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This past Wednesday, I presented a front end performance session for how to make web sites work well.  I primarily covered the content from from Steve Souders Excellent book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers.

 

Not being a browser engineer, my knowledge is not the best in that area so probably the talk was a little dry.  We did spend a bunch of time talking about the the Sprite library just released to codeplex from the Asp.Net team.  That was  a great discussion!  I plan on talking more about that at my upcoming DevConnections talks in Orlando (very soon).  One interesting note was that there was a browser compatibility slide regarding sprites from Microsoft.  One of the attendees said “Peter, are you sure that Sprites are only supported on IE 8 and above?”.  I said I was sure that is what the document that I got from Microsoft said.  Well, I had several emails today with the Asp.Net team including the author of the document and though I don’t know the final answer, I’m sure that the Microsoft document was wrong on browser compatibility.  It seems that css and sprite support would work all the back to IE6.  When I know more, I’ll post a comment below with a link.  I’m sure Microsoft plans on updating that doc.

That’s it for now.  Below are some pictures from before the meeting.  I’d say that we had about 75 people in attendance.

 

The same authors who write the original Learning Ext JS are back and definitely with a winner here.  Just to start out, the book is about a third longer, has a new contributing author (Nigel White, aka “Animal” on the ExtJS Forums) and definitely packs a lot more content.  You get the feeling these guys took the feedback they got on the first book and went to town.

To start with, they have lots and lots of examples covering a lot more areas. There is a lot more architectural discussions that really help in building high end ExtJS applications. Chapter 13 for example is completely devoted to code reuse (extending ExtJS).  New features such as Ext.Direct are discussed extensively as well as the new graphics library (but don’t take that too seriously because it is being replaced with a non-flash version in ExtJS 4.0 which is coming out soon).

Overall, I give this book a solid A.  I’m even fortunate enough to get mine signed by Shea Frederick, one of the authors (see picture below).

 

 

Hope you get a chance to read this great book!

I’ve been slowly building up my Azure experience over the past few months and actually plan to release a product using Azure during the next month or two.  Programming Windows Azure has been a huge value to me in learning both the basics of the Azure platform as well as the details.  It has a great balance of theory verses practice.  I strongly recommend this book if you are new to Azure or even if you have experience with Azure.  I often find myself going back and re-reading sections to better understand things.

 

Two of the sections I feel are particularly well written or the ones that talk about Storage and Tables (chapters 7 and 8).  The application I’ve been working on heavily uses blob storage and I spend lots of times re-reading those sections.  Azure tables is a hard topic to get a sql server programmer like me to get my head wrapped around.  Sriram does a great job of talking directly to someone like me to help me understand how and when to use tables.

Again, I whole heartedly recommend this book.

For those of you that have been sleeping for the past year, Cloud computing is Hot!  Amazon more or less lead the way with their cloud computing platforms for the longest time with new comers like GoGrid, Google and Microsoft coming along with their own offerings more recently.  The offerings are quite complex, both licensing, capabilities, costs etc.  One of the nice things about this book (among others) is it gives detailed discussions in the beginning of several different offerings as well as their licensing models (which do change often so check directly with the companies).

On to the review..

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You all know that I’ve blogged quite a bit about LINQ2SQL.  That technology has saved me a huge amount of programming effort verses using ado.net directly.  We all know that LINQ2SQL is really just a stepping stone to Entity Framework (EF), though Microsoft doesn’t quite say that.  I’m sure, based on how many people are using LINQ2SQL, it will live on and be supported for quite sometime.  Personally, I’ve been waiting for EF to become more mature and then, I assume I’ll start all my new projects with it (EF) and slowly migrate my old ones from LINQ2SQL to EF.  So, time for me to start taking EF more seriously.  It’s baked into the upcoming .net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 2.  It’s obviously not done, but from what I’ve seen, when .net 4.0 releases, EF will be ready for prime time.

Now, for the review:

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For the past year or so, I’ve been spending part time learning JavaScript.  My reason has been we use ExtJS extensively in my company and it’s written in JavaScript.  ExtJS is very object oriented so any book that tries to present JavaScript in an OO fashion is a big help.

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Andrew Siemer has written an excellent book about how to best use .Net (specifically with asp.net as the front end web technology) to build a social networking site.  He literally starts at the beginning and builds service by service, screen by screen, data table by data table what is necessary to build the site.  A lot of Andrew shows is not only just web type stuff, but he shows many best practices for building .Net applications in general.

Among other things, the goes in to great detail on the following topics:

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I’m sure many of you know Lynn Langit.  Her role at Microsoft has been a Developer Evangelist of many of the business software offerings from Microsoft including Sharepoint and SqlServer and it’s many offerings.  She’s always been a wealth of great information about those products and it’s great to see she’s got a book out about one of her favorite topics, Business Intelligence.

So far, I’ve read the first four chapters and have skimmed the rest.  I am so far very impressed with both how well it’s written and the depth of topics the book covers.  As I read more, I’ll come back and update this post.  I have no doubts I will get a lot out of this book, as I’m sure practically anyone else who buys it will also.

