We'll lets hope the rest of this week does not go like this.
I am on my way to Las Vegas to for MIX08 and my 12:15 AA flight from Newark was canceled when I got here. New flight time is 4:45 with a winter storm looming off to the west and severe weather heading up from the south.
<sigh>
Update: Spoke too soon. Flight to DFW is now delayed until 6pm, which means I miss my connecting flight to Vegas (which of course is the last one of the day). I am now rebooked on a flight to Chicago O'Hare tonight and an early morning flight to Vegas tomorrow. If I am lucky, I will get to Vegas in time to catch the second half of the mornings keynote.
Technorati Tags:
MIX,
TravelLike spoon feeding water to a man who has walked the desert for more than a year, news about IE8 has been slow to come, but Chris Wilson and Dean Hachamovitch cracked open the flood gates a bit today by announcing that IE8 has been able to pass the Acid2 test (yay!!!).
For developers this represents a huge step forward for IE and is hopefully the beginning of it coming more into line with the other more standards compliant browsers out there.
Both the blog post on IEBlog and the Channel9 video do a good job of explaining that while passing Acid2 itself does not automatically standards compliance (as Chris remarked in the video the good thing about standards is there are so many to choose from), Acid2 is basically the benchmark test for demonstrating standards compliance.
It was also made very clear by both Dean and Chris that developers (though quite loud and usually willing to call it as they see it) are just one of the many audiences that the IE team has to try to please.
While IE8 is a little ways away, today's announcement hopefully shows the commitment the IE team has on supporting developers and not breaking the web. More news to come at MIX08 (see you there!).
Technorati Tags:
Acid2,
IE8,
StandardsThe Philly .NET User Group has announced their 2008 Code Camp schedule. These hugely popular (and FREE!) conferences normally fill up very quickly, but this year, the User Group is partnering with DeVry university, which is going to allow them to host much larger conferences, with the first conference in January scheduled for 8 tracks and 48 sessions. Registration opens on December 15, and I believe if you register on the Philly.NET web site, you can choose to be notified when the registration opens, so go sign up today!
Oh, they are also looking for speakers to fill those 48 sessions.
ScottGu and Brad Abrams have announced the release of the first preview of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions. The release includes great new features like:
- MVC Framework
- ASP.NET Silverlight controls
- AJAX Enhancements like History support
- Dynamic Data Controls
- Entity Framework
- ADO.NET Data Services
Grab it from here: ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions
Also available is the MVCToolkit (courtesy of Rob Conery) which contains a bunch of helper extension methods you can use in your Views. You can get it here: MVC Toolkit
Finally, Scott has also been posting a series of new posts on using the MVC Framework:
If you are new to the MVC pattern, those posts are a great place to start learning about the pattern and how the new MVC framework works in ASP.NET. If you need and explanation of the MVC pattern, Todd Snyder, one of Infragistics Guidisans posted a great explanation here: MVC or MVP Pattern – Whats the difference?
With 2008 right around the corner I am putting together my travel plans, part of which includes visits to developers, designers, architects and CTO's who's challenges include building web-based applications. If you are a user of ASP.NET user interface controls (Infragistics or any others) and have an hour to spare some time next year, then I would love to come talk to you about the problems you face in developing ASP.NET and Silverlight application user experiences. Infragistics is based in New Jersey, so if you are also in the Northeast, that helps, but we travel to a lot of places all over North America and Europe throughout the year, so there is a good chance I will be in your area.
If you are interested, drop me a line at devinr@infragistics.com
This past Tuesday morning we released the first public CTP of NetAdvantage for ASP.NET Aikido, a project that has consumed a significant portion of my life for the past 6 months. The CTP represents the introduction of a new series of controls based on our new Aikido framework, which is the first significant re-architecture of the product since its inception over 7 years ago. The new framework is designed from the ground up to provide a platform on which developers can build a new generation of Web 2.0 enabled applications.
Since the beginning of the project we have laid out a clear set of goals for Aikido that, based on our years of control development experience and talking to customers, we felt strongly would be the keys to making it work.
Client-side functionality and deep AJAX integration
The Web 2.0 world demands developers build applications that provide the end user with a rich client experience. This means that the days of the post-back are diminishing, and in its place, rich client-side application libraries and AJAX functionality are demanded. To provide this, we decided to make significant use of Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, which not only provide a great AJAX implementation which we can integrate deeply into our controls, but also gives us a unified client script platform on which to base our client-side object model.
