Scott Hanselman

My one-hundred-and-thirty-second podcast is up.

Well, actually a few weeks ago, but I totally forgot to update my website with the details. You'd think somewhere around 100 shows I'd had automated this somehow. Hm. If I only I know a programmer and the data was available in some kind of universal structure syndication format…;)

What is Subsonic and should you use it? Scott and Rob Conery chat about his baby and comparisons to other Open Source frameworks. Also, Scott tries to get free consulting for his new pet project.

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show #132
• Play in your browser.
• ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley! Digg us at Digg Podcasts!

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show!

Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Enjoy the versatility of our new-generation Reporting Tool. Dive into our online community. Visit www.telerik.com.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My one-hundred-and-thirty-first podcast is up.

Well, actually a few weeks ago, but I totally forgot to update my website with the details. You'd think somewhere around 100 shows I'd had automated this somehow. Hm. If I only I know a programmer and the data was available in some kind of universal structure syndication format…;)

Today we reminisce with Jeff Webb about the very early years of Basic and Visual Basic at Microsoft. What was it like to work just a few offices down from BillG? When did Basic stop being ALL CAPS?

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show #131
• Play in your browser.
• ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley! Digg us at Digg Podcasts!

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show!

Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Enjoy the versatility of our new-generation Reporting Tool. Dive into our online community. Visit www.telerik.com.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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Getting reading for my talk at PDC 2008. 75 minutes just isn't enough time to cover everything. I hope the talk doesn't suck. Here's what my home office looks like as I'm getting my demos ready.

I was reminiscing by looking through the nine pages of my blog's PDC category just now. It was interesting to look at what I said about PDC 2003 in conclusion. (Yikes, 5 years ago?)

What I remember most about PDC 2003 was that I used my Blackberry (at the time) to Live Blog the whole keynote. Remember this is five years ago, before wireless was everywhere and a bit before keynote live blogging was really common. Hurt my fingers and hands a LOT as I recall.

Here's one of the posts I did from my Blackberry at the time:

* using System.MessageBus - the namespace for Indigo, interesante.
* Now, Don is going to use the Indigo system to post directly to his blog (http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox) from the stage.
* They are checking out his blog, and they see that he hasn't blogged since last night.
* BOOM.  Posted.  Check it out.
* Now, they've switched to VB.NET (apparently Chris has been in the closet, and has been attracted to VB.NET since he was 5, but could never explain his feelings.  Don wonders if he could do both languages...)
* Now they've added a component to the sidebar that will receive an Indigo message from their client.  So they'll be talking "Indigo Messaging" for Interprocess Communication.  They added a TextPanel to the SideBar and pushed text out to it.
Scott Hanselman - Corillian Corp
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Ah, good times. I hope to see you at PDC! My talk is on the first day, Monday at 5:15.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Remember last week when I mentioned the Microsoft Web Platform Installer? It's an bootstrapper that gets you setup for free web development, all in a single application. It'll setup IIS7, get you Visual Studio, SQL Server, .NET, etc. Cool. And there was much rejoicing (except XP folks, sorry.)

Well, the team just released the Web Application Installer (Beta). Get it? First Platform, now Applications.

What does it do? Well, how about a screenshot.

Yes, that's Drupal in there. And PHPBB. And WordPress. Sweet.

I've talked to the team, and they've promised that DasBlog is next in line to get in that list o' applications. It's a *ahem* gem of an application. Well, it's a great start. Open Source, baby, baby.

The installer knows about prerequisites, although the app can't currently install them for you. However, it'll point you to all the correct places to get what you need.

When you've satisfied the prerequisites, it'll setup IIS for you, prompt you for application-specific configuration and you're up and running. It'll also validate the configuration so you'll know ahead of time if the app will work.

There are people at Microsoft do care about Open Source. I'm telling you guys and gals, we're turning this ship around. Slowly, but we are.

Oh, by the way, the Web Application Installer uses and ships ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib, which is GPL'ed Open Source. It has an exception, however:

"..gives you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library"

Which is legal Open Source license speak for "link on, brother, link on." There you go, Microsoft ships an app with a mostly GPL'ed library. Madness. Cats and Dogs, living together, mass hysteria!

