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End of 2007 Roundup

December 31st, 2007 | Comments Off | Posted in ASP.NET

Well it’s been a fantastic year for me and mine so I’m just going to welcome a new year ( Liverpool Capital of Culture 2008 no less )  in with a bit of a recap and a few 2007 highlights.

Books of the Year
Programming WCF Services is the most authoritative textbook on Microsoft’s latest communication methodology. A great resource book that I have returned to again and again.

Non-Tech Books of the Year
Lexicon Devil: The Short Life and Fast Times of Darby Crash and the Germs is a fantastic word of mouth recount of the early days of the LA punk scene.
House of Leaves: Spooky shape shifting architecture story told in experimental prose. Most innovative book I’ve read for years.

Album of the Year
Panda Bear – Person Pitch is hands down winner. Super tight Beach Boys style harmonies over clever loops makes for a seductive mix. No hiphop in my end of year list. It’s been the worst year EVER for rap in my mind – even the new Wu, or Big Doe Rehab just don’t make the grade.

Booze of the Year
Both Makers Mark and Knob Creek have been well received around my way!

Event of the Year
The arrival of my daughter Kitty has been the most life affirming thing I have ever experienced. She is so clever and surprises me with new stuff every day. I’m so proud!

Next Year
I work with some pretty cool and clever people at Qire, it’s a great environment to make software in. We are doing cutting edge IVR stuff and gaining more prestigious clients every day. Next year we have some pretty tough targets to meet, but I’m going to do my damndest to make sure we get there. Also, I’m going to get right into VS 2008 and attempt to pass a couple more Microsoft certs.

That’s it! Have a happy new year!

Microsoft Exam 70-547 : Passed!

December 17th, 2007 | 2 Comments | Posted in ASP.NET

I took the Microsoft 70-547 Designing & Developing Web-Based Applications Using the Microsoft .Net Framework examination today and passed with a score of 900 out of 1000. I’m pretty chuffed to be honest. This is the first MS cert I’ve taken, but it has given me the bug to take a few more. I would recommend it to anyone.
If you are googling this page and want some tips on how to pass this exam, I would say that the MCTS training kit from Microsoft is a must: the entire content of the exam was explained in this book. I studied for a month, about 2 hours a day, and cleared the exam in about 20 minutes.
It’s my birthday later on in the week, and Christmas is just around the corner. Passing the exam has put me in a celebratory mood!

Is it too late to say I love jQuery too?

November 5th, 2007 | Comments Off | Posted in ASP.NET, Ajax

jQuery is lightweight javascript framework with lots of support on the net and a big library of plug ins. Given the amount of client side content that is going to be knocking around in Visual studio 2008, I’d say it’s a good time to brush up on your jscript skills. While you are at it, make sure you check out this library to give you a leg up. Communication between jQuery and ASP.NET is a breeze and as a quick example, this is what you need to get inline editing going with very little effort at all.

You will need:
jQuery
jEditable

First the .aspx
<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head runat="server">
<title>Untitled Page</title> 
<script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 
<script src="jeditable.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript">$(document).ready(
function(){ $("p").editable( "http://localhost:3684/test/handler.ashx", { type: 'textarea',cancel: 'Cancel',indicator:"test.jpg", submit:'ok'});
});</script>
 </head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
</div>
<p>yes you are now rocking with the best</p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
 

and you will need a httphandler to save the edits. For this example, I’m just writing the data back out without storing it.

<%@ WebHandler Language=“C#” Class=“handler” %> using System;using System.Web; public class Echo : IHttpHandler {public void ProcessRequest (HttpContext context) {context.Response.ContentType = “text/plain”;context.Response.Write(context.Request.Params["Value"]);}public bool IsReusable {get {return false;}} }

 

And that’s it. Inline editing with jQuery and ASP.NET. Simple!

PS if you want to know why there has not been much action on the blog this month, blame this.

Book Review: Professional ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX

July 30th, 2007 | Comments Off | Posted in ASP.NET, Ajax

proAjaxBook I’ve been knocking together a little hobby project that contains plenty of AJAX, both the ASP.NET and rolled-from-scratch variety, and needed something to act as a bit of a reference to get me through some of the more non-obvious attributes and properties, so I spotted this on Amazon and went for it. I’ve got to say, that when it arrived, it was a bit of a shock. This is the thinnest technical book I’ve ever bought, compared with other Wrox publications it just looks puny!

To be honest, a lot of the content is a bit puny too. Maybe it’s just me being a bit to eager, but i already knew about 75% of the content just from my Internet based studies. The chapter of the AJAX Toolkit is particularly thin and doesn’t cover anywhere near as much functionality as one would expect.

On the other hand, the chapters on debugging and testing, deployment and building AJAX based customer controls are particularly illuminating. To sum up, I’d say this was a decent introduction to the subject, but not something that deserves a ‘Professional’ title added to it. A half decent weekend read, 6 out of 10. More at Amazon.co.uk…

AJAX.ASP.NET library interop

July 16th, 2007 | 1 Comment | Posted in ASP.NET, Ajax

I’ve messed around quite a bit with the ‘Atlas’ libraries in the past, and only recently have I had a real reason to play with the updated and re-badged Ajax.Asp.Net libs. My main frustration with the old libraries was that the system threw a wobbler if you tried to use it in conjunction with one of the shockingly good pre-built javascript libraries such as prototype or scriptaculous.
It’s good to see that Microsoft has gone a long way to code their way around code base clashes and are a member of the OpenAjax Alliance, dedicated to interoperability amongst libraries.
Anyway, here’s a brand new how-to video that has only just appeared on the official AJAX.ASP.Net site.

Liverpool ASP.NET Usergroup….

July 5th, 2007 | 2 Comments | Posted in ASP.NET

I’m thinking of re-activating the Liverpool ASP.NET usergroup again. Things ground to a halt last time as it degenerated into some kind of geeky piss-up! Anyway, if I do it, it’s going to be done properly this time….Pizza….Guest Speakers….ASP.NET related discourse rather than ‘fancy another pint?’….the full nine yards. Any old members still interested? Any new people interested? Leave me a comment.

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