Emil Stoychev's Blog on ASP.NET, AJAX and Silverlight (WPF/E)

CodeCamp Bulgaria

estoychev — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:40:16 GMT

The developer's community in Bulgaria organizes the first Code Camp on 15/16th of February 2008. I'm glad to see that such initiatives are held in my country as well. I'm sure it is going to be fun and this will be the first of many upcoming camps.

There will be 7 sessions:

Pingback and Trackback enable your web application
Multicore architectures and programming
CIFactory - continues integration on crack
Mootools
Aggregator How-To
Creating multiplatform .NET applications using Mono

I'm going to speak in the first one - Pingback and Trackback enable your web application. You can find more information on the official site - http://codecamp.sofiadev.org

Meet you there.

Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha - VS Orcas Beta 2 to VS2008 RTM migration issues

estoychev — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:10:27 GMT

Last week Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for VS 2008 RTM were released and as a developer working with Silverlight I run to install them on my fresh new copy of VS 2008 RTM. The installation went without any problems, but unfortunately after trying to create a new Silverlight project (same for class library) I got a popup error saying:

"The project file 'C:\Users\estoychev\AppData\Local\Temp\zhxiyguv.4rr\Temp\SilverlightProject1.csproj' cannot be opened. The project type is not supported by this installation."

Puff. I tried to google about this error message but I got no helpful results. I only noticed that a guy commented on the ScottGu's blog with the same problem. Scott kindly replied to this guy to mail him and he would attach someone to help for this problem. I followed his advice and wrote to him. The next day I received an answer from Bill Hiebert guiding me how to resolve my problem. The simple step you should take is the following:

Open a Visual Studio Command prompt and type "devenv /resetskippkgs".

Then try to create a new Silverlight project. This solution does work for me. I hope it also works for you. Thanks Bill ;)

SilverlightShow.net - Silverlight Community

estoychev — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 15:12:00 GMT

Today we've published our first beta of SilverlightShow. It is a website that provides regular aggregation and classification of the information related to Silverlight available all over the Internet. We will get interviews, make video/audio/screen casts, write articles, provide samples; we will try to bring to you the hottest articles around Silverlight. As it is still a beta version there are no benefits to be a member of the community but soon we will provide functionalities to publish your own articles.

Currently we aggregate news from different sources - blogs, user groups, etc. We categorize the information carefully and let you see only the valuable pieces of it. Probably now you use RSS/Atom feeds or Google Alerts or Google Blog Search to stay in touch with the latest news around Silverlight. Yes, we also use these 'tools'. We also check the official Microsoft Silverlight Community site. We know about all of them. But we strongly believe that we can offer you more - a better experience to stay tuned with Silverlight.

I hope you will see in SilverlightShow a great place to learn and discuss things about Silverlight.

ASP.NET 2.0 issues: Validation of viewstate MAC failed

estoychev — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 11:44:00 GMT

Have you ever experienced such error? Well, today I did. It is not easy to get it - you have to browse too quickly trough pages (or in one page) and click buttons (causing postback). Yep, sounds strange. The point is that if you have a page, with lets say just a text box and a button, and you push that button quickly you will probably get this error - especially if you do it with slow connection or at least not on your local machine.

I would reccommend reading this thread in ASP.NET forums if you want to learn more about this error and want a solution (or a workaround).

4 reasons to switch to Visual Studio 2008 (formerly known as Visual Studio code name “Orcas”)

estoychev — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:37:00 GMT

Microsoft aims to release Visual Studio 2008 by the end of this year. Currently there is a beta 1 and a second beta release is expected later this summer. There is a couple of improvements in the new version of the most popular software development platform that could probably make you switch from an older version.

Multi-Targeting Support

Visual Studio 2008 will now support targeting multiple versions of the .NET Framework. That means you can open an existing project or create a new one and select the .NET Framework version to work with. No matter which version you choose you will be able to take advantage of the new features Visual Studio provides.

LINQ Support

Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) extends C# and VB with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities. It is a set of APIs that allows you to write SQL-like queries. LINQ is available only when .NET Framework 3.5 is used.

JavaScript intellisense and debugging

Built-in support for JavaScript intellisense and debugging (improved). One of the coolest things is that VS 2008 allows you to set client-side breakpoints directly within your source files.

