Bill Evjen's Blog

Zune HD to compete with ITouch

Bill Evjen — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:43:38 GMT

Microsoft just recently made some announcements that they will be releasing the new Zune HD. The new Zune HD will also support the now much loved multi-touch capabilities that has made the ITouch and the IPhone as famous as they are.

From the image above you can see that the new Zune HD is going for an advanced look with the beveled edges. I owned a Zune first generation and then I bought myself a Zune (120GB version) later. I really did like it mainly because of the very large screen that I could watch video podcasts on. This was something that wasn’t as good with the IPod and other items out there in the world. I am looking forward to the new Zune HD and would love to review it --- but it is hard to buy another device right when I got this new Zune 120 GB.

The one thing that sounds pretty exciting with the new Zune HD is the HD radio built into it. The older Zunes also have radio in them and it is nice feature to have – but now with HD radio! The other nice thing about the Zune is that you have some pretty good Zune software in working with you music collections and in getting them on the device. I hear a lot of constant complaints from friends about Apple’s software – and it is true that the Zune software was absolute garbage in its first version – but now you will find that the new software from Microsoft for the Zune is quite nice (too bad they didn’t write it in WPF (my side note)).

Another nice feature you will find on the Zune is that list of games is growing and they aren’t half bad. Though, currently, they don’t seem to compare with all the new software that you can get on the Apple IPhone or ITouch. Apple is just so good at this stuff that it is amazing. You would think that putting out a device would be simple – but as everyone from Sony, to Microsoft, to Nokia and other are trying to catch up with the IPod, Apple comes along with something that makes the IPod look dumb. The IPhone and the ITouch were just simply revolutionary. From the multi-touch, to the balancing and directional capabilities, to the new IPhone/ITouch store that enable software developers to make some serious money and use Apple’s distribution network – it was outstanding and hard to beat. If anyone can catch up – it would be Microsoft.

They do need to try and people shouldn’t say that they aren’t capable of this. Nobody thought they would have a chance in the console market in that the competition was Nintendo and Sony – but they have done an outstanding job with the original Xbox and the new Xbox 360. They dedicated themselves to doing this and they made a splash.

Why did they enter this market (the console market)? It was really due to the fact that the console was something that could have become the home computer – displacing the desktop home computer as we know it today (this is still possible). Microsoft, for their own survival – need to dominate this space. When it comes to the IPhone/ITouch devices, this is another area that is threatening.

There currently is a fight between the netbook world and the device world (with the netbooks really starting to dominate), and Microsoft needs to capture both of these areas. They are doing an outstanding job in the netbook world as it looked like Linux might do well as they ran well on computers with limited capabilities – but the new Windows 7 OS is something that has been designed rather well to work on computers (such as netbooks) that have these limiting factors. So they are pretty well placed in this arena.

Well, anyway, the new Zune HD is a step in the right direction. For me – it will come to the software that people can use on these devices. Apple will be a tough catch. Let’s see what happens.

PS – it is interesting that they saw the need to name the category ‘marketplace’ (look in the above image) and not simply ‘market’, so that it would fit into the screen! Oh well.

Get Windows 7 RC – It’s Free!

Bill Evjen — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:19:51 GMT

Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) is out and the incredible thing is that Microsoft has provided this operating system (OS) for free to the entire world. They will only let you download the OS for a limited time – so if you are thinking of getting it – you should be getting your hands on a copy of it as quick as you can. Microsoft is offering both a 32bit or a 64bit version that you can download. This is NOT the final version of the OS though – that is something to be aware of. If you install this OS, then you will have to install it again at some point. Though – it is important to note that this RC build will be valid till June of 2010 – so you have some time that you can use it.

The final version of Windows 7 will be coming out this Fall (according to all speculation) – so most of us will be doing another install in another four months or so. I have to say that my recommendation is that you make the install of the RC build. This is a great release – even better than the Beta release.

