Brennan’s Blog

It won't be long before we can get our hands on the final release of Visual Studio "Orcas" and .NET 3.5. For those of us who did not attend MIX '07 you can still get a sneak peak. I watched Web Development Using Visual Studio "Orcas" by Omar Khan and I am quite impressed with the changes they are going to include.

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I have updated LinkMindr.com with a few improvements. The big change is limiting the tag cloud to just 35 of the most recently modified tags. At the bottom I have a drop down list for all of the tags so users can still access all of their tagged items. This conserves real estate on the page and makes the most used tags more accessible.

As a part of this change I also converted the page to use PostBack events as triggers for the UpdatePanel which is a features of the new ASP.NET AJAX control suite. Previously I had a clever jQuery call handle all of my AJAX functionality but with the latest changes it became easier to handle this functionality with event triggering.

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Six months ago I wrote Web Development Tools for the Power Developer which covered the progress that has been made with tools for web development. It got picked up by a few popular websites and through the various comments I learned about a few additional tools I did not know about previously. The two most useful bits that I found were Firebug and jQuery.

You can see the power of Firebug and jQuery in a demo by John Resig which I have leveraged heavily since I have seen the video. I used his example to pick apart some effects used by the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit as shown in my own video. And now my newest website, LinkMindr.com, is using jQuery as the main engine for the key functionality. Look at the source and you will be surprised that the Javascript running the website is under 40 lines of my own hand written Javascript especially for what it does.

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Meet Polita Paulus. She works on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. I just watched this interview by Scott Hanselman and Rory Blyth. They were walking around Building 42 and randomly selected her for an interview. They did not initially know she was the developer who created the GridView, much less the ObjectDataSource among several other popular controls. She was actually the architect for the entire datasource system in ASP.NET. You can see the 5 blocks in the photo which show her accomplishments.

She also created a utility called BLINQ which scans your database and generates a functional website which uses LINQ to work with all of the data. I am impressed.

I have been telling people a while now that I enjoy working with .NET because they have developers like Paulus who are very good at what they do who are motivated to make it easier to do our work. She is a prime example. I hope to see more videos of developers from Building 42.

One way to speed up an ASP.NET application is to trim ViewState as much as possible. You can do it by turning off ViewState for controls which do not need it or to move the ViewState to the server-side by adjusting the Page State Persister. To keep an eye on your ViewState you can use the following link as a bookmarklet which will tell you the length of the ViewState for the current page.

ViewState Length [save this bookmark]

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I have looked briefly at ASP.NET AJAX now that it has been released and I am trying to come up with techniques to make it easier to develop AJAX features for a website. I am finding the Firebug extension for Firefox is invaluable. As I was working with the Collapsible Panel I found that as I toggle the panel to hide and show itself the style values change in Firebug as the height and other values change. It is pretty instructive on what is exactly happening.

I created a video to show what this looks like. And you can try it yourself at LinkMindr.com.

[ Download Video ]

It has finally been released. Go and get ASP.NET Ajax 1.0!

To get a jump start on doing Ajax with ASP.NET use the training videos.

I have been building a simple website with some of the web 2.0 signature features like AJAX, RSS, OPML and tagging. It even has an moniker at the bottom indicating it is currently an alpha release. Soon I hope to have it ready for the Beta moniker.

The website works as a social bookmarking system to allow the user to save links from any computer to their LinkMindr account. The focus is on the timeliness of the links with features to give the user access to recently added links. As a part of that focus, RSS feeds are available to access the 20 latest links and links added in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. These feeds work well as Live Bookmarks in Firefox. They also work with IE7 but accessing the feeds is a bit clumsy. Below the videos show how LinkMindr works with Firefox.

I would like to get more feedback. To get you started I have created a video demo on YouTube which is shown below. You can also use the other video alternatives: SWF, WMV for higher quality.

[ Go to LinkMindr.com ]

I had several tasks I wanted to complete on several of my personal projects which I had on hold while I was busy with other work the past few months. Over the break I was able to squeeze in time between driving around the state for family visits to knock of few of these tasks off my list.

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Just in time for the weekend, Microsoft has released the long awaited service pack for Visual Studio 2005 as well as the release candidate for the much touted AJAX solution.

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