• The Basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• JavaScript Tools
• jQuery Basics
• jQuery Advanced

Last week I gave this presentation in Madison and it was very well received. And this presentation is not .NET specific, so if you have any interest just in jQuery and AJAX please feel free to attend this presentation. I will be going through everything you need to know to start building interactive web interfaces with jQuery.

Below is the information for the Milwaukee and Fox Valley meetings:

Milwaukee

November 11
7:00PM

Direct Supply Inc
6663 N Industrial Road
Milwaukee, WI 53223
Map

Fox Valley

November 12
6:00PM

Fox Valley Technical College
Room A161A
1825 N. Bluemound Road
Appleton, Wisconsin 54912
Map

The appeal that I see with Amazon WS is the fact that the charges are accumulated by the hour. Amazon WS also has an API to allow developers to create control systems to manage their virtual servers. With the API you could fire up the additional seed servers as new content is pushed to the primary seeding server to replicate the content ahead of publishing the new torrent content in the RSS feed used by torrent clients like µTorrent.

And hosting content is not that expensive. I recently saw hosting for 1 terabyte of bandwidth for about $7 a month. That is really quite cheap if someone wanted to produce their own audio or video content and make it available on a minimal budget. It should not be necessary to rely solely on YouTube to host your video content. You could produce quality video and host it yourself on a virtual servers in the cloud and not have to deal with the low quality video that YouTube is still using. Services like hulu.com are pretty impressive. I have been watching full screen movies on my 37" LCD with my attached LCD TV and it is better quality than Time Warner cable.

Connect the dots and you can see that the traditional media distribution mechanisms are already far out of date.

Cable is going to have to step it up, and YouTube as well.

IIS specified authentication schemes 'IntegratedWindowsAuthentication, Anonymous', but the binding only supports specification of exactly one authentication scheme. Valid authentication schemes are Digest, Negotiate, NTLM, Basic, or Anonymous. Change the IIS settings so that only a single authentication scheme is used.

A forum post showed me that I had to disable Integrated Windows Security because the automatic ASP.NET compatible service host already had a different security mode in place. The forum post explained to turn off that default setting and suggested it was necessary to do an IIS Reset. I actually just restarted the Application Pool for the affected web site and was able to fix the problem. Now the WCF/AJAX functionality works as it did on my development machine.

I stayed with classic ASMX for a long time mostly because it worked with very little effort. The biggest trouble with WCF is that it gives you so many options which have to be set so precisely or nothing works. It is maddening and pile of documentation you have to go through to get the right answer is overwhelming. A recent video I discovered on Channel 9 showed how to meticulously make a WCF service AJAX friendly. It was a pretty extensive configuration but I found that I needed to enable web sessions (not wcf service sessions) and there was no simple way to do so, until I came across documentation that reminded me about service host factories.

Specifically, the WebScriptServiceHostFactory allows me to configure my service host to automatically be AJAX friendly. I do so by adding the Factory attribute to the service host declaration.

<%@ ServiceHost
    Language="C#"
    Service="AcmeService"
    CodeBehind="~/App_Code/AcmeService.cs"
    Factory="System.ServiceModel.Activation.WebScriptServiceHostFactory"
    Debug="true"
%>

Using WebScriptServiceHostFactory allows me to strip all of the configuration details out of system.serviceModel in the web.config that I added to manually make it AJAX friendly. To enable back end support to use web sessions I had to set add a little to the web.config.

<system.serviceModel>
  <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />
</system.serviceModel>

To enable web session support I added the AspNetCompatibilityRequirements Attribute and set it to be required.

using System;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.ServiceModel.Activation;
using System.Web;

[AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Required)]
[ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:Acme.Services")]
public class AcmeService
{

    [OperationContract]
    public void DoWork()
    {
       // Use HttpContext.Current.Session
    }

}

Now the deserialization works perfectly and data is structured according to how I have set up the DataContract objects. Now I can get back to work and get this thing completed!