If you were working with the Beta release of Windows 7, you will find that there are new additions to this release of the operating system. Some of the first things you will notice is the UI changes that have occurred. It is even more cool (IMHO) than before in this regard. In the beginning, when you need to login to the machine – you will see the following screen:

This includes a burst of streams and a bird, a couple of branches, etc. A little like Twitter IMHO. You will find that there is a lot more themes and backgrounds that you are able to work with as well.

When you personalize the appearance of the OS, you will find a lot more options as is shown in the following image. You are able to select larger themes such as Architecture, Characters, Landscapes, and more. This will change the colors, sounds, and the screen saver. You can modify these further and you can then save that as your own theme.

One nice new feature is that Windows 7 now includes the ability to change the wallpaper on a set interval. By default, each theme has a series of wallpapers assigned to it, but you can also point it at any set of photos that you might have. You are then able to change how often the wallpaper should change and if it should be shuffled or not.

NOTE: The Windows team has a great post about the wallpapers that they came up with here.

For those that are new to Windows 7, you will also find that there is a new taskbar on this OS.

You will find that the Quick Launch toolbar is now gone and this new toolbar is meant to replace the previous (obviously). Seeing an application on the taskbar doesn’t mean that there is something there. It could mean that the application is “pinned” to the taskbar for quick access to that application. You can then open multiple versions of this application and you will see a “stack of cards” in the taskbar to signify that exactly. Then you can hover upon that stack and you will get little thumbnails of each open instance (as shown in the above figure). You are in total control of the toolbar (what is pinned, order, and more). One cool hotkey for this toolbar include the Windows key + number for opening the position of the application in the taskbar.

Some interesting items on Windows 7:

Technorati Tags: windows,win7,vista,microsoft

Windows 7 Coming to a Computer Near You April 30th

Bill Evjen — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:17:24 GMT

Good news for us all is that the RC build of the much-anticipated Windows 7 is going to be made available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on April 30. For the rest of the world, you won’t have long to wait, as the Windows 7 RC will be available on May 5^th as I previously reported on my Twitter account.

For those that are not aware, RC means Release Candidate, as this is the pre-final version of the operating system and it is supposed to include everything that will be in the final shipping version of the application. As I understand it, this version of the OS will be valid for one year.

Microsoft has been saying that they are going to provide the final release of Windows 7 sometime in early 2010 – but all the forces on the Internet have been suggesting a Q3 2009 release of this OS. The reasoning behind this is twofold (in my opinion). The first is that Microsoft has surely taken a beating on Windows Vista – its early compatibility problems and the on-going performance issues that Vista was giving end users. Because of this, Microsoft as a company cannot afford to wait much longer and let other OS venders take market share from them. You will notice that Microsoft seems to want to put this OS release behind them and get to talking again about the “wonders” of Microsoft and the technology they provide rather than constantly being put in a defensive position when it comes to their OS. If they release is going to be ASAP, then the time to do this is in time for college students to get their new computers for their upcoming school year – thus, the reasoning for the Q3 release.

I have to say that I was a big voice of complaint against Vista. I installed Vista on my computer on three separate occasions over the last few years in order to give it another chance and in all cases; I uninstalled it as it was preventing me from doing my day-to-day job at Thomson Reuters. However, I have been running Windows 7 now some time on many machines and I am the biggest fan of this OS. It is FAST, works well on netbooks (computers with limited memory and CPU capabilities), and it a wonderful experience all around. Once I spent some time with Win7, I released that my XP days were no behind me. I have converted many of my machines to Windows 7 and was simply waiting for the RC release before I get rid of XP all together.

The only issue that I have experienced with the Beta release is when my 4 year old (who has an account on the same machine) plays one of his game DVDs (an ooooooold game) that takes the resolution down to 800x600, it won’t revert back without a reboot of the computer.

I also had an issue with the Internet Explorer 8 version that was running on Windows 7 and had to switch to Firefox in order to work with many of the sites I was trying to run. This will be corrected in the RC release as I am quite sure that we will have the production version of IE8 in this release.

For those that are questioning whether to wait for the final release of the OS or to install this RC-version of the OS – my suggestion is if you know how to install an fresh OS and install all your favorite applications and doing this every six months is a non-issue for you – then you should make the switch. You’ll be glad that you made this jump from XP or Vista to this OS – it is quite a wonderful piece of technology.