Richer WYSIWYG Designer

VS 2008 will now support nested ASP.NET master pages at design-time. Master page support was one of the most popular features shipped with ASP.NET 2.0. But the drawback with VS 2005 was that nested master pages couldn't be edited with the WYSIWYG designer.

Split View support – source and design views available at the same time.

Rich CSS Support – CSS property window, CSS inheritance viewer, CSS preview, and CSS manager. This allows the designers/developers to easily create, manage and refactor CSS rules.

ASP.NET asynchronous operations presentation + source code

estoychev — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:14:00 GMT

Here I'm back from the Linux-bg and RIABG seminar where i've talked about Asynchronous operations on the client and on the server using MS AJAX and ASP.NET. It was my first ever presentation, people seemed interested though, and I had some great questions and comments after the session, so I guess everything went well.

Here you can download the presentation in PowerPoint 97-2003/2007 format and the source code(VS Orcas Beta 1 project) from the demos.

Asynchronous operations on the client and on the server using MS AJAX and ASP.NET

estoychev — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:22:00 GMT

This Saturday (21.07.2007) I'm going to speak at the RIABG seminar about executing async operations on the client and on the server using ASP.NET async pages and Microsoft AJAX library. I'll try to reveal some interesting points about the usage of async operations and what problems they solve.

The seminar is starting at 13:00 on Saturday in the French Centre of the Sofia Unversity. My speach will take place at 15:00. The entrance is free. Everyone is invited ;)

Wicked ASP.NET Programming

estoychev — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:05:00 GMT

Today was the first day of the Wicked ASP.NET Programming presented by Dino Esposito who talked about The ASP.NET Underlying Machinery. The talks were based mainly on his book Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics. HTTP runtime, runtime components and asynchronous pages were the general topics today.

The interesting things that happen behind the scenes are something the developers do not care about or simply don't know about because they are not well documented. Dino Esposito tried to unveil some of those like using HTTP modules and handlers, when and how to use them in the right way. He also talked about the asynchronous pages and benefits for the ASP.NET runtime when executing lengthy tasks through AJAX (no benefits actually ;). In future posts I'll try to summarize some important points regarding the usage of HTTP modules and handlers, ways of calling web services asynchronously, and the benefits we can gain using asynchronous pages together with AJAX.

Tomorrow Dino is going to talk about AJAX extensions. I hope to learn some useful things to blog about ;)

Back from REMIX’07 Budapest

estoychev — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:57:25 GMT

There is no better start of the week than being an attendee in the REMIX'07 conference in Budapest. It was my first time attending Microsoft conference and it was really great to be a part of this event.

I'll try to point out the most interesting moments from both the developer and the designer sessions.

UPDATE
Pictures from Budapest

The event began with the Scott Guthrie's keynote about the new technologies that had recently come out from Microsoft and of course more specially Silverlight. It was quite cool to listen to such an experienced speaker even when you were already well grounded in Silverlight.

After the keynote I went to the designer session room where Pete LePage talked about Search Engine Optimization with Rich Media. I was totally impressed from Pete as he is also a very experienced speaker. He showed some good practices how to get our rich applications ranked up by the search engines. Unfortunately I can't find this session online. Here are the most important things he mentioned:

Use semantic HTML – H1, H2 … tags, paragraphs, lists, etc. Also mind that you put no more than two H1 tags, three H2 tags, etc.
Put an HTML equivalent content in the <div> tag where your rich media is placed. Search engine crawlers can't read the rich media (Flash, Silverlight, etc.) so if you put a description or fully created HTML equivalent of the rich media (better!) the crawler will read the HTML and index your page as expected. The browser ignores any HTML written in the <div> where the rich media is placed so you don't have to worry about the regular user. For an example Pete referred to http://miniusa.com/ which is pretty well optimized for search engines as it is completely developed in Flash.
HTML Meta keywords – there were questions about whether the Meta keywords were useful for the search engines and whether they had taken them in 'mind'. Pete was well prepared as he had consulted the Live.com team about that but they hadn't uncovered such secrets ;) The wisest thing you can do is to put them regardless what search engines thinks about ;)

Thinking in CSS: How to build great looking sites

Molly Holzschlag had a great session about CSS, how to and how not to use it. I strongly recommend you to watch the video if you are interested in building stunning standard based sites. She also talked about the usage of the new Expression Web.

