Silverlight 2 Release Candidate

Last night, the Silverlight 2 Release Candidate came out.

You can read all about it on Scott Gu's Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/25/silverlight-2-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

Silverlight was a disappointment

Yesterday we discussed 3 of what I thought were the most cool topics in the entire course:

• AJAX for ASP.NET
• SilverLight
• Webservices

I already have a profound knowledge of webservices, having build and consumed many in my previous coding experiences, so that topic was not really a challenge.

On to AJAX for ASP.NET. Now that's some cool stuff. Very easy to use, but there in also lies a great danger.

Sure adding AJAX functionality to your ASP.NET is just dragging and dropping 2 controls on your page and voila... your page does AJAX.
A project manager will love to hear that.

But what happens behind the scenes ? .NET adds tons of references to online .js resources to your page (making it slighty more heavy to load, especially for low-bandwith clients) and uses those scripts to support your AJAX needs.

The question I felt compelled to ask myself was: What is something goes wrong ? Suppose one day, your partial page update no longer work and you, the developer, graciously used the .NET controls. What answer will you provide ? Probably something like 'Euuhm, well, mmmm, ...., must be Microsoft related ?'

The AJAX controls for ASP.NET are good, cool and very easy to use. Also the AJAX control toolkit for client side AJAX support is very, very nice.
But use them with caution, don't forget to learn about the basics of partial page updates, which are no more then HTTP calls to your server made by your page.

Then came Silverlight. Oh joy. After the slides and a really cool demo of what it can do, we were supposed to do the exercises. Hmmm, that were it went wrong. The course was using Silverlight 1.1, while we had Silverlight 2 BETA installed.
Need I say more ? It was a very disappointing first experience.

Today we'll be covering the last three modules of the course: Managing state, Configuration & deployment and Security. Yay :D

The course continues

Hello there.

Completed day 2 and 3 of the "Developing Web Applications Using Studio 2008" here at Info Support.

Traffic on both days was a real pain. Yesterday it took me nearly 2.5 hours just to get to Mechelen. Something that normally doesn't take more then an hour :s

Today was better, but mayB it's because I came from the other side of Brussels ;-)

Anyway, the pace of the course is still slow. Getting a lot of tips and tricks, but no fundamental new stuff so far. I'll be dedicating a blog soon with a summary of all the tips I've gotten over the last couple of days.

It wasn't all bad, off course. Yesterday we briefly covered Linq, which was really cool to say the least. The course covered only the designer way of doing it, but I couldn't resist and wrote my first Linq statement. Amazingly cool and performant.

var s = from peeps in context.people
where peeps.name = "steven"
orderby peeps.dateofbirth;

Just write a syntax like this on a defined DataContext and bind it to a control. The cool stuff about Linq is that it only executes the statement once the databind instruction is called, thus only when data is actually needed.

Today, we will be covering some new 3.5 stuff like AJAX and SilverLight. I'm really exited about these things.

My thoughts go out to my buddy Willy who is doing my presentation in Brugge while I'm taking the course. Respect !

Eric was right :s

Eventhough Eric warned me about taking on the classroom courses because he found them to be slow and relativaly boring, I had to proof him wrong.

well, the first day is almost over, but so far, he was right :s

Really didn't learn much new today, apart from some nice-to-know's:

• var keyword that is new in C# 3.5
• using studio 2008 requires your pc to have a fast disk
• MVC model will become very important in the near future

Besides these things, I did get some good book references:

• Professional ASP.NET 3.5 with C# or VB
• Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework
• ASP.NET AJAX in action
• LINQ in action
• C# 3.0 in a nutshell

This concludes my first, rather disappointing day. Better luck tomorrow, I guess.

See ya

Back to school.......again ;-)

Hi there, it's been a while since my last blog, and to be quite honest, I've gotten a bit behind with my studies.

Naturally, there are lots of reasons for this backlog. The most painfull one is work. Work is murder for the moment ;-). Lots of projects to complete, new team members that need mentoring and off cource my first 3 weeks of leave this year that are finally coming up.

In addition, I'll be moving into my appartment in a few weeks. This also generates an additional amount of work, naturally ;-)

Finally, I've met a great girl with whom I'm spending quite a lot of time with. No need to go into details, I think :p

But back to the subject at hand: MCTS certification.

I've started the 2nd part of my cource: the classical Web Applications developer training.
Today's day 1 of 5 of the 1st cource out of 3. Wow, what a sentence, that was ;-).

I normally was enroled for a 5 day course Developing Web Applications with Visual Studio 2005, but the company facilitating the training, Info Support in Mechelen, decided to change it into Developing Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008, for obvious reasons.

This course apparantly is intended for those who never did ASP.NET websites before. Pit of a set back, as I already have some experience with these things.

But nevertheless, it will be a good review and hopefully, I'll get to see some new 3.5 stuff. The teacher is a Martin from the UK, and I'm so enjoying his dry british humour.

Anyways, not much new learned during the first day. The pace off the course is rather slow, hopefully the teacher will pick up the pace a little bit over the next days.

See you soon.