December 2007 Entries
Our friends at Axosoft, the makers of the excellent OnTime Bug Tracking software, have created a really cool tool for sending large files either privately or publicly.
TransferBigFiles - File Sharing the Easy Way: Upload and Send Large Files for Free
Sometimes I need to send large files and don't want to bother with creating FTP accounts for people, this is a great way to accomplish this.
Thanks for making life easier Axosoft!
I have “threatened” to write my own Blog Engine in VB.Net with a Silverlight UI and still might...
Until I can find time to actually do that, I have evaluated all the different engines I would consider using instead.
Since this blog runs on DotText, the first obvious thing to look at was SubText, it's cool, and does pretty much everything exactly the same, this is both good and bad, bad because it does not do much innovation and just tacks on some extra functionality. In fact I went as far as trying to get it to import my old blog (which failed miserably in 3 releases). So I don't want to bother with it any more.
I don't really like the skin model anyway its ok, but not really what I am looking for in a web 2.0 world.
Last night I had the priviledge of seeing a demo of Graffiti by none other than Rob Howard.
Let me tell you, this interface is incredible! At first glance, I thought it was a Silverlight App, but it is pure CSS and HTML. What it does is more akin to a full Content Management System (CMS) than a blog engine, but it is not Community Server (huge and bulky for a small operation).
I thought about Community Server a long time ago and rejected it only because it is way overkill for one person. Same thing with DotNetNuke.
Grafitti is exactly what I was looking for, so when it is out of Beta, I am switching.
For those of you who want to use Subversion, but just can't stand not having integration in Visual Studio...
Here is a very cool solution: TortoiseSVN and Visual Studio Integration - Visual Studio 2008
I was just dropping to Explorer since an update or merge for me usually includes more work than I want to bother with in VS, this little group of setting has changed my mind. It is much easier to kick everything off right from the toolbar in VS.
You still sacrifice little icons for each file in VS, but they can cause performance problems in large projects anyway and are a total distraction for me. If I need to verify if a file has changed the right-click menu really helps out here.
This is not a program... It cleverly uses VSSettings files and a small .vbs file for the install to do all the work.
It does require TortoiseSVN, which, if you are using Subversion you had installed anyway right? The Toolbar and Right-Click menus shell out commands to Tortoise which is really great, only one tool to keep updated.
I also found this handy set of Subversion and TortoiseSVN Tips & Tricks from David Vidmar (via Jason Haley)
I am going to try to sort out what these updates are and how they are grouped together so you know what to choose, these are not in order of when they where released, but rather in the grouping they are most commonly used. In addition, NONE of these have "Go Live" licenses yet, so don't try using them in production.
ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions
This is the one I just posted about, it is a glimpse of new, powerful functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET next year (2008). It includes:
Silverlight 1.1 (soon to be 2.0, but not quite yet.)
Web Deployment
- The Web Deployment Projects - December 2007 CTP is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008 which provides developers with advanced compilation and deployment options, while not strictly required, it does make deployment much easier. There is nothing in the License that says this cannot be used now, but then again, it does not specifically say you can use this in production either.
Parallel Extensions
- Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5, December 2007 CTP gives you a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, and coordination on parallel hardware.
- If you are contemplating Parallel Development, you need to read this: The Manycore Shift White Paper it is Microsoft's plan for how they plan to support better development with the Many Core processors we are just starting to see, most likely a 16 Core Processor will be mainstream as early as next year!
Volta
- The Volta technology preview is a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. Warning, this does create a HUGE volume of JS code which will most likely be streamlined and cached in a future release.
- This goes on top of Entity Framework and does all the Tier separation for you, it creates most things dynamically, not requiring recompiling ala Code Gen. This is a very interesting technology and is still very early in its development, while it still has some small limitations for VB development, it is certainly worth looking at now.
VS08 SDK
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit
All these tools are going to be very helpful for developing the next wave of great applications. While it is fairly confusing as to which method to choose right now if you are architecting for future development, here is what we know:
ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions are a definite, EF and Data Services will most likely overshadow Linq to SQL and provide a much richer (i.e. easier to use) development experience.
