I’m in the UK today and tomorrow (on my way back from a trip to India for two days earlier this week), and am giving two tech talks while in town.  The first is this evening at a London .NET User Group event .  I’ll be presenting Silverlight 3.  Unfortunately the event is already over-registered – so if you haven’t registered yet you’ll need to catch it the next time I’m in town. The second talk is tomorrow (Friday) from 1-4pm at the Microsoft facility in Reading and is on ASP.NET MVC .  When we first announced it last week it also over-registered quickly.  Thankfully my hosts were able to get a larger room this week, though, so another 120 spots became available.  You can register to attend the talk for free until...(read more)

There’s a lot of debate these days about the ASP.NET WebForms model vs. the newer ASP.NET MVC model. There are advantages to both. Disadvantages to both. Pick the one that best fits your needs. Nuff said. But sometimes that choice isn’t so obvious. MVC for example essentially gives you much more control over the generated HTML for the page. Well, complete control. But sometimes you don’t really need complete control, and the lack of an encapsulated control kind of sucks. HTML Helpers help, but they have no design time experience. Hence, there are the MVC Controls in the MVC Futures project on CodePlex and an interesting compromise between the two models, at least when it comes to the rendering part of the application. But then there’s the other...(read more)

All of the talks at this year's Norwegian Developer's Conference were recorded, which is always a treat. I did four talks as well as a live .NET Rocks show. It was a crazy week. I also recorded a half-dozen great podcasts. Three are already live on Hanselminutes and I've got more in the hopper coming soon. The HaaHa Show - Hacking with Phil and Scott In this one, Phil is a hacker and he keeps breaking my websites. I fix them, and he breaks them again. Watch movie . .NET Rocks - Live! With Carl, Richard, Scott and Phil. This is a really silly show and was entirely content-free. ;) Watch movie . The Magic of Astoria - ADO.NET Data Services Me talking about REST and SOAP and ADO.NET Data Services. Watch movie . Making Your Blog Suck...(read more)

I got this email today from Mark….. Hello Joe, First may I say thank you very much for all the information that have published on asp.net. I have learnt allot from it. I do follow you on twitter although I am interested to know how you started out, how you gained experience to the point that you are a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft. If you are able to spend any of your time replying to this message I would be very grateful. Many thanks Mark I get an email like this every few weeks so I thought I’d blog the reply with some tips. Mark, I began as an accidental programmer when a business my father had an interest in purchased a CNC machine and had problems programming it. Through my career I worked on Main-Frames, Mini-Computers, and Micros...(read more)

Microsoft patterns & practices is excited to announce the latest addition to the p&p library of software engineering guidance: Acceptance Test Engineering Guide, Volume I (BETA 2) Codeplex site: http://codeplex.com/TestingGuidance Here is some of what it covers ! Common Scenarios – How to Plan for Acceptance Testing – What Kinds of Acceptance Tests to Run – How to Create and Run Acceptance Tests – Defining What “Done” Means – How to Justify Your Approach – How to Streamline Your Acceptance Process Contents of at a Glance PART I – THINKING ABOUT ACCEPTANCE explains six mental models that are useful when thinking about the acceptance process. Chapter 1            The Acceptance Process...(read more)

I saw Maurice de Beijer recently published a good introduction article on .NET RIA Services.  Getting started with the .NET RIA Services The post starts with a very good introduction: RIA, short for Rich Internet Applications, is a bit of an umbrella term for all sorts of applications delivered through the browser. The key aspect however is that they deliver some business function and are not just about flashy graphics. Business applications tend to work with data and other business resources so they are usually built in the standard N tier architecture. If we take a look at this N tier architecture for the most common type of business resource, the database, we typically see the Create, Read, Update, Delete, (CRUD) pattern appear all the...(read more)

