Mischa Kroon

Samsung will be delivering a Hard disk mid 2006 with built in Flash cache of 1 GB.

This will mean a huge performance boost. Windows Vista is reported to be booting from this 1 GB flashdrive and other speed up options...

http://news.com.com/Samsung+hybrid+hard+drive+works+while+it+sleeps/2100-1041_3-5683836.html

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1789198,00.asp

For most of your Asp.Net 2.0 questions:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/beta2/faq/default.aspx

A lot of the questions are points which differ from the 1.1 version...

All in all this seems like a very good base to start from in preparing to use 2.0

 

This time Opera removes it's ads + price tag :)

If you want to know why: http://www.opera.com/free/

Or just go get it at: http://www.opera.com

http://atlas.asp.net/ <--- is said to have gone live an hour ago :)

Still can't reach it.

But I'm very curious at what's there to see.

When I get a chance to try this out I will try to compare it with the leading implementation of Ajax out there at this moment.
Ajax on Rails.

Site has really gone live by now :P

 

In evaluating Ruby on Rails I have seen a very beautifull Ajax implementation. At least from the programmers perspective.

No extra coding in javascript, easy and elegant to setup etc.
When looking at the .Net equivalent, it doesn't seem very elegant, nor portable not programmer friendly.

Now a roadmap of a Ajax alternative has reached my eyes and it looks good, the roadmap can be found here.

Some examples can be found here.

The developers for this project seem to be working together with the creator of ajax.net ( professional )
My hope is set on them :)

Django and Rails an introduction.

What is Django:
Intro text from http://www.djangoproject.com/ :

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Developed and used over the past two years by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed from scratch to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of experienced Web developers. It has convenient niceties for developing content-management systems, but it's an excellent tool for building any Web site.

Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.

What is Rails:
Intro text from http://www.rubyonrails.org/ :

Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups

Being a full-stack framework means that all layers are built to work seamlessly together. That way you Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) and you can use a single language from top to bottom. Everything from templates to control flow to business logic is written in Ruby—the language of love for industry heavy-weights.
In striving for DRY compliance, Rails shuns configuration files and annotations in favor of reflection and run-time extensions.
This means the end of XML files telling a story that has already been told in code. It means no compilation phase: Make a change, see it work. Meta-data is an implementation detail left for the framework to handle.

You have read it in both the intro's DRY, now what is it:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DontRepeatYourself

The DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Principle states:

''Every piece of knowledge must have a single,
unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.''

What do they have in common:

- They are both open source frameworks built on dynamic open source languages.
- They are both striving to maintain the DRY principle.
- They are both in heavy development.
- They are both based interpreted languages.
- They both push the MVC stack (http://www.slash7.com/articles/2005/02/22/mvc-the-most-vexing-conundrum)
- They are both based on the LAMP stack.
- They both strive to take productivity to a new level.
- They both include some extensive caching schemes
- They both include an ORM in the Framework
- They both render URLS which are without an extension.
- They both have a way of making dynamic datadriven pages without doing a lot of coding

They are different in:

- Their language: Python vs Ruby.
- Their background: CMS vs Web App.
- Their time in front of the public eye: a couple of weeks vs about a year.
- The way they define the Model part: Model in the framework vs model in the Database.
- Database support: sql lite, mysql, postgres vs those 3 + DB2, Oracle, SQl Server.
- Url handling: Regexps vs Defining / using Code.
- Datadriven page generation: Full blown CMS Admin vs Good building blocks for custom datadriven pages.
- Built in Ajax support: Has yet to be implemented vs Best of the breed.
- Testing support: none that I know of vs Automaticly created testing framework.

In Future posts I will try to go through most of these points and why offcourse these things might matter for you.

Reference for more comparison articles:

An index for comparisons

A larger comparison of rails and django

Ok what do you do when you have a bit of time when not going out and partying with friends,  when your a lazy programmer.
You check out ways to be even more productive when programming.

So that when you start a programming again you will be even more productive and in a more fun environment.
First thing I did was have a look at all the open source .Net CMS systems I could get my hands on that interested me to install them and play with them.

I also tried some other projects.
Nsurvey comes to mind... which absolutely rocks...

So far so good in terms of free solutions, there are offcourse also commercial solutions which make your life easier but for me exploring these won't happen expect for when my  dayjob justifies this.

Beyond the realm of asp.net there are also some other solutions which are advertised to save a lot of time.

2 of these technologies are Ruby on Rails and the Django Project.

I will try to explain and explore these technologies for people who haven't yet read about
or haven't explored these technologies and compare these technologies to Asp.Net with VS.Net.

This is a great way to add search to a website, and it's so simple that you will probably love it.

The code needed:

string search = string.Format("http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site%3yoursitehere.com+{0}&format=rss",
                              HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(SearchText.Text));
RssFeed1.DataSource = search;
RssFeed1.DataBind();

RssFeed1 is a SKM RssFeed control  which can be downloaded here.

Only thing to do after this is add some visually pleasing styles and your done.

An example of this in action can be found here.

This idea came from:
Ryan Farley's blog.

Scott van Vliet has made a MSN reference bot.

To use this bot add:
dotnetreference@hotmail.com

To your MSN list.
Afterwards you can query this bot with Namespaces where it will give references back.

More details can be found on Scott's blog

For people who don't know it Linspire is a commercial linux distribution.

Which is designed to look as much like windows like possible, it also includes some licensed software from third party's which usually isn't included with free linux distro's.

However this free version does not incude a license in any way to the Click And Run feature of Linspire.

It usually costs money: 50 dollars for a downloadable version.
It's free till 6 september 2005:

http://info.linspire.com/freespire/index.html

Has the details

Intro text from http://www.easyobjects.net/

Based on Microsoft's Enterprise Library and MyGeneration's dOOdads, EasyObjects.NET is an Object/Relational Mapper (O/RM) data architecture written entirely in C#. It's real time saver for software developers. Imagine decreasing your development time by over 50%! Using your existing database schema, EasyObjects.NET combined with MyGeneration can generate a complete data-access layer and business logic layer for you in C# or VB.NET in a matter of seconds.

Features:

Based on Microsoft's Enterprise Library and Application Blocks

Feature compatible with Mike Griffin's dOOdads architecture

Advanced features, such as support for transactions and a custom query syntax

Support for SQL Server and Oracle (other databases to be added in the future)

Support for a dynamic query provider, controlled by configuration file

Code-generation scripts available for the popular MyGeneration code generator