.Net Technologies

Windows Azure Management Tool (MMC)

Jay Kinker — Sun, 17 May 2009 12:21:30 GMT

Available immediately from Code Gallery, download the Windows Azure MMC. The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your storage accounts in Windows Azure and makes it simple to help debug, create, and explore your storage solutions. In our testing, this tool has been invaluable to us to inspect messages in our queues.

debug, create, explore…

Developed as a managed MMC, the tool allows you to create and manage both blobs and queues. Easily create and manage containers, blobs, and permissions. Add and remove queues, inspect or add messages, or empty queues as well.

Features

· Manage multiple storage accounts (makes it easy to manage all your accounts)

· Easily switch between remote and local storage services

· Manage your blobs

o Create containers and manage permissions

o Upload files or even entire folders

o Read metadata or preview the blob contents

· Manage your queues

o Create new queues

o Monitor queues

o Read (peek) messages

o Post new messages to the queue

o Purge queues

* The current release does not work with Windows 7 due to a bug in the underlying PowerShell version. All other OS versions should be unaffected.

What is Windows Azure?

Jay Kinker — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:42:43 GMT

Have you read or experimented with Azure yet?

Business wise this is a fantastic approach from Microsoft for the way they want to sell Azure platform. Pricing, SLA and commercial version are yet to be made available by Microsoft but it’s worthwhile looking at it in its current form.

For developers… here are some resources:

What is Azure: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/whatisazure.mspx

Demos and samples:

Updated MMC for .Net Services: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AzureManagementTools

Windows Azure MMC (yet to be published): http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuremmc

Bid Now Sample: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BidNowSample

Contoso Cycles (yet to be published): http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/contosocycles

Fluffy Photos: http://phluffyfotos.codeplex.com/

Upgrading to .Net - Webcast series

Jay Kinker — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:57:24 GMT

I use webcast as one of primary source of information to upgrade myself. Its rapid action upgradation (RAU) for you

You can easily upgrade yourself to .Net technologies if you are aware of any object oriented language. Upgrading to C# would be easiest for JAVA professionals.

One excellent collection of .Net webcast series is at:

http://www.pluralsight.com/drjoe/webcasts/webcasts.aspx

.Net Framework 3.0 webcast series:

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnnetframework3.aspx

Modern Software Development Using C#: Develop in .NET:

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/modernsoftdev.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=42420

Architecting Modern Desktop Apps in .NET:

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/modernsoftdev.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=42418

C# for Java developers

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228358(VS.80).aspx

Converting Java Applications to Visual C#

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c6t6bsdk(VS.80).aspx

Visual C#

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kx37x362(VS.80).aspx

Visual C# samples

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z9hsy596(VS.80).aspx

Visual C# 2005 Webcasts

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnvisualcsharp.aspx

You can always go to Events and Webcasts and find webcast on other technologies/products you are looking for. At the same time I have to admit, its getting tough now-a-days to find your webcasts…!

Events and Webcasts Homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/events/default.mspx

New wave of Microsoft technologies/products...

Jay Kinker — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:42:33 GMT

Be ready for new wave of Microsoft technologies and products. Few are already released and rest will follow in the next few months.

Below are some of major releases from Microsoft. Click on links below for more information:

.Net 3.5

o WCF, WPF, WWF

o ASP.Net

§ ASP (.Net 3.0) - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644563.aspx

Check below blogs for “what is .Net 3.5”

§ http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/06/net-framework-35.html

§ http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/05/clr-v20-remains-at-same-version.html

This version of .Net is most stable, feature rich, best performing version so far. We may not see a new version of .Net anytime soon. Microsoft released .Net 3.0 soon after it released 2.0. This is based on the information I have come across so far.

IIS 7

o IIS 7 FAQs - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/iis/iis7faq.mspx

Visual Studio 2008

Windows Server 2008

Free e-learning, e-books from Microsoft:

- Clinic 7045: What's New in Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008

- Clinic 5935: Introducing Server Virtualization in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (RC0)

- Collection 5934: Introducing Microsoft Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" (Beta 3)

- Windows Server 2008 – Learning Portal (Free e-book, e-learning, etc)

- Visual Studio 2008 – Learning Portal (Free e-book, e-learning, etc)

- Clinic 5135: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Presentation Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005

- Clinic 5136: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Workflow Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005

- Clinic 5137: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Communication Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005

Microsoft Silverlight - Beyond AJAX and JavaScript

Jay Kinker — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:11:52 GMT

Everyone working in Rich Internet/Interactive Application (RIA) must look at Silverlight. Web application are really getting richer. Once this is released, you may not need flash component for many things.

Silverlight is a lightweight component/app for web extended from WPF.

To run a Silverlight application - In addition to server installation, you will need client side installation of Silverlight plugin for the browser. Browser will prompt for installing "Silverlight" if your browse do not have plugin required to run the application; similar to Flash plugin. Installation of Silverlight plugin is one click and file size is under 2MB.

Silverlight offers:

Richer UI capabilities by excellent vector imaging, text animation, audio and video
UI experiences beyond what you can do with server generated HT
Superior platform capabilities beyond AJAX
Microsoft claims better performance than JavaScript or ActionScript
Broad set of language support (C#, VB.Net, ...)

Useful Links:

What is required to get started with Silverlight http://silverlight.net/GetStarted
Sample Applications http://silverlight.net/community/communitygallery.aspx
All the recorded session at the MIX07 conference http://sessions.visitmix.com
Recommend Keynotes http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/05/07/silverlight.aspx
- KYN001 - Keynote I Comments by Scott Guthrie -
- And RIA sessions by Jamie Cool to start:
  - DEV22 - Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET (Part 1 of 2)
  - DEV07 - Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET (Part 2 of 2)
Other links

ASP.NET Documentation Tool

Jay Kinker — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 06:58:00 GMT

There are many vendors who develop such tools. Below are two leaders in this domain that i know:

1. NDoc (Recommended my Microsoft) http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/
- NDoc generates class library documentation from .NET assemblies and the XML documentation files generated by the C# compiler

- NDoc uses pluggable documenters to generate documentation in several different formats, including the MSDN-style HTML Help format (.chm), the Visual Studio .NET Help format (HTML Help 2), and MSDN-online style web pages

- NDoc's source code is freely available

2. ASP.Net Documentation Tool 5.0 http://www.winnershtriangle.com/w/Products.ASPNETDocumentationTool.asp

Evaluation version can be downloaded from - http://dl.filekicker.com/send/file/183414-4X23/ASP.NETDocumentationTool_1.0.zip

The ASP.NET Documentation Tool creates technical documentation for ASP.NET 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 projects written in VB.NET and C#. It is intended to the quickest and most cost effective way of automatically documenting and understanding ASP.NET projects. It is also able to document Windows Forms and Console applications written in .NET.

Documentation is created in standard HTML, Microsoft's HTML Help and plain text formats.

One of primary input for such tools are comments within the source code

One additional software vendor is: Roland Weigelt's G h o s t D o c - http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/

FYI - Documents created by such tools has a high level picture about the source code i.e. namespaces, classes, Functions, subroutines, web controls, any other component, etc that are used in the source code. This is completely for developers which can be useful for future reference and can also be helpful for new team members. Please refer to above URLs for more details about the product.