PeterKellner.net

 

Introduction

The Final Project when running:

Tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 23rd), we are having another meetup to talk about using MVC inside of Sencha’s JavaScript products.  I (Peter Kellner) will be talking for the first 20 minutes about how we are integrating the MVC pattern in our Silicon Valley Code Camp web site, then Ed Spencer from Sencha will follow on talking a lot more about MVC and best practices as well as Q&A

Hope you can make it.  Details are here:

http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-ExtJS-Meetup-Group/events/28760211/

Checkout the new session viewer we put together for Silicon Valley Code Camp.  Using one of the very cool Sencha demonstration pages (Forms Dashboard), we build a page that let’s you easily navigate all the sessions as well as express interest in attending them.  Come read about it as well as play with it. You don’t have to be logged in, but then you miss half the fun (selecting interest in sessions).  The source code is right under your mouse. Press View Source once you are on the page and you’ll see how simple it was to build.

Also, if you have not registered for our code camp, being hold October 8th and 9th at Foothill College for the 6th year in a row, please do so now at our registration page.

Blogged here and available here

Let us know what you think!

For my final of 3 presentations at DevConnections Orlando is about building a hugely performant web application with html5 storage.  The app we built was a simple photo viewer that let you first look at hour images on line, then view them being pulled from local storage.  Here are a couple screen shots of what we built:

And, here is the Visual Studio 2010 Project File:

To build fully-featured web applications that support complex interaction in a reasonable amount of time requires a high-end JavaScript library. Someday, maybe JQueryUI will be good for this, but for now, the choices are few and include ExtJS, Dojo, YUI and a handful of others. This session will use ExtJS as the example. We will use Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC as the data / CRUD layer and from that, we will build a typical LOB (line of business) application using complex UI elements. Those elements include layout managers, data grids, extensive validation, spinner controls and other advanced UI features. To get an idea of what I’m talking about, spend five minutes looking at the examples on the ExtJS web site demonstrating these advanced web UI features http://www.sencha.com/products/js/. You will be convinced that spending hundreds of hours trying to build something not nearly as well done as this is a waste of time when there are such excellent libraries already built for you.

The source attached below for my demos.

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!

Over the past couple years, the focus of the web development I’ve been doing involves building highly flexible, highly scalable and straight forward web sites to implement and maintain Line of Business (LOB) applications.  As you can probably tell from my posts, I’m very “practical” focused, and at the same time have a desire to build awesome web applications.

The technology pairing I’ve chosen is Microsoft’s .Net platform with MVC on the server, and ExtJS on the client.  Though it’s possible to still use ExtJS with standard html/aspx pages, I’ve found the best combination is to use 100% JavaScript on the client (ExtJS) and have all the server side technology be 100% service based.  I’ve used LINQ2SQL extensively as well as Entity Framework in the latest Visual Studio 2010 release.

The learning curve was quite steep to actually be able to efficiently build highly flexible, highly scalable applications using these technologies, but now that I know it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m considering putting together a series of 4 Day Classes around the country (or even world) that would basically teach people the methods and patterns I’ve learned and essentially leap frog a development team into being able to quickly do what it has taken me years to figure out.  I’ve been fortunate enough to know the top 1% instructors and I’m sure with the right incentive, can get them to join me in both putting together these classes as well as teaching them.

Yet another great meetup with the ExtJS San Francisco Group (though not meeting in San Francisco this time).  ExtJS has moved it’s main office and developers out here to Palo Alto, California and volunteered to host our meetup.  They provided pizza and beer and I’d say it was our most successful event so far! 

http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-ExtJS-Meetup-Group/calendar/12527913/

Most of the ExtJS team stayed until after 9.  The team introduced themselves to start the event, then we got presentations of all kind of cool upcoming technologies from ExtJS that we promised not share because it was top secret.

I’ve posted more pictures to FaceBook at the following URL:  Click Here  I believe you will have to create a facebook account if you don’t have one to view them.  It would be great if everyone can Tag themselves so next time we will all know each other.