Technorati Tags: windows7,win7,windows,vista,msdn,betasoftware

New Book: Professional ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 In C# and VB

Bill Evjen — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:59:01 GMT

My latest bookwas just released new and improved and with a fresh mint taste! Last month my AJAX bookcame out and this month is it a book that is a continuation of a great series of ASP.NET books. This is an update to the best-selling Professional ASP.NET 3.5 book that the three of us put out about one year ago (time flies).

If you are an ASP.NET developer, I (no doubt) advise you to get this book as there has been plenty added to it to bring it up with the latest release of ASP.NET. This service pack (SP) release of ASP.NET is not a bug fix SP – but it is a release that include a lot of new features! So for us in doing this book, it wasn’t simple a matter of going back and making some corrections – but this was release of the book that covered all the new and exciting features that got packed into this service release. I have to say that this is an exciting release of ASP.NET and you will find some powerful items included in this version of ASP.NET.

This new edition of the book is more than 1800 pages – enough to knock you out if it falls off the shelf and hits you in the head! Because of the size – the book is available as a hard cover edition. You’ll find new chapter on the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and ADO.NET Data Services. There is also a new appendix on Silverlight 2.0 as well as an ‘ASP.NET Is Greater Than ASP.NET MVC’ appendix. You will also find that many of the chapters have been expended in one way or another to include new controls or capabilities.

Something different than my previous books is the inclusion of a CD-ROM that includes the entire book in PDF format. You will also find 7 (seven) complete PDF Wrox Blox books that normally sell for $6.99 (US) each. Currently, this book is only around 44 dollars on Amazon, so this is a great deal all around. Enjoy and happy coding!

What is needed is a revolution in Office

Bill Evjen — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:28:55 GMT

I think that Microsoft is missing a large opportunity with the Microsoft Office product. I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. To me, it has been evolving in the wrong manner over these last few releases and it has bothered me greatly. You might be saying, “what is Bill talking about here, they just did a major and well-received upgrade to Microsoft Office with the Office 2007 release!”. I do have to say that you are right in that regard – but what I am talking about is Microsoft Office for Developers!

I do like the new Office (2007) in regards to the new workflows – the Ribbon and some of the new Excel features. It is a wonderful product for the end user that works wonderfully with the types of documents that you would expect from the Office product. But what we are missing – and greatly missing – is an Office platform that is easy for the developer to work against.

When you look at the types of applications that you are able to build, you typically build either web applications or thick-client applications using Windows Forms or WPF. Web applications are by far the most popular as they are *very* easy to create, release, and make available to end users. Though, if you think about what you are doing here, you are still working with a thick-client application. The thick-client portion is the browser that has the ability to remotely pull in other core pieces of the application for the end user to work with. You, as a web developer, are taking advantage of this great (thick) client application to do thinks like display images, text, interpret JavaScript, or to make use of the XmlHttpRequest object to do some of the newer things like Ajax work. Also as a web developer, you don’t have to worry about much changes to this thick client application as it is usually built to be backwards compatible to the code that you send it and it is continually being enhanced to handle your code in a better manner each and every year.

I work with a large company in the finance space and I work with a lot of major financial institutions. One series of applications that is always on everyone’s desk is Microsoft Office – and more importantly – Microsoft Excel. Like the browser, you can be sure that there are enterprise/business users with Excel and Word on their computers. Yes, IE and Firefox are amazing applications – but I have to say – Excel is a powerful (if not more powerful) container on the client. Excel is *the* container in many regards and many people spend their entire days in this application.

But ….

Have you ever tried to develop to this container? What container is easier to build to – Microsoft IE or Microsoft Excel? Well, I can quite strongly say it is IE. Excel and the other Office products are a complete pain to build to. I am also a big web developer and I see a lot (I mean A LOT) of investment from Microsoft being made into building better web applications faster than any other time before. The ASP.NET team at Microsoft is one of the world’s outstanding example of how to service a market as they are continually doing dramatic and powerful releases and even out-of-bound releases. They have a powerful roadmap, they bring in the developers to this wonderful world that they created through community outreach, involvement and presentation.

