Author: Mark

Habib (a Program Manager on the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET debugger team) is looking for some feedback on how people use remote debugging. If this is a feature of VS .NET that you use, here’s your chance to share thoughts/ideas. I just had to use remote debugging a couple of days ago for forums.asp.net to track down a nasty multi-user caching bug. My only complaint was the number of times I had to ‘google it’ before I found the right steps for getting it setup.

Anyhow, if you’ve got suggestions/comments please follow up on his post in the forums: http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=419228

We have feeds for all the public forums @ www.asp.net/forums now. For example, you can grab the announcements feed here.

Just look for the familiar at the bottom of the page when viewing the threads in a forum.

You can filter the list of threads returned by a forumid parameter or a count parameter on the querystring of the rss.aspx page. For example:

http://www.asp.net/Forums/rss.aspx?forumid=11
Returns most recent 25 threads in the Announcements forum

http://www.asp.net/Forums/rss.aspx?forumid=11&count=50
Retuns the most recent 50 threads in the Announcements forum

Today we’re going to add RSS feeds to the ASP.NET Forums @ www.asp.net/forums/. Kent has been asking me to do this for a while 🙂

We’ll start with feeds for all of the Forums. Depending upon the feedback we may also add a feed for recent posts and/or allow you to subscribe to a particular user’s posts.

We’ve already added a ton of RSS feeds – with more to come – on the Forums 2.0 code base over at http://forums.asp.net (including support for tracking pingbacks now too).

Stay tuned, more to follow…

About 9mo. ago I was chatting with a friend of mine about getting a GSM phone. I wanted to start making some mobile aware applications — specifically the www.asp.net articles/forums. The recommendation was the Sony Ericsson t68i which was getting great reviews in Mobile circles. With Bluetooth, infrared, GSM, etc. it looked great on paper!

What a mistake that turned out to be.

I’ve never had more problems with a piece of electronic equipment. Frankly, I’m really surprised that Sony put their name on it. I mainly travel to large cities and the phone connects about 1 out of every 25 times I dial a number – if that – and usually randomly disconnects after 2 minutes. It was already replaced once due to ‘software issues’ (I have another GSM phone from Motorola and haven’t had a single problem, so that rules out the network). 

Most people I’ve chatted with that own a t68i seems to have the same gripes – Bill Evjen and I were commiserating together about our t68i’s in St. Louis. So, after this last Roadshow I decided to retire the phone and pick-up a Blackberry 7230 – I’ve got a first generation Blackberry, but the 7230 looks great: combo email/phone with that wonderful Blackberry keypad. Now if they could only put .NET on it 😉

I was catching up on the weblogs feeds this morning and ran across a couple of articles where people were worried about the influx of MSFT people from GotDotNet to weblogs.asp.net.

The main concerns are that the blogs on weblogs.asp.net will somehow become editorialized. I wanted to confirm that I’ve personally received email from Bill (Gates that is) that all blog entries must now be reviewed by Microsoft legal, the Microsoft board, as well as every member of the marketing and product teams before posts can go live. We hope to get this process streamlined and that posts should be live within 45-60 business days.

By the way…I’m kidding!!!

I’ve also read some negative comments about the domain ‘weblogs.asp.net’. The reason we’re using this domain is that Scott’s .Text engine is hosted on the ASP.NET servers. We offered to host .Text/weblogs.asp.net for free so everyone could continue using Scott’s great blogging engine and so more people could join. Believe it or not, servers, bandwidth, software, etc. still costs money – we want to see this community continue to grow and thrive without Scott having to pick up the tab each month!

There have also been some concerns about posting criticism of MSFT products. Lot’s of people – including those of us that build the technologies to be criticized – read the blogs on weblogs.asp.net. Moving your blog somewhere else would only mean that it’s going to be harder to act on your feedback. For example, Paul didn’t like how our cross-page posting feature worked. We took the feedback after reading his weblog and changed the behavior. P.S., it’s usually good to follow up with an email about these kinds of things (ASP.NET related) to: rhoward@microsoft.com or scottgu@microsoft.com to ensure it gets seen.

I hope that helps to answer some of the questions – also please give a warm welcome to our friends from GotDotNet as they move their blogs here.

Last week’s roadshow events were great! We visited Denver on Tuesday and St. Louis on Thursday. I also had the chance to present at the Colorado Springs .NET Users Group on Tuesday night. Wednesday I had the opportunity to present to several Denver area ISVs as well as a set of Denver area architects from local companies – great stuff! I’ll update the slides and demos @ www.asp.net/roadshow later today.

While in Denver Ashwin Karuhatty (Microsoft Denver Developer Evangelist) gave me a biometric device after I spied his while we were on stage preparing for the Roadshow. The device is made by Digital Persona and can be used as a replacement for typing a password when logging on to Windows. It can also be used for encrypting files and web site password management. Pretty cool stuff!