Go check them out:

• Web Application Installer
• Web Platform Installer

They require Vista or Windows Server, x86 or x64 and you'll need admin rights. Enjoy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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ASP.NET MVC is now officially in Beta. Go get it! ScottGu has all the juicy details in his usually Epic style. In a nutshell, this is called Beta (and not Preview 1138) because the quality and the amount of testing gone into it was higher than the Previews and source drops you may have gotten off of CodePlex. It's API surface is pretty stable now.

Also, we're shipping jQuery with ASP.NET MVC! When you go File | New ASP.NET MVC Project, you've already got jQuery. Bam.

Here's what's new in ASP.NET MVC Beta:

• New "Add View" Menu in Visual Studio
• New \Scripts directory and jQuery Support
• Built-in Model Binder Support for Complex Types
• Refactored Model Binder Infrastructure
• Strongly Typed UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel WhiteList Filtering
• Improved Unit Testing of UpdateModel and TryUpdateModel Scenarios
• Strongly Typed [AcceptVerbs] attribute
• Better Validation Error Messages
• HTML Helper Cleanup and Refactoring
• Silverlight / ASP.NET MVC Project Integration
• ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly
• \Bin and GAC Assembly Deployment

If you've been playing it safe as all the Alpha Geeks have been living on the edge, if you're wondering when would be the time to start using ASP.NET MVC or when you could go live, this is a good time to start. This release as a very clear Go-Live license. Totally, (if you haven't already) go out there and put your sites out in public on ASP.NET MVC if you like. It's pretty much feature complete (again, hence, "Beta") and shouldn't change in any major ways between now and it's release in a coming month ending in "-ber" like January-ber or Next June-ber. (Seriously, I have no idea when it'll be out. When it's done. But, we're closer than we were yesterday. Go ask Phil.)

One of the new additions is Model Binders that formalize the relationship between what's happening in HTTP and what ends up happening in your Controller actions. Similar to what you can do in MonoRail with IParameterBinder, you can now do in ASP.NET MVC. For example, back in June I showed how to handle uploaded files with ASP.NET MVC. It was useful, but hard to test and kind of hard to read.

Here's a cleaner way as an example from Levi Broderick, a Developer on the ASP.NET MVC team.

A Sample ModelBinder for HttpPostedFileBase:

public class HttpPostedFileBaseModelBinder : IModelBinder {

    public ModelBinderResult BindModel(ModelBindingContext bindingContext) {

        HttpPostedFileBase theFile = bindingContext.HttpContext.Request.Files[bindingContext.ModelName];

        return new ModelBinderResult(theFile);

    }

}

You'd activate it in your global.asax.cs (or .vb):

ModelBinders.Binders[typeof(HttpPostedFileBase)] = new HttpPostedFileBaseModelBinder();

Then you'd make sure the form in your view uses the correct enctype:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="{some url}">

Choose file:
<input name="theFile" type="file">

<input value="Submit Query" type="submit">

</form>

…and finally, in the action method of your controller:

public ActionResult Upload(HttpPostedFileBase theFile) {

    // 'theFile' now contains the uploaded file

}

That's it. There's lots of cool binding stuff you can do, but that's just one example.

One other thing I wanted to say. I was in Las Vegas yesterday keynoting VSLive and I made it a point to show this new slide. It's simple, and perhaps obvious, but perhaps not:

I wanted to make it clear that even though folks (and me) might use the term "hybrid" to refer to ASP.NET applications that mix WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data, that these are all just ASP.NET. Arguably ASP.NET Ajax and the Ajax Controls could be either another circle or part of the larger one.

I also showed ASP.NET+Dynamic Data that you'll be hearing more about at PDC and even more next year. You should feel free to use these subsystems as you like, mix and match, promote and ignore. Whatever makes you happy. All the ASP.NET core stuff like Authentication, Authorization, Session, Caching, etc, that all works in all of these subsystems because they are all ASP.NET.

Wow, that kind of sounded like a political speech! "Can't we all just get along? MVC and WebForms living together, with Dynamic Data by their side..."

Enjoy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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