Nuno Filipe Godinho : ASP.NET 2.0

Microsoft Web Platform

NunoGodinho — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:57:48 GMT

With the purpose of helping the Web developers Microsoft launched a new site called, Microsoft Web Platform that contains several elements with the goal of simplifying the life of those developers, with some of the contents being:

This is not yet completed, but it’s a good idea and I’m certain that it will grow a lot in the near future.

On this site we find 2 installer packages, that are:

Microsoft Web Platform Installer
- This package is completely free and serves as a “Launcher” for the development of Web Solutions using Microsoft platform, because it installs IIS7, Visual Studio Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and also .NET Framework
Microsoft Web Application Installer
- This package will allow us to create easy installers for Web Applications in PHP or ASP.NET that will be installed on IIS.

Without any doubt this is a good way to centralize contents for whoever develops or wants to develop solutions for the Web.

ASP.NET MVC Beta version Released

NunoGodinho — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:29:58 GMT

Following the ASP.NET development this new MVC Framework is important because in some cases will be the right choice for the development process. The first releases had problems regarding AJAX integration and also poor set of controls, when compared to the ASP.NET Web Forms version, but with this version a lot has changed, and things like:

Better Visual Studio Support

Works with VS 2008 with and without SP1
Provides a new “Add View” option in the context Menu when developing the controller class

Supports jQuery

This has been a great progress for ASP.NET and it’s not only possible with ASP.NET MVC Framework

Strong Types

Changes in order to use Strong Types like:

UpdateModel
TryUpdateModel

Improved Unit Testing
Validation Errors

Adds support to IDataErrorInfo
Adds support for Dynamic Data Attributes

Integration between Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC Projects

This are some of the new stuff in this new Beta release, and you can see more about it on Scott Guthrie’s Blog post that presents this subject.

To start using it just download this version here.

Training for ASP.NET Virtual Earth Control

NunoGodinho — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:24:35 GMT

For all of those that develop or would like to develop ASP.NET solutions with integration of Virtual Earth using the new ASP.NET control here is the link for a very interesting series of videos and samples about how to use the ASP.NET Virtual Earth control.

Don’t miss this fabulous opportunity to know more about this control that brings a easy way to develop ASP.NET solutions with integration of Virtual Earth.

Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control Released

NunoGodinho — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:04:43 GMT

As I said some while ago, there are several projects running related with Virtual Earth and one of them is the generation of a Server Control for ASP.NET that will allow us to develop solution and at the same time take some of the complexity of using Virtual Earth, and so here's the announcement that this control is made available as part of the Windows Live Tools July Refresh and you can even watch a video related to this subject on Channel 9 with Mark Brown that is a member of the Virtual Earth Team, where he talks about all the elements that were made available with this control.

One other very interesting project that is being developed is the Virtual Earth control for Silverlight and that you can see some of the results here. This project is named Deep Earth and is hosted on CodePlex and for now there's no release made available, but keep looking. For those of you that would like to use Virtual Earth with Silverlight you can use the codeplex project named Views that as even a video on Channel 9 that explains it's usage.

So good luck with your developments using Virtual Earth.

Federated Security Framework

NunoGodinho — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:39:36 GMT

One of the great issues that exist when developing solutions is the Security, and when we talk about SaaS or S+S the issue becomes a lot more complicated and so we have to use Federated Identity, and there are several ways to do this and as Frederik Chong from Microsoft and Dwayne Taylor from RDA wrote on their article Federated Identity: Scenarios, Architecture and Implementation this is not a easy issue to solve and so they show some ways that can be used, and although this is a 2006 article, it's still very interesting to read about the issues, but now the Federated Security Team is developing a framework for Federated Identity with the codename "Zermatt" that's present on the Microsoft Connect Services site, and this already have a public beta that can be downloaded and used.

For more information's about the Zermatt you can check the Microsoft Connect Services site and there are some whitepapers for developes you can read to get to know a little better this new framework, and you can also check this Matias Wolosky Blog entry and the Vittorio's blog from Microsoft that made the announcement of the framework.

This is a framework that will help a lot when developing claims-aware applications. This framework will work on top of technologies like Windows Cardspace, WCF, ASP.NET and several other to help developers and architects.

ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap

NunoGodinho — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:46:47 GMT

Being ASP.NET AJAX a very important part of ASP.NET one thing that would help is knowing what and when will be delivered and so a Roadmap is a must-have, and Microsoft delivered precisely that in order for us to get to know what's being done and have some notion about when it will be delivered, and I think there's some great stuff there like AJAX in ASP.NET MVC, Interoperability, Accessibility and even support for OpenAJAX-compliant XML metafiles, never forgetting that the Javascript support in Visual Studio must evolve also. So if you want to have detailed information about this subject check here for the complete document with all the explanation regarding this Roadmap.

Virtual Earth Control for ASP.NET

NunoGodinho — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:27:00 GMT

The Virtual Earth Control for ASP.NET will be made available with the July CTP of Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, and so keep in touch for news on the dev.live.com/tools site.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2

NunoGodinho — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:17:39 GMT

The Beta 2 of Silverlight 2.0 is already available in order for us to develop using this version of Silverlight that now as some more new stuff in terms of controls, skining, among others that we will analyze during our next posts. This version is available for both Windows and Mac because we continue and will always continue to talk about a technology that is Cross-Platform and Cross-Browser.

You shouldn't miss this Overview that makes a relationship between the functionalities that are present on the Beta 2 of Silverlight 2.0 compared with the ones that already existed on Silverlight 1.0.

For developers that want to stard developing the essential tools are the following: