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SV Code Camp is happening next weekend with well over 200 sessions.  The conference is really technology agnostic and try hard to keep it that way, but I am an ASP.NET guy these days so I think it reasonable I take my Code Camp Coordinator hat off for the moment and put on my ASP.NET hat.  As an ASP.NET Microsoft MVP, I feel I’m in a good position to give a tour of some sessions in ASP.NET and throw in my own 2 cents.  Below are a list of these sessions in no particular order.

Demystifying ASP.NET MVC, $(Lino).MVC{getknowledge()}

Sunday, October 9th 9:45AM

MVC (Model View Controller) is one of the hottest patterns around building web sites these days no matter what the technology. When Microsoft first introduced Web programming to Visual Studio, they did it such that almost anyone who had done windows programming (VB or other) could quickly come up to speed and build a web site. Personally, this what sucked me into web programming. Drag a button, drag a textbox, double click on the button and add some code to set the text box and WHAM, you have a web site. Unfortunately, as things get more complicated, this model does not scale so well. ASP.NET’s MVC implementation does scale, it takes a little bit of flipping your mind around if you are Web Forms programmer, but definitely worth learning about and seeing if it’s right for you.

Lino Tadros is one of my favorite presenters and I’m sure will give you a much better understanding of MVC and how it fits into the ASP.NET programming model. I strongly recommend this one. Lino is the CEO for one of the top Application development and training companies in the world that partners with Microsoft, Falafel Software. In other words, GO TO THIS SESSION!

Pragmatic JavaScript, jQuery & Ajax with ASP.NET

Saturday, October 9th 1:45PM

Damian Edwards is a Program Manager on the Microsoft ASP.NET team.  That’s right, he is flying here from Redmond just to present to us.  He’s also an awesome presenter and we are extremely lucky to have him at Code Camp!   Damien will tak about using JQuery while building sites with the Microsoft ASP.NET framework.  Something Damien knows very very well.  For those who don’t know, Damien is also leading the next generation efforts around ASP.NET WebForms which is the technology 90% of who use ASP.NET use (it’s what the silicon valley code camp web site is built with).

DON’T MISS THIS PRESENTATION!

WebMatrix In Depth

Saturday, October 9th  5:00PM

John Sheehan, one of the best guys I know at explaining complex things is presenting this session on WebMatrix.  I’m not sure everyone would agree with me, but for those people that really don’t like the heavy weight feeling of building web applications with Visual Studio, WebMatrix will make you feel right at home. It’s much lighter weight and also gives tons of punch.  Come see John and ask him a million questions!  He loves that.

All the sessions Tagged ASP.NET can be found here:  http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx?sortby=title&by=category&tag=3

Say you have an existing Microsoft Windows Forms Application and you want to create a class library for it to reference.  For some reason, I’ve been stuck with this problem for a while now and I accidentally found the “unintuitive” button by accident of how to do this. My expectation was that when I created a new solution in Visual Studio 2010, that it would show 1 project in the solution and then to add more projects, I’d right mouse button on the solution and say “Add New Project”.  Sadly, the solution explorer does not show me my solution, just the one project I have in it, regardless of whether I opened it directly (for which I think it creates it’s own solution) or I opened from my newly minted solution file.

That is, here is what I get when I create an empty solution, then add one project to it (no solution showing!)

The way I do Windows Azure development is that I have OneClick Deployment setup on my Azure host.  This means I can simply and quickly update what I have on my Azure WebRole and test it without going through the 10 to 20 minute deployment process.  Sometimes, when I’m tired, I accidentally press the “Debug” or “Run” button on my Visual Studio 2010 cloud project.  This launches a 2 or 3 minute process that I have trouble killing.

Today, I accidentally figured out a way to stop it.  Simply go to the web project and right mouse button on your project and say “Publish”. You will be immediately presented with an option to stop the deployment!

That’s it.  Simple, but pretty undiscoverable IMHO.

Background

This post shows a very simple technique for processing a gzip compression on a background thread using c# with Visual Studio 2010.  What is unique here is we are using no statics to do it.  I’m not totally against using statics, but in general, it is best to avoid them.  I’ve heard the notorious Ward Bell say statics are evil and have had many cases where they have bitten me.  Since I heard Ward say this, I’ve been trying to avoid them where I can.

The Simple Problem

The problem is to simply compress a file to bytes and return to us the compressed, uncompressed and byte array of the result.  We can pass parameters into a thread, however we can not return them (when I say thread, I mean the anonymous method that processes our data).

MSDN has a very nice article on how to create a windows service that hosts a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service.  It explains all the details of doing this in a step by step fashion.  One thing that I often find missing from these articles is the actual Visual Studio project that I can download and play with.  What I usually do is put that together myself (which I’m sure is the author’s intent).

To save anyone some time who wants to do the same thing, I’ve created a VS2010 project from the example, added a very simple Windows C# console application that consumes the service, as well as made some small changes in a very nice Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) calculator project so that the calculator does it operations inside the windows service rather than in the calculator itself.

In this article, I’ve attached the source code (with my small changes and additions) for you to work with and change as you like.

One of the very cool new features in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to “Pin” a variable you are watching, right in the place you want to see it.  It’s always been a hassle to have to add a “Watch” and keep track of it among all your other watch variables.  I guess I shouldn’t really complain because I’ve always really like the debug capabilities in Visual Studio, but I have to say, this new “Pin” is really nice.

This article is very short.  In the actual presentation, there was not much time to talk about this so a brief overview was done.  Basically, it’s all standard WCF stuff.  The idea is that the Silverlight Business Template adds logging in and supports Authentication just like an asp.net application does.  It uses the DomainDataSource to do the bridging between the silverlight clientside app, and the web application.  Authorization is built into the login module also so that you can assign attributes to your domainservice classes to restrict access.

In this section, we will talk about what happens when the users presses the “Sessions” hyperlink from the speakers page.  If you remember from the last article, we used a special converter on the Speakers.xaml page and bound that to the hyperlink titled sessions as shown below.

In this article, we will use the the Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 Tooling to create a Sessions DataGrid.  We will add a Pager to it as well as a Silverlight busy indicator which will show while the data is loading.  In Article 1, we build a simple DataGrid with code behind, in this article, it will all be declarative in XAML built with the Visual Studio 2010 designer.

This series of video presentations goes through the process of building a Speaker and Sessions Viewer for Silicon Valley Code Camp’s data using Silverlight 4 and RIA Services (Using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2).  It starts with a brief introduction of RIA Services and is followed by screen casts and blog posts the parallel each screen cast.

The actual presentation was done at the Microsoft office in San Francisco.

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:

I’m currently watching an online video (400 level, very high) from PDC while flying home from Chicago (and blogging about it).  One of the common patterns I often implement is to write some code that does a bunch of “Thread.Start” type stuff and “Thread.IsAlive”.

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT21

With PLINQ, this can be avoided with clean error free code (as long as my method is thread safe).  Here is some simple code that demonstrates this.