PeterKellner.net

My guess is 75 people showed up at Dolores Labs last night for this meetup.  It lasted about two hours and had about 6 great presentations.  Douglas Crockford kicked it off with a discussion on upcoming security models around new versions of JavaScript followed by several other presentations that included a Google engineer showing cool Google Labs projects, several JavaScript frameworks and other very cool things.  Dolores Labs is down a small alley where I was sure I was lost.  Marked 83A was a non descript door with two flights of stairs. Then, a roomful of engineers, lots of ethernet connections, beer and pizza.  What else could we ask for.

Below are some fun pictures I took. Not sure if it does justice to the fun that was had.

Many thanks to Matt Humphrey for organizing the event.  Job well done!!!

Come hear about how to see ExtJS integrated with ASP.NET for awesome Membership and Profile Management!  I will speaking at the Microsoft Office at a meeting of Bay.Net Users Group.

http://www.baynetug.org/DesktopModules/DetailXEvents.aspx?ItemID=378&mid=49

ASP.NET: Membership with Profile and High Performance ExtJS JavaScript Interface

When: 

Wednesday, 5/20/2009 at 6:30 PM

Where: 

Microsoft Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco

Event Description

In this session, we will demonstrate building a super rich JavaScript interface to the standard ASP.NET Membership and Profile services. That is, built into ASP.NET are wonderful providers that allow you to validate and store user credentials typically to a database. It also lets you store other information such as pictures, first and last names, as well as anything else you may want to store. In this session we will build a highly performing, 100% JavaScript UI to maintain hundreds of thousands of users. As part of this solution, techniques for using REST based services to access this information will be presented. Once you see this, it will be hard to ever use web forms again.

We’ve been looking to find the best Cloud based host to put our soon to be virally growing web site up on.  Our requirements are it must run IIS7 and use Sql Server 2008 as it’s database. We have lots of wants (like Service Broker, Replication, etc.) but primarily we want the web tier to scale easily.  After doing research and testing, we got frustrated with our options at Amazon’s EC2.  We emailed their support (with our paid support contract) and were basically told we should go do our own Windows research to find out what works best.

At any rate, I emailed Steve Evan’s who is a frequent speaker at conferences and also an expert consultant on all things Windows and IT related and asked for some advice.  He told me that he had been asked that question often recently by others so he would do some research and get back to me.  He did one step better.  He wrote a blog post describing the ups and downs of the different cloud providers including Amazon’s EC2.  I respect Steve’s opinion a lot and rather than try and paraphrase it, I’ll just link to his post.

Here it is:  http://serktools.com/2009/04/20/load-balancing-iis-web-farm-on-amazon-ec2/

Good luck and feel free to post comments here if you’ve got opinions on Cloud Hosting of IIS and Sql Server 2008.

If you are using an IMAP client and you want to set certain folders to be synchronized when you are offline, you need to simply do the following while you are running outlook.

First, Press Ctrl-Alt-S (you’ll get the screen below)

Then, Press the Edit button (second from top left)

From there, you can choose which of your IMAP account you want to set (see the button bar on the left)

Now, you simply choose the bottom radio button which says “Use the custom behavior defined below” and you can decide which folder will get synchronized.  For example, I synchronize my inbox and my starred folders as well as a few common others ones.

This should make it easier to run outlook in offline mode.

Hope this helps.

Firs

I’m doing two sessions at VS-Live in June.  Both sessions are in the asp.net track. One is on High Speed performance in ASP.Net, and the other is on using ExtJS (a brilliantly fast rich JavaScript library).  Hope to see you there!