What we need is a revolution in Office. Excel can be one of the most powerful clients on the computer for developers. But today, coding to Microsoft Excel is difficult and cumbersome. Why is it so difficult? The difficulty needs to be completely obfuscated and a much simpler API needs to be made available. Why can’t I just drag and drop chart objects onto a design surface, connect web services, show grids of data – do all this with no coding required. Why isn’t it easier to work with web services, data providers, charts, conditional formatting, the Ribbon, and more. Why can’t we easily use peer-to-peer, file transformations, imports, exports, etc in code? Why can’t we easily have a more modern version (and safer) form of dynamic linking? Obviously much of the work will have to be done within Visual Studio and not just with the Excel products or the other Microsoft Office products. Visual Studio can be enhanced to make much of this required obfuscation possible. It did a great job with ASP.NET, it can do just as well with Microsoft Office.

I have such a vision for Excel. It is one of the world’s best clients and we are seeing this somewhat wasted by making it so difficult to work with for the developer. Taking the correct steps here, Microsoft can take the revolution they would bring to Excel right to the office itself!

Cisco VPN and Windows 7

Bill Evjen — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:35:20 GMT

Before I had posted a small blog entry on how it was basically impossible to get the Cisco VPN software working on a Windows Vista machine. It turned out to be one of the most hit blog entries I had – mainly due to the amount of help that was being provided in the comments. In the comments, many folks tried to help others with a solution. Though, one of the last entries I read recently was about a gentleman that pointed out that if you get all the Vista updates, that it seemed to just work.

There are many reasons I didn’t leave the safety of Windows XP and move to Vista over the time since it has come out. One of the biggest reasons was due to the fact that I just simply couldn’t get the Cisco VPN software working on Vista. Though, I have to say, I am now on Windows 7 on my main machine (32-bit) and you can get the Cisco VPN software running quite easily now. I have tested it out on two machines now and it works perfectly.

I myself used version 5.0.04.0300. Probably not one of the latest ones – but this one works and was one that was mentioned to be one of the more stable versions. I brought the setup.exe file for this to my local machine, right-clicked on the file and select ‘Run as Administrator’.

On one machine it took quite a number of minutes to install, but on my main desktop – it only took around 30 seconds. In both cases, the install went perfectly. I know that I passed my Cisco VPN problems into the Windows 7 team early on and I was communicating back and forth with them on this issue, so it would be nice to think I did my little part for Windows 7 :) …. but in any case, I’m so glad this now works. Goodbye Windows XP!

Step Aside Kindle – Hello Sony eReader!

Bill Evjen — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:32:29 GMT

I wanted an eReader of some kind. I knew that. This is a cool technology. First off, no matter if you get an Amazon Kindle or a Sony eReader, then you are in for a definite treat. This is one cool gadget and if you like to read books or magazines or whatever, then you are going to love the portability in carrying an easy-to-read library with you in a nice convenient little package such as these gadgets offer.

For those that haven’t seen this in person, the big deal with this all is the piece of the gadget that neither Sony nor Amazon invented – the E Ink screen! You can read about E Ink here on Wikipedia. So with that bit of news, don’t be all amazed that Amazon or Sony invented something wonderful. They really haven’t – it is all about the screen. The only way in which Amazon or Sony then can make a difference in the product is how they go about letting you view items with the screen. It comes down to the device that they built around the screen and the software that they use to make it easy for you to view items on this wonderful screen. I don’t want to explain how the E Ink screens work in a lot of detail. For that you can read the information here (I suggest that you do as it is a cool thing).

Basically, the best part of the E Ink screen is that it is not like any display device you have ever seen. It is clear and easy to read things like text. It is not at all like a backlight display, but instead is more like an old Etch-a-Sketch. It draws a screen of images or words (you can view pictures) with wonderful detail and it looks to your eyes as if you were viewing a traditional light gray paper from a book. The other thing is that due to the technology of the screen, battery life basically lasts for a crazy long time (week-weeks). The only electricity used is when a new screen is redrawn. Redrawing screens is rather instantaneous as well. When you are viewing a screen of text, you are not consuming any battery power from the device. Amazing.

