Aggiorno, the web developer add-in for Visual Studio, just hit Release Candidate 0 this week and packed with bug fixes we are also making available 3 new aggiornings.
In this first incarnation, Aggiorno lives as a Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in, assisting Web developers in accomplishing complex tasks in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.
The following video shows the new aggiornings in action, making required fields for the script and textarea elements a snap to fix.
Following a similar experience as the Add alternate text to images, this 3 new aggiornings will guide you to add the missing script type and column and rows properties to your textarea elements which are required per compliance with the XHTML standard.
Last week I told you guys about the changes that have undergone in my professional life as in the last months, and one big part of the change was joining the Artinsoft Research family and the chance to work with the Aggiorno team for a start.
In its first incarnation Aggiorno lives as a Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in that assists Web developers in accomplishing complex tasks in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.
As you can see in the following video, we put, famous blogger, Nikhilk Kothari's Web site into a test and show you how by just executing a set of aggiornings (this is how we call our smart refactorings) we were able to bring the Web site to almost full compliance and improved its accessibility.
Since developers can leverage their knowledge of the Visual Studio user experience, Aggiorno’s learning curve is gentle providing results right out of the box.
Getting your Web ready for the People and the Engines... all of them
Standards compliance and accessibility seats at the core values of what the team is doing and they want to help make it a reality to all web developers out in the wild.
But now that you are into making things the right way, Aggiorno can also automate the following tasks for you
Fix Deprecated Elements For XHTML Compliance
Replace CENTER Tag By Inline CSS
Replace FONT Tag By Inline CSS
Update Deprecated Attributes
Update Other Deprecated Tags
Fix Syntax Errors For XHTML Compliance
Fixed Malformed Entities
Replace Characters With Entities
Make Tags Lowercase
Make Attributes Values Quoted
Use Default Attribute Values
Fix Tag Structure For XHTML Compliance
Just like that, right click on your pages, click Aggiorno, choose the aggiorning you want to run and let Aggiorno do it's magic and your Web site is nearer to its nirvana of accessibility and compliance.
Here is a teaser on how it works.
Oh and one more thing... Aggiorno works on XHTML, ASP.NET and even PHP source code, so go call it for a wide of options.
Under the covers
Aggiorno was born as an initiative to provide means of productivity and reliability to the masses in a straight and user friendly way. It's tag line is "Improving the Web one tag at the time" and the team perform to make it a reality to the thousand of web developers out there.
Aggiorno is powered by the same technology that Artinsoft has used throughout its more than 10 years of experience transforming businesses code source from different platforms like Java, PHP and Classic ASP into the .NET Framework in both simple and quite complex scenarios.
The Sky is the limit
The cool thing about Aggiorno is that because of they way it is architect, it provides the team with the necessary flexibility to integrate Aggiorno's core engine with different platforms, having a straight separation between the engine and its presentation layer, allowing the team with the chance to come up with different form factors, therefore providing with its power to a wide variety of audiences.
Now what?
So now that you are so out of your mind with what Aggiorno can do for you, here is where you can go and learn more about it and let's us know what do you think about.
I know I've been out of public word for a bit of time lately - at least in the most extent use of the word (me blog) and have moved my frequency into the tiny world of 140 characters with my twitter voice as Samiq.
There are, though, a lot of great voices out there who have kept us informed and misinformed about what's been going on in the RIA world and surroundings in the time being - hence the necessity no to write and just go express my point of view in the comment spaces or around beers, whenever possible and whatever comes first.
Yet as direct results of these conversations, some people has asked me to come back to my blog and revive it a little bit - or revive it in it's full - bring that same voice I have had whenever there are beers, geeks and some good topic to convey, and make it public.
So here I'm bringing my word to the broad end of the world of bits with my Bits and adding a little flavor to the semantics of web - yes I know, a little cheesy but I have grown my opinion about it... so let's make it worth.
Summarizing a little bit and to create context to what's to come here is a couple of things that have happened in the past that will impact the way I behave in the future:
September 7th, 2007
Silverlight 1.0 gets released to web and with it a couple of applications I worked on made it to the official press release.
September 29th, 2007
Participate of Silverlight DevCamp Chicago with a session about Creating MVC-driven Applications using the Silverlight 1.0 bits.
October 1st-3rd, 2007
Max 07 happened and here I meet a lot of really cool guys from the Adobe community, although what made the trip worth was getting to know the Microsoft's UX Evangelists, lead by Chris Bernard.
November 2007 - January 2008
I work with a great team, on probably one of the most complex Silverlight 1.0 applications up today - yet it has not seen the ray of public light as of this writing.
