|
|
These blog entries are written by industry experts and leaders. We consider this content to be a good read for any software developer or web technologist.
Browse by Tags
All Tags » ASP.NET » Talks (RSS)
-
Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day. You can download my slides+samples below: General Session The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here. In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code. You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here. I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support - which you can learn more about here. I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework - which you can learn more about here. I also showed off the new Hard Rock Memorabilia site built with Silverlight 2. You can try out the Hard Rock application yourself here. You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here. Building .NET Applications with Silverlight The slides + demos for Silverlight breakout talk can be downloaded here. You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here. In particular, I recommend reading my tutorial posts here and here. ASP.NET MVC The slides + demos for my ASP.NET MVC talk can be downloaded here. You can learn more about the latest ASP.NET MVC source refresh here. Stephen Walther also just posted a really good set of slides + demos from his post conference tutorial on ASP.NET MVC here. Hope this helps, Scott 
|
-
This week I'm visiting Scottsdale Arizona and will be presenting at a free user group event during the day. I'm presenting two sessions myself: 1) Developing Applications using Silverlight 2: This will be a drill-down into the new Silverlight 2 Beta1 release, and how you can build applications with it using VS 2008 and Expression Blend. You'll leave this session with a good understanding of the basics of Silverlight programming and how to start building applications with it. 2) Developing Applications using ASP.NET MVC: This session will be a drill-down into the new ASP.NET Model-View-Controller framework option (which last week was updated . You'll leave this session with a good understanding of what it is, how it works, and how to start building ASP.NET web applications with it. In addition to my sessions above, there will also be great sessions at the event from Microsoft employees on "Consuming Web Services with Microsoft Silverlight", "Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight", and "Serving Applications with Microsoft Silverlight Streaming". You can sign up and attend the sessions for free. Click here for more details on the events, and click here to register online to attend. Hope to see some of you there, Scott 
|
-
This Friday I'm leaving for a 10 day trip to Asia. Traveling on business doesn't usually get me excited (I was on a plane ~70 times last year), but I am really looking forward to this trip as it will be my first trip to Asia. I'll be visiting China (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen), South Korea (Seoul), and Japan (Tokyo), and I will be presenting at events, meeting with customers, and visiting one of the development teams in my group that is based in China. I'm also hoping to get a chance to see immerse myself a little in the countries. Below are some details on the presentations I'll be doing during the trip if you are interested in attending or learning more: - China (Beijing, January 13th)
- South Korea (Coex Conference Center 310 on January 17th)
- Japan (Izumi Garden Gallery in Roppongi, Tokyo on January 21st)
I've been extremely fortunate the last year to have had some great people volunteer to translate my blog posts into other languages (including Chinese and Japanese). Below are links to a few of the feeds if English isn't your first language: I'm hoping to meet Hongchao Wang (who has been translating my posts to Chinese) and Chica (who has been translating my posts into Japanese) on the trip and have the chance to thank them personally. :-) Thanks, Scott 
|
-
 One of the things that many people have asked for over the years with ASP.NET is built-in support for developing web applications using a model-view-controller (MVC) based architecture.
Last weekend at the Alt.NET conference in Austin I gave the first public demonstration of a new ASP.NET MVC framework that my team has been working on. You can watch a video of my presentation about it on Scott Hanselman's blog here. We'll be releasing a public preview of this ASP.NET MVC Framework a little later this year. We'll then ship it as a fully supported ASP.NET feature in the first half of next year. What is a Model View Controller (MVC) Framework? MVC is a framework methodology that divides an application's implementation into three component roles: models, views, and controllers. - "Models" in a MVC based application are the components of the application that are responsible for maintaining state. Often this state is persisted inside a database (for example: we might have a Product class that is used to represent order data from the Products table inside SQL).
- "Views" in a MVC based application are the components responsible for displaying the application's user interface. Typically this UI is created off of the model data (for example: we might create an Product "Edit" view that surfaces textboxes, dropdowns and checkboxes based on the current state of a Product object).
- "Controllers" in a MVC based application are the components responsible for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model, and ultimately choosing a view to render to display UI. In a MVC application the view is only about displaying information - it is the controller that handles and responds to user input and interaction.