I got my first view of an eReader when my boss strolled into town carrying one and after I saw it – I was hooked. After quite a bit of research on which one I was going to get, I decided on the Sony PRS-505. There are a lot of reasons for this, so let me get into them for you.

Document Formats

The Sony PRS is more “open” allowing you to get more of your documents, ebooks, etc on the device. When it comes to formats, you are able to get on your documents quickly and fast. Though the Kindle touts a wireless capability to get your documents onto the device – this is somewhat limited when you actually get into it. Also – there is absolutely no issue in just plugging this device into a USB jack in your computer and transferring over the files that you need. All you are doing is doing a copy-and-paste. Also – you are going to need to do this every now and then to charge the device. Though Amazon touts this as a feature – it actually is somewhat limiting as there are only specific formats that you can grab wirelessly. If you dig down into it, some of the biggest reasons the wireless is there – is that it makes it easy for you to buy new books wirelessly without needing to connect to a computer. If this is a really important thing for you, as you might be always on the road or something, then this is something that you really might want to consider. If not, you won’t feel limited by not having wireless on your Sony.

The Sony PRS can deal with the following formats: BBeB (LRF), PDF, TXT, RTF, ePub, LRX, MP3, AAC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, RSS (sweet).

The Kindle supports the following formats: AZW, TXT, MOBI, PDF, DOC, PRC, HTM, LIT, LRF, PDB, RB, IMP, ePub.

Looking over these lists, you might think that some formats are really missing from this list. These are just the formats that the devices accept and there are tools out there that will convert all sorts of other formats to something that is good for your device. The best tool that I found out there so far is called calibre. This is a free download.

So this means that you are easily able to convert your .doc files to .rtf to be read just as well on the Sony PRS.

One of the better things is the RSS capabilities of the Sony PRS. Though the Kindle touts RSS capabilities as well – they only let you use the wireless to get to their few chosen RSS feeds. Using the Sony PRS, you are able to point to *any* RSS feed and then pull that content onto your device. With the program calibre, you are also able to pull nicely formatted magazines and newspapers to your device. You are also able to use navigation and get right to the story that you want to read.

The ability to work easily with PDFs was one of the features that I was looking for. With the Sony PRS, you are able to pull up a PDF and it will first be viewed as you would expect, by viewing the entire page. This is shown here:

Though, you can also use the zoom button and the Sony PRS will then reformat your PDF document and you will be able to see the text larger (it won’t be viewed basically as an image at this point). The text lines are somewhat cut off, but from this figure, you can see that it looks quite nice. Actually, the two figures here, show a PDF in the medium and large zoom sizes.

The other option is to change the view entirely by rotating the view. For this, simply press and hold the zoom button for a few seconds and then the PDF will be rotated and you will be able to read the top portion of the PDF and then when you press the next page, you will view the bottom portion of the PDF.

Organization

Obviously, when working with eReaders, you need to organize your library on the device as you will end up with a lot of material that you will need to wade through. As you can see from this screen, you are able to access content via a number of different means.

You are also able to bookmark items as much as you want using the bookmark features. It will remember where the last point you were in each book and when you go back to a book or document, you simply need to press ‘Continue Reading’ to start again.

The Sony PRS, when turned back on, will go directly to the last page of the last book that you were reading.

Navigation

This device provides a few ways to navigate your pages. It is built to suit both lefties and righties. Here are some navigation points:

Cover

The Sony PRS comes with a nice leather cover that is a little larger than the device and therefore protects it quite a bit. The cover is thick and feels good held in your hands. It also has some magnets built into the corners and stays conveniently closed when put away or thrown into your backpack or briefcase.

