Jeffrey McManus » .NET

ASP.NET Ajax Will Incorporate JQuery

jeffrey — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:14:26 +0000

From the most excellent blog of the most excellent Scott Guthrie comes news that Microsoft will incorporate and ship the outstanding JQuery Javascript/AJAX library in a future version of ASP.NET Ajax.

This is a tremendous win for JQuery, which already has the momentum of a runaway freight train in a space that has been profoundly fragmented and confused for many years now. It’s also a huge win for Microsoft. Although they’ve been touting their openness to open source concepts and practice for the last few years, Microsoft has also demonstrated its willingness to frustratingly re-invent the wheel in a proprietary fashion¹. This demonstrates that there are still open thinkers within Microsoft who are willing to incorporate community-driven standards and technologies.

The only loser here may be me. Although I incorporated JQuery into my Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax talk recently, I’ll need to update the talk once again to incorporate Microsoft’s formal support for JQuery when it becomes available. (I’ll be giving this talk at VSLive Las Vegas in October as well as the VBUG UK conference in Reading in November.)

If you’re looking to come up to speed on JQuery I can recommend the excellent Learning JQuery by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg as well as JQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz.

¹See: Silverlight, Velocity, et al.

ASP.NET Ajax Will Incorporate JQuery is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

.NET Developers: Recommend Your Favorite Open-Source Projects Here

jeffrey — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:59:31 +0000

After literally years of trying, I’ve finally succeeded in getting the VSLive folks to let me do a pure open-source talk at the conference. The talk is called Codeplex’s Greatest Hits. The idea is to take a bunch of different cool open-source projects and provide descriptions of them as well as working code demos. The talk is 75 minutes long, so I imagine I’ll have time to do quick demos of between 6 and 8 different projects, of which I already have three or four picked out.

In the spirit of open source, I’d like your help on this. If you’re a .NET developer and you have a favorite open-source tool, post a link to it in the comments. (The tool doesn’t have to be hosted on Codeplex, but it does have to be open-source.) It would help if you also explain why you like it, what you’re using it for, etc. It is totally OK to recommend your own project.

This talk will take place at VSLive Orlando, May 12-16. Once again, the good folks at the conference have provided a discount code for lucky readers of this blog; use the code SOMCM when you sign up for the conference, to get a Gold Passport for $300 off.

.NET Developers: Recommend Your Favorite Open-Source Projects Here is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Slides and Code for Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax Talk

jeffrey — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:56:36 +0000

Even though I was frazzled and exhausted after battling airlines and airports trying to get home yesterday and today, I arrived for VSLive exactly eighteen minutes before my first scheduled talk, which was on using .NET to build Facebook applications. The talk went pretty well and was decently attended but it was challenging to cover the material in a 75-minute talk. If I do this talk again, I’m going to reorganize the content somewhat, maybe include a few diagrams and definitely some more code examples.

My afternoon talk, Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax, was an updated version of a talk I gave at VSLive NYC last year that was very well-attended and well-received. Here are the slides and code for that talk. Because I used System.Data.SQLite as the database, the demos require no setup or configuration; just open the web site in Visual Studio and peruse to your heart’s content.

Slides and Code for Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax Talk is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Death to Developer Contests

jeffrey — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:38:22 +0000

Over on his blog Microsoft’s Dan Fernandez courageously decries the frequent use of developer contests to engage developers and increase momentum for platform adoption. He counted up the number of contests Microsoft is running at the moment: it’s 18. Eighteen different ways to win cash and prizes for doing stuff with various Microsoft products.

Dan thinks this is over the top and I totally agree. When I ran the evangelism team at eBay I resisted the urge to do developer contests for the reasons Dan points out, and when I ran the Yahoo program we didn’t do any; we were more concerned with giving back to the entire community by devoting our very limited time and resources to making new products happen for developers.

Contests are like steroids for platforms. They may pump you up in the short term, but they don’t actually grow the ecosystem. Contests don’t kick off interesting and useful conversations about your platform because they put your developers in competition with each other. More importantly, contests detract resources and focus from where they’re needed.

Throughout the history of American business, the worth of marketers has been measured by the size of the marketing budget (as opposed to the results they might bring to the business). But in a world in which no platform in history has ever provided good enough documentation or code examples for its developers, there’s no excuse to do a single contest.

Death to Developer Contests is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Creating Facebook Apps Using ASP.NET at VSLive San Francisco

jeffrey — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:34:27 +0000

The VSLive conference is an excellent place to become familiar with the latest and greatest technologies for Microsoft platform development. I started speaking at VSLive in 1996 which makes it one of the oldest things I do on a regular basis besides eating/breathing/excreting. VSLive takes place in San Francisco March 30 through April 3.

I am extra excited this year because for the first time in a long time they’ve given me three talks to do, but more importantly, the talks are all on subjects that are fairly out there at least by this conference’s standards (the old management used to be extremely conservative about what you could and couldn’t give talks about). The conference has definitely found an independent editorial voice under its new management and as a result, the talks that I was sure would get laughed off the playground are actually getting accepted.

