.NET

Trac Inside Visual Studio

Tony Yates — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:30:43 GMT

For those of use using Trac for online projects and wiki-type functionality, and live in a visual studio world, you've got to check out Devja Vu's Visual Studio plug in.

http://vstrac.devjavu.com/

Its only in a Beta 1 state, but looks good enough to try out! You can too, grab it here on the SourceForge site:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=214927&package_id=259175

Mr. SubSonic going to Microsoft

Tony Yates — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:38:40 GMT

Rob Conery, the author of the coolest DAL utility known to man (AKA SubSonic) has joined the ranks of ASP.NET gurus at Microsoft.

He now may be getting paid by Microsoft, but his work is still the same. Can you beleive it? They are paying Rob to continue his efforts on Subsonic, and even integrate it with the ASP.NET Teams MVC framework!

Very cool news... Lets see, Scott Gu, working together with Shawn Burke, has brought in Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman, and now Rob Conery. Who's next? I would be putting my money on Mads Kristensen, but he's not American. Huh.

::: now back to our scheduled program :::

Microsoft Open-Sources .Net Framework Libraries

Tony Yates — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:06:04 GMT

Simply Wow! Taking the open source initiative to new heights, Microsoft decides to open up access to the source of .net framework libraries. Someone is definately shaking things up inside the box! Of course its a little (*alot) restrictive with what you can do with it, but hey, its out there!

Read all about it on Scotts blog:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

Where to next?

Heres a little more by Shawn Burke, one of the pushers to get it out there.:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2007/10/03/making-net-framework-source-available-to-developers.aspx

Nice...

Living, Breathing, Dynamic, and Organic Web

Tony Yates — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:25:00 GMT

You may never had associated the title words with the Internet or web-based applications, but I predict that within 15 years thats exaclty the type of experience we will be getting used to on a day to day, site-to-site, basis. Web developers today can either get relevant or get lost.

With applications and technologies like Photosynth, Seadragon, Popfly, and Silverlight, that's exaclty where Microsoft is headed.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ : "Newest and most exciting way to view photos on a computer. Takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next."

http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/ : "Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups."

http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx : "Aimed to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network."

http://silverlight.net/Default.aspx & http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ : "Enables rich interactive applications for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces. Create richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance. Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays that enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application. Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media, and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight."

Although king in its time, Flash has been around for '-ever', but has change very little. I can still remember learning the ins and outs of keyframe development, but it has never caught on because for many reasons; cost of the designer, limited scripting capabilities, and only web-bound support - just to name a few. Thats too bad in may respects, but like Netscape, they can only blame theirselves for growing complacent and stale.

Microsoft has, love em' or hate em', learned from many technologies mistakes (and made many of their own) in recent history. Picking up where Flash and similar techlogies have left off, Microsoft is again leading the pack into the next era of presence. Having the power of a first class programming language and world-class framework library is exactly where the Redmond camp is headed with Silverlight. Combined with the extraordinary capabilities of photosynth and seadragon, its only a matter of time before we start to be able navigate sites that way. And along comes Popfly - oh my-my see how far Frontpage has come (hehe)! Ok, its like apples and oranges, but still, Redmond has come along way with so much weight to carry.

Here's to the future of the Microsoft web, Cheers!

...now back to our scheduled broadcast...

MSDN Blogs == Perpetual Motion

Tony Yates — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 20:50:33 GMT

As some of you that know me know, I'm an avid blog reader. I like to read about all the different 'stuff' thats going on in the minds and lives of thoses that inspire, educate, and humor me. Its a hobby. Instead of the latest book on my night stand, as me about my latest favorite blogs and blog writers. There are quite a few.

For someone like me though, who loves to keep up on the latest and greatest code corners, subscribing to the msdn blogs rss feed is just too much information. Its truly information overflow.

BEWARE of this RSS feed! http://blogs.msdn.com/MainFeed.aspx?Type=AllBlogs

Sure you can subscribe to just a few that interest your tastes, but what it those tastes are dozens and you like to be in the 'know'?

With new entries popping in every few seconds, its truly perpetual motion.

Facebook...