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page   This post is a continuation of various recent posts, most notably: A new and improved ASP.NET MVC T4 template The MVC T4 template is now up on CodePlex First, I’d like to thank all those who are using the MVC T4 template and sent me suggestions and bug reports.  Most issues have been addressed, and most suggestions have been integrated.  I’m up to the 8th CodePlex drop, and it’s only been a week! You can see the history of changes at the top of the .tt file. Frankly, when I started playing with this, I just thought it’d be a fun thing to spend the afternoon on.  Instead, I have probably spent close to half my time working on it in the last week.  And I do have other...(read more)

Tip#66: Did you know... how to insert quotes values automatically while typing the attrib values? Tip #67: Did you know the list of ASP.Net MVC shortcuts? Tip #68 Did you know… How simple it is to attach an existing style sheet to your web page? Tip #69: Did you know…The keyboard shortcut for View in Browser? Tip #70: Did you know… how to install win7 RC IIS through command script? Tip #71: Did you know... there are several new configuration settings available in FastCGI Extension 1.5 Beta Tip #72: Did you know... you can now manage Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 from Windows 7 Tip #73: Did you know... about IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta Tip #74: Did you know…How to Add and Remove AJAX Extenders in Visual...(read more)

The standard methods for searching can be found under the Edit --> Find and Replace menu. The “Quick Find” method (Ctrl+F) allows users to search inside of the current document, all open documents, the current project, the entire solution, and the...(read more)

Visual Web developer 2008 SP1 supports multiple selection of controls on your designer using Ctrl+Click . You can see that the designer: Displays the primary selected control with a white tab. Button3 in the image below. Enable you to set property for...(read more)

From the Developers Guide To successfully deploy your .NET Framework application, you must understand how the common language runtime locates and binds to the assemblies that make up your application. By default, the runtime attempts to bind with the exact version of an assembly that the application was built with. This default behavior can be overridden by configuration file settings. The common language runtime performs a number of steps when attempting to locate an assembly and resolve an assembly reference. Each step is explained in the following sections. The term probing is often used when describing how the runtime locates assemblies; it refers to the set of heuristics used to locate the assembly based on its name and culture. Here are...(read more)

  SyntaxC4 , this one is for you ! I’m planning for some work in NETOOP and digging into the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Since  SyntaxC4 asked for it – here is a list of stuff I’ve found. I have the 1st 3 books below and review will be coming soon. Links MSDN Entity Framework Site   Entity Framework Design Blog Entity Framework Videos from the ADO.NET Team Blog Model-First Development with the Entity Framework 4.0 ADO.NET Entity Framework: What. How. Why. ASP.NET EF Video ASP.NET MVC Example Application over Northwind with the Entity Framework Integrating Entity Framework with an ASP.NET Web Site Introduction to the ADO.NET Entity Framework using ASP.NET MSDN Entity Framework Documentation MSDN Entity Framework API Documentation...(read more)

In Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 release, SQL server database schema and data can be packaged for deployment along with the website.  It utilizes Msdeploy SQL Database provider functionality in IIS team’s msdeploy release.  In Visual studio 2010 Beta1, user can set the database package options in web application project’s Deploy-SQL property page as following. User can add a package connection by clicking “Add” button and make sure it’s checked.  To select the source database for package, one can check “Pull data from an existing database” check box, and select or enter the database connection string.  In Beta1, only three packaging choices are provided for the database, “Schema only”, “Complete database” and “Exclude objects...(read more)

When you visit Norway, it takes a week to recover. Ok, at least when I visit Norway, it takes a week. But that’s just a testament to the good time I had. As they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what happens in Oslo gets recorded as a .NET Rocks Live episode . The week before last, I spent the week in Oslo, Norway attending and speaking at the Norwegian Developer’s Conference (NDC 09). This conference was not your typical Microsoft conference I usually attend but was a conference on .NET with a heavy Agile Software bent. Just looking at the speaker line-up will tell you that. Scott Bellware tweeted a blurb recently that succinctly summarized my impression of the conference: how to know you're at a good conference: the speakers...(read more)

As you are developing your site, you may want to start at a particular page for testing your web site. By defaults, when you start debugging, Visual Studio runs the page that was currently in focus in your designer. If you set this page, Visual web Developer...(read more)