how overriding some functionality at a base level can make life much easier, and correct any false assumptions of how some things work in the first place. If I want the Recursive, Generic Routine to have the same limitations as the built-in framework method, I can always set the startingControl to something other than Page or use MyBase.FindControl().
Visual Studio code name "Orcas" is the next generation development tool for Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and the Web.
"Orcas Beta1 displays all of the essential value in the Orcas product but it's important to keep in mind that it's not feature-complete. There are many features (for example: lambda expressions, support for nullable types, etc.) that will be coming online in a later milestone."
See the rest of the VB Team's comments here.
If you want to have an early look at what your main development platform will be in a year or so (sooner for some of us…), go have at it.
A public download is available here.
Express (VB) Edition is here.
I am pretty excited about this release we not only get LINQ; we also get major improvements to support the .Net Framework 3.5. I am downloading Team Foundation Server now so I will post on some experience with that soon.
The main Highlights of Beta 1 are:
Link to The Visual Basic Team : Live From Redmond Webcast Series (Beth Massi)
Solutions Architect MVP Beth Massi has joined Microsoft and her first order of business in the Visual Basic Developer Center is to kick off a series of Webcasts covering Orcas. These are sure to be most helpful as you start moving your coding efforts to the new release.
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