Random .NET Ramblings

This last Tuesday I had the pleasure of giving a talk to the San Diego ASP.NET group about developing a web site for mobile clients. The talk did not have a lot of code but we did look at the difference of how simple HTML renders vs. using the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit. I should have pointed to the asp.net web site for it?s mobile support http://www.asp.net/mobile/ as there is some good resources there including a good article from Scott Hansleman ?Mobile Web Sites with ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File? from his MIX09 talk.

If you were there I hope you enjoyed the talk and I look forward to giving more in the future!

It looks like Novell has made it easy for .NET developers to create and deploy Mono based applications to Linux. This should scare Microsoft quite a bit, one of Microsoft's big concerns is to win server market share on the internet. They have created the WebsitSpark program just try to attract PHP developers to deploy on Windows and here is Novell making it easy for .NET developers to deploy to Linux. Looks like there will be some interesting times ahead for Miguel and the MS relationship people.

Test, package .NET apps for Linux with Visual Studio add-in - Ars Technica

For the record I can't see using Linux, Windows Server 2008 R2 has such good hosting tools now it would be much cheaper to Windows in the long run and at scale.

Last night I was able to present to the San Diego ASP.NET Users Group about Visual Studio 2010 and after some difficulties in downloading the Beta 2 the day before I was able to show the latest Beta.

On the cool factor I think the editor Zoom was a hit and many of the new debug features were also a big hit. If you were there let me know what your best feature you saw was. There was just not enough time to go through everything, I did not get to show some of the cool demos around ASP.NET and site deployment. I have posted my slides to SildeShare and embedded to below but for more information checkout The 10-4 Show on Channel9 and the VS 2010 / .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit.

Just yesterday I commented on twitter how I dreaded giving a 101 talk on the .NET Framework and I was pounced on in twitter and email with comments about how needed that type of content is desired. Like many people once I know something I tend to think everyone knows it… I need to break myself of that!

So today I found a two (new to me) sites that Microsoft has for getting stated…

• Ramp Up
  • This is new part of MSDN that has some quite complete content and helps you track a learning plan.
• www.msdev.com
  • This is a site targeting solution providers but anyone can use the content

Update: SI forgot one of the more amazing offers Microsoft has going right now. it’s called Jumpstart and you get 60 days of free hosting, free Expression Web and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.

Mix Online Labs has released a great tool to help creating jQuery scripts for common interactive scenarios… If you go to the Glimmer site and read the related blog posts for more information I especially like the post by Tim Aidlin about the development of Glimmer.

Microsoft has teamed up with several web hosting partners to offer 60 days of free web hosting and Microsoft also gives you the software to do the development with.

This should make it easy for anyone who wants to tryout the Windows web platform. For all the details and a list of the hosting companies go to the web page Microsoft Web Platform and enjoy!

From all that I have seen Brad Abrams as the best wrap up of what is in SP1 at hi blog post Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 "SP1" Beta. It did not hurt that I stopped looking after I found it ;).

I recently able to help the Southern California DotNetNuke Users Group to host a virtual presentation by Shaun Walker the dotNetNuke projector founder. We used Microsoft Live meeting to project Shaun's slides and show is real time demonstrations to the group in Buena Park, CA while he was at his home in Canada.

To get all the information about the meeting and how you can view the recording go to Michael Washington's blog post entry about the meeting on the dotnetnuke web site.

LA event next week... sorry for the late heads up.

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I just had a wow moment... I was not paying attention to the presentation I should be paying attention to and catching up on blog reading and found this entry by Adam Hems Link to A British Geek in Texas Pontificates : Caching in Winforms / SmartClient Apps. The interesting thing he suggests is to use the System.Web.Caching namespace on a Windows Form application to cache client data... WOW I have used the winforms namespaces in a web app in the past but I never thought to try the reverse. I can't wait to play with this.