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!

Great news for web designers and developers, IE8 now passes the Acid2 test. You can see for yourself on Channel 9. The video shows the actual rendered image in their nightly IE8 build which will not be out until the first half of 2008. That could mean late February or late June. I expect we will get a Beta 1 release followed by a Release Candidate a month so that we can all try it out and report any breaking changes it may have caused in our websites and web applications.

I am not sure what this really means for CSS compliance. It would be great to get Firefox 3 and IE8 up to CSS Level 2 and then get moving to CSS Level 3 next. That would allow for automatically flowing multi-column layouts and other basic features the people in the print world have enjoyed for years.

In the late 90's there were a few developers and designers who were feeling out the web as a new medium. I would read their websites, which were essentially blogs before RSS existed, and they would write very personal entries on all sorts of topics. My very favorite was Maggy. I somehow came across the websites she created and quickly discovered others like Alexis Massie, Lance Arthur, Ben Brown and Derek Powazek. Each of them showed a great ability to develop and design great concept websites as well as write amazing content. The mixture of these talents made for very addictive websites.

One website that Powazek created was Kvetch.com which is no longer active. He wrote that when he moved his websites from one server to another he did not restore the Kvetch.com website. That is unfortunate. It was a brilliant idea. Essentially you could select from a handful of topics and then view a series of complaints about that topic. You could also post a complaint anonymously. (Note: Kvetch is a Yiddish word for complain.)

This week I wanted to get some exposure to various features in Visual Studio 2008 which was released recently so I thought this would be the perfect time bring the Kvetch.com concept back. When I built it originally he used inline frames while I am using AJAX as well as some nice effects with jQuery. In another post I will cover the details on how it was built. I have refactored down the AJAX work so that it is very easy to create AJAX-friendly user control with complex, yet uniquely contained, behavior.

I look forward to reading your comments.

[ Kvetch Reborn ]

Also, I hope to see you at the installfest tonight. I may give a short demo of the LINQ and JavaScript that I created for this website.

The new release for Visual Studio has been out for MSDN subscribers for a couple of weeks now and if you have tried it out you may have discovered that the Web Deployment Projects are only registered to work with Visual Studio 2005 despite interest in having this capability added directly to the IDE. Instead the add-in will be updated and released for Visual Studio 2008. Today as I upgraded a set or projects from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5 I found that the Web Deployment project that I have set up for the website was not loaded, however, I am still able to make use of the project even if Visual Studio does not know what to do with it.

I am a big fan of automation and what MSBuild can do for you. There are bits and pieces of MSBuild sprinkled all over .NET projects. Most project files are actually MSBuild scripts that you can use like any other MSBuild script. What I like to do is place an MSBuild script called build.proj in the root folder of a Solution that I use to carry out common tasks such as building and packaging the Solution. One of these tasks has been to run the Build target in the Web Deployment project for a website and then package the contents of the output folder in a zip file. I prefer doing deployments this way instead of using the publishing feature in Visual Studio which seems to take longer most of the time. Using the MSBuild script also allows me to run the build without using Visual Studio, such as when the code is on a server and not on a development machine. Once the zip file is created I can simply upload it to the server, unzip it and place the files in the directory where IIS is configured to serve up the website. For important websites I make sure to keep an older zip file around in case I need to roll back the changes.

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There are many events coming up where you can get a free Visual Studio 2008 installation. These events have filled up quickly, as Dave Bost explains. You can get a 90 day trial for Visual Studio 2008 from MSDN right now but when you get the fully licensed version you will need to uninstall the trial. The special installations for these events, however, do not require the uninstall which is a good reason to get into one of these events. But before you attend one of these "installfest" events you will want to prepare your computer with the following tips.

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I cannot believe I neglected to mention the new code metrics features in Visual Studio 2008 along with previous list of worthwhile features. Code metrics will scan your project and show you a Maintainability Index at the class and method level based on Cyclomatic Complexity, Depth of Inheritance, Lines of Code and other values. Knowing how your code looks from this perspective should help you in refactoring it into a more simple form that should save you many headaches in the future. The details are presented to you with an easy to read grid that is ideal for quick code reviews.

You can read more at the Visual Studio Code Analysis Blog.

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You can now get a stable release of the Service Factory for Visual Studio 2005. The release page shows a summary with many useful links for tutorials and videos as well as screenshots of the service diagrams. If you attended my presentation on code generation last month I mentioned that the modeling was not quite all there yet. Now it is. It is time to try this out and make use of it to rapidly build services (ASMX or WCF) as well as maintain them with this powerful tool.

Clean markup is important. If you allow a page to include sloppy markup it will switch from rendering in "Standards Compliance Mode" to "Quirks Mode" which will apply different rules to how the layout and style works. It makes for an unpredictable result and can be a major headache. One way to introduce sloppy markup into a website is making use of rich editors that spit out HTML, such as the ASP.NET Rich Text Editor Control on CodePlex. There are others like the RichTextBox, FreeTextBox and FckEditor. Each of these editors are ASP.NET controls while you can get a purely JavaScript solution using TinyMCE which is used in BlogEngine.NET. Some of these solutions do create decent markup, but in the case of the ASP.NET Rich Editor Control, it still creates HTML 3.2 instead of XHTML 1.0 Transitional which has become the de facto standard since ASP.NET 2.0. (XHTML?) It still includes FONT tags and other older syntax which has been deprecated. This is where Tidy comes in.

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I finally purchased an XBox 360 just over a month ago and I immediately started having problems. The screen would freeze at random points and I would have to restart the console. I figured it was just a problem with the games I was playing and that software updates would fix the problems. But when I did connect the console to my home network to get updates from Xbox Live the problems continued. Since the problems were sporadic it took a while to see if the problems remained or if the updates helped at all, but over the next few weeks it froze up many times. It became so frustrating because a few times it failed to save many checkpoints which caused me to redo levels that took me a long time to complete. I decided something had to be done about this flawed hardware and I planned to return it to the store. Later I would get a new one once Microsoft fixed the flaws. By this time it was past the 30 days that Best Buy allows for returns and they refused to do anything about it. If you buy a new Xbox and it locks up just once, return it right away or at least exchange it. Maybe you will get lucky the second time around.

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As a developer I find that writing for this blog has been extremely helpful. I do it for selfish reasons as well as to help others who come along who are experiencing a problem I have already overcome. And whenever I do solve a common problem I make sure to write it up in tutorial form to help others. I find that I also help myself down the road.

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