Silverlight is going through major changes, until we get to 2.0 sometime early in 2008 we will not really know how Silverlight will settle, we just know it is here to stay and we should start gearing up for it's use in our applications.
Volta is something to look at in the long term, it is relatively early in its release and is not something else that has been renamed, it is new and will continue to grow. It is still so early in development that it is possible it may be canceled if there is not enough interest, but I doubt that will be the case (as happened with Acropolis). It is built on top of EF and Data Services so if you are looking at incorporating those two technologies (which IMO you should) then you will be able to leverage what you learn in EF and Data Services to use Volta.
Alex Daley says: "The vision of Volta is ultimately pretty big. It's to change the way people build Web apps. Volta takes the same level of abstraction required to deliver distributed applications as VB did for client applications."
This is a pretty bold statement and hopefully they can manage to see it go hand in hand with VB development in the future. This will require lots of changes and streamlining to be effective, but it does provide a great deal of the Magic that VB 3 to 6 once had exclusively for making Data Applications easy to create.
Ok, ok, it took us a little longer than we expected, but we finally got the ASP.NET 3.5 Extension Preview posted! This is the release with all the MVC goodness you have been hearing about as well as some very cool stuff such as Dynamic Data controls which makes building data driven web applications a breeze, AJAX history support, ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria), the ADO.NET Entity Framework and updated ASP.NET support for Silverlight.
Download the bits - they work with VS 2008 and are side-by-side so they will not hork your system
more at Brad Abrams Blog: The Wait is Over: ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview Posted
This is a much anticipated release, especially for MVC, Entity Framework and Astoria. I am installing it now and will make a post with my findings later.
I am pleased to report that my foray into getting Xvid content running natively on an Xbox 360 since the Dec 4th Dashbord update is working VERY well. I am in the process of writing a better uPnP Server (using VB and Linq of course) to handle my library. I had originally hoped we would have Xvid/Divx support on the 360 and I am quite pleased that now we do and it works perfectly for me.
I have tried a couple different uPnP servers out there, TVersity, uShare and some others, they are all lacking when you want a rich interface for the server and high quality, easy to use management of your Library with thousands of files.
I started leveraging the capability of Xvid years ago to reduce the storage size of my library as well as having centralized storage for all my personal media so I can share it around the house on different TVs in the house.
And lets not forget that MP3s are still a chore to wrangle and manage, being able to play these on a device you can buy new for $399 or used for like $100-200 and still use as a Top Notch Gaming system as well is really awesome! And I didn't have to hack a thing, it just works.
December 2007 System Update
Hello Everyone!
Coming shortly is our December 2007 System Update, one where we've added a lot of new features that you guys have been asking for. You should be prompted for the update early next week on December 4th.
Xbox Team : December 2007 System Update
This is not only the most exciting update I've seen to the Xbox 360, it is also the most compelling reason for me to go out and buy another one!
An Xbox lives in many rooms in my house right now, there are only 2 things I still want now that we FINALLY have Divx support.
- I want XNA Support for VB!!!
- We need Silverlight 2.0 Support
I know for a fact that some Silverlight support has at least been demoed for the Xbox but I don't believe this was running on an Xbox.
VB Developers should be allowed to be XNA Developers! This stems from there not being a build of the VB Runtime yet for the Xbox. Hopefully this will be cleared up soon, there is some talk about the VB Runtime not being required any more in VB.Next but nothing firm. I'd much rather see a port of the runtime to work on the Xbox so we can just start writing games in VB Now. There were a ton of great PC Games written in VB3 and up, it only makes sense that many of those developers would love to be writing titles for the Xbox.
With support for Silverlight, we could have awesome media library connections and Home Server applications that would be displayed on our main Entertainment / Living Room system. I'm hoping both those updates roll out soon and I will then commit all my entertainment type development to the Xbox.
I really look forward to testing out the Divx update on Tuesday and if it works as expected, I will finally be building my Library system with the Xbox in mind.
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