Price and Other Versions

You will find that the Sony PRS 505 is the cheapest one of quality out there. You will get this for around $270 USD, while the Kindle is running $359. There is a Sony PRS-700 out there that touts a touch screen – but the reviews that I have read is that the touch screen makes the text a little more blurry than the PRS-505. If Sony wants to send me a PRS-700 to review – I’ll do that for you though! :)

Technorati Tags: sony,ereader,kindle,amazon,gadget

My Latest Book – Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

Bill Evjen — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:06:35 GMT

I just got back from a business trip and sitting there on the counter was a copy of my latest book from Wrox! This book (my 20th) is titled Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX. This was a fun book and I wrote this with some great co-authors including Matt Gibbs, Dan Wahlin, and Dave Reed. Amazon says that the book will be available on February 3rd (not too far away). Here is some of the introduction I wrote for the book:

-----------------------------

ASP.NET revolutionized Web application development. The platform handles many of the complexities of creating Web applications. Now ASP.NET AJAX takes the development platform even further. The lines between rich client applications and traditionally less interactive browser-based applications are being further blurred with the use of this technology.

The ASP.NET AJAX Library brings object-oriented programming to JavaScript development for modern browsers, and ASP.NET AJAX makes it easy to write rich Web applications that communicate with the Web server asynchronously. Again, the complexities are made easy by using ASP.NET.

The new server controls that are part of ASP.NET AJAX make it simple to designate parts of the page to be updated automatically without making the user pause and wait while the data is refreshed. You can have partial page updates without writing a single line of code. Other new controls let you alert the user that background work is happening and designate regular intervals at which updates occur. In addition, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit makes it easy to make your user interface really come to life with animations, modal dialogs, transition effects, and more.

Ajax is definitely the hot buzzword in the Web application world at the moment. Ajax is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and, in Web application development, it signifies the capability to build applications that make use of the XMLHttpRequest object.

The creation and the inclusion of the XMLHttpRequest object in JavaScript and the fact that most upper-level browsers support the use of this object led to creation of the Ajax model. Ajax applications, although they have been around for a few years, gained greater popularity after Google released a number of notable, Ajax-enabled applications such as Google Maps and Google Suggest. These applications demonstrated the value of Ajax.

Shortly thereafter, Microsoft released a beta for a new toolkit that enabled developers to incorporate Ajax features in their Web applications. This toolkit, code-named Atlas and later renamed ASP.NET AJAX, makes it extremely simple to start using Ajax features in applications today.

Prior to Visual Studio 2008, the ASP.NET AJAX product used to be a separate application that developers were required to install on their machine and the Web server that they were working with. This release gained in popularity quite rapidly and has now been made a part of the Visual Studio 2008 offering. Not only is it a part of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE, the ASP.NET AJAX product is also baked into the .NET Framework 3.5. This means that in order to use ASP.NET AJAX, developers are not going to need to install anything if they are working with ASP.NET 3.5.

Overall, Microsoft has fully integrated the entire ASP.NET AJAX experience in that developers can easily use Visual Studio and its visual designers to work with your Ajax-enabled pages and even have the full debugging story that they would want to have with their applications. Using Visual Studio 2008, developers are now able to debug straight into the JavaScript that they are using in the pages.

In addition, it is important to note that Microsoft focused a lot of attention on cross-platform compatibility with ASP.NET AJAX. Developers will find that the Ajax-enabled applications that they build upon the .NET Framework 3.5 are able to work within all the major up-level browsers out there (e.g., FireFox and Opera).

This book is aimed at experienced ASP.NET developers looking to add AJAX to their applications, and experienced Web developers who want to move to using ASP.NET and AJAX together.

In this book, I assume that you already have an understanding of how ASP.NET works. For an in-depth discussion of ASP.NET, I recommend Professional ASP.NET 3.5 by Bill Evjen, et al. (Wrox, 2008). The focus here is on how you can extend ASP.NET applications to update portions of the page asynchronously and to add richer UI elements to a page. ASP.NET AJAX makes it easy to enrich your existing application or to design a new application to provide a better experience for users. The differences among modern browsers have been abstracted, allowing you to write to a common set of APIs and trust that the user will get the correct behavior whether they are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari.