One live interview in the mix of all the events on that day that morning sticks out in my mind. A reporter was interviewing a woman who was recalling how she saw these horrific sights that were still happening as they looked out over the rooftop of a building near the twin towers. The shear intensity of what she saw was so much she could not continue to describe it. She lost it and the reporter just broke down and put his arms around her. There were no words necessary to relay what they were both clearly feeling.

The day after I remember a discussion among news commentators and a writer who noted that during all of the coverage of the previous day the word "tragedy" was carefully avoided by everyone on every network. Each person had a sense that somehow that word did not accurately describe what they were covering and experiencing. The twisted anguish caused by the events were too visceral to be explained with a simplistic description.

As the news spread to other countries I remember the phrase "we are all Americans today" from so many people. That was the silver lining on a dark day. We are in this together so take care of each other. I always want to remember that detail.

It has been 7 years. If you think about it, some of the first responders who died that day had children who were in grade school. Now they are through high school and are either in college or possibly taking up work in the same positions as one of their lost parents. Many of them are children of firefighters. They should have the equipment they need to do their work as first responders. You can donate to The Leary Foundation to help firefighters in New York, New Orleans and Massachusetts. This foundation was formed by Denis Leary in 1999 after six firefighters were killed in his hometown. Over the years the foundation expanded to provide resources to New York and New Orleans. It is a very worthwhile charity that has a real impact. Just giving $20 is all that is needed. Every little bit counts.

Tonight Jeff Palermo is presenting TDD, DI, and SoC with ASP.NET MVC at 7pm at Direct Supply. Already there are over 100 people registered which is much more than we normally see at a monthly presentation. Attendance is even more than the AJAX presentations, which has to say something.

It is going to be an interesting night and I hope to get some insight into how I can leverage MVC in future applications. I have some ideas and some of what I have seen with MVC makes me uncomfortable, but the presentation tonight may bring me around.

Below are the details:

Unified Communications Group Inaugural Meeting

Come be a founding member at our inaugural Unified Communications User Group meeting!

• Learn and share your thoughts and ideas around Exchange, Office Communication Server, LiveMeeting, Presence, VOIP, and other collaborative techniques.
• Meet like-minded peers who share common interests and challenges
• Learn -> Understand -> Share!

We are privilege to have our first meeting in the Quadracci Pavilion, at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Wednesday, June 25th - Meeting Agenda:
4:00pm - 4:15pm Welcome! – First User Group Kick-Off
4:15pm - 5:00pm Christine Malone - Microsoft Unified Communications Solution Specialist – speaking on UC
5:00pm - 5:15pm Break
5:15pm – 5:45pm Steve Zimmerman – CIO of Prent Thermoforming to present on their OCS and Exchange UM implementation.
5:45pm Networking

Sign up here or visit www.wucug.net for more information.

The newest book to be released is JavaScript: The Good Parts (170 pages) by Douglas Crockford who is the lead JavaScript Architect at Yahoo. He knows all about the bad parts and in this book, which I ordered and just shipped a minute ago, covers the good parts that you can use that will allow you to create the kind of web site that will make your users ecstatic and win you more fun and interesting projects.

Last year I read Pro JavaScript Techniques by John Resig who is the creator of the wildly popular JavaScript library jQuery. All of the books that I purchased just a few years back, covering advanced topics like DHTML (a term that makes my eyes roll), were using horrible syntax which did not allow for building advanced sites due various problems that are easily overcome with techniques explained in Pro JavaScript Techniques. You will learn about scoping, namespacing, inheritance and how to handle cross-browser issues.

Later this year a new book by John Resig called Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja will be published. The book is made up of topics suggested by the community through his blog which were not covered in depth in his first book or any other book out there. I am extremely anxious to get my hands on this book. Resig has an uncanny talent when it comes to JavaScript and reading his last book was an eye opener for me and I expect to learn a great deal more with this next book.

It is an important year for JavaScript. With competing technologies like Flash, Adobe AIR and Silverlight fighting for market share it is necessary for JavaScript to keep pace and it is not standing still. Soon the standard for JavaScript 2 will be nailed down and features like the Canvas in HTML5 and SVG will offer major competition to the proprietary alternatives. Now is a good time to retrain yourself on JavaScript. I strongly suggest you pick up these books.