I set up the finger print recognition software on the plane home from Denver. The amusing part was when it asked me to register another finger, in the event my current finger was unavailable – Yikes! Little did I know that this weekend I would drive a quarter-inch splinter into the index finger of my right-hand while installing some pulls on some cabinets, ouch! I hate wearing bandaids — and especially hate wearing them when I work — so I used a little trick I picked up from my rock climbing days: using super glue to mend skin. Rock climbing really tears up your hands, using super glue you can mend the tears and keep going, at least until the next tear. It sounds funny but it works really well; the finger print recognition software didn’t like it too much!

In Denver I also had a chance to chat with both Andy Smith, Keith Barrows, and my old buddy Tim Huckaby.

On Thursday I arrived in St. Louis. I forgot my power supply/cord and was on the way to pick up a new one from Best Buy when I got rear-ended by a cab. After all that ‘fun’ was over I made it to Best Buy, got a new power supply, and barely made it to the St. Louis event on the St. Louis University Campus.

After the Roadshow presentation we gave out some free books. It was a little chaotic as Bill Evjen, Devin Rader, and others got gang rushed! Eventually we made it out and Bill and Devin gave me an un-official tour of St. Louis as we tried to find a very elusive pub.

Today (December 8^th) Scott Guthrie is presenting the Roadshow in Redmond. We’ve received a lot of email and requests to present in other cities – we’re listening. We have some more cities that we’re adding to the schedule. We’ll update the list once we nail down the exact dates. Rumor has it was may also be visiting Hawaii – maybe I’ll finally get to windsurf at Diamond Head!

Finally, we’d love to hear your feedback! If you’ve been to one of the Roadshow events, what did you think? Anything we should do different?

We’ve made a ton of progress over the past couple weeks on the Forums v2.0 code base. We now have RSS feeds for all the forum groups, for example our check-in forum: http://forums.asp.net/Forums/rss.aspx?forumid=5&mode=0.

About once a week we get an email for us to add RSS feeds to our list of articles on www.asp.net.

So last night I finally did this; we’ll update the site later today. I was curious to know how most people are writing their RSS feeds.  Maybe I took too simplistic of an approach, but I’m just using a <asp:Repeater /> server control and hand-coding the XML to be generated. How is everyone else writing their feeds? Are there any good RSS toolkits for working with the various RSS XML elements in more of an oo manner? I’d love to populate a collection of articles and then pass the collection to the appropriate XML generator – does anyone have an RSS object model they would care to share 🙂

From the ASPInsiders web site:

“The ASPInsiders is a select group of international professionals who have a demonstrated expertise in ASP.NET technologies and who provide valuable, early feedback on related developing technologies and publications to their peers, the Microsoft ASP.NET team, and others.“

This group was started more than a year ago and has now quickly grown to over 50 members.

Unlike most community groups or organizations, one of the big differences is how the ASPInsiders is run. Instead of operating similar to the MVP program (another awesome group), where membership is determined by Microsoft, or other groups, where a single individual might determine membership, ASPInsiders is managed by a member elected board from the developer community.

The board provides organizational functions such as managing the ASPInsiders website, helping coordinate events with the ASP.NET team, and all the other day-to-day work that goes into running an organization.

Membership, however, is peer driven: ASPInsider members nominate and vote on new members every quarter; Membership is already > 50.

I’d like to call out a special thanks to all the board members who have contributed countless hours – and too many IM chats <g> – to make ASPInsiders happen:

• Keith Barrows
• Scott Cate
• Dana Coffey
• G. Andrew Duthie
• Paul Glavich
• Stephen Martin
• Robert Merriott
• Steve Presley
• Eli Robillard
• Scott Sargent
• Steven Smith
• Stephen Swienton

Without your dedication, time, and effort ASPInsiders wouldn’t be where it is today!

We also truly value all the feedback and direction the ASPInsiders have given us. As Scott Guthrie said, “Their work and contributions are invaluable”.

For more information about ASPInsiders, please check out their web site and FAQ.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the new ‘Provider Design Pattern‘ being introduced in ASP.NET “Whidbey”. In summary, the provider design pattern allows for a pluggable data abstraction layer / business logic layer which allows for built in functionality of ASP.NET to be easily replaced.

We plan on shipping several providers with ASP.NET “Whidbey” supporting SQL Server, Authorization Manager, and several others. However, we also want to build source-code samples for other systems. Specifically: Oracle, DB2, LDAP, and MySQL.

Today I sat down to start working on an Oracle Membership provider and realized: a.) I have not used Oracle in about 6 years, b.) there are lot’s of people that would likely be interested in helping – and who probably know Oracle better than me!

I’ve created a new workspaces project on GotDotNet called ‘ASP.NET “Whidbey“ Providers‘. It’s private for now, but within the coming weeks we’ll open it up for membership (I’m going to see if I can get some filtered design specs. to help the creative process).

It would be great to start working on some providers for ASP.NET “Whidbey“, the only caveat being that there will be some changes between the current Alpha and the upcoming Beta – specifically that we’re moving to abstract base classes vs. interfaces (which we require now).

To begin with it would be great to start on Oracle providers for the current alpha. If you are interested – and already have a copy of “Whidbey“ and know Oracle, please:

1. Join the workspace

2. Send me an email with the username you joined the workspaces as and I’ll add you.