Abe invited us all back so I’m sure we will have the chance to all see each other again.  Here are a couple shots, including the rock band at the end of he meeting starring Tommy.

(above picture courtesy of Mats)

Mats and I met today in Palo Alto for lunch to talk about the upcoming Meetup January 7th (in two weeks) at ClickTime.  We’re looking forward to both Mats presenting his Ext Scheduler, seeing some cool tricks from a surprise Ext Core Developer, and of course seeing old friends.

We also talked about Mats incorporating his schedule component into the Silicon Valley Code Camp Web site.  We had 145 sessions over 2 days so it’s a target rich environment for the schedule component.  I can’t wait to see how it looks on the site.  Stay tuned for more blog posts.

My friend Mats Bryntse, who you may know from our our San Francisco ExtJS Meetup group based in San Francisco, has written a very pretty impressive scheduling component built for the Ext JS framework.

http://www.ext-scheduler.com/examples.html

You can choose between several different time resolutions and easily change the styling since all items shown in the grid are created by a standard Ext Template. The interaction is pretty straight forward, to create a new item in the grid, you just click somewhere and drag. Can’t be any easier. To modify an item you can both resize and use drag and drop. If you are looking for a way to schedule your resources I recommend you check this UX out!

I’ve been a very happy use of Foxmarks over the years for keeping my bookmarks in FireFox up to date.  Turns out, they’ve renamed themselves to xmarks I guess so that people don’t assume they just do Firefox.

Basically, the way it works is you create an account on their server, then for firefox you download a plugin, and for IE you download an extension.  Like magic, your bookmarks just stay in sync!

Today was my first time doing 2 presentations during the same day at a professional conference (VSLive, Las Vegas).  Both sessions were fun to present and hopefully the audience got as much out of it as I did.  Lots of great questions, several twitter posts and best of all, they both finished on time (that is, I finished the material at the time I meant to!).

Here is the material for the first presentation:

Last night, I gave a 90 minute presentation on how to use ExtJS with ASP.NET serving up the data at the San Francisco Microsoft Office to what seemed to be between 50 and 100 people.  I started out with just a basic overview of ExtJS, starting with a hello world app, then, finally building it into a full blown paging, updating, inserting and deleting Membership Management editor.  The final application is actually here if you want to see how it runs:

Last week, we had our 5th Meetup of the San Francisco ExtJS Meetup Group at ClickTime.  Xiaohui Chen and I both presented different aspects of some new features in ExtJS V3. Specifically, I showed you to use the new Proxy Writer to do restful CRUD operations from ExtJS to Asp.Net with ease, and Xioahui presented using the new Direct (RPC calls) ExtJS 3 feature for taking those same CRUD calls but passing them through an RPC gateway rather than through REST type calls.

Lots of great feedback from the group.  Here are some pictures of us.  ClickTime provided pizza and soda (and also BTW, is looking for a great ExtJS/JavaScript/.Net engineer).

At tonight’s meet up, we will be having several short presentations on the new features in ExtJS version 3.0.  For my short presentation, I will be showing how to build a simple asp.net application that lets you Create, Update, Delete and Edit Membership data using the ASP.NET built in membership providers.  I will be leverage code from an MSDN article I wrote a while back here along with the URL to the meetup location.

http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-ExtJS-Meetup-Group/calendar/10302891/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478947.aspx

My plan is to do a progression where I start with a trivial GridPanel, then work myself in 5 steps to a full working membership editor that looks like this:

Programmatically setting JavaScript into an ASP.NET page is very straight forward when you do it in code.  That is, in my case, I simply put it in the Page_Load event of the page and have it load from there.  I’m currently working on an ExtJS project that requires me to show some details on a page that I want to show with JavaScript.  I’ve nicely modularized all the JavaScript into a name space so the code that I want to include on my ASP.NET Page looks like the following:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" >

    ASPWeb.newsGrid.loadTypeId = 229490;

    ASPWeb.newsGrid.init();

</script>

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.

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)