Tony Yates — Mon, 28 May 2007 19:46:47 GMT

Ok, so I broke down and enlisted in Facebook. There is a catch though! Actually two! First and foremost, I just had to let my wife link to who she is married to, and second, I\m thinking up ideas how to work Facebook into a SuperOffice DevNet article. There are a dozen ideas, and when I get a few minutes I'll write and code it out to share with the community.

I'm sure there are others that are thinking the same thing, so if so, give me a poke and we can build it together!

For those interested in the Facebook Developers Toolkit, you can find it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CCD46762-45EC-4FBE-AD91-FC916671E734&displaylang=en&clcid=0x409

See you online, friends!

Create Membership Tables In Your Database

Tony Yates — Sun, 27 May 2007 19:45:59 GMT

I came across kris' blog entry about installing the asp.net Membership tables in a database you define. This is not about creating the standard ASPNETDB database, but creating a sql script that installs the Membership tables, triggers, stored procedures, the whole lot, into a database you define! This is a great tip that certainly alleviates me from having to deploy a completely seperate database just to manange users information.

Essentially it breaks down to this line:

aspnet_regsql.exe -E -S localhost -d MyPersonalDatabase -A all -sqlexportonly c:\membership.sql

As most probably already know, aspnet_regsql.exe is found in (C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\)

Kris has more about setting up the connection strings on his blog, so check it out at:

http://blog.krisvandermast.com/CreateMembershipTablesInAnotherDatabaseThanTheStandardAspnetdbmdf.aspx

NStub, finished before it ever really started...

Tony Yates — Sun, 13 May 2007 21:06:09 GMT

The creator of NStub, Jeremy Jarrell (sometimes referred to his blog handle: Digital Blasphemy), has just announce that NStub Beta 2 has been released. Unfortunately, he also says that that will not be any more effort going into that project. Thats too bad because its a cool idea! Expecially for lazy-ass programmers! Then again, it does kind of go against the point of TDD - write tests first, then code. Oh well... :-(

Open Source C# Project Hosting Site

Tony Yates — Sun, 13 May 2007 20:40:18 GMT

For those people who don't like to mess around with interpreted-language sites (e.g based on php, python, perl, etc), and have a desire to host a .Net project-based, subversion-friendly site, you need to check out SharpForge.

Its no TRAC, thats for sure! However, the project and site have been around for awhile, and more and more effort going into it makes it a worthwhile option for managing small to medium-sized projects. Expecially if you prefer .Net.

Interesting features include:

Multi Portal
Multi Project
Subversion Administration
Work Item Tracking
Project Forums
Release Management
Subversion Wiki
Browse Source Code
News Feed Aggregation

The best thing about this is that no Apache is needed to communicate with Subversion. Not that I have an issue with doubling up software suites. Heck, I can remember a time when I has both MS Office and Word Perfect installed on my machine. There was even a time when I had two or three music players installed too, but hello! Why try and fix what's not broken? Apache should be used, not seen - via error message after error message. Why install tempermental software on my machine when I don't have to?

Anyway, I'm not trying to start any web-server-religious wars here, just passing on the word to my .Net-friendly buddies out there.

Shameless plug:

For rock-solid project hosting, with more features than [fill-in your favorite software product here], check out http://www.coderesort.com (pun intended).

Machine Key Generator

Tony Yates — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:33:23 GMT

So there I was, strolling along minding my own SharePoint custom Membership Provider business, when all of a sudden I ran across some information (issue???) about Client Integration and persistent cookies. Then there was more information about cookie timeouts, and what a hassle it is to recover from the timeout on a machine with a default machine key in the machine.config file. THEN, there was a link to a microsoft article that describes the process to create new keys for use in Forms Authentication. So, I thought to myself, "Self, feels like a good time to write a simple windows form application to easily do this." All the code is there, its just a matter of retrofitting it for a form.

So, here it is in all its glory. The valid values for decryptionKey is 8 or 24. This creates a 16 byte key for Data Encryption Standard (DES) or a 48 byte key for Triple DES, respectively. Valid values for validationKey are 20 to 64. This creates keys from 40 to 128 bytes in length. The output from the code is an entire <machineKey> element that you can copy and paste into a Machine.config file. Simply right-click in the text box and choose copy, then past it in your machine.config. Easy, huh?

Download it here (Contains Source and Binaries for 32 and 64 bit).