If you know how to author ASP.NET pages, you can easily start using the Microsoft AJAX library to manipulate the browser’s Document Object Model and communicate with the server to update the user’s view of data without forcing them to wait for the entire page to be refreshed.

This book covers ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX. It does not cover ASP.NET 3.5, on which ASP.NET AJAX is built. The examples lead you from the core of what is included in the ASP.NET AJAX Library through the core controls you would first start using. You build on that using the core JavaScript library and the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit before covering debugging, deployment, and custom control development.

The ASP.NET 3.5 release includes the Microsoft AJAX Library as well as the server controls that can be used in ASP.NET pages to extend applications, making them more rich and interactive. It does so by leveraging the ASP.NET AJAX Library, which is JavaScript that runs in the browser. The server controls and JavaScript Library work together to let you update HTML with data obtained asynchronously from the server. The ASP.NET application services are exposed to JavaScript classes in the ASP.NET AJAX Library, making authentication and personalization accessible from the browser.

UPDATE: This book is now available on Amazon [Feb 10 2009].

Technorati Tags: ajax,aspnet,dotnet,aspnetajax,wrox,books

Google Chrome Updates and Running on Windows 7

Bill Evjen — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:45:33 GMT

I’ve been playing around a bit with Google Chrome lately. I switched back to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 as it answered a lot of the frustrations that I was having with Google Chrome (some key pages I like not rendering correctly). Though, when I switched one of my computer’s operating system to Windows 7 Beta 1, I was even more frustrated. The IE that came installed on Windows 7 was a less than superior IE than what I could download off of the Microsoft site. I tried to install the latest IE 8 version from the Microsoft site onto Windows 7, but the installer would not allow that install to occur as it didn’t recognize the operating system of all things (see http://geekswithblogs.net/evjen/archive/2009/01/15/128669.aspx for more information on that).

It really got to a point where I couldn’t use this IE8 on Windows 7 – so I downloaded Google Chrome to the OS instead. I was still having some of the same issues rendering some key sites as before and it seemed that Google Chrome hadn’t updated its version since it was released. I did find out that you can opt to take the dev build of Google Chrome (or the Beta builds) by changing you updater using this Google Chrome Channel Changer (from this site: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/). I opted for the Dev version and once you switch to this version, you can click on the Wrench in the toolbar and select About Google Chrome. From here, you can then check to see if you have the latest version (you won’t in the first case) and from here update your Google Chrome version.

After you Google Chrome is updated (you will have to close all Chrome instances and then reopen them), you will notice (if you are running on Windows 7) that it just doesn't work. To make Google Chrome work on Windows 7, right click on Google Chrome icon from your desktop and select Properties. From the first tab, the General tab, you will need to change the value of the text in the Target textbox to:

C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --in-process-plugins

The bold part is the part that you are adding. Once you have done this, it will work in Windows 7 just fine.

Technorati Tags: windows7,windows,google,chrome,ie

IE8 on Windows 7

Bill Evjen — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 comes on Windows 7 (of course) but I am unable to tell what version of IE this really is. Here is the About dialog from the one that comes on the OS by default:

If you look at the version number – it is 8.0.7000.0 – which I really don’t think is too real as it looks like the Microsoft programmers just set all the build numbers to 7000 for the sake of being Windows 7. A little annoying but I understand the fun they are trying to have.

The reason for all this conversation is that I am having issues with the IE on Windows 7. It doesn’t work so well on my Intranet and some of the pop-ups are going a bit crazy (multiple times). Also, probably my biggest pain is that the Delicious IE toolbar doesn’t install. It does install on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 on my XP machine as well as a Vista machine that I have. So, I am unsure why it won’t install on this machine.

To fix this, I went to http://www.microsoft.com/ie and tried to install the latest and greatest IE – which is Beta 2 at this time. I was concerned that maybe the one on Windows 7 was older than what is currently available. Though, in downloading the setup.exe file for IE there wasn’t a version in place for Windows 7 32- or 64-bit. This is understandable as Windows 7 isn’t released as of yet. So, I tried installing the one meant for Windows Vista 64-bit and I got this logical message:

Oh well. It is what it is.