jQuery News

I know this nugget is a couple of weeks old now, but did anyone catch the news that Microsoft is throwing its support behind jQuery?

So it seems that if you have been using the Microsoft AJAX tools you are probably not going to be seeing much of an effort to improve those tools in the future. Not that it really matters, since it seems that most developers have abandon that toolset about a year ago, and with the emergance of MVC, they were becoming irrelevant anyway. Also, the earlier versions of the Microsoft AJax framework had performance problems under heavy load and although they have done a lot of work to make improvements, jQuery is still far and away much faster. Plus, when working with designers who are not Microsoft centric, jQuery built a bridge for the developer and designer to work together.

I have several examples on jQuery Ajax calls in case you are interested.

My first official large site using ASP.Net MVC 2

So this past month I started working on my first large MVC web application using MVC 2, and although I have been playing around with for more than a year now, I have learned a lot in the few months. The book that was really helpful was “Pro ASP.Net MVC” Framework by Steven Sanderson. I highly recommend it if you are getting started, but you might want to wait until the MVC 2 revision comes out. If you can't wait for the revision there is the eBook "Asp.Net MVC 2 In Action." This book is good in that it covers some more advanced topics like how to keep you controllers light. I think the two books together will get you well on the way to developing in ASP.Net MVC.

So far the only hang up I had was that I had set up my solution to incorporate multi project areas which was supported in the MVC 2 preview releases of Areas. However, when the RTM came out it was no longer supported. I searched and searched for solutions to my dilemma, but the only thing I could find was post by Jonathon who basically had the same experience I had, and a reference to an obscure message on a message board saying (by what appeared to be some one from the ASP Team) that it was not supported. To date, I haven't found any more formal post or article saying that was not the case.

I looked at trying the MvcContrib’s portable area alternative, and it’s a pretty nice approach, but I would like my views deployed to production as separate files and not as a resource file in a assembly, so I decided not go that route. I think for now, I am just going to include the areas in a single project and when the next version of MVC comes out—pull the different areas out into different projects then—if that is, they will have that feature in future releases.

TFS license for VS 2008

I heard this week, not from someone official, that once Visual Studio 2010 is released, they will also include Team Foundation Server for Visual Studio 2008 as a part of the MSDN license. That good news for me as I have been using the trial version for the past few weeks. I suppose the cool tool now is GIT so maybe I should take a look at that as well. At least for my VS 2010 stuff. My only thing is I am getting kind of tired of having to learn a new source control repository every year, there are other cooler things I could be learning, but I guess that is part of the job.

I just updated my blog with the latest version of BlogEngine.Net version 1.6. You can get the latest downloads here.

Also, I updated my theme to Indigo.  I think it is a really nice look if I do say so myself. You can get a bunch of themes here (click on the theme pack link), and if you want to see a screencast on how to update you theme you can check it out here.

The guys at BlogEngine.Net have done really nice job with this application. I have been using it since the 1.1 version many years ago, and have been really happy with that they have done. As you can see from previous posts, I have been going though their site and seeing if I could convert it to MVC. I don’t actually plan on using that version, but I must say I am learning a lot not only about writing good code, but also about how blogging sites work in general.

Anyways, if you need a .Net blog site; BlogEngine.Net gets a thumbs up from me.

I was asked how I was copying my code to this blog, and I was going to reply that you can get this great free tool at the address below but if you click on it (at the time of this writing anyway), the link is dead.

www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/blog/archives/2006/06/copysourceashtm_9.html 

I heard about CopyAsHtml tool from MSDN Magazine a couple years ago in its aricle titled, "Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now."  Even though it was written in 2005, much of the tools on this page are still pretty useful.  If you find this tool some where you can still get it to work for Visual Studio 2008.  Go to your VS 2005 addins folder (C:\Users\<user>\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Addins) and copy the CopyAsHtml files to your Visual Studio 2008 folder.  Then Open the CopySourceAsHtml.AddIn file and where ever you see 8.0, change it to 9.0.

Now as far as settings, Scott Hanselman has a nice post on the different themes out there that you can use if you do not want to go through all the toils of setting all the fonts yourself.  You can now Import themes which is quite cool.  I picked Oren Ellenbogen's theme, because I really like the soft dark colors.  I only changed a couple of colors to make my User Object and key words stand out a bit more.  I started my IT life in front of a green screen, and even when I was developing in Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual Interdev, I changed my background settings to black.

 If you know where we can get CopyAsHtml let us know.  It's a great tool and it would be a shame if it disappeared.