June 2005 - Posts

Atlas: AJAX for .NET from Microsoft
Tue, Jun 28 2005 7:32 AM
While everybody hoped Microsoft would build some AJAX-support in .NET 2.0, it has come clear that it won't. But Microsoft did announce Atlas, a framework that utilizes javascript in the browser to create dynamic experiences. A preview will be shown at the PDC later this year. Details can be found here on Scott Guthries blog. Promising stuff. I have used Ajax in a small solution recently and was impressed by it's power.
by Carlo Poli | 4 comment(s)
June CTP's of Visual Studio 2005
Fri, Jun 17 2005 1:23 AM
The MSDN Subscriber Downloads RSS Feeds showed June CTP's of Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Team Suite and Foundation Server available for downloads this morning. Haven't seen any announcement anywhere though. Anyone knows what new and why the brought it so quickly after beta 2?
by Carlo Poli | 2 comment(s)
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MSDN Nuggets are good stuff
Mon, Jun 13 2005 7:07 AM
I love to watch the MSDN Nuggets every now and then. The ones I've seen are all presented by Mike Taulty and are great. One tip for frequent video watchers: try to switch the video speed to 1.4x, most of the time you can still follow and it takes only 70% of your time ;-)!
by Carlo Poli | 1 comment(s)
Undocking the output window
Mon, Jun 13 2005 6:21 AM
I was just watching an MSDN Nugget on WSE2.0 Attachment when I saw the output pane was in the document space in VS2003. Very handy, because I find myself scrolling or resizing this window a lot of times. Just rightclick it's tab, unselect Dockable and it's now a document window. Learn something every time ;-).
by Carlo Poli | with no comments
Using Ajax today, and I liked it!!
Mon, Jun 13 2005 5:07 AM
Today I was working on a small ASP.NET control that allows searching Active Directory from a popup in the browser. My first attempt was of course fully serverside, but two things made this attempt fail. First, for whatever reason a postback did open a new browser window if fired from a popup and secondly, the flashing of the page was particularly annoying. I didn't even bother researching the first problem, the second one made me decide to start working clientside.
 
Stupid me, in my first attempt I thought Ajax would be too complex for this simple task. But then I realized I had to do some form of XML deserialization in Javascript, find a way to distinguish out-of-band calls from regular requests, etc. After a step back, I considered Ajax again and gave this Ajax.NET library a try (found via Chris Sells just today). A little document reading and 30 minutes later the basic stuff worked. I found that the real issue I now have to solve it doing the document dynamics right, not the client/server integration.
 
I just became a little bigger fan of Ajax.
by Carlo Poli | 3 comment(s)
Comparing IBF to VSTO 2005
Wed, Jun 8 2005 8:22 AM
Ever since IBF was announced I was rather enthusiastic about it. The whole idea of seamlessly integrating BackOffice Systems into Office, the home of tens of millions of users just seems a great idea and huge possibility for productivity improvement. The only problem I had with it every time I looked at it is that it is so darn complex to get something simple done. Even in IBF 1.5 , following the steps to create and publish a (one!) smart tag is to hard to handle. Now today I saw this video from the Channel 9 team interviewing Catherine Heller and she writes a smart tag in seconds using VSTO 2005 (it's somewhere around the 30 minutes).
 
I know that VSTO doesn't bring the notion of entities, views, actions etc. that IBF does and I do think that distinction is a great idea, but you have to have a good reason to choose IBF and invest something like 4 hours into building a smarttag when you can do the same with VSTO in 30 minutes (times are completely my estimates and therefore inaccurate!). I think IBF will only stay interesting in very few cases, unless someone very quickly integrates it with VSTO2005. What do you think? Am I to quickly abandoning IBF?
by Carlo Poli | 2 comment(s)