Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit from Microsoft

Microsoft has just released Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit.  According to Karsten Januszewski, “Our main goal with Oomph is to make Microformats more accessible for users, developers and designers. Oomph is an amalgamation of applications: an Internet Explorer Add-in built in C++; a cross-browser HTML overlay built using JQuery that aggregates Microformats (hCard and hCalendar); a set of CSS styles for Microformats; and a Windows Live Writer plug-in written for inserting hCards”

There is a video demo on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx2f2Z9MMQ8

The code is on CodePlex at http://codeplex.com/oomph

Silicon Valley Code Camp is this weekend

While I am sitting far and away from Silicon Valley, I will be watching as the second Silicon Valley Code Camp happens this weekend. I want to tell all the developers, coders, architects, hackers, or whatever techie names they want to call themselves who live in or near the Valley how lucky they are to have such a great event there. Some of my favorite techies will be speaking at this event. People like Douglas Crockford, Juval Lowey, and Matt Mullenweg will be taking time to share their knowledge and experiences with the rest of us and thanks to the hard work of folks like Peter Kellner who have spent countless hours organizing this event, it will all be for free. Believe me, people from other parts of the country or the world do not have this same luxury to drive a few minutes from their home and listen, learn, and share with such a powerful group of software engineers and pioneers involved in such a divers array of technologies. Fortunately, the word has gotten around and over 700 people have registered. Unfortunately, many of those who register will not show up. Mainly because registration is free and the barrier to entry is nothing. So at the last minute, they decide to do something else or feel lazy or … I don’t really know why. All I know is that this is a great opportunity. People pay hundreds of dollars at conferences to see the same speakers give the same talks and folks in the Valley have a wonderful chance to take advantage of it for free this weekend. So don’t let this opportunity go by. If you have not registered, register now. If you have registered, set your alarm clock for Saturday morning and go down there. You are blessed with the opportunity to live in the valley and take advantage of this. Take full advantage of it.

I wish I was there.

The tools folks said they used at Alt.net Conference

At the Alt.net conference Someone put a sheet on the wall and folks filled it out with:

here is a flickr link to the photo of the first page and here is what was on the sheet:

Update:  AltNetPedia has this list in much better order now.

What tools do you use?
Resharper
NUnit
NHibernate
Castle
Reflctor
Subversion
MbUnit
Bugzilla
Visual Studio!
TestDriven.NET
PowerShell
CodeRush
Fiddler
CharlesWebProxy
FogBugz
Jira
Confluence
Fisheye
Big Witeboard Wall!
Mono
Reboot
CruiseControl.net
Rhino Mocks
MS Test
TFS
Team Build
Mac Book
Firebug
Structure Map
Textmate for C# (Really!)
e
Autotest
Active Record Migrations
NAntMy Generation
VMWare
perl
Visual SVN
Socket Wrench
Scredrive
Eclipse
Java
Groovy
JUnit
Gurce

Fitnesse
Rake
NUnitForms
iBatis
Index Cards
WORM
NDepend
FXCop
Putty
Baseball Bat
Simian
Ruby
Watir
NetBeans
Subversion
Selenium
Fiddler
MSBuild
Excel
.NET
Media Wiki
OS X!
Synergy (network KVM)
Tortoise SVN
jQuerry
Hammer
DPack
GreatEX
Subsonic
NCover
NCoverExplorer
SQL Server
Mingle
Git
Vim/ViEMU
Emacs
Trac
Firefox
Cygwin
Grep
Skype
Acrobat Connect
Trillian
Outlook
SQL Diff
Google
(o)(o)
CI Factory
Ethernal
Caffeine
SQL Compare
MANTIS
ADIUM
NotePad
XML Doc Viewer
Fire
Lots of e
Manipulation
Beer
Cross Loop
YUI
WinMerge
Pandora
Parallels