The conference continued in the evening when all attendees were invited to join the evening party aboard on Europa Boat on the Danube River. It was quite an amazing trip – I'd never travelled on a boat. Great cocktail party indeed ;) Cheers Billy ;)

The second day began with a session about WPF and Silverlight. It was presented by Paul Dawson from Conchango – one of the Europe's leading web design agencies. I'd never heard about Conchango or about Paul Dawson before REMIX'07. He also talked about Killer Digital Reading Experiences.

Molly also presented a session about Web Standards and IE7. If you have no experience with CSS 3.0 this session is right for you. Molly talked about cool new features in CSS 3 like child selectors

(#content > p, #content > p > a

), sibling selectors(

th + td, tr + tr + tr

), attribute selectors(

a[title], a[id = "cart"], img[alt ~= "offer"]

), alpha transparency, conditional comments etc. It was nice to hear that in CSS 3 we have 'hover' everywhere. In previous versions of CSS we have only hover functionality on anchors but it is not valid for all tags. That is really cool! No more java script hover functions ;)

Inspired by Molly and Pete I'll definitely write more on search engine optimization and web standards and CSS. Check out soon.

Wicked ASP.NET Programming Seminar

estoychev — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 08:36:25 GMT

Dino Esposito, one of the most trustworthy ASP.NET and AJAX speakers, is going to visit Sofia, Bulgaria and have a talk about ASP.NET infrastructure, building asynchronous pages, utilizing ASP.NET AJAX machinery and monitoring requests. Check out the agenda and hurry up to register.

WebTech 2007 Varna, Bulgaria

estoychev — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 08:21:29 GMT

WebTech 2007 is focused on new technologies in web programming and open source. This is the 4^th edition of WebTech conference and it will take place in city of Varna, Bulgaria on 29-30 June.

It looks like this year there are less sessions than before, but still there are interesting sessions especially for RIA technologies – RIA plug-in based technologies, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), JqPie, Using JavaScript libraries (jQuery, YUI, Prototype).

See you there

Reflector for Silverlight applications

estoychev — Mon, 21 May 2007 14:15:11 GMT

Curious about Silverlight application's source code? Ernie Booth has created great Silverlight plug-in for Lutz Roeder's Reflector.

It's cool to be able to look at the other guy's source code, but what to do when you want to protect your code? Using Obfuscation is the answer you are looking for ;) Have fun!

Silverlight issues: Handling KeyDown and KeyUp events

estoychev — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:52:16 GMT

Issues

When you attach to KeyDown / KeyUp event you get a JavaScript error AG_E_INIT_ROOTVISUAL (ErrorCode: 2101).
KeyboardEventArgs.Key is not a standard ASCII code

Description

In Silverlight 1.1 Alpha keyboard events can only be handled on the root most Canvas. That is the reason you get Error 2101.

The Key you receive from the KeyboardEventArgs is not a standard ACII Code in this release.

Solutions

To get the root most Canvas you can iterate trough all parents of your control. The following code explains it:

FrameworkElement parent = myTextBlock.Parent as FrameworkElement;


while (parent != null)

  if (parent.Parent != null)

    parent = parent.Parent as FrameworkElement;

  else

    break;

                                        
if (parent != null)

(parent as Canvas).KeyDown +=
new KeyboardEventHandler(myTextBlock_KeyDown);

To workaround the second issue you should use this Key Enumeration to handle the actual key. But if you need to localize it – good luck 

Great article about JavaScript for ASP.NET developers

estoychev — Tue, 15 May 2007 08:16:00 GMT

K. Scott Allen has written a great article for ASP.NET developers who have no experience in JavaScript programming. It is a well structured article defining the JavaScript basics – What is right/wrong with JavaScript, Object Oriented JavaScript, JavaScript Functions, Constructor Functions, and Object Prototypes.

I like what he summarizes at the end of his article:

Every JavaScript object is a dictionary.
Every JavaScript function is an object.
Every JavaScript object references a prototype object

REMIX’07, Budapest, Hungary 11-12 June

estoychev — Tue, 15 May 2007 08:05:47 GMT

Hey, I'm going to participate in the reMIX'07 conference in Budapest and I'm pretty excited about that.

I've never thought I'm going to visit a MIX conference but today when I read PeteL's Blog and understand that he is heading to Budapest I really freak out. To participate in a conference where speakers are Scott Guthrie and Pete Lepage is something I've been waiting for a long time.

Hope meet you there guys!