Brennan’s Blog

On Tuesday we had our local installfest holiday part of the new release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. This was a big one. I feel like I have been hearing about multi-targeting and LINQ for years now. A few weeks back I wrote a summary of my favorite new features. In that post I forgot to mention the new code metrics, so I followed up with a summary of that great set of features.

Since I had a copy of Visual Studio 2008 prior to the installfest I was able to dig in and build a little application that I showed during my mini demo. I call it Kvetch Reborn because it is a recreation of the original Kvetch.com which is no more. I made use of LINQ to get it up and running faster than writing the stored procedures I have typically used with .NET 2.0.

I also made use of the ASP.NET AJAX features to convert a web service into a JavaScript proxy so the methods provided by the service could be used directly from the client-side. The service callbacks are extremely lightweight. Most communications are measured in bytes while your average ViewState is multiple kilobytes. I have been leveraging this functionality for several months now since it was released with ASP.NET AJAX release last year. But now it is a bit easier with intellisense support for JavaScript. You can try it and download all of the source with the following links. In later blog entries I will detail exactly how it was all built. Check back for those details.

• Online Demo
• Source

It was a great event. We nearly filled the seats with an expected attendance around 200 people. There were lots of prizes thanks sponsors like KForce, Fullhouse Interactive and Apress. All of the tasty food was sponsored by Centare. And Microsoft also threw in some big prizes like the Xbox Elite, Zunes and lots of other great prizes.

I especially want to thank Matt and Kerrie at Direct Supply and Patrick at Northwood Software for helping out the .NET User Group this past year by hosting events at their facilities. I look forward to more meetings with them.

Lastly I want to thank our organizers and hosts: Scott Isaacs, Gerry Heidenreich, Larry Clarkin and Dave Bost. Without them these events would not happen. Thanks guys!