ASP.NET

IIS 7.0 Rocks the House!

Bill Evjen — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 19:55:33 GMT

Yes, we have Windows Server 2008 coming. Yes, also SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Framework 3.5, and more - but probably one of the more exciting new items to come at this same time is IIS 7. As Scott Guthrie states in his recent blog post on IIS, this is a major update to the technology.

IIS 7 will allow for a plug-in architecture and allows you to take out all the pieces of the IIS stack that your applications don't need. It also allows you to build your own extensions and plug those directly in the stack. Before this, when Microsoft came out with enhancements to IIS, they usually had to wait for the next release of IIS. With the new IIS 7, new enhancements can be sent out as extensions and easily plugged in. If you work with IIS in anyway, you really should start getting up to speed on this.

IIS has just hit RC0 and here are some good sites to start taking a look at:

New Version of ODP.NET for .NET 2.0 Released as Beta Today

Bill Evjen — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 04:26:22 GMT

Oracle has released a new version of ODP.NET as a Beta today. You can find it here. This release offers some outstanding features ODP.NET developers have been waiting for. The new feature list is as follows:

Oracle Data Provider for .NET Features
Instant Client Support: Smaller ODP.NET client installation
User-Defined Types: Map Oracle objects and collections to .NET custom types and support REFs to object types
Process Database Down Events: ODP.NET automatically frees connections of a downed Data Guard instance
Windows-Authenticated User Connection Pooling: Windows-authenticated connections can now be pooled.
Connection Pool Performance Counters: Monitor connection pool status

Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET Features
Visual Studio 2005 integration with Server Explorer, Data Sources Window, Dataset Designer, TableAdapter Configuration Wizard and more
Improved ASP.NET web developer support
Oracle Database script project to provide source control of Oracle scripts
SQL script editor
Built in support for executing SQL*Plus scripts
Explain plan support
Integration with Query Designer
New designer for granting/revoking privileges on schema objects
User-Defined Types: Create, explore, modify UDTs; custom class code generation for .NET applications
Data Window and Query Window enhancements

Oracle Providers for ASP.NET Features
Membership Provider: Stores and retrieves registered user information in the Oracle database
Role Provider: Stores and retrieves user role information in the Oracle database
Site Map Provider: Stores and retrieves site map information in the Oracle database
Session State Provider: Stores and retrieves session state information in the Oracle database
Profile Provider: Stores and retrieves user profile information in the Oracle database
Web Events Provider: Stores and retrieves ASP.NET health monitoring event information in the Oracle database
Web Parts Personalization Provider: Stores and retrieves personalization data in the Oracle database
Cache Dependency Provider: Automatically invalidates ASP.NET cached data based on changes made to the base data in the Oracle database

Some big things that excite me are the new providers for ASP.NET! The new provider model in ASP.NET 2.0 is a must utilize for most applications that are being built today. It is an easily extensible system that allows for you to plug your controls and the application into built up and thoughtout systems that are commonly used in all web applications today. This includes items like membership, role management, instrumentation, personalization, and more. The wonderful thing about the provider model is that it is rather extensible and the new providers available in this new release of ODP.NET is testament to this extensibility.The other big feature that I am excited about is the UDTs or user defined types. This allows you to push your .NET custom types up into Oracle and get away from cursors if you wish. Nice!

The smaller Oracle Client installation is also a wonderful new feature as those that work on large web farms are aware! :)

There is quite a bit more - the main point is that if you are working with Oracle - take a look at the new release.

New Book - Professional VB 2005 with .NET 3.0!

Bill Evjen — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:03:46 GMT

Another book! I and some friends just finished a new release of our Visual Basic book. This is another book I wrote with the wonderful Kent Sharkey! :) We really cleaned up this version of the book. This book came together quite well and shows not only the core of .NET 2.0 in depth - but it also covers the new ground of .NET 3.0. The .NET Framework 3.0 includes the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

The table of contents of the book is as follows - (the new chapters are in yellow):

1. Understanding the .NET Framework.

2. Visual Basic 2005 Core Basics.

3. Object Syntax Introduction.

4. Object-Oriented Programming.

5. The Common Language Runtime.

6. Localization.

7. Generics.

8. Namespaces.

9. Exception Handling and Debugging.

10. Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0.