One of the benefits of using a MVC methodology is that it helps enforce a clean separation of concerns between the models, views and controllers within an application. Maintaining a clean separation of concerns makes the testing of applications much easier, since the contract between different application components are more clearly defined and articulated. The MVC pattern can also help enable red/green test driven development (TDD) - where you implement automated unit tests, which define and verify the requirements of new code, first before you actually write the code itself. A few quick details about the ASP.NET MVC Framework I'll be doing some in-depth tutorial posts about the new ASP.NET MVC framework in a few weeks once the bits are available for download (in the meantime the best way to learn more is to watch the video of my Alt.net presentation). A few quick details to share in the meantime about the ASP.NET MVC framework: - It enables clean separation of concerns, testability, and TDD by default. All core contracts within the MVC framework are interface based and easily mockable (it includes interface based IHttpRequest/IHttpResponse intrinsics). You can unit test the application without having to run the Controllers within an ASP.NET process (making unit testing fast). You can use any unit testing framework you want to-do this testing (including NUnit, MBUnit, MS Test, etc).
- It is highly extensible and pluggable. Everything in the MVC framework is designed so that it can be easily replaced/customized (for example: you can optionally plug-in your own view engine, routing policy, parameter serialization, etc). It also supports using existing dependency injection and IOC container models (Windsor, Spring.Net, NHibernate, etc).
- It includes a very powerful URL mapping component that enables you to build applications with clean URLs. URLs do not need to have extensions within them, and are designed to easily support SEO and REST-friendly naming patterns. For example, I could easily map the /products/edit/4 URL to the "Edit" action of the ProductsController class in my project above, or map the /Blogs/scottgu/10-10-2007/SomeTopic/ URL to a "DisplayPost" action of a BlogEngineController class.
- The MVC framework supports using the existing ASP.NET .ASPX, .ASCX, and .Master markup files as "view templates" (meaning you can easily use existing ASP.NET features like nested master pages, <%= %> snippets, declarative server controls, templates, data-binding, localization, etc). It does not, however, use the existing post-back model for interactions back to the server. Instead, you'll route all end-user interactions to a Controller class instead - which helps ensure clean separation of concerns and testability (it also means no viewstate or page lifecycle with MVC based views).
- The ASP.NET MVC framework fully supports existing ASP.NET features like forms/windows authentication, URL authorization, membership/roles, output and data caching, session/profile state management, health monitoring, configuration system, the provider architecture, etc.
Summary If you are looking to build your web applications using a MVC approach, I think you'll find this new ASP.NET MVC Framework option very clean and easy to use. It will enable you to easily maintain separation of concerns in your applications, as well as facilitate clean testing and TDD. I'll post more tutorials in the weeks ahead on how the new MVC features work, as well as how you can take advantage of them. Hope this helps, Scott 
|
-
The last two days I've been speaking at the the MIX:UK conference that was held this week in London. We had a sold out crowd of 500 people come to learn more about some of the new Microsoft web technologies. I gave 5 talks at the conference, including the Keynote and 4 breakout talks: Building Silverlight Applications with .NET (Part 1 and 2), and Building ASP.NET 3.5 Applications with VS 2008 (Part 1 and 2). I also had the chance to participate on 2 panels (including a really fun one where we sat around and drank tea, ate biscuits, and discussed technology trends). Below are the slides + demos from my talks if you are interested in downloading them. Building Silverlight Applications with .NET (Part 1 and 2) This two part session drilled into how to build Silverlight 1.1 applications using .NET. I really like the slide + sample approach of this talk (I first gave it at MIX:Hungary in June), and think it provides a really good way to learn the programming concepts of Silverlight 1.1 using .NET. Note: All samples are built using the current Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and VS 2008 Beta2 with the Silverlight Tools Alpha Installed. Building ASP.NET Applications using VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 (Part 1 and 2) This two part session was primarily a demo driven talk that shows off many of the new improvements for ASP.NET with .NET 3.5 and VS 2008. - Click here to download the slides from the talk.
- Click here to download the samples from the talk (these require VS 2008 Beta2).
