On My Way to .NET

Last week I finished one of Citigroup’s Online Learning Courses and got certified in “Upgrading Web Development Skills from ASP to Microsoft® ASP.NET”

They made the mistake of giving me access to their entire online learning catalog (which is like giving a kid free reign in a candy shop) so this week I’m starting an introduction to C# course.

I also received a trial “ASP.NET Using Visual C# 2005 ” training CD-ROM from www.appdev.com so I need to try that out.

It feels good to finally be learning .NET/C# after putting it off for so long. Or not necessarily putting it off but finally making it a priority and being able to cross it off my To-Do list. Hopefully you’ll see me posting some .NET-related Brainbench certifications here in the next few months before my subscription there expires in November.

Atlas from Microsoft

Ajax freaks working in the .Net environment should run right out and download Atlas,a new development framework from Microsoft. I said run.

Atlas integrates client-side script libraries with the server-based services of ASP.NET in order to create some really rich,interactive UIs. I watched a demo in which Microsoftie Scott Guthrie created a simple to-do list with tons of functionality in less than 20 minutes. The mini-application let users sort by task status,insert new tasks,and modify existing tasks all without page refreshes.

Scott also used some new,cool ASP.NET 2.0 methods that make handy things like pagination and alternating row colors super easy. There’s also another new method that makes it easy to display update statuses. As interfaces use page refreshes less and less to fetch data,letting the user know what’s going on becomes more important. Scott demonstrated this new method makes that as simple as drag and drop from the tool palette. Cool.

Visual Studio 2005 Professional

I bit the bullet and bought Visual Studio 2005 Professional. It came today. Now that ’ve literally made the investment in it,hopefully I’ll find the time to sit down and get some .NET experience.

Visual Studio…the best edition

Although it’s been put on the back burner many times over the last few months years,I’ve committed myself to learning .Net. After talking with quite a few people,I decided that C# would be my best bet.

So I bought myself a book and compiled a list of online resources. The next step would be the IDE. Visual Studio is anywhere between $500 and $2500 depending on the version. Ouch.

I don’t remember how but luckily I stumbled upon the Express area of Microsoft’s web site. As the name suggests,they offer Express (read free) versions of quite a few of Microsoft’s development products such as Visual Studio and SQL Server to name a few. While I’m not sure about SQL Server,the drawback of Visual Studio Express is that only one programming language is supported per version. I’m sure it’s short on other features as well but that seems to be the main difference. There isn’t anything preventing someone from downloading an Express edition for each of the programming languages they develop in but I imagine they’d quickly tire of switching back and forth and pony up for the commercial version which supports all of them under one IDE.

An added bonus (in addition to the free part) is that registering the product grants the developer access to another area of Microsoft’s site where you can download two dozen or so free icons from IconBuffet,about 250 royalty-free images from Corbis,and development related ebooks. Not a bad deal.

I imagine that as I get more into developing in C#,I’ll spend the big bucks for the commercial product. Until then,I intend to post here about my development progress and what I think about Visual C# Express.

My .Net Adventure

I freely admit that I’ve been lazy. I’ve had years to learn .Net,I’ve even had a book for years,but never quite got around to it. .Net is in,VBScript is has been out. Citigroup’s best practices recommend .Net and C# and after another discussion last week,I decided that’s my best course of action at this time.

I think I might actually be looking forward to it. I enjoy learning new things,and in a sick twisted way,the frustration of grappling with a problem and the satisfaction of coming up with a solution.

Sitecore CMS

I attended a demo for a CMS by Sitecore recently. The organization is looking at it in order to more efficiently update content on our external sites but it’s also of interest to me as an intranet developer for the same reasons. Sitecore offers full support for Microsoft’s .NET plus XML, SOAP, XSLT, HTML, CSS,Javascript,C#,and the DOM so that it can easily integrate with ERP systems,CRM tools,financial systems,etc. More about that in a later post however. Because of the wide range of department representatives attending,the demo didn’t get too technical but focused more on the role of an Editor.

