I have been a huge fan of jQuery ever since I started working on IdeaPipe about 10 months ago. Mostly because of its simplistic DOM access using standard CSS syntax that we all have to learn anyways in the modern Web 2.0 world. In addition to the ease of finding elements on your page, it also works very nicely with other frameworks, I have used it in combination with Microsoft AJAX, Google’s GData JavaScript, and TinyMCE.
Personally I found this to be amazing news, because Microsoft is shipping an Open Source project, licensed under MIT License, with its flag ship developer tool, Visual Studio. Maybe if we play our cards right, we can start seeing other projects like NUnit and Moq start to ship with Visual Studio. I have my fingers crossed.
Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).
We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24×7 with Microsoft PSS.
This is probably some of the most exciting, because it means that jQuery will be a supported stack in some of the more rigid enterprise development environments that won’t install anything that isn’t supported by Microsoft. I also beleive this is great news for MVC, because jQuery makes MVC just that much more useful for the average developer.
Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor. My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation.
If you think you might attended the meeting please make sure to register, so that Bill has an accurate count for the food order.
User Group News
* Please distribute this notice throughout your development community!
We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site.
September 17
ASP.NET Dynamic Data, MVC & Web 2.0
Wednesday
Malvern, PA
Our monthly meeting will be held at the Microsoft Greater PA Office in Malvern, PA on Wednesday, September 17 from 5:30-8:30. Refreshments are provided courtesy of Vovéo Marketing Group. Please register on our web site. Detailed directions are on the Microsoft Greater PA web site.
5:30
Rachel Appel, Appel Consulting An Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data
If you are tired of the same old ASP.NET webforms, GridViews, and ADO.NET data access code that make up your current applications, then you’ll want to take a closer look at ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET Dynamic Data is Microsoft’s new technology that provides a template infrastructure for your application, page and fields based on your application’s data model. In this session you will learn concepts and use of application templates to create ASP.NET dynamic data web application. We’ll then create customizations at the application and page levels showing how easy website maintenance is when using ASP.NET Dynamic Data. We’ll also cover field level customizations by supplying data display formats, custom field types, and data validation based on the application’s data model.
Rachel Appel lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania and is the senior technology consultant at Appel Consulting. Rachel is an MVP and a member of ASPInsiders, and holds the MCT MCAD & MCSD certifications. She has been working as an instructor, software developer, architect and DBA for a wide variety of organizations. She is the Vice President and a regular speaker of the dotNetValley user’s group, as well as an active member in other local user groups of Northeastern Pennsylvania and the tri-state area. Rachel’s expertise lies within developing solutions that align business and technology using the Microsoft .NET family of products.
6:45 Q&A
Rob Keiser & Dani Diaz, philly.net co-leaders, ask questions, get answers from your peers!
Nicholas Berardi, Vovéo Marketing Group MVC & Web 2.0
Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor. My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation.
Nicholas Berardi works for Vovéo Marketing Group in Malvern, PA as a Software Architect. He is the co-author of ASP.NET MVC Website Programming, Problem, Design, Solution published by Wrox and will be released early 2009. He received his BS in Information Science and Technology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2003. Nick has been using C# and the .NET framework since its beta and has over 10 years of experience in web development and related technologies. He helped to develope one the first websites on the internet to use the ASP.NET MVC framework, in a production environment, at http://www.ideapipe.com. He blogs at http://www.coderjournal.com.
Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements
The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code
WCF improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services
Streamlined installation experience for client applications
Improvements in the area of data platform, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and support for SQL Server 2008’s new features
Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1
A number of improvements have been made to Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation including:
Version Control
Simplified the user experience through cleaner “Add to Source Control” dialogs, drag and drop support to the Source Control Explorer and a much easier to use “Workspace” dialog for working folder mappings.
Version control now automatically supports non-solution controlled files.
Various changes to the Source Control Explorer such as a new checkin date/time display column, local path hyperlink support and en editable source location field.
Work Item Tracking
Microsoft Office 2007 integration is now done using the standard Office “Ribbon” delivering a cleaner and easier to use integration to the different Microsoft Office 2007 products.
Email integration for work items and links for Team system Web Access to make it easier to use email as part of the development lifecycle.
Visual SourceSafe migration tool
The migration tool has been dramatically improved through many performance and reliability improvements. SP1 provides support for the elimination of namespace conflicts, automatic solution rebinding, improves timestamp coherency and increases the amount of migration logging information available.
Additional Features
Support for using SQL Server 2008 with Team Foundation Server.
Team System Web Access provides “live” links to work items and checkin emails. This improves the customer experience for users who do not use Team Explorer.
Scripting support for the creation of Team Projects.
Performance and scalability
With SP1 a large part of the focus was to improve the performance and scalability of Team Foundation Server through changes such as faster synchronization with Active Directory, improved checkin concurrency, a faster way to create source tree branches, online index rebuilding for less maintenance downtime and better support for very large checkin sets.
Improvements in the number of projects a server can support that make not only the scalability of the server better but also the client experience when connecting to a server with a large number of projects on it.
During the install, of TFS 2008 SP1, I received the error: Failed to call WMI on the RS server. I did some searching on Google and found a post that I did back in November on the same problem. I followed my exact same steps and it fixed the issue. I don’t know why this DNS issue continues to cause Microsoft problems, but I really wish they would fix this bug.