To learn more about VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2 for web development, please also check out these recent blog articles of mine that cover some of its features in more detail: General: VS 2008: ASP.NET in .NET 3.5: LINQ to SQL: New Language Features: One last note... I usually get at least 4-5 emails a week from people asking whether they can re-use some of my slides/samples for their own presentations (or books). My answer to this is always "absolutely!" Please do not worry about asking for permission on this - you can always re-use any of the content from my talks and blog postings (and feel free to re-use slides and decks wholesale). I write this content to help people learn how to use .NET - so you helping spread the information is pure goodness from my perspective (my blog is technically not part of my official job, rather just a side hobby I enjoy and find useful). Hope this helps, Scott 
|
-
Several people have sent me mail asking what conferences I'll be speaking at over the next few months. Below are a few events where I'll be covering ASP.NET, LINQ, VS 2008 and Silverlight content: MIX:UK 07 Conference in London on September 11th and 12th I'll be doing the keynote for this Microsoft event, as well as (at least) 4 technical breakout talks covering ASP.NET "Orcas", VS 2008, LINQ and Silverlight. You can learn more and register for the event here. Please note that the early-bird registration discount ends this Friday - so sign up soon. Heartland Developers Conference in Omaha, NE on October 18th and 19th I'll be doing a keynote for this event, as well as 4 technical breakout talks covering ASP.NET "Orcas", VS 2008, LINQ and Silverlight. You can learn more and signup for this event here. Microsoft ASP.NET Connections Conference in Las Vegas from November 5th-8th I'll be doing a keynote and several technical breakout talks on ASP.NET, LINQ, AJAX and VS 2008. If you haven't attended ASP.NET Connections before, I definitely recommend it. They put on a really high quality show with great speakers. It is co-hosted with VS Connections, SharePoint Connections, and SQL Connections, which means you can also attend great sessions on other related .NET technologies. You can learn more and register for the event here. Hope to see some of you in person soon! Scott 
|
-
Earlier this week I presented three breakout sessions at the ASP.NET Connections conference in Orlando. Below are the slides / demos for each of the talks I gave: Introduction to "WPF/E" This talk provides a good introduction to "WPF/E" - which is the code-name for a new small, cross platform browser runtime that enables developers and designers to deliver richer, more interactive web experiences. I first blogged about "WPF/E" here. You can download the slides+demos from my WPF/E talk here (it includes a video sample - which makes the overall download ~10MB). The talk provides an overview of the core capabilities within the WPF/E CTPs today, and also demonstrates the core XAML and JavaScript programming model concepts you use. For more "WPF/E" samples please visit the online "WPF/E" sample gallery on Channel9 here. You can also download documentation and samples on the official "WPF/E" MSDN site here. Mike Harsh on my team also maintains a fantastic blog that covers WPF/E here that I highly recommend subscribing to. Building Data Driven Web Applications using LINQ This talk provided a drill down of LINQ (which will ship as part of our "Orcas" release), and demonstrated some of the dramatic productivity improvements it will bring for ASP.NET. Click here to download the slides for this talk. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend watching my 20 minute video that demonstrates using LINQ with Visual Studio "Orcas" here. You can learn even more about LINQ and how to use it with ASP.NET by reviewing some of my past LINQ blog posts. Here are a few in particular worth reviewing: Lastly, to learn more about some of the new C# and VB language features coming out with "Orcas" (and which LINQ heavily uses), please check out the first two posts in my language series here: I'm going to try and post the next installment in my language series (which will cover Lambdas) in the next few days - so stay tuned for that. ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks: This talk covered ASP.NET UI, AJAX, Caching and Deployment Tips and Tricks, and Visual Studio 2005 tips/tricks. The samples include updated versions of ASP.NET AJAX that all work with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. You can download the slides+samples here. You can learn more about the Visual Studio build performance optimization suggestions by reading this past post of mine on improving build performance. Hope this helps, Scott 
|
-
I'm in Orlando the next few days presenting at the spring ASP.NET Connections / DevConnections conference. There are about ~1500 people attending this week's conference, which is a great turnout for the spring show (the fall show is in Las Vegas each year in November, and had almost 5,000 people last year). On Tuesday, I'll also be presenting on ASP.NET and Visual Studio "Orcas" at the Space Coast .NET User Group. The presentation starts at 6:30pm and is free for everyone who wants to attend. You can register online to attend the talk here (you can also find the address of the event and driving instructions). Hope to see some of you there! Scott 
|
-
Ryan Olshan and StrongCoders have helped put together a great ASP.NET live web chat for later tonight. It includes an all-star cast of MVP experts to field questions (I'll be there too to help answer questions). You can join us from 8-9pm EST (5-6 PM US West Coast Time) tonight to participate. Details can be found on Ryan's post here, and on the MSDN Chat Center. Hope to see you there, Scott P.S. Apologies for the 150+ unanswered comments on my blog this week. I was taken out by the flu the last few days and haven't been online. I will post the comments and respond this weekend. 