The Facebook talk was the most challenging to put together and promises to be the most fun. Facebook’s platform is a new, evolving and fairly unusual paradigm for application development — it has some of the elements of traditional web development with a few curve balls that make it feel almost like embedded systems development at times. And since Facebook’s support for PHP is sorta-okay and their support for other languages is not-terrific, things can go from bad to worse for .NET developers who want to create Facebook apps. (It’s surprising that Microsoft doesn’t do much to fill the gap here since they own 11% of Facebook now, but that shouldn’t stop an ambitious hacker from making good software, right?)

You may not want to go to the trouble of learning PHP just to create a Facebook app (although I’m actually doing just that), so I’ve put together some recipes that make it easier to navigate the landscape of Facebook application development in .NET, so that’ll be the focus of my first VSLive talk.

Bonus: If you haven’t registered yet, the good folks at the conference also gave me a promotion code that you can use to save $695 off a Gold Passport for the conference. Use the code SPMCM when you register to get the discount.

Creating Facebook Apps Using ASP.NET at VSLive San Francisco is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Database Queries with Windows Powershell

jeffrey — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:27:42 +0000

I haven’t done a serious learning project for a while so this week I decided to play around with Windows Server 2008 and PowerShell. I’ll post some thoughts about Server 2008 soon (at first glance it looks terrific once you get past the fact that IIS is now a "role" instead of something you install). But I wanted to post a PowerShell example first because I wanted to do something with it that I couldn’t find information about anywhere — specifically, perform a database query and dump the contents to the console. (Later we’ll get fancy and dump it to HTML or send it somewhere via email, etc.)

PowerShell can invoke any .NET object, so I knew it was possible to do database stuff with a PowerShell script, but I couldn’t find any examples anywhere, so here’s what I cooked up via trial and error.

The first step is to create a database connection:

[system.reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("MySql.Data") $cn = New-Object -TypeName MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlConnection

The syntax to load a .NET assembly in PowerShell is pretty awkward; couldn’t they have provided a Get-Assembly cmdlet? (I suspect that thousands of PowerShell users have already written that one already.) Also, you have to know the assembly name of your ADO.NET provider (which, for MySql, is "MySql.Data," not "MySql.Data.MySqlClient," which was my first guess). The thing to remember is that loading an assembly is syntactically different than including a namespace even though the objective is sort of the same.

Fortunately this is the only part of the process that I didn’t get right the first time, and I had it resolved after a few minutes of experimentation.

I should mention that I’m using the MySql data provider because we use MySql on Approver.com, but you can obviously use any ADO.NET provider you want here. This assumes that your ADO.NET provider is installed in the GAC; if you need to make an explicit reference to an assembly in the file system the syntax is different.

Next, open the database connection:

$cn.ConnectionString = "SERVER=localhost;DATABASE=mydb;UID=xxx;PWD=yyy" $cn.Open()

If you want, you can check the value of $cn.State here to make sure it worked. Then execute the query:

$cm = New-Object -TypeName MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlCommand $sql = "SELECT ID, FirstName, LastName FROM Person LIMIT 50" $cm.Connection = $cn $cm.CommandText = $sql $dr = $cm.ExecuteReader()

ADO.NET programmers know that there are lots of ways to do this that require fewer lines of code, but I like to assign everything out explicitly using properties of the ADO.NET Connection and Command objects.

Finally we iterate over the results and close the connection:

while ($dr.Read()) { write-host $dr.GetInt32(0) " " $dr.GetString(1) " " $dr.GetString(2) } $cn.Close()

This is not too different than what a C# developer is accustomed to, particularly reading out the data. I like that you can just pass a big list of values to write-host without having to explicitly concatenate or convert to strings here. PowerShell figures out what you want to do and does the right thing.

On Approver.com we have a bunch of utilities that we use to monitor system health and site activity (like how many people registered that day, whether people are discovering and using certain features of the site, etc.). Every web site should crunch these numbers frequently (otherwise you have no idea whether the work you’re doing matters to your users).

I think I’m going to eventually migrate our various statistical and maintenance utilities to Powershell. The power of the .NET framework combined with the convenience of script is going to come in handy for a lot of stuff.

Database Queries with Windows Powershell is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax

jeffrey — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:41:32 +0000

This week I presented two talks at VSLive in New York. I love speaking at this conference because of its technical focus and because I’ve done it so long — eleven years — there are always a bunch of people I run into at this conference that I only see when I’m there.

I’ve posted here several times about how I’d been trying to get the conference to let me talk about interesting yet sorta-non-mainstream topics such as unit testing (which I pitched to them unsuccessfully back in 2000) and open source (which I succeeded in doing in 2006 with the first talk on MySQL for .NET developers). In the past few years the conference has been much more open to talks on the kind of tools and technologies that are important to me (as well as many other developers for whom Microsoft’s out-of-the-box offerings are not always sufficient).