February 18-20th, 2008
Along with my peers from LA, NY, Atlanta and Costa Rica, participate on a private Silverlight 1.0 & 2.0 training prepared by ourselves. Now call it knowledge sharing!
March 5-7th, 2008
Mix 08 happened and here I meet a lot of really cool people and had great conversations around the world of RIE - some of them I recorded in the form of video, yet to be published as a documentary. Got to see Ka, amazing show! Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 is released to web.
April 11th, 2008
I get a call
April 14th, 2008
I attend a meeting and get introduced to a cool project
April 15th, 2008
I go to dinner with probably 1 of the most brilliant minds in Costa Rica
April 18th, 2008
I quit Schematic as Software Architect and join Artinsoft as Technology Evangelist to its Research Division.
May 9th, 2008
I finish my work at Schematic, and with it I finish my pass with one of the greatest interactive agencies around the world.
May 19th, 2008
I start part time with Artinsoft and focus on the marketing strategy for Aggiorno Beta 2 with the team.
I start writing this while exploring ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 stuff for a freelance gig.
Ok, so now that you know where I've been during this time (at least the portions that are public), it's time to keep the fingers warm and shoot and connect directly to me head to start getting some word out of my thoughts, and make them happen!
Today Microsoft Live Labs announcedMicrosoft Volta. Volta technology preview is a developer toolset built on top of .NET to further excel the development of software+services applications enabling you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns.
Supporting the lines of the Live 2.0 roadmap, Volta is presented as an experiment for the community to work around and provide feedback on how this declarative architecture enable Architects to tune, alas Grid-computing, the way its application behave and distributes their processing load across several tiers.
It is no surprise that more and more our every day applications are becoming all interconnected. Most of our collaboration tools live somehow in the cloud and it's their connectivity and ability to mash up what makes them valuable, but just as this connectivity grows it makes the process of architect decisions a complex and almost imperfect task, getting us to continue tune its distribution to match the execution availability sometimes stretching the boundaries of quality and availability in or to pair up the ever-changing business needs.
With Volta you architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together.
Given that this technology is in an experimental mode you can foresee changes in the way of how the toolset will evolved, but for us architect-geeks it is a great way to starting trying new models of architecture applications and get tips towards how we build our future business models.
If you want to learn more about this new model, go on a check out their technology site here.
Cheers!
G.
Update:Here is an amazing post from Erik Meijer who is part of the team, talking a bit more of what Volta is and how it came to be.
Today will be moved to history as the day Silverlight 2.0 feature set was made public along with the road map of what Microsoft feels like is the future of ASP.NET 3.5.
Just a week after Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released to manufacturing, ScottGu's team keeps working fearlessly in the next round of features that will mark ASP.NET and Silverlight as big contesters for the future of both the Web and the RIA world.
Silverlight 1.1 moves to be Silverlight 2.0 and will go into Beta on Q1'08; such release will ship with a GoLive license allowing companies to build upon it and move applications to production.
ASP.NET will see itself upgraded with an Extension Release that will sport a set of Framework Extension excelling manageability in the way we build applications and improvements to current technologies like AJAX, Silverlight integration, and Dynamic Data consumption.
Last but not least important, IIS 7.0 will present a new deployment strategy for applications residing both in single or over web farms that will allow version, deployment and roll back of features both from the command prompt or thru the management shell; all of this as part of the release of Windows Server 2008.
A lot of traction has gone into twitter during the last half an hour and I guess this are great news that we all welcome. Let's keep our eyes open to the future and how it all behaves.
Microsoft, and specifically the Visual Studio team has been doing a great job during this decade, sometimes even pushing the boundaries of the technology itself towards the developer community and the digital world itself. Keep up the good work!
For more info I encourage you go check ScottGu's blog post here.
Gosh! It's been a few days I don't come around this bits and it's due to a lot of stuff going in my head, laptops and life... which can be translated into great stuff!
Getting back to my virtual life after a long weekend of vacations by the beach with my friends, I had the chance last Tuesday to install the new version of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 on my Vista laptop and XP desktop.
Both installations went fairly painless after expending a good 5 minutes around the web reading other people's experiences.
It took me about an hour to get Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 out of my system, although I would like to point out a couple of tricky things:
If you installed .NET Framework 3.5, before installing VS.NET Beta 1; by the end of the uninstalling the applet will ask you for those installers, so as a workaround here just cancel that, and it will end the installation without the .NET Fx 3.5. After this happens just uninstall the .NET Framework from Add/Remove Programs normally and presto.