Standards Compliance
At our initial release of NetAdvantage for ASP.NET (way back when), the Internet was still very much in something of a wild west state. Browser vendors took it upon themselves to implement the existing standards of the time as they saw fit, and when the standards couldn't keep pace with the demands of web developers, the browser vendors just added their own tags (IE and Netscape are both quite guilty of this). CSS was just coming into its own, and accessibility was a virtually non-existent requirement except in government work. Flash forward to today and the world is vastly different. Developers and browser vendors have for the most part realized the importance of standards, and the fledgling standards of the late 90's have congealed to become a fairly solid base on which developers can rely.
Aikido is designed from the ground up to accommodate all of these changes in technology and developer expectations. The controls render at least XHTML 1.0 Transitional, though most of the time they can render XHTML 1.1 markup. They are being tested to ensure compliance with the latest Accessibility standards (Sec. 508 and WCAG), and they make use of CSS extensively to both lighten the amount of markup needed to render the controls, and to give you more control over the layout of the controls.
Performance
We are focused very heavily on performance with the Aikido controls, consciously making sure that we test their performance throughout the entire development process. Performance gains and losses can be caused by a wide variety of things in a web application, and we are doing everything we can to minimize the impact our controls have on an application. As mentioned in the prior section, things like ensuring XHTML compliance, and relying more heavily on CSS for layout and styling has helped reduce the overall markup weight of the controls. We are shipping the controls with compressed client-script libraries and have worked very hard to ensure that the controls keep their ViewState as small as possible.
Style-ability
In NetAdvantage for ASP.NET 2007 Volume 1 we introduced the concept of Application Styling to the product. Application styling simplifies the process of creating great looking, consistent web user interfaces by introducing the concepts of StyleSets and Roles into the styling of Infragistics controls. This means that, for example, every Infragistics control that has a Header portion can be styled using a single common set of styles contained in a single StyleSet. The underlying format of a StyleSet is simply CSS and in Aikido, not only have we embedded Application Styling, but we are now defaulting to CSS for all of the control styling.
Extensibility
We recognize that our controls cannot provide all of the custom functionality that each individual project may require, and in fact we often hear from customers that it is a normal practice for them to not use our own controls directly, but instead create derived versions of our controls to use. We wanted to make sure that with Aikido we specifically addressed these use cases and made it as easy as possible for developers to leverage our work and extend the controls to fit their specific needs. With the Aikido framework, you can extend the existing controls with new client-side objects, behaviors, and even your own custom renderers. Additionally, the framework can even automatically manage between the client and server, any new properties you add to a derived control.
Scenario Driven
Finally, as we create new controls and evaluate our older controls, we focus on the specific scenarios that customers tell us they have. We do this so that as we create new controls, we can ensure that each control fills a very specific purpose, rather than creating giant, monolithic, uber-controls that try to be all things to all customers. By putting our focus on the scenarios the control will be used, we can create controls that are easier to understand and quicker to integrate into your applications.
We believe that the initial release of controls based on the Aikido framework show the work we have done to meet theses goals, and now we place it in your hands to use and tell us if we hit the mark. I encourage you to download the tools, give them a try and provide us feedback in our new forums.
In August, 4 of us IG employees (Jason Beres, Ambrose Little, Grant Hinkson and myself) all spent several long weeks churning out in record time the Wrox Silverlight 1.0 book (available now on Amazon.com). I was just told by our Director of PR, that Infragistics is going to be giving away copies of the book at our book at Dev Connections, so if you're interested in learning about Silverlight 1.0, stop by the booth (#218) and enter to win!
An interesting phenomena of working at a tech company is that the average age is around quote young. We @ Infragistics are fortunate though to have several of the more seasoned citizens working with us as well, including our esteemed VP of Engineering, Steve, who in an effort to remind all of us <grampa_voice>young whipper snappers</grampa_voice> of the inevitabilities of life, has introduced to us Steves Whoolpool Of Life™. The general idea of the Whirlpool of Life is that we all start out on the edge of the whirlpool where the water is nice an calm, and as lifes events pass (gradutation, marrage, first house, etc), we get pulled further into the whirlpool. Sometimes the water gets a bit rough, other times its a joy to ride arond the whirlpool.
