Greg Blogging On .NET

Ann Arbor Day of .NET

The Ann Arbor Day of .NET TOTALLY rocked. This event was organized by the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group, Ann Arbor Day of .NET Group, and the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group.  The effort was largely lead by Josh Holmes, (Ann Arbor/Gang), John Hopkins (Gang) and Jason Follas (NWNUG).  There were about 16 speakers for the event, my self included- many of whom were MVP's, User Group Learders, INETA speakers, or all three in some cases :)  

Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer would have been proud.  This event was all about developers- by developers, for developers.  Everyone who came and organized the event volunteered. Around 150 people showed for the event (220 registered).  There were 4 tracks and all of them had some great content, especially the Atlas talk (shameless plug) :)   I was happy to have a full room with people standing in the back.  Hopefully everyone enjoyed the talk and learned something.  Also, special thanks to ScottGu for helping me pull together some slides.

We had around 30 sponsors for the event.  We had a formiddable "Swag Wagon" loaded up at the end of the event.  EVERYONE was a winner at least once... The swag we gave away totaled over $40,000 in retail value!!  Special thanks to Wiley, Microsoft, Addison-Wiley and Apress for donating the books. We had everyone in the room raise their hand if they won a book and got a great picture (75% of the room had books)- hopefully Josh will post it.

After doing some ad-hoc interviews, I kept hearing things like "This was totally better than what I expected." and "Wow, I can't believe how well-done this is!".  And best of all "I'm definitely coming back next year!". And those things were said before the swag raffle :)

Anyway.. Stay tuned to the Ann Arbor day of .NET link above.  Much of the material (including presentations, code samples, etc) will be available in the very near future.

Experienecs with Mono

I've been playing around with Mono a little bit on Redhat Linux.  I wanted to see how truly "compatible" it was with stuff that I have written on the windows platform.  I also have a good business reason- one of the groups my team supports uses Linux for data processing activities.  My team has already written some great utilities to do this on the windows form and we wanted to see how adaptable these would be for Linux in a shell environment.

Anyway, installing Mono on Redhat enterprise took all of 5 minutes. We have a pretty sharp system admin here, and he took care of that. He said the toughest part was figuring out what order to install the rpm's (redhat packages) in.

After installing Mono, I took a bunch of class libraries (DLL's) assemblys from a rather large windows forms application.  Since I would be playing around on the command line, I created a console application in .NET and called a few of the library functions.  These library functions use a lot of native XML objects including XmlDocument, XmlTextReader, XmlTextWriter. 

I FTP'd the dll's over and ftp'd over the console application EXE.  I then ran the "mono MyExe.exe" and I was pleasantly surprised by the result. There were a few minor issues due to the way some file paths were coded (using \ instead of /) but those were trivial to get around.  The entire application worked after some very minor tweaking!

Anyway, I guess the point is- if you have a linux platform, you can easily run 1.1 assemblies on it. The only thing you really need to be aware of (at least in my experience so far) is differences in environmental things- such as the way linux handles paths.  There is probably an easy way to deal with this, such as making your application smarter based on what OS it is running on.

ASP.NET Atlas Controls Refresh

Please get over to ScottGu's blog and check out the latest news on the ASP.NET Atlas controls that were released.

Of particular interest:

- 50-100 controls
- Includes source code that can be modified
- Collaborative / Community model for contributions planned

Cool stuff!

If you are in Ann Arbor on the 13th and planning to go to the Day of .NET, I will be presenting on ASP.NET Atlas- come check out my presentation if you are interested. I will cover a lot of the concepts of Ajax and why atlas is important to web developers. I am also planning on walking through development from scratch on writing a simple ASP.NET atlas enabled application with a few of the controls. I think you'll find it really easy to get up and running with Atlas.  As a big proponent of having usable web applications that scale, I think atlas is a GREAT technology and it is awesome to see the ASP.NET team finally getting behind this. Long overdue!!!