I have been a huge fan of MySQL for a long time. It is the perfect database for when the budget is tight or you are not working in a Microsoft Environment. It performs well, and has a huge following of dedicated professional programmers that use it day in and day out on some of the largest websites on the planet. Most noteable Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Digg. Even with all these proven capabilities to scale and perform, Microsoft has choosen to ignore it and focus on some of the monolytic providers of databases such as IBM and Oracle when comparing SQL Server.
However that has all changed with the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008. Microsoft has set its focus on MySQL. This is a huge turning point for both companies, because it means Microsoft is starting to take the needs of the Web 2.0 crowd, which MySQL has dominated, just as seriously as the big iron installs they have always catered to.
I am not sure if this comparison has been spured by the purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems, or if Microsoft has started to feel the preasure from Web 2.0 MySQL installs, or a little of both. But none-the-less this is very encouraging, because it means that Microsoft is finally taking the needs of the “cloud developers” seriously.
I just downloaded Opera 9.5 Mobile for my Windows Mobile phone. And I have one thing to say. Wow! This brings a more standard compliant browser to your phone to replace the aging Pocket Internet Explorer. Opera 9.5 Mobile event beats the iPhone version of Safari in the ACID 2 and ACID 3 tests, so it is an amazing experience to finally get the full web, as it was intended, on my mobile device.
The features of Opera Mobile 9.5 will include the following:
Intuitive user interface
Tabbed browsing
Improved text wrap
Page overview, zooming and panning
Landscape mode
Save Web page for future offline access
Call phone number from Web page
Send link as SMS/MMS
Send image as SMS/MMS
Small Screen Rendering
Password manager
Web address input auto-completion
History and bookmarks
Copy text
Opera Widgets
The user mhalachev in the forums had the following to say about his first impression (and issues with the beta) of Opera Mobile 9.5:
- The default keyboard is altered when I start opera. (this one was quoted a lot of times, but it’s very important for be, because I use alternate IME with cyrillic text input)
- It is not necessary to pop-out the IME automatically every time, especially on devices with qwerty keyboard.
- When I double-tap to zoom-in outside of a paragraph, it always zooms to the top-left corner of the canvas and not to the point where i’ve tapped. I don’t know how you determine the exact size of the zoom-in area, but I’ve noticed that if the element is defined only with css properties (e.g. page header with backgroud-image) it zooms to the top-left.
- It would be nice if you implement the soft keys to do something (I’m running it on Kaiser, but most wm devices have softkeys too), like in Opera Mini, where I can access the menu via soft keys)
- It would be nice too if it’is possible to scroll and zoom with the d-pad, like in Opera Mini.
- The Kaiser has a Tab key on the sliding-out keyboard. (other devices have too) You may catch it and make Opera jump between page links, like a tab key on a “normal” PC.
- I liked the black theme on the first screenshots that you’ve posted in February. It will look good on the black htc theme. Think of making a theme, that takes it’s colors from the device’s theme.
- I have the Flash plug-in installed (Pocket IE displays flash), so I would like to see flash content in Opera. The kick-ass mobile browser will be that one, that displays flash content along with AJAX.
- Talking of AJAX, I would like to congratulate you for the support in Opera Mobile! It displays correctly various ajax-enabled sites, incl. the google reader for iphone etc. Various dom and dhtml gimmicks are rendered (almost) like on a desktop pc.
- I would also like to suggest once again to take some of the navigation and control options from Opera Mini (the softkeys and the d-pad), because they are very convenient while on the go, with one-hand operation.
So as you can see this is pretty typical beta software with the normal line up of things to do before the gamma release. But I definitely recommend checking it out. This is a video produced by Opera to demonstrate the features of this new release, in case you are not convinced yet.
The following are know issues with the current release, as noted by Opera:
ActiveX is disabled — Flash plugins and embedded video streaming do not work.
Custom IME’s (like HTC’s IME) will be buggy at best, not working at worst.
Not multilingual build — Only English is supported. Problems with other languages (and input methods) are not unexpected.
Installation on memory cards may cause problems.
Text wraps in overview mode.
Main testing has been done on English HTC devices (Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, Touch, Touch Dual, Touch Cruise, TyTN and Wizard) and Samsung i900.
We have got reports from some users that this build will disable the phones sounds/notifications.
Firefox 3.0 is going to be released today at 1:00 PM EST and 10:00 AM PST, other times can be found here. This is going to be a huge release where the Mozilla team is going for the Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in one day.
I have included a schedule below of the events for today leading up to the actual release. When the even is completed it will be marked as such on the official Firefox 3.0 Release Wiki.
repackage & sign builds with new name
June 13th
send signed windows builds to AV partners
June 13th
move new web content to authstage
June 16th, 2:00pm PDT
QA tests web changes on authstage
June 16th, 5:56pm PDT
QA tests live builds (fresh install, overwrite existing Fx2)
I for one can’t wait. I have been purposely not downloading the Release Candidate versions so I could be surprised by the massive upgrade that Firefox 3.0 is suppose to be. My wish list includes:
Less crashes through better memory management
Better bookmark management
And a less clunky interface
I will update this post through out the day so visit back to get my reaction to FF3, and some screen shots.
Well I have officially seen everything now, it should be a sad point in my life, but I was cracking up during this whole rap video. This video is of a computer science rapper, which sort of out does the web standards rapper that I posted last week. What is even more amazing is that he uses the famous, computer science book, The Mythical Man Month in his rap. So I definitely think he is an actual computer science student at Stanford where this video was shot. Enjoy!
You’re the tertiary storage; I’m the L1 cache.
I’m a web crawling spider; you [sic] an Internet mosquito;
You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.
You’re a dialup connection; I’m a gigabit LAN.
I last a mythical man-month; you a one-minute man.
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