Here are the descriptions:

VM1

Build Blazingly Fast ASP.NET Apps with 100% Clientside UI ExtJS

Peter Kellner

Intermediate

Need a web application that has the responsiveness and interactivity of a forms app but still looks and feels like a web? One of the best kept secrets (at least to the Microsoft community) is ExtJS. It’s a different paradigm then we are all use to, but the results are spectacular. Take a look at this url and you will see as well as learn how to do this yourself. The hardest part is shuttling the data back and forth. A lot of this session will be talking about how to do a real world app that does this. Once you go this way, you’ll be gone from serverside forms for almost ever.

http://portlandcodecamp.org/default.aspx

Portland Code Camp – May 30, 2009 at Reed College

Building asp.net Membership with ExtJS (Super Rich JavaScript Library)

JavaScript | extjs | ASP.NET

In this session, we will demonstrate building a super rich JavaScript interface to the standard ASP.NET Membership and Profile services. That is, built into ASP.NET are wonderful providers that allow you to validate and store user credentials typically to a database. It also lets you store other information such as pictures, first and last names, as well as anything else you may want to store. In this session we will build a highly performing, 100% JavaScript UI to maintain hundreds of thousands of users. As part of this solution, techniques for using REST based services to access this information will be presented. Once you see this, it will be hard to ever use web forms again.

Over the past week, I met lots of people I know from the ExtJS forums.  It was great fun.  I also met two of the authors of “Learning Ext JS” (Shea Frederick and Steve Blades).  Both are really interesting guys.  When I got home, I was looking at Shea’s web page (aka VinylFox on the forums) and noticed he has some great tutorials posted. Here is a link to them.  I’m sure they are going to be very helpful for me.

http://www.vinylfox.com/category/extjs/tutorials/

(BTW, in case you missed it, Release Candidate 1 for ExtJS 3.0 is now out, very awesome new features)

(Steve Blades at ExtJS Conference in Orlando)

 ExtJS is having it’s first conference.  The JavaScript software company is releasing 3.0 of it’s flagship software.  As many of you know, I’m using ExtJS quite extensively now and am very impressed with the quality of the library, as well as the outstanding people who make it.  I was fortunate enough to be at the right place and time today to join them as well as their featured keynote speaker, Douglas Crockford for dinner.  Below is our group.

So, I asked the following question in at http://forums.asp.net/t/1408631.aspx

The problem is, I’ve got 30 methods that all have the same signature, but have different implementations.  Mike Banavige (the lead moderator at the forums) suggested I look at the following article on reflection:  http://www.csharphelp.com/archives/archive200.html.  Turns out, that helped my solve my problem exactly.  Rather than go through a lengthy line by line explanation, I’m going to post some of my before and after code.  It’s pretty clear what is happening, but I thought it would be nice to show a real example.

At MIX09 this year, Scott Guthrie presented the Web Platform Installer which seemed like an easy way to install specific technologies on an IIS server.  At the moment, I need to test an application that uses PHP so I figure this is a good time to try it.  Over the years, I’ve had several spectacular failures trying to install PHP on IIS.  Now, maybe I will get it right.  So, here we go.

Step 1: Read the walk through ( http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/523/web-platform-installer-walkthrough/ )

Step 2:  Click Install now  (Can’t find PHP, starting searching the web now)  {Note: 4/14/2009. Turns out I missed an easy step.  See bottom of article for that step}

Found this link:  Install PHP with Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0

Step 3: Go Here and try again:  http://php.iis.net/

So, I’ve always incorrectly thought that somehow, the cookie stored in asp.net was somehow tied to the Session provider in asp.net.  Turns out I’m wrong.  This came up because I was discussing with another engineer whether we need to bother with a Session provider since we do not use Session in our web application.  That is, we don’t ever store information by saying something like:

Session[“MyKey1”] = “MyShoppingCartInfo1”;

My assumption was that somehow, the Cookie planted on the client’s browser was in lock step with the IIS server through Session and that even if we did not store Session data, we still had to hook up a Session Provider.  Wrong I am.

Falafel Software is putting a three day training course in their new training facility in Capitola from Monday to Wednesday April 13-15th.  As many of you know, I’ve used Telerik control in many projects and have blogged extensively about my experiences.  The control toolkit is hugely rich and very well written.  Personally, I never had the chance to do a training class and managed to learn the toolkit on my own.  This seems like an awesome opportunity to learn from one of Telerik’s best partners.  I hope you can make it!

For more information, check out the link here:

http://www.falafel.com/telerik/radcontrols_winforms_openclasses.aspx