|
-
I've finished my whirlwind speaking tour of Europe (Belgium, UK and Netherlands in less than one week), and was fortunate to have had the chance to present to several hundred people along the way. Many thanks to everyone who came out to attend my talks! Here are the first two slide decks + samples from the talks I gave: ASP.NET Tips and Tricks: This talk covered ASP.NET UI, AJAX, Caching and Deployment Tips and Tricks, and Visual Studio 2005 tips/tricks. The samples include updated versions of ASP.NET AJAX that all work with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. You can download the slides+samples here. You can learn more about the Visual Studio build performance optimization suggestions by reading this past post of mine on improving build performance. You can also find several dozen more ASP.NET and Visual Studio Tips/Tricks of mine on my Tips and Tricks summary page. Building an End-to-end Web Application from scratch using ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX, IIS7 and Visual Studio: This talk walked through building a rich data-driven application from scratch using ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, IIS7 and Visual Studio (all of which are now officially shipping products). You can download the deck + completed sample here. This talk demonstrates the following features: IIS7 distributed configuration, Master Pages, Building a DAL using DataSets, Building Data Driven Edit Pages, Building Catalogue Browsing Pages, Site Navigation, Url Rewriting, Site Navigation, CSS Control Adapters, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, Membership/Roles, IIS7 Admin UI, SQL Cache Invalidation, and WebPart portal support. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I'll be posting more slides+samples from my other talks in the days ahead (including my Orcas and WPF/E talks). 
|
-
One of my goals this year is to use video more with my blog. My theory is that video is often a better medium than text to walkthrough how something works, and can also help you avoid the tedium of reading though some of my really long blog posts... :-) Over the next few months I'm going to try and create a new video every other week or so on various topics. Many of these videos are going to involve first looks at some of the new features coming with Visual Studio "Orcas", which is our new release that will ship later this year. For today's video I decided to focus on introducing LINQ - which I think is one of the most exciting features coming with "Orcas". At a high-level, LINQ makes the concept of query a first class programming concept within .NET. Using LINQ you can easily query relational databases, XML files, as well as any plain-old .NET object. You can also easily use your own data source abstractions with LINQ to provide rich domain models for various data providers (for a great example of this check out Fabrice's LINQ to Amazon implementation that supports LINQ queries against Amazon data exposed via web-services). Both VB and C# include rich language integration with LINQ as part of the "Orcas" release, including full intellisense, compile-time checking, and debugging support. Watch or Download the Video This first video starts with a new project, and then demonstrates the basics of using LINQ against a SQL Database to build a simple data reporting page (including support for aggregate values computed from multiple tables, and efficient server-side paging within the database). You can watch the video online here (it is 24 minutes in length). Or you can download a .zip version of it here if you want to save and watch it locally. Note that it might take 30-60 seconds to buffer (since it is a large video). In the event that my server is swamped with requests, I'll update the location and post it on one of the Microsoft video servers later this week. For more information on LINQ (including the slide deck for a "Building ASP.NET Data Driven Application Using LINQ" talk of mine), please check out my previous post here. For other ASP.NET 2.0 Tips, Tricks and Tutorials please check out my ASP.NET Tips and Tricks summary listing page. Specifics Topics Covered in this Video My walkthrough in this video illustrates a number of new features: 1) A brief demonstration of some of the new WYSIWYG HTML designer capabilities (including split-view and a brief look at the new CSS manager - both of which I'll cover in more detail in the future in a separate video): 
2) How to create classes that model data using the new VS "Orcas" ORM designer for LINQ to SQL: 
3) How to use the new LINQ intellisense support within the VS "Orcas" code editor to get full intellisense and compilation support for queries: 
4) How to use LINQ to SQL to create a data report that combines Product entity data with aggregate unit and revenue values computed from OrderDetail entities associated with the Product entities. This data report uses server side database paging to efficiently retrieve only 10 rows of data at a time (so that with a 100,000 row products table you only ever retrieve 10 rows of data from the database regardless of which page index you are on within a report): 
Future Videos I'll be drilling into LINQ some more with future videos (I barely scratched the surface with this one). Additional segments will include content on: - Type inference and the "var" keyword (and why that is so cool)
- Supporting Insert, Update and Deletes scenarios using LINQ to SQL
- Using SPROCs with LINQ to SQL
- Richer JOIN support with LINQ to SQL
- LINQ to XML and LINQ to Objects
- Using the new LINQDataSource controls and other ASP.NET Data Controls to easily create Web UI with LINQ
I'll also obviously have many more ASP.NET and web-related video topics to cover including: - The new HTML WYSIWYG Designer and CSS support
- Client-JavaScript Intellisense
- JavaScript Debugging
- ASP.NET AJAX Extender Support
- Database Dump and Upload Integration
- Unit Testing
- Multi-targeting support (showing how you can use VS "Orcas" to build ASP.NET 2.0 projects - without having to upgrade your framework/server)
Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you have other topics and/or subjects you'd like me to drill in on with videos, please post them in the comments section of this post. 
