Are you a true beginner at web development? Do you want to know what CSS stands for or how to write your first line of JavaScript? Do you already know HTML and basic web development, but are new to ASP.NET? Are you familiar with ASP.NET but are not sure how to add master pages or membership to your application? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, the Beginner Web Development Learning Center that we launched last week is just for you. You can start at the level that is appropriate for you. There are 3 levels at the site labeled Tier1 through Tier3. Get started with a 30 minute video overview of Visual Web Developer Express that starts at the very beginning - i.e. how to download and install the product. It goes on to do a detailed...(read more)

If you like me, after dinner it’s back to work. Duringthe day it’s recording videos, and phone calls most of the day. Night time is research, coding, learning, etc…. While my office is only a few minute walk from my house, I like to be in the house at night so I can hear the kids play. They run in and out of my den or turn my TV to the Disney Channel Sitting on the couch with my laptop isn’t comefortable and the laptop on my lap doesn’t really work either. I recently found this “Lap Desk”. It’s the second of these type of products that I’ve tried. The first was junk, but this one is cool. It’s light but pretty firm and it’s vented so your lap doesn’t sweat. It’s also wide enough for my Trackball or my mouse dock. So now I can sit back and comefortably...(read more)

I’m a mobile guy and USB devices are an integral part of my day. I found this little beauty at Circuit City. It has a total of 7 ports. 4 on the front and 3 on top. The ones on top are great for dropping USB keys onto. It also has an external power supply (so it doesn’t suck up 2 USB ports on your PC). You can pick them up HERE. Read More......(read more)

A very interesting conference that's available from Yahoo!. Douglas Crockford's introduction is worth the watch in itself but the others also have very interesting things to say. Chris Wilson from the IE team and Mike Shaver from Mozilla are all about conciliation and doing the right thing for the Web to continue to be the platform of choice for the killer applications of the future. Encouraging. Mike even had nice things to say about IE7 (yes, you read that right). H?kon Lie was more trying to pitch his product (and gently bashing IE) but still made an interesting case for a standard

One of the questions I am often asked is "How can I integrate ASP.NET security with Classic ASP other non-ASP.NET URLs?". Specifically, people want to know if they can integrate ASP.NET's Forms Authentication, Role Based Security, and URL Authorization features with Classic ASP, PHP, JSP, .HTM, .JPG and other non-ASP.NET URLs. The good news is that this is pretty easy with ASP.NET 2.0 and IIS 6.0 today, and will get even easier in the IIS 7.0 timeframe. The below blog post demonstrates how to integrate ASP.NET 2.0's Forms Authentication and Login/Membership features with classic ASP and static .HTML files. For a much more detailed walkthrough of how to achieve this (as well as how to integrate features like ASP.NET role based authorization with...(read more)

A reader asked about the reference to running part of ASP.NET AJAX on PHPApache in my recent interview ... The specific thing I was talking about was running the Microsoft Ajax Library on PHP... Check out the CodePlex project.. Feel free to jump in and contribute to it. http://codeplex.com/phpmsajax Here is the "hello, world" for this project.. ProcessRequest(); ?> index.html : read more)

The March CTP of Visual Studio Orcas is out, and it includes IntelliSense support for JScript. See Jeff King's post about it. That by itself is cool, but the ASP.NET AJAX support is awesome! It uses the xml documentation in the AJAX Library to give you extra information like parameter types/descriptions. I've seen this before internally, but I haven't gotten a chance to play with it yet. I'm definitely looking forward to it! Read More......(read more)

The upcoming workshop on the WCSF next March 12th. is sold out. If you are still interested in participating please contact me through this blog and I will put you in our waiting list. We normally have some late cancellations, so you might be able to make it. Thanks a look forward to seeing you! Read More......(read more)

Last night we released our 10301 Toolkit package. David Anson already wrote up a great post describing what's in there, but I thought I'd highlight some of the great stuff the team has done. We do almost all of our prioritization based purely on customer feedback from CodePlex Issue Tracker and the Forums, and it is really great to be able to turn things around this quickly. We pay a lot of attention to the issue voting on CodePlex. We added two new components: ListSearch and SlideShow . In addition we now have localization support, theming support, and (finally!) a built-in mechanism for removing comments and whitespace from the JavaScript files, which results in quite a bit smaller download sizes for the AJAX pages. This is an issue that I've...(read more)

This is an absolutely awesome feature. IntelliSense / autocompletion for JavaScript is a difficult problem (because of the dynamic nature of JavaScript) which the Visual Studio team is brilliantly solving. They were able to build an elegant solution to the problem that works reasonably well on plain JavaScript, but really shines when used with ASP.NET Ajax. The type information that we added to our debug scripts through doc comments really helps in making the whole experience seamless. Jeff King wrote a great blog post that shows what's already available in the Orcas CTP: http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2007/03/02/jscript-intellisense-in-orcas.aspx The CTP itself can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b533619a-0008-4dd6-9ed1-47d482683c78&DisplayLang=e...(read more)