Microsoft announces its new MVC architecture for Web Apps

Today at the alt.net conference, Scott Guthrie demoed the new MVC architecture that Microsoft will be releasing in Spring 2008 for web apps. The first CTP should be available in two weeks. This architecture is very similar in many ways to the Rails architecture but takes full advantage of Microsoft .NET 3.5’s features and the strong typing in .NET. The crowed of alpha geeks that where incredibly critical of Microsoft the night before all gathered in one room and intently listened. Many questions were asked: Does this framework work with such and such? Can I do so and so. Scott’s answer was yes to all of these questions. The crowed was enchanted by Guthrie. No one had anything negative to say. There were a few syntactic and minor suggestions. And some mental wresting from some of the geeks, but Scott’s technical answers addressed the issues raised. Everyone was incredibly impressed. Scott’s presentation and rapid fire answers to questions demonstrated his detailed understanding of all the testing frameworks as well as alternative development frameworks out there and his team’s synthesis of all this knowledge in what appears to be a superior product to what currently exists in the market.
This will be a MVC pattern similar to Rails with a similar URL mapping convention and an architecture that allows you to plug in your favorite testing tools. Both Scott Hanselman and Philip Wheat taped the talk and will post it shortly. I strongly recommend watching it. This architecture is far superior in separation of concerns, testability, maintainability, and scalability to the existing ASP.NET architecture that was basically mimicking a state-full WinForms environment in a stateless web world to bring existing WinForms developers up to speed with web application development quickly. It will enter a heated battle with Ruby on Rails for the top spot as the best way to develop modern web apps. The Microsoft .NET Framework will have certain advantages such as WCF, Linq, and strong typing while the dynamic nature of Ruby and it’s faster innovation rates due to its open source nature will have other advantages. It will be interesting to see how this fight will pan out.

Note that because of a fundamental change in the design, there will be a new (smaller) set of ASP.NET controls that will work in this model. This architecture relies more on the native html controls (which is a good thing. See my CSS blog post to see what hoops you need to jump through to make ASP.NET controls work well with CSS). AJAX Control Toolkit controls that talk to the server also will get counter parts that will work in this model. There will be no change to the Microsoft Ajax Library or the networking stack of the Microsoft Ajax offering. This stack will also improve the existing ASP.NET architecture by replacing the UpdatePanel that was designed to wrap existing ASP.NET controls which were not originally designed for Ajax with a control that can be passed into the app as a JSON object and placed in a placeholder.

To read other perspectives please read the following blogs:

Bob Grommes, Chris Holmes, Howard Dierking, Jeffery Palermo, Jason Meridth, Joshua Flanagan Mike Moore, Roy Osherove,

altnetconf

Update: Sergio Pereira has written nice blog post that goes in more detail with sample code.

topics at alt.net

jay flowers: loop diagrams from system thinking

jeffery palermo: advanced nhybernate techniques

paul juliean : different styles of pair programming

mvc stuff and plugging the dlr into that ruby view,

can we call it msft does rails

ndunit and xunit

ddd domain driven design

scott belware behavior driven design

rod how to sell agile to management

making tests pretty

eric anderson how to introduce bdd to developers who are not actively seeking better ways to do that. how to lower barrrier to writing specs

passion, what to do to build that passion

what is going on with architecture, what you have learned about

unit testing

futurespective on msft. give msft ideas on where to go.

mono,

boo

what we lack in .net community that they have in ruby and java community

scott gu new mvc pattern from msft. use nunit to test it.

simon guest guidance or lack of from msdn. how to fix or replace it

westin benford monorailmoving from asp.net to monorail. why would someone spend 6 months on monorail and then move to ror

dynamic languages on the cl

aspect oriented programming

why move from tdd to bdd.

how to move organizational skill up

kevin d? how to move legacy code under test

jacob boris. how to avoid xml hell

howard turking. runs msdn magazine (laughter which was not cool) how to systematically moving it up to the masses vs c++ hates the vb community.

moving a .net team to ror. tips tricks

it is harder to build software this way how to make it easier.

intersection of the domain moder pattern and rich internet app built on silverlight

dave ohara. how do we take these ideas and sell them to folks in a way that they see the value.

tom integration tests involving databases. i am fan of nhybernate and active record. (use sql light with database in xaml -joke)

lightning talk for 5 min. to do quick demos, …

roy: a famous speaker said that td will deteriorate your design, can it really do that. when to use it or not. how it compares with bdd.

mike from uk you are all a freindly bunch… i am a java manager now. all alpha geeks have left as martin has already left. apple is taking over the desktop. is vista is the last nail in the coffin. why should i care about msft anymore.

vista ME will be out in just 2 years.

where does a model go, what is the lifespan. when to use mockin, when not.

agile project management.

scott: writing and understanding user stories.

jean paul — becoming a catalyst for change in your organization. how to introduce things like agile into the organization

james kovacs — why are we facinated with executable xml. it is terribly verbose. painful.. can we do better. most msft devs diddnet go to college.

ruby for dummies, i mean .net developers.

testing guis.

fostering passion within a company to grow.

