Hi,

Long time since my last post I know, but promise to start writing again soon; I am starting these days to write my first big Silverlight 2 application, so I think I’ll have plenty of stuff to share.

For now, great and convenient search engine from google to search MSDN contents (thanks to Erez Eden, my friend that keeps me on track with such nice things…)

You can check it out in the further and save it in your favorites: http://www.google.com/microsoft

Be in touch, promise, Eran.

Long time since I spent my words here (shame on me...), but I am in a middle of a great project that touches almost every MS technology: asp.net, WPF, WCF and even WWF. I want to talk here about known issue from Microsoft and not to innovate something but to share my frustrations in regadrs it.

Even WWF is a great technology, has very intuitive API and supplies fun of programming - which is very important these days (for me at least) it has a major disadvantage: VERY VERY VERY slow VS 2008 designer. I am talking here about very big WF that contains somthing like 15 state activities, which everyone of them holds very complex conditions, code activities, send & receive activities that exposed outside as a WCF service.

In the beginning (were I was young by 6 months) life were easy and the future sound even better, but this has been changed after more and more and more logic in the WF which turned it to be a WF monster that except of doing coffee it does almost everything...

My main insight in regards to it is to split every single state (also if it very small one) to a custom activities that each one of them (of course) will be placed in a seperate file and will hold all its logic. After it, in the main workflow file you could attach each one of them and combine the puzzle.

Click to read more: VS2008 Workflow Designer is Very Slow

Hi,

ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 has browsing history (making bookmarking functional too) handling support built in.
Resently web applications become more and more ajax-style, it is important to keep that in mind and see where it is reasonable for use.

You can read about it here:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc972638.aspx

It is a very recommended article for ASP.NET developers to read in general, It also reveals the ASP.NET v4.0 Ajax Template approach, looks really cool.

CodeRush just come out with a free version of its well known and recommended addin to VS.
It provides stronger refactoring capabilities and also ease other tasks like browsing for files in a solution.

You can check it out and some more information here: http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/markmiller/archive/2008/10/27/announcing-coderush-express-for-c.aspx

C# version is here: http://devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/CodeRushX/

Another version for ASP.NET refactoring is here: http://devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/RefactorASP/

Have fun ;)

I waited so long on regards this issue to be coming out with much more stable version, and I am not a great beleiver of beta versions but I think MVC Beta framework is kind of stable one and ready to use (I admit it my - fingers are burning in order to start working with this great tool), one more thing is that the Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments.

The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types).

You can download it from Scott Guthrie's blog here and read some more details on regards this issue.
Great examples and web casts you can find here.

My point of view on regards this issue is quite clear - I am supporting this methodology and work-scheme over the traditional asp.net webform that does simple round-trip to the server and back. One more thing is that traditional asp.net webforms were being done much more heavier and with low performance where including vast logic - not including asp.net AJAX controls (ScriptManager, UpdatePanel etc...) that make the page process to be much more slow and not intuitive;
MVC framework got me back to the traditional web development, while using simple HTML code that does simple submit to the server and shows the server-side data in fewer code while not using asp.net server controls at all.

One more great featutre that MVC supplies according to it behavior is explicit URLs patterns. This one helps to SEO against search engines - something that comes out of the box and you don't need to implement it like on regular asp.net webforms; that means MVC is perfect to content websites that suppost to be indexed by the search engines.

The main question is why Microsoft came out with this framework so lately, you know MVC methodology is exists for years...

I waited so long on regards this issue to be coming out with much more stable version, and I am not a great beleiver of beta versions but I think MVC Beta framework is kind of stable one and ready to use (I admit it my - fingers are burning in order to start working with this great tool), one more thing is that the Beta release comes with an explicit "go-live" license that allows you to deploy it in production environments.

The ASP.NET MVC Beta works with both .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1, and supports both VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 (which is free - and now supports class libraries and web application project types).

You can download it from Scott Guthrie's blog here and read some more details on regards this issue.
Great examples and web casts you can find here.

My point of view on regards this issue is quite clear - I am supporting this methodology and work-scheme over the traditional asp.net webform that does simple round-trip to the server and back. One more thing is that traditional asp.net webforms were being done much more heavier and with low performance where including vast logic - not including asp.net AJAX controls (ScriptManager, UpdatePanel etc...) that make the page process to be much more slow and not intuitive;
MVC framework got me back to the traditional web development, while using simple HTML code that does simple submit to the server and shows the server-side data in fewer code while not using asp.net server controls at all.

One more great featutre that MVC supplies according to it behavior is explicit URLs patterns. This one helps to SEO against search engines - something that comes out of the box and you don't need to implement it like on regular asp.net webforms; that means MVC is perfect to content websites that suppost to be indexed by the search engines.

The main question is why Microsoft came out with this framework so lately, you know MVC methodology is exists for years...

Great post by Omar Al Zabir on regards best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.

This post will demonstrate you step by step how to make your website more scalability and cachable.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar/archive/2008/10/04/best-practices-for-creating-websites-in-iis-6-0.aspx

Mono 2.0 is a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Unix, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems.

What is Mono?
Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.
According to Novell: "We feel that by embracing a successful, standardized software platform, we can lower the barriers to producing great applications for Linux".

The components that make up Mono are:
C# Compiler - The C# compiler is feature complete for compiling C# 1.0 and 2.0 (ECMA), and also contains many of the C# 3.0 features.
Mono Runtime - The runtime implements the ECMA Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). The runtime provides a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler, an Ahead-of-Time compiler (AOT), a library loader, the garbage collector, a threading system and interoperability functionality.
Base Class Library - The Mono platform provides a comprehensive set of classes that provide a solid foundation to build applications on. These classes are compatible with Microsoft's .Net Framework classes.
Mono Class Library - Mono also provides many classes that go above and beyond the Base Class Library provided by Microsoft. These provide additional functionality that are useful, especially in building Linux applications. Some examples are classes for Gtk+, Zip files, LDAP, OpenGL, Cairo, POSIX, etc.

The benefits are:
Popularity - Built on the success of .Net, there are millions of developers that have experience building applications in C#. There are also tens of thousands of books, websites, tutorials, and example source code to help with any imaginable problem.
Higher-Level Programming - All Mono languages benefit from many features of the runtime, like automatic memory management, reflection, generics, and threading. These features allow you to concentrate on writing your application instead of writing system infrastructure code.
Base Class Library - Having a comprehensive class library provides thousands of built in classes to increase productivity. Need socket code or a hashtable? There's no need to write your own as it's built into the platform.
Cross Platform - Mono is built to be cross platform. Mono runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Sun Solaris, Nintendo Wii, Apple iPhone. It also runs on x86, x86-64, IA64, PowerPC, SPARC (32), ARM, Alpha, s390, s390x (32 and 64 bits) and more. Developing your application with Mono allows you to run on nearly any computer in existance (details).
Common Language Runtime (CLR) - The CLR allows you to choose the programming language you like best to work with, and it can interoperate with code written in any other CLR language. For example, you can write a class in C#, inherit from it in VB.Net, and use it in Eiffel. You can choose to write code in Mono in a variety of programming languages.

In order to view the Mono 2.0 Release Notes click here.

Whether you are a software developer, student or just a guy, attached below a link that gathers great 6 websites that allows you to download great ebooks entirly free.

Enjoy... :)

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-6-sites-to-get-free-ebooks/