Getting started with ASP.Net

October 25, 2006

OK, here is another post that has been re-purposed from an email I sent. I had someone looking to get started on the .Net/ASP.Net platform and was looking for help. Since I could tell that I was probably going to get sucked into some type of longer term support role for this person, I decided to recommend some way that they could help themselves.

.Net as a platform is quite nice and brings a lot to the table in terms of development. Unfortunately, it also gives you lots of flexibility to do things in less than ideal ways. While it would be nice to just have one pattern for how to do something, quite the opposite is true and there is seldom consistency around anything.

So, for you as an apparent newbie to ASP.Net, I would recommend the following:
- A book or two on ASP.Net 2.0 is a great place to start. These come in handy for reference and some will actually walk you through building an application.
- Hang out at the ASP.Net Forums. There are many forums dedicated to complete newbies to .Net. What’s nice is you’ll get answers to your questions from someone who just walked in your shoes two weeks ago. I spent lots of time there several years ago when trying to make the break from ASP to ASP.Net
- Check out the Starter Kits. These are great sample apps to help you get a feel for how an ASP.Net app is built. And annoyingly enough, each one of these starter kits was built completely differently (at least back when I went through them). This would give me fits because I wanted to know the one “right way” to do things. You eventually pick and choose what works best for you and your situation.
- Another approach that I have recommended to several newbies at my day job is to purchase a subscription to LearnVisualStudio.net. You get access to over 500 videos (over 100 hours of content). You can’t really beat this concept. First, the price is just right - you can get a three month subscription for the price of a tech book. Second, the videos are awesome - great quality, great content.
- If you have your backend mapped out, you could look at tools like CodeCharge or Iron Speed. While I haven’t directly used either, I know CodeCharge has been around for several years and might actually be more along the lines of what you are looking for. They make it easy to take an application concept and generate the necessary code. One of our MyHomePoint competitors, HomeConvenience.com, appears to be built around such a concept/tool.
- If you are feeling really adventerous, you could download the source code for the ASP.Net Forums (and our site and many other sites around the web) The Microsoft developer (Rob Howard) originally working on those forums many years ago left and took the open source code with him to a new gig called Telligent where it was re-packaged as Community Server. They maintain the code and have extended it greatly. However, this is a project that has been under development for many years and is quite large. It could be quite daunting to just jump in and figure out your way around. But there are a lot of really good practices to learn from in the code. We implemented a lot of things we saw in there in our MyHP code.

Obviously there are tons of other resources out there, but these are a few of my favorite tactics. Anyone have any suggestions of their own?

Popularity: 22% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, ASP.Net, Microsoft | Leave a Comment 

ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1 Released

October 20, 2006

Scott Guthrie just announced the release of ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1. This is excellent news for us. We had recently tried to implement the Atlas June CTP but were running into some issues with Safari. Hopefully those issues will be resolved. From Scott:

Previous ASP.NET AJAX CTPs didn’t have great support for Safari (UpdatePanel didn’t work at all). With this Beta we have added Safari as a fully tested and supported browser.

Between ASP.NET AJAX, YUI and Jack Slocum’s Yahoo Extensions, looks like I’m going to be busy.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, AJAX, ASP.Net, Microsoft | Leave a Comment 

IE7 Final is released!

October 18, 2006

If you are a web developer/designer, prepare to get busy! Internet Explorer 7 was released today. Since they have made numerous changes to how they handle CSS, I’m sure that there will be many sites that won’t be rendering as expected.

Of course, if you were a good developer/designer, you would have downloaded IE7 a long time ago and would have fixed any potential issues a long time ago. While I consider myself a good developer, I unfortunately had not even bothered with checking out IE7. I don’t have many sites to maintain and I’ve become quite attached to Firefox. The only real reason I’m interested in IE7 even now is because my day job recently began only allowing IE traffic outbound (don’t get me started) and I miss my tabbed browsing interface. For a while, I just changed the user agent string to IE6 and that worked pretty well for basic sites, but the enhanced Yahoo! Mail and GMail interfaces had issues. So lately I’ve been using IE for checking email. Which then means that I either use the same browser instance to check multiple sites (Yahoo Mail, GMail, Bloglines, MyHomePoint, etc.) or I open a bunch of windows so I can keep them all up. Both options suck compared to just having multiple tabs open in one interface.