So my "Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax" talk is an attempt to take the ASP.NET demonstrations and tutorials that Microsoft provides and tailor them to more real-world scenarios. Here I’m trying to show how a dynamic web application can display data from a database, but also how you can use ASP.NET Ajax to efficiently display large (million-row-plus) data sets, do database transactions, perform server-side data validation without a full page refresh, and so forth. This is a new talk, and I really worked hard on it. I gave it for the first time on Monday afternoon and there were about 120 people in the audience, which was gratifying.

Because I like promoting alternatives to the Microsoft defaults, and because I wanted to be able to give away the source code for my demos and the data without forcing people to go through a big configuration step to get it running on SQL Server, I used System.Data.SQLite as my database. System.Data.SQLite is the .NET implementation of the terrific free embedded database SQLite. Because it’s free (as in public domain) and small, I can distribute the database engine itself along with my demos, which means you don’t have to download or configure a thing to run the demo web site. Just open the project in Visual Studio or drop it into an IIS virtual directory and open index.aspx in your browser.

Here’s the download. It’s about 9 MB because I included the million-row SQLite database I included in my demo, and it also includes the System.Data.SQLite dependency. This version of the site also fixes a problem that I encountered while doing one of the demos (I changed a reference to the master page right before I gave the talk which caused one of the demo pages to barf).

Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Apache At 56%

jeffrey — Sat, 05 May 2007 08:24:03 +0000

Very interesting thread on Digg this morning called "Apache at 56% – what is wrong?" Apparently a number of factors are converging to erode the dominance of the Apache web server (which, as of two years ago, used to run 70% of web sites by some measures). Lots of interesting pro-IIS and .NET comments in the comments (the most vocal Unix/LAMP proponents seem to be embarrassingly out of date on the state of comparable Microsoft products — blinded, no doubt, by their rabid reaction to Microsoft businesses practices in the 1990s).

Several people pointed out that IIS today is very secure, performs well and is easier to configure (and the upcoming IIS7 adds a number of compelling features that bring it closer to feature parity with Apache). In discussions like this somebody always brings up the "free beer" argument (that Apache costs $0), but they neglect to mention that you can get the web server edition of Windows for just $300 now, and IIS/.NET is a more productive stack for developers by far. (I could easily burn more than $300 worth of time getting Apache configuration figured out.)

Apache At 56% is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Cgen: Simplest .NET/MySQL Relational Wrapper That Could Possibly Work

jeffrey — Tue, 01 May 2007 14:29:37 +0000

Last week I attended and spoke at the MySQL conference. Some of the talks, particularly the ones that targeted system administrators rather than developers were over my head, but that’s useful information in itself — it serves as a reminder that sometime soon I’ll need to either learn the finer points of big-time MySQL system administrator or hire somebody who does.

It was particularly fun giving a talk on .NET to MySQL guys just two weeks after I finished giving a talk on MySQL to a room full of .NET guys. It was also fun seeing my client Alfresco and hanging out with them in their booth, where they were doing demos and fielding lots of inquiries.

I’m just now getting around to firing up the blog-o-matic in earnest after four weeks of more or less non-stop conference-going, but I wanted to mention that I’ve released the tool that we use to create the data access layer. It’s called Cgen, and it lives here.

The idea behind Cgen is that you create an XML document that represents your database schema, and Cgen (which is packaged as a command-line tool written in C#) spits out a bunch of classes that make it easy to do the basic create, read, update, and delete operations that represent 80% of all database-driven applications. (For the remaining 20% of the data access code you’d need to write, the tool generates subclasses that you can add your own code to.) You can then compile these classes as a .DLL or, if you’re making an ASP.NET 2.0 web application you can just dump the classes into the application’s App_Code folder and .NET will figure out how to compile the classes.

We use code generated by Cgen as our data access layer for Approver.com. It has worked splendidly and saves us a bunch of time. At the same time, Cgen doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles. I realize that this is probably the one millionth object/relational code generator in the history of software development. I took a look at other object/relational mappers like SubSonic, and I used NHibernate on an intranet project I did at Yahoo in 2005. But for Approver I wanted a tool so simple that you didn’t spend more time learning the tool than you would have spent writing the code yourself. I also needed something with good support for .NET 2.0 and MySql (which was difficult to find in March 2006 when I started using MySQL).

Cgen: Simplest .NET/MySQL Relational Wrapper That Could Possibly Work is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

New Version of MySQL .NET Connector

jeffrey — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:38:30 +0000

A while back I posted that the 5.x line of MySQL connectors was a bit too garden-fresh for production use. Fortunately Reggie and team have quickly released a new version: here are the details.

From the release notes it looks like they might have resolved the problem that I was having. I’m still using the 1.0.9 connector for now but I’ll be testing the new 5.0.5 version as soon as I get some time in hopes that I can show off MySQL/Visual Studio integration at VSLive in a few weeks.

Update: Reggie says that 5.0.5 isn’t soup yet, either: details here.

New Version of MySQL .NET Connector is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.