11. Using XML in Visual Basic 2005.

12. Security in the .NET Framework 2.0.

13. Visual Studio 2005.

14. Working with SQL Server.

15. Windows Forms.

16. Windows Forms Advanced Features.

17. Windows Presentation Foundation.

18. Integrating WPF with Windows Forms.

19. Working with ASP.NET 2.0.

20. ASP.NET 2.0 Advanced Features.

21. Assemblies.

22. Deployment.

23. Working with Classic .COM.

24. Threading.

25. Windows Workflow Foundation.

26. XML Web Services.

27. Remoting.

28. Enterprise Services.

29. Network Programming.

30. Windows Communication Foundation.

31. Windows Services.

32. Visual Basic and the Internet.

Appendix A. The VB.NET Compiler.

Appendix B. VB.NET References.

Scott Guthrie Gives Short Review of Professional ASP.NET 2.0 SE

Bill Evjen — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:05:00 GMT

It was nice to see "Mr. ASP.NET" himself (Scott Guthrie) give a nice review of the latest version of my ASP.NET 2.0 book on Amazon just recently!

MIX07 – The Web Developers Conference

Bill Evjen — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 08:11:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie are the keynote speakers to this Microsoft-centric Web Developers conference held in the beautiful desert of Las Vegas. The conference is from Monday, April 30^th till May 2^nd and has sessions on everything from Windows Live, to AJAX, to LINQ, to the topic I am most interesting in right now - WPF/E. I wonder if my friend Laurence is going to be there?

Microsoft's Sandcastle Released as CTP

Bill Evjen — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 15:04:00 GMT

Microsoft's Sandcastle was released as a CTP just recently. This is a tool for .NET 2.0 that allows you to create documentation from the XML comments that are found in a DLL. This is a tool that is meant to compete with NDOC which hasn't really had the greatest support for generics found in .NET 2.0. I haven't tried Sandcastle myself yet, but here is the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?
familyid=E82EA71D-DA89-42EE-A715-696E3A4873B2&displaylang=en

Web Services - Sending Large SOAP Messages

Bill Evjen — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:33:00 GMT

I have been working in the area of Web services for some time and I am on a project where I needed to distribute some extremely large datasets to some clients (Windows Forms). So, imagine an interface where you need to request information about an entity and you have a service where you can send in an array of entities to then get back an array of result sets about each one of the identifiers passed in. We had one such application and it worked quite nicely in that we built some ASP.NET 2.0 Web services to push out the SOAP messages to the client in just this scenario. It worked so well since we were only sending in 30 identifiers at a time but then we really decided to test it out when we put in 1,000 - 5,000 identifiers into one request. This in return was giving us back tremendously large SOAP messages and in many cases our Windows Forms application was simply timing out. How to approach this we thought. There are many methods of approach and we had to pick one and go with it as we had to support this scenario for our clients.

Our options included:

Using the Windows Communication Foundation and building services that pushed binary objects around instead of using SOAP.
Using .NET Remoting instead and using the binary over HTTP that it offers.
Using an HTTP compression class technique along with SOAP Extensions to compress the SOAP message before it went out across the wire.
Using the HTTP Compression feature found on the Windows Server 2003 box with our standard ASP.NET Web services
Using WSE 3.0 MTOM capabilities to encapsulate our messages into binary objects to send across the wire

There are a lot of options, but we quickly narrowed them down. First off, we are not able to use the WCF yet as we are unable to put this on the client at this point in time as we are supporting so many operating systems that are below the required Windows XP SP2. .NET Remoting ... maybe, but we really wanted to stick to the SOAP model for later routing purposes. Soap Extensions - a possibility, but not the easiest to implement and would require us to put a decompression class on the client. HTTP Compression - that's a possibility. WSE 3.0 - another interesting stance, but would require us to put the WSE 3.0 on the client - something we weren't too interested in doing.

So, we narrowed our tests down to .NET Remoting as well as HTTP Compression using Windows Server 2003. We built a test application that first did a comparison between .NET Remoting and standard ASP.NET 2.0 Web services with no compression enabled. The tests were interesting. First off when a single identifier was sent in and a tiny SOAP message was returned - there really wasn't that much difference between the two. The results were pretty much the same. Though, when sending in 1,000 identifiers .NET Remoting considerably outperformed ASP.NET 2.0 Web services. This was due to the fact that the large SOAP message was being sent as binary over the wire and the entire serialization and deserialization process was eliminated. The results were that .NET Remoting performed by shrinking the time it took to get the response to less than HALF that of the ASP.NET 2.0 Web services approach.

Then we turned on HTTP Compression on the Windows Server 2003 box. Instructions for this can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/?id=322603 but you want to do this for .asmx pages. Though, you will discover that enabling compression through IIS is not the only step you are required to take. In order for the HTTP message to be compressed on the server, you are going to need to get the client to ask for the message to be compressed. This means that the client will need to send a accept-encoding: gzip; in the HTTP header. By default, proxy classes don't do this for you. Instead, you are going to have to force the client to make this type of request by using the new EnableDecompression property in .NET 2.0.

Fundamental.Fundamentals_1_0 proxy = new Fundamental.Fundamentals_1_0();
proxy.EnableDecompression = true;

After you instantiate the proxy class, you simply set the EnableDecompression property to true and you are then good to go - the proper HTTP header will now be included. Enabling our client to do this and sending in the 1,000 identifiers we were amazed that we could just about replicate the .NET Remoting performance and in some cases we could match it. This showed us that we could deliver our large SOAP messages over HTTP and get away with doing the littlest impact to the client that was possible (as far as new installs of any software or code changes to the client app).

Other scenarios may of course warrant different approaches - I'm just describing what worked for us in this case. It was a good lesson.

Atlas 1.0 Coming as Beta by the end of year

Bill Evjen — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:58:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie posts about the upcoming Atlas 1.0 release at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/11/_2200_Atlas_2200_-1.0-Naming-and-Roadmap.aspx. The highlights include:

The only date mentioned is the end of the year for the beta - then will come an RC and then they will decide later when to release the product.
Atlas will be fully compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS2005.
Atlas will have a outstanding support model and MSFT is committed to supporting it for the next 10 years.
The names of the components will be the Microsoft AJAX Library, ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Links of interest:

Microsoft's product support commitment - http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy
Using the Microsoft AJAX Library with PHP - http://www.shankun.com/Atlas_Php_2.aspx
Using the Microsoft AJAX Library with ColdFusion - http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2006/06/29/649944.aspx
Info on the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - http://atlas.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47&subtabid=477

Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Bill Evjen — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 02:07:00 GMT

Oh yeah .... Scott Hanselman beat me to the punch, but Mission “Build Biggest Book Possible” has been completed! Our Professional ASP.NET 2.0 book from Wrox just had to get bigger with all the cool stuff we wanted to add. 300 new pages! So big, that we could only offer the book in hardback because they don't make bindings big enough to handle all the pages (~1,700). Its called, Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition (because it is just so special). :)

And as was stated by others:

Here's a brief list of what's updated and new in this new edition.

FOUR completely new chapters:

Introduction to the Provider Model
Extending the Provider Model
Localization
Instrumentation

TWO new appendixes:

Migrating ASP.NET 1.x Projects
Using Atlas

...and dozens of additions throughout all the existing chapters, including:

Class Designers and Open Test Bench
Build providers
A More Complex Callback Example
Uploading multiple files from the same page
As an example, in Chapter 11, DataBinding in ASP.NET 2.0 these changes:
- Added SqlDataSource Configuration Wizard to add optimistic concurrency
- Added SqlDataSource Events, Using the SqlDataSource with Oracle, AccessDataSource Control
- Added GridView events that fire when the data binding occurs
- Added Using the TemplateField Column in the GridView Control
- Added Using the TemplateField's EditItemTemplate
- Added Expressions and Expression Builder
Using Oracle as Your Database with ASP.NET 2.0
Added Generating Custom XML from SQL 2005

That's the list up through about the first 1/2 of the book...there's a pile more...

And there's an added DVD which is the Visual Studio 2005 Professional 180 day trial, and there's an added CD which contains more than 1000 pages of selected chapters from other Wrox .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, VB 2005, C# 2005, and SQL Server books.

RTM for ODP.NET for ADO.NET 2.0 Has Been Released!

Bill Evjen — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 01:20:00 GMT

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software
/tech/windows/odpnet/index.html

Oracle has released ODP.NET for those that need to work with Oracle from their ASP.NET applications, Windows Forms applications, and more. This is what you would use for your .NET 2.0 applications as well. This release includes the following:

   Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET 2003 10.2.0.2.20
   Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2005 10.2.0.2.20
   Oracle Data Provider for .NET 1.x 10.2.0.2.20
   Oracle Data Provider for .NET 2.0 10.2.0.2.20
   Oracle Database Extensions for .NET 1.x 10.2.0.2.20
            -- for upgrade only
   Oracle Database Extensions for .NET 1.0 10.2.0.2.20
            -- for upgrade only
   Oracle Provider for OLE DB 10.2.0.2.20
   Oracle Objects for OLE 10.2.0.2.20
   Oracle Services for Microsoft Transaction Server 10.2.0.1.0