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William Bartholomew just published a new book on MSBuild and TFS. There is a great forward by Richard Hundhausen (Famous TFS Author and top MS consultant).  I personally don’t use TFS yet, but I do use MSBuild and plan on using it more extensively for web deployments going forward.  I have not yet read the book, but am anxiously looking forward to.  It is a topic that IMHO has been very under documented.  This should be a big help!

***(This book has been replaced by a new one from the same authors titled Learning Ext JS 3.2 and you should order that one and not this one)

I’ve been learning ExtJS now for a couple months and it’s great to see someone has written a book for it. I just bought it and downloaded the E-Book version of it and from what I can tell it looks great.  I’ll post a more detailed review later, but for now, here is where you can get it. (Note:  2/11/09:  I love this book.  I still plan on writing a more detailed review, but for now, I thought I’d put a brief comment.  I carry it around with me every where  go (almost everywhere).  It has great examples and great explanations -Peter)

I’ve been working on a project lately that requires a lot of JavaScript, and if any of you are like me, you’ve had trouble learning the language well.  Over the years, I’ve taken several runs at it but have not been successful.  Sure, I could always to basic stuff, but it seemed that when ever I need to do anything useful, I just could not figure it out.  Well, times have changed.  Mostly based on my need to know the language, I am really starting to feel good about the language. I’m understanding scoping, I can throw functions and arrays around as well as actually do useful stuff.

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First off, I wasn’t in the market to buy a c# book, but after seeing that Jon published one by Manning I couldn’t stop myself.  Jon has been such a great and prolific poster on the internet forums that If felt at a minimum I should support him in his book effort, and Manning, always seems to bring us great books.  I have been totally happy with my decision.  It’s a great book.  I don’t know Jon personally, but after reading the introduction and premise, it’s hard not to just really like this guy.

So, on to the review…

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Windows Powershell is something I’ve been meaning to learn for quite some time.  It started out as the Monad Project at Microsoft and I remember seeing it discussed at Code Camps but never spending the time to go.  I thought it was just another command.com with special commands.

Turns out, I was very wrong.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s strength is that you can reference .net assemblies directly.  That means, you can access everything in .Net just like a first class language.  Be that C# or VB, you can get to all of it.  You can write your own assemblies and reference them as well!  It of course if fully object oriented, very rich, and full error handling.  Very cool

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Many of you know that my favorite technical book in the world was Pro ASP.NET 2.0 and C# 2005 by Mathew MacDonald.  Well, Mathew has done it again.  I can’t believe I didn’t know it was coming, but there I was in the book store looking for books on LINQ and right in front of me was his new book with a nice chapter on LINQ.  So, it’s now mine!  It’s also got a large section on all the new Ajax stuff that I’m looking forward to reading.  I’m mostly a back end database kind of guy but I know I need to learn the javascript stuff better.  I can do it, but not as well as I’d like to be able to.

Run don’t walk.  go buy this book!

Amazon.com: Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008, Second Edition

Now that Visual Studio 2008 has RTM’ d, I’m very motivated to learn LINQ.  Like most of us, I’ve read articles, seen presentations, talked a lot about it, but now, it’s time to begin in earnest.  What does that mean?  Time to get the books and start doing some serious examples myself.  I just bought the book "Pro LINQ Language Integrated Query in C# 2008" and so far am very impressed.  Because I’m a total newbie to link, I started with the first chapter (very unusual for me).  That was a good overview of the different types of LINQ.  One thing I learned was that all those names like dlinq,xlinq, etc. are no longer valid.  I kind of thought that, but couldn’t find it written explicitly anywhere’s else.  I think it’s one of those things everyone knew but me.

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I’m basically a back end database kind of guy, but over the past years have been doing more front end web stuff.  Asp.Net has been a huge help for me, and now with Visual Studio 2008 and the JavaScript debugging capabilities, I’m finding doing web stuff is just not so bad.  Many of you know I’ve written several MSDN articles and one of them was over a year ago on how to add Ajax to my Membership solution (back then it was called Atlas).  The article is still out there though now a little out dated.  In it, I extensively use Alessandro’s code he posted on his blog.  My point here is Alessandro keeps up with this stuff, and as it turns out, he wrote an excellent book that’s been helping me out.

I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone trying to incorporate Ajax into their asp.net applications.  It’s not only got a great introduction, but also goes into lots of useful details for day to day programming.

Amazon.com: ASP.NET AJAX in Action

First, Matthew MacDonald is one of my favorite technical authors so I was very happy to hear that he was writing a book on WPF. I’ve been a big fan of one of his other books (Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005) for many years. I use it like a bible. To cut to the chase, Matthew has done it again. Pro WPF, though doesn’t fit in your pocket very well since it’s 980 pages is great. It carefully explains topics in WPF that are not easy to explain. I have to say I did not understand dependency properties very well until I read that section and it really cleared things up for me.

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