One of my goals for PDC this year has been to better understand the Microsoft data story about how to work with clients better (Silverlight, JavaScript, Forms, etc.). RIA services has been on my radar for quite some time. I was hoping to get some good conversations about this, but never expected to get almost an hour with Nikhil, the inventor of RIA services.
(more…)One of the fun parts of being an MVP is that occasionally we get asked to help at Microsoft events and answer questions around topics that are just fun to talk about regardless (and usually includes a free lunch). Today, I was sitting at the ASP.NET Dynamic Data table. We probably had about 10 people come and go. turns out, the most interesting topic was Commerce server. One of the guys at the table talked about a LINQ provider they developed that lets you make commerce server look just like any other LINQ data source.
Here are some pictures from my table.
(including, by twitter handles @Zannabanana and @EmilyF)
So, for those of you that don’t know me well, suffice it to say, I have less than no sense of direction. I always manage to make my way home, but often with a lot of zigs and zags. So, why should this morning be any different. After arriving in LA around rush hour, I thought the best move would be to take the bus to Union Center (downtown LA), then the train to the convention center. On the bus, I met a very nice Japanese woman (living in LA) who helped me get on the train in the right direction. Having shorter legs than me, I got to the convention center first and promptly started walking in the wrong direction. She chased me down and let me know that I was heading in the wrong direction.
(more…)We are in the process of “speeding up” our ExtJS application. I’m just finally figuring out the rules of the road for doing this. Here are a couple of rules I believe to be true
We are using a library http://atashbahar.com/post/Combine-minify-compress-JavaScript-files-to-load-ASPNET-pages-faster.aspx and it’s working well for us. This project does a nice job of calling a minifier, gzipping and caching.
Hoe this helps!
Just a quick post in case anyone is wasting 10 minutes figuring out how to do this. For me, this came up because in Sql Server 2008, NVARCHAR(MAX) is 4000 characters and I needed more. The recommended datatype to use for more is VARBINARY. When I did that, LINQ2SQL converted that type to Linq.Binary. (using encoding)
So, in my C# code, here is what you need to convert to the Linq.Binary:
(more…)Cutting to the chase, I choose Vladimir Bodurov’s Color Formatter!
For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a project that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC for providing data to our pure JavaScript application. That is, there are no web forms, no dynamic HTML generation, just 100% JavaScript running on the client. I’m using a library called ExtJS which gives us high quality “forms like” user interactions and MVC for getting the data. That is, the Application looks like this:
The data retrieval URL used by the JavaScript look like:
(more…)
For the past couple years, I’ve used a product called FinalBuilder from VSoft Technologies to automate my build processes. Since I’ve been building web sites (about the past 5 years or so), one of the biggest hassles is maintaining them. That is, updating the databases, deploying the web site, automating backups, etc. I’ve used several products like FinalBuilder (including Cruise Control), and to be honest, none of them come close to the quality of FinalBuilder.
Basically, the way the product works is that you create a “project” file using the FinalBuilder IDE. That project file has “Actions” in it which do things like “ftp” files to servers, rename files, iterate over sql scripts, parse and update files, checkout from source control, as well as hundreds of other convenient functions. You then execute that “script” file and all the magic happens.