Back in October at the Ajax Experience Conference, I had a chance to sit down with Jack Vaughan from ServerSide.NET to talk about ASP.NET AJAX. Check it out: Brad Abrams on ASP.NET AJAX ( Video ) I'd love your feedback or thoughts... Here is an idea of what we talked about You have described basic elements of AJAX . but when you looked at it first, what were the main components of AJAX for someone just even starting out? Jack Vaughan: So, a lot more client side caching? And, but it does have a server side and a client side, and as being at this conference, how do you see people's views on where what should be? Okay, well, the.what we called Atlas Controls and now we are calling ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. I think I saw that yesterday. What did...(read more)

Today on the www.asp.net site we posted a great new "How Do I?" video series focused on SQL Server 2005 Express (which you can download and use completely for free). The series features 13 professional videos that start at the very beginning and then explore designing tables/schemas, using data types, creating SPROCs, using reporting services and the business intelligence engine, enabling full text search across your data, and more (I'm guessing even most devs with a lot of data experience might learn some new things from the reporting services and full text search videos): You can download or watch the the SQL Training videos online for free here . In case you missed my posts on uploading a SQL Express or SQL Server Database into a remote hosting...(read more)

The March CTP of Visual Studio marks the debut of a much-requested and long-awaited feature: improved JScript IntelliSense . We’ve been working on this for almost a year now and I’m pretty excited to finally be able to share it with the public. There are a variety of topics I’d like to deep dive into, but for today let’s just take a quick aerial tour of the new features. 1. Proactive Completion List Our old list was a bit lazy and only “awoke” when you typed a period while accessing a member. Our new one is on-its-toes and is wired up to the language grammar. Net effect: it comes up when you would expect it, and you can spend less time pressing ctrl+J. =) 2. Keywords in Completion List In practice, you will spend half of your time typing keywords....(read more)

I’ve had SO MANY inquiries as to how I reocrd the How-Do-I videos I thought I’d type up a little guide. First, I use Camtasia Studio 4 from TechSmith . I do my recordings on Windows XP, but I’ve tested a beta release of Camtasia for Vista and it appears to work fjust fine. Audio… Get a GOOD USB Headset. I use the Plantronics Audio 510 USB . This really makes a different with sound quality. My audio format is MPEG Layer-3 (TechSmith LAME), 44100Hz, mono, 15KB/s When recording – I set my screen properties to 1024x768 and I do video capture as native .camrec format, I use the standard TechSmith Screen Capture Codec and record at 5 frames per second. When I produce my video I use custom production settings to create the .wmv file. I producs with...(read more)

The IIS team delivered an amazing product with IIS 6 but they sure haven’t rested in their laurels since then. They’ve been doing all sorts of great work, not the least of which is IIS 7. So I thougt I’d share this list of IIS Resources that I keep my eye on. IIS.net IIS-Resources.com IIS FAQ IIS Answers IIS Toolshed IIS MVP Blog IIS Product Site Read More......(read more)

Improving performance is all about finding and removing bottlenecks. In many web applications, the bottleneck is one slow piece of the page. More specifically, it's the work that happens on the server to enable that one piece that's slowing down the application. For example, you might have a page that displays an article along with links to related content. The article is quick to load, but those related links require a query across several databases and then an expensive merge step. This means that while your users are sitting at a blank page twiddling their thumbs, the article (which is what they want) is ready to go but stuck on the server waiting for those related links (which they don't yet care about). This problem leads a lot of ASP.NET...(read more)

Thanks to everyone who came to my webcast today on Using the Microsoft AJAX Library with PHP . We had about fifty people at the live webcast. If you missed it, a recording should go up in the next 24 hours. During the talk, I showed how to use the Microsoft AJAX Library to create client-side controls and behaviors. I also showed how to use the networking API (plus " PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library ") to communicate with a PHP server. The sample I showed during the session is brand new. It's called "Achord", and you can play with it here . The idea is for you to be able to write notes during an event (like a webcast!) while seeing the notes other people are taking. Then you can aggregate (copy/paste) when you see something useful. That way not...(read more)

The March CTP (community technology preview) of Visual Studio Orcas is now available here . You can either install it (side-by-side with VS 2005) or use via a VPC image. This is the first CTP that contains significant web tools feature enhancements - the new HTML/Webforms Designer, Jscript Intellisense and Debugging, LINQ to SQL Designer and Multitargeting being some of the key features. You can learn more about these features from this blog post by Scott as well as this forum post by Jim. We encourage all of you to try out the CTP and provide us early feedback that will help shape the rest of this release. We have created a new forum for you to post your questions, issues/bugs and suggestions regarding the feature set. Team members will be...(read more)

Being a good web designer requires some artistic tendencies. I have none ! I think most developers lack real artistic abilities. Maybe being able to use the logical engineering part of the brain is mutually exclusive from using the artistic part. I’ve been getting lots of email from developers asking for guidance on doing good DESIGN when using ASP.NET. If you’re a designer, you know the questions. DIV versus Table? CSS in ASP.NET, etc. Do you have some ASP.NET Visual DESIGN topics that you are especially good at? Let’s web cast them. Contact me and I’ll host you in a Live-From-Redmond Webcast on Design. The web cast will get linked from www.asp.net Great way for independent designers to show off their skills. Contest for highest attendance...(read more)

Are you a Microsoft MVP or RD ?? Wanna show off your tech skills to the developer world ? Pick ONE COOL THING and I’ll host you to show it off in one of my Live-From-Redmond Webcasts. Just email me !!! Read More......(read more)