Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

I’ve been very busy last month working for our new customer Nick, from UK. We are developing a new module for his ASP.NET Recruitment System. We worked almost 15 hours a day for the past week to finish with the tricky module on time !

That is why I haven’t updated my blog in a long time. I just had some time to read the hot topics in the blogs, and some other articles that helped me a lot with my current assignment. So these are some of the bookmarked links for October:

•  ASP.NET MVC Framework announced

Without any doubts, the hottest announcement during October. Microsoft plans to ship a Model View Controler version for ASP.NET so you will be able to use this well known architecture in a simple way with ASP.NET.

•  ASTORIA released

Expose the database in a REST format with this new tool from MS. Big companies such as Ebay and Amazon uses this model for exposing the data, and even when it can reduce the data load and perform faster, for certain scenarios I believe that WebServices are still needed. It needs entity framework in order to work.

• Tutorials for Silverlight 1.1 (managed code)

Samples, tutorials and simple tasks you can do with Silverlight 1.1.

• Page Life Cycle with AJAX Explained

Understand how the update panel works, and avoid some common mistakes when working with it.

• 43 AJAX applications

Use these scripts to add AJAX functionality to ANY kind of website. These will definitely help to have your visitors happier.

NHibernate Data Source Control

A datasource control for NHibernate. If you use this ORM you must give it a try !

I hope these few links help you to be updated in this evolving world. Stay tuned, this week I’ll be writting about our outsourcing experience from Uruguay !

Even when I work for a huge IT Company, coding standards are always a problem.

Available .NET standards used to be long, complex, and sometimes hard to comply with. We finally end up customizing some Microsoft official coding standard and set up FxCop to check the code for compliance with MS Guidelines.

Well, after reading latest Scott’s post, I end up finding this excellent C# Coding Standard Guidelines  from IDesign team.

This standard looks neat. Simple but complete at the same time. It not only includes C# Coding Guidelines, but also Best Practices for having a better code, configuring security at different levels, Projects settings, and many other useful best practices, applied to several areas such as ASP.NET, Web Services, Remoting, Threading or Data Access. And everything using only 25 pages.

Great start point for those who are looking for a complete C# Coding Standard or Guidelines Checklist!

I’ll start to customize it right away for my particular needs.

I hope it helps you too.

Excellent news from Scott (Microsoft Technologies General Manager):

We will be able to Debug the .NET Framework 3.5 Source Code ! Yes, as you read it !

When releasing .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft will enable us to download and browse the Source Code of the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows).  They also aimed to add more libraries in the following months (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ).  Source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

Visual Studio 2008 will be enabled to download the source code and debug symbols on demand from a Microsoft web server, so when pressing F11 in a breakpoint, we will be able to go through the underlying Microsoft .NET Code, even if you haven’t installed it as a standalone install!

I think this are great news, this will help us to understand those weird behaviors we sometimes don’t understand and then building better applications for our customers. And there won’t be any need of using any Reflection tool and no IL, just a commented and with original var names Source Code!

New VS 2008 has a small but very useful feature that will probably help some asp.net programmers.
Right now, when using VS 2005 and if you don’t have much time to fix all the errors in the Error List because your HTML code is not in compliance to the required standard (HTML or XHTML) and you are in a hurry to run your application by hitting F5, then you  probably  feel very upset when you see a large list of design errors (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and application just don’t run.

VS 2008 Beta 2, downgrades Markup errors to Warnings, and even when you don’t complain to selected standard, the list of errors would become a list of warnings, or messages if you prefer, and VS will let you run your application smoothly.

Well, even when this small tip can save you some time, don’t use it to avoid Standards compliance