Overall, it seems pretty nice, but there are some obstacles to me becoming a true convert. Here is a list of petty annoyances in the first hour of usage:

  • Phishing Filter - While I think that providing that functionality is probably a good service to the general public, it got pretty annoying real quick. I tried to ignore it’s requests to make me decide to either turn it On or Off and told it to bother me Later thinking it would be in a couple days, but it was within a couple of clicks. What was probably most annoying was that it kept throwing the message at me while I was checking out MyHomePoint for any CSS fall-out (it was minimal). For some reason, Yahoo, Gmail, Bloglines, etc. were all immune to the phishing filter. Anyway, I turned it Off since I am pretty confident in my ability to judge a site’s validity.
  • Mouse Gestures - I’ve grown accustomed to my FF Mouse Gestures extension. It makes life much easier to not have to travel so far with the mouse. I know that there are plenty of keyboard shortcuts to do what I want, but I tend to rely mostly on my mouse for my interactions. I would have thought that MS would build that functionality in. I know Ralph Hare provides a Mouse Gesture for Internet Explorer plugin, but the site didn’t inspire me with confidence (no offense).
  • Add-ons - I think it is great that IE7 can support Add-ons which will greatly enhance it’s usefullness, much like Extensions have done for Firefox. I’ve only installed one Add-on so far (Bloglines Browser Plug-in) and it was a really annoying experience. Not sure what the exact order was, but it was annoying in that:
    • The install process was way too long/involved too many clicks. I much prefer the Firefox simple download and go approach.
    • Not only was it too long, but it was trying to install the add-on into it’s own folder under Program Files and I don’t mean nicely contained under some IE7 sub-folder. It was going to create a Bloglines folder under Program Files. The last thing I need is yet another application folder polluting that directory. Why not just stick all add-ons in some common folder (which is what I’m going to do). Granted, I’ve only installed one and maybe that isn’t the default action, but I certainly wasn’t expecting it.
    • During the course of installation, it threw a dialog box at me that told me I had to shut down IE in order to continue the installation. My options were Retry and Cancel. I much prefer the Firefox installation method of “You will need to restart Firefox in order to use this extension.” That leaves it up to me to decide when I want to close all 8 of my tabs and start over. I wasn’t expecting that in the middle of the install.
  • Address Bar to Search Bar Navigation - My current process in opening a new window in Firefox to do a Google search is this: Right-click and mouse up to open a new tab, hit the Tab key to jump to the search box, type my search term and hit Enter. It has become second nature to me. Without mouse gestures, the equivalent is Ctrl + T to open the new tab which should work in FF and IE7. Oops. Someone decided to put the Refresh and Stop icons (of course with a tab stop) in between the Address Bar and Search Box. I’m sure there is a short-cut key to jump straight to the Search Box, but old habits die hard.

I’m sure that I will find many other quirks that I’ll have to get used to but hopefully those will start to be offset by some of the new features. Either way, I’m glad that I’ll finally be able to get back to tabbed browsing at my day job.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

HyperSpin Website Monitoring

October 6, 2006

HyperSpin’s monitoring report for DiscountASP was aware of the outage I just posted about (and apparently had been going on for over an hour) and also provided metrics for the entire year. It was interesting to see that DiscountASP is at 99.986% versus 99.918% for MaximumASP, which is a much higher end host. Not that I would make a final decision based on that since MaxASP brings a lot to the table.

Popularity: 5% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

DiscountASP.net Down?

October 6, 2006

It is 2:15pm CST on Oct. 6, 2006 and I can’t access our site or any of the sites associated with our host, DiscountASP. Anybody else experiencing the same thing or know any information?

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

Issues with ASP.Net Atlas UpdatePanels and Safari

October 5, 2006

We are in the process of trying to incorporate some Atlas/AJAX into our site. What we added works correctly in IE6 and FF1.5 on Windows and also works correctly in Camino and FF (not sure of the version numbers) on Mac. However, it is not working correctly with Safari. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of information on what the problem is since I don’t have reliable access to a Mac to dig into it.

While I don’t have specific error messages, we do have a test environment that you can check out. Please note that this test site is being served up through a DSL connection (small upload pipe) and might be a little slow (especially with all the extra overhead AJAX script, etc.). To reproduce the issue, do the following:

Log into our site with our test account by clicking here

  • Once you are in the site, click on the Calendar tab at the top
  • Once in the Calendar, make sure that you are viewing either the Day, Week or Month view (top-right below the main tabs)
  • On the left-hand side, there is a module called Mini Calendar that allows you to navigate through the calendar.
  • If you are on Day or Week view, click the links at the top of the Mini Calendar to navigate to the previous or next item (On Day or Week view, it will navigate by month. On Month view, it will navigate by year)
  • If you are using IE or FF, when you click the next or previous link, the content of the Mini Calendar should update with the previous or next view of the requested information (there is also a small ‘Loading’ graphic that appears in the top-right of the screen). In Safari, nothing happens and apparently there is a JavaScript error thrown.

I posted this to the ASP.Net forums but it isn’t getting much activity so I wanted to throw it out as a post to see if it pops up on anyone’s radar. Any help in getting to the bottom of this is appreciated.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, AJAX, ASP.Net, Microsoft | 3 Comments 

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