|
-
I just wanted to give a quick update on a few presentations I'm giving in the weeks ahead: Brussels, Belgium: I'll be presenting two talks ("First Look at Visual Studio and ASP.NET 'Orcas' and "ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX Tips and Tricks") in Belgium on February 1st (next Thursday). You can attend the event for free. More details can be found here. Reading, England: I'll be presenting four talks ("First Look at Visual Studio and ASP.NET 'Orcas', Building an end-to-end application using IIS7, ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX and VS 2005 Part 1 and 2, and "First Look at WPF/E") at the WebDD event at the Microsoft campus in Reading on Saturday February 3rd. Orlando, Florida: I'll be presenting the keynote and several breakout sessions at the ASP.NET Connections conference in Orlando from March 25th->28. If you haven't attended ASP.NET Connections yet, I highly recommend it. It will have 40+ great talks done by excellent speakers in a great location. You can learn more about it here. 
Hope to see some of you at the upcoming events! Scott 
|
-
-
 Yesterday Channel9 posted a video interview of me with Rory Blyth that was filmed earlier this week.
During the interview I talk about WPF/E, VS Orcas, IIS 7 and the upcoming Microsoft MIX conference on April 30th - where Ray Ozzie and I are the keynote speakers. I also talk about having my car towed by Microsoft campus security. Click here to watch it. - Scott 
|
-
Ron Jacobs recently published a podcast with me for his ARCast.net show (which is a free Podcast series aimed at architects). In the podcast we covered a couple of topics people might find interesting: - Some of the history behind .NET and specifically ASP.NET
- The importance of prototyping (and how not to screw it up)
- The importance of developing "soft skills" to be a successful architect
The prototyping discussion is one that I think has a lot of relevance to many projects out there. It is a best practice that I really encourage all developers to dedicate more time towards -- since done right it really allows you to experiment and quickly try out a lot of ideas and concepts that can help you dramatically move the innovation dial on your projects. The critical thing with prototyping is to ensure that you never, never, never allow prototype code to morph into becoming production code. Don't try and "clean it up" or "refine" it to make the prototype code production grade. This type of "clean up" rarely goes as far as it should, and usually ends up starting a project off on a very poor footing. And checking in "quick and dirty" prototype code to an existing code-base is kind of like tossing in a bad apple into a barrel of good ones - you can easily end up with "code rot" spreading across a code-base this way. It is always much better to simply start a blank new project and import the prototype concepts -- and not the code -- to the project. Spend extra time up front ensuring that the new production code starts off at 100% production quality, and don't try and save a few days by re-using the lines of code in the prototype. What you'll find after a prototyping exercise is that writing the "real" production code from scratch ends up going much faster than you might have expected, since the feature ideas are much more fleshed out in your head and consequently you'll have a much deeper understanding of how the implementation should be structured. The code quality bar will also be dramatically higher. I recently ran into this with one of the ideas I've been playing around with prototyping in my spare time the last few weekends. I had some pretty complex dispatcher logic that I'd been working on and morphing overtime as I experimented with features and approaches. I knew that once I'd finished playing around with some of the programming model ideas I'd be able to clean it up considerably - but it wasn't until last night when I set aside a few hours to write a new implementation from scratch that I was able to see just how dramatic an improvement I was able to get over the iteratively developed prototype one. I suspect most people will see similar code improvement/quality results by being disciplined and making sure that they consciously throw-out prototype code once they've finished iterating/learning from it. To listen to the podcast in full visit Ron's podcast link here. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I just saw that Paul Glavich also just posted another podcast with me here. Show contents on this second podcast include: ASP.NET AJAX (aka Atlas), WPF/e, Windows Workflow/Cardspace, BLINQ and Script#, and Visual Studio 2005 SP1. Definitely check it out too! 
|
|
|
|