are executable requirements possible. are … better. can we do better.

domain specific languages for business and geeks.

language oriented progamming is challenging. design asthetics and environment is challengeing with mocking and dependency injection.

what is the persona for .net. mort, einstien, elvis, belware

sorry for misspelling everyone’s names.

altnetconf

Back to the future with source code viewing with Visual Studio 2008

Today Microsoft announced that it will be releasing many of the .NET Framework libraries under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL).   Scott Guthrie’s post details what this means.  We have been able to see this source code using Reflector for a number of years so while getting the code in one big chunk is nicer (and now properly licensed) it is not that big of a deal.   A feature that has been lacking since the days of MFC is the ability to step into Microsoft source code in the Visual Studio debugger from your own code.  This was a great feature in MFC and I among others had asked Microsoft’s product team for it in 2005.  Today, my wish has been granted.  Starting with VS2008 you can actually step into Microsoft source code from your own code.  This will help developers everywhere better understand how Microsoft code works and write their code better.  It also puts Microsoft source code more in the spotlight and I hope this visibility will cause Microsoft developers to write better code.

My new wish is that future pieces of source code released in this manner should have the signature or alias of the developer who wrote it so if they did a poor job, the whole world would know.  While this wish coming true is very unlikely for many many reasons, I thought I put it down in writing none the less.

Networking with a VPC in Windows Vista

 For my talk at the SF launch I need to do a demo of a client computer calling a SharePoint server.  Since I have one computer to do this on, I have to run the server inside a VPC and install the client software on the host computer.  Then I need to use the Microsoft Loopback Adapter to connect these two.  Here is the details on how to install and configure the Microsoft Loopback Adapter on Windows Vista.

1.       Install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter

Control Panel  à Add Hardware à Click Next on the “Welcome to Add Hardware Wizard”

On the page that comes up click the “Install the hardware that I manually select from a list” button then click Next à Choose Network adapters click Next à Under Manufacturer choose Microsoft Under Network Adapter choose Microsoft Loopback Adapter.  Click Next à Click Next  …

 2.Assign a static IP Address to the Microsoft Loopback Adapter

Start à Control Panel à Manage Network Connections à You see a new network registered with a name like “Local Area Connection 2 Unidentified Network Microsoft Loopback Adapter”  à right click it and select Properties à click on TCP/IPv4 à click Properties  à Click use the following IP address à enter 192.168.1.10 (of course the two first numbers are what is important) for the IP Address and 255.255.255.0 for the subnet mask à Click OK.

How to get a Free Legal Production Version Windows Vista

The Windows Vista Team will be holding a Windows Vista Install Faire as part of The Silicon Valley Code Camp on Oct 7,8.  Those who participate will get the help of the team that built Vista to install the latest build of the RTM candidate.  Once Vista is released, all participants will get a free copy of Vista Ultimate.  Space is limited and you will need to register beforehand, so they know how much hardware and engineers to send down for the event.  Make sure you read the details of system requirement, backups, and what to bring and not bring carefully to make sure we could actually upgrade your system.    To register go to http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/AttendeeRegistration.aspx 

ATLAS to be released around the end of the year

I can finally talk about this.  The V1.0 of the Microsoft AJAX framework code named ATLAS will be shipped around the end of the year.  It will be “Fully supported” which means that customer support services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and that any customer can request hotfixes in the event that they encounter a bug affecting their application. 

In order to meet this date, we will be shipping a “core” set of functionality including all the common components needed to enable developers to build client-side controls/components, as well as the server-side functionality that provides integration within ASP.NET (including the super-popular update-panel and other assorted controls).  There are features of the current “Atlas” CTP drops that won’t be in the fully supported “core” bucket. These features will continue to be available in a separate download and will continue to work on top of the supported “core” release.  We will obviously continue to support a Go-Live license for all features going forward.  Overtime we will be moving more and more features into the fully supported bucket.

Naming:

1) The client-side “Atlas” javascript library is going to be called the Microsoft AJAX Library.  This will work with any browser, and also support any backend web server (read these blog posts to see how to run it on PHP and ColdFusion).

2) The server-side “Atlas” functionality that nicely integrates with ASP.NET will be called the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions.  As part of this change the tag prefix for the “Atlas” controls will change from <atlas:>to <asp:>. 

3) The “Atlas” Control Toolkit today is a set of free, shared source controls and components that help you get the most value from the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions.  Going forward, the name of the project will change to be the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Watch for a white paper with details in late September.