The Editor functions seem to most closely map to the responsibilities of copywriter,meaning they are ultimately responsible for generating content. What I liked most about Sitecore in this regard is the ability to establish a workflow. Within the system,the overall adminstrator can specify areas which are editable by the Editor. The Editor can then add,delete,modify,etc content within these areas and mark it as pending for the next step in the workflow. This could be the adminstrator,another higher level Editor,legal counselor,compliance,corporate branding,or anyone who might need to approve content before it is published. Any level can send copy back to lower levels for revisions along with the ability to attach notes to the copy. It’s my understanding this workflow can have unlimited steps as long as it stays linear.

Sitecore also makes allowances for dated content. Content can be created in a staging area and then given a date in the future when it should automatically be published. For example,the developers for an E-Commerce web site can put together promotional materials ahead of time for their big post-Thanksgiving sale and set it to be published Thanksgiving day at11:59p or whenever they like. Conversely,content can also be set to expire automatically at a future date.

The technical developer-focused demo is this week so I’ll have additonal details after that. So far though,I’m pretty impressed with this product and excited about the opportunities using it could uncover.

ASP “Templating”

This is a follow-up to an earlier post about creating an easy-to-implement “templating” system in PHP that can be found at http://www.letsgomurphys.com/dailies/wp-trackback.php/4. At the time that was written,I promised an ASP version and here it is.

Over the last year or so,I’ve been using this successfully on over 30 domains as an alternative to Dreamweaver’s template system. I’m kind of eh about Dreamweaver. I think it’s file management system is handy. I like that I can rename a file and it’s dummy alert tells me other files are linked to that file,should it change the name in those files as well? Yes. Good,that was easy. To me,it beats manual find and replace. DW’s templates are useful when trying to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout a web site but if you want to change something you’ve got to have all the files that use that template,make the change,and reupload every file affected. Some of my sites have dozens and dozens and dozens of pages. Modifying and reuploading every file is time consuming and unnecessary. Enter the include.

I use includes to,well,include all consistent elements of a site. Using this technique,a sample page would look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>World’s Greatest Web Page</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>


In the above example,the contents of the hdr.asp and ftr.asp files are included in the page before the HTML parser sends everything to the browser window. They’ll contain all the design elements that appear on every page such as logo,global navigation,etc. The only contents of each page are it’s customized title and meta tags and its copy.

Now let’s take a look at the contents of hdr.asp:

<h1 id="logo">World’s Greatest Domain</h1>
<div id="nav">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>etc.</li>
<li>etc.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="content">

This basically displays the logo (I usually use an image replacement technique here) and the navigation. Then I open the div that will contain all the content in the actual page.

The footer file is going to wrap up any open tags,such as the content div opened by hdr.asp,and contain any elements that semantically come after the content area such as sidebars and/or footers. Here’s what that looks like in this case:

</div><!–– close the content div ––>
<div id="bottomNav">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>etc.</li>
<li>etc.</li>
</ul>
</div>

That’s all there is to it. When the source of the page is displayed in a browser,everything gets put together and looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>World’s Greatest Web Page</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>


This example is obviously extremely simplisitc but this technique can accomodate virtually any layout and is guaranteed to make updating a snap.

ASP-based sitemap creator

Today I implemented a sitemap generator written in ASP by my good friend Clark. I must say I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s a function that can be included on any domain on our server and when passed the directory name,it indexes everything in it and writes it to an HTML page. While the script indexes everything,the presence of some custom meta tags indicate whether the file should be included in the sitemap or not and how it should appear. With a little modification,it can also be used to output a sitemap.xml file which appears to be all the rage now that Google accepts XML feeds of sitemaps. In addition to being able to output both an HTML and XML document,the script automatically updates these files when pages are added or removed from the domain. A PHP-based version is in the works for this site.