Turning 31 this year, I am now entering the thick of the whirlpool. At times the waters been a bit rough, others its been a blast, but I am happy to say that on or around April 30, 2008, the whirlpool will once again pull me further in when I get the privilage of becoming a Dad for the first time. Needless to say right now the excitement level is off meter, but as the months tick by I am sure that the trepidation levels will also increase. Thankfully I have some pretty amazing roll models to lean on - guys who have already been pulled even further into the whirlpool and who I know will be there to help me navigate the waters.
I write this entry on an Ibera flight on my way to TechEd Europe, which I have never been to before. I am really looking forward to seeing the differences between this conference and the TechEd NORAM verison of which I have attended for the past 5 years. One big difference I think I will really like is that the TechEd Europe conference is really two seperate conferences, once for IT Pros and one for Developers, each one run it a different week. This is unlike the NORAM TechEd which is one huge conference all in one week. If you are heading to TechEd, stop by the Infragistics booth to say hey!
After TechEd its time a much needed week of vacation in one of my favorite spots, the Canary Islands. Most North Americans I don't believe know much about the Canaries, let alone consider them for their vacation, but they are an absolutely amazing place to vacation. The islands are an autonomous proviance of Spain and Tenerife (the island we are visiting) is home to the tallest peak in Spain, Teide. Oh, and the peak also happens to be a dormant volcano. The island is famous for its black sand beaches, amazingly diverse eco-systems ranging from tropical to desert, and also for the Los Gigantes, spectacular cliffs that one day, according to several Discovery Channel shows, may fall into the Altantic ocean causing an immense title wave which may wipe out the Atlantic coast of the United States.
One of the best things about the island is that it is large enough to have the ammenities of modern life, while at the same time being small enough that you can drive around the entire island in a single day, but I think I am planning to spend most of my time reading on the beach. :)
One of our newly anointed Guidisans Todd Snyder has posted an excellent blog post on the differences between the MVC and MVP patterns, something that has long confused me. A very well written article that worth the read.
Infragistics would like to invite you to give feedback on our Peer-To-Peer Forums by taking a short 6 question survey.
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB226XRBL2KAD
Its been quite the busy and exciting week at IG...as usual lots of stuff going on:
At TechEd this year, Infragistics showed a cool proof-of-technology demo based on the Silverlight 1.1 framework. The demo shows not only how developers and designers can use the power of Silverlight to create some amazing user experiences by combining rich media and content, but also demonstrates three prototype Silverlight-based controls we have been working on, an Image Slider control, Slider Panel control, and Chart control.
If you were not at TechEd, you can check out the demo online at http://labs.infragistics.com
Other Announcements
The Silverlight demo also includes information on two other announcements that we make at TechEd. The first announcement is regarding NetAdvantage for WPF's support for Visual Studio 2008. Currently in the public Beta version of VS2008, controls take advantage of extensibility points to provide automatic XAML and code Intellisense, and a real-time view of the controls on the VS2008 design surface. As Visual Studio 2008 moves forward through its Beta cycle, we will continue to add more integration of the controls into Visual Studio.
More info on our VS2008 integration is here.
The final announcement is around a new set of ASP.NET controls we are currently working on called 'Project Aikido'. These new controls are architected and built specifically for the ASP.NET 2.0 + ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 stack, and will also be natively targeting ASP.NET 3.5 when it releases.
Learn more about the controls at http://www.infragistics.com/aikido/
Finally, thanks to everyone that came by the booth this year and chatted with us. If your lucky you became an it getter ;)
Its once again its time for the weeklong geek-fest known as TechEd. This year is my 5th TechEd in a row, and I am looking forward to getting to reconnect with many of the people I only see at conferences and events. I was also pleasantly surprised at the number of interesting (to me at least) sessions that are scheduled for this year. My Schedule is already jam packed with sometimes 2-3 talks per time slot so its going to be hectic to say the least.
Also, if your in Orlando on Sunday night, come by the Party with Palermo, of which Infragistics is a sponsor
And, as usual, Infragistics will have a booth (1008), and this year we are going to announce a few new exciting things at TechEd so stop by the booth and check it out.
Join Infragistics Guidasan Tony Lombardo on April 26 as he gives a Live From Redmond webcast, Ajaxifying ASP.NET 1.0 with NetAdvantage.
Learn how you can easily add AJAX functionality to your existing ASP.NET 1.x applications using UI tools from NetAdvantage for ASP.NET. Attendees will have the opportunity to win a fully licensed copy of NetAdvantage for .NET after the webcast.