Now, before you call it for the day and go in and install the new bits you will have to uninstall the Web Authoring Components, this is a small library with an icon of Office in the Add/Remove Programs, go and remove it.
Ok now this is it, this is what it took me to have successfully uninstalled the beta bits.
Now to the new ones, it took me about another hour to do this: here is a workaround I found to the issue of not being able to install from a remote place.
The only reason Visual Studio .NET won't install from a remote location is because .NET Framework 3.5 won't do it, so go ahead and install the Beta 2 bits separately (this is a download of about 118MB) and after this is done, kick the install bits of Visual Studio with out having to copy the 3.5GB to your local machine.
Once you get this done, you are almost done with the install - what? yet there is more to do?! : yes there are two more things:
Go to this post from ScottGu and download and run a small batch script that will fix a bug with the Binding Policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll and ASP.NET 2.0.
And, optionally, in case you had a previous version of Orcas running on your system (the one you just uninstalled before) you will have to run devenv /resetsettings from the command prompt located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ this will reset the settings so that it won't mess with the previous settings and upgrade to the new ones.
Ok, Done! After all this manual work you and I have a working copy of Visual Studio .NET 2008 Beta 2 on your machine.
Jonathan Ramirez, a colleague of mine @ Schematic and whit whom I have done most of the Silverlight work lately, is conducting a test on Silverlight SEO.
For such experiment he has published a really simple page hosting only a Silverlight control in it, part of the test is to get Google to index the word SilverlightSEO out of it for which there are no current results in it.
The page has not metadata nor text other than the control itself and the xaml file containing it - I am sure this post will get indexed but we want to get this post as an entry point to the test itself.
Now let's wait and see how long does it takes to get indexed if so happens...
Just today Microsoft made available its latest updates to its family of Platform Development with the refresh to the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 they are getting the Beta 2 label.
As part of this update Microsoft has also grant its Go-Live license to such products, allowing people to do production development and releases based on this bits, which will be a great step further to see production ready web sites using Silverlight and LINQ technologies.
Note: Remember that the final launch for this products is expected for February 2008. So we are still some good 7 months away from that state.
Based on this new evolution on Microsoft Development Technologies the company is renewing its statements associated to the mission they see this products playing in our dev shops:
Visual Studio 2008 enables developers and development teams to rapidly create connected, secure and compelling applications on the latest platforms, including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Office System and the Web.
As new community previews will raise along the year, we will see improved performance and better work flow with the ecology of tools like Expression Blend for creating compelling experiences that will allow the user to get immerse in usable worlds excelling its productivity... plus encouraging for the Software + Services worlds that Ballmer and Gates have been taking about during the last couple of weeks.
Update:ScottGu has a great post here, including some quick overview of this release and some post-installation notes as to make sure everything will work as expected.
Update2:Channel9 has a great video here with an interview with Soma and ScottGu talking about what's new and what is there to expect with this new release.
Update3: Here are my experiences getting this bits installed just as well as couple of tricks to get Beta 1 uninstalled.
It's been some busy and interesting days for me lately as I am on board learning a new wave of tools, languages and architectures.
One of this newly -for me at least- dynamic architectures surrounds is Python; and as I'm opening my mind to the "think dynamic" I found ScottGucheering up for a different, yet quite impressive, dynamic language making it to the .NET family: IronRuby.
Just as there is a current heavy-duty wave of applications being surfaced in LAMP-like environments, powered by Python, Ruby and tens of RAD Frameworks being built in top of them, Microsoft has not stop playing and hence has brought its own flavors of dynamic seeds with one subtle difference, this seeds are supported by the strong power of the .NET CLR and its API.
As ScottGu states on his post
Today's IronRuby drop is still a very early version, and several language features and most libraries aren't implemented yet (that is why we are calling it a "pre-alpha" release). It does, though, have much of the core language support implemented, and can also now use standard .NET types and APIs.
...
The end result will be a compatible, fast, and flexible Ruby implementation on top of .NET that anyone can use for free.
Part of the samples being made available on the web with this release is a WPF hello world application written in IronRuby showing the strength of what would be enabled once it gets feature complete.
If you want to start playing along with this set of bits John Lam has a post showing you how to download and build your this preliminary release.
Also, if you are interested in what the world of ASP.NET dynamics looks like check out this video on ASP.NET Futures (May 2007) showing IronPython in action with Dynamic Data Controls.
As the Silverlight team gets ready to the lunch of Silverlight 1.0 RC in a couple of weeks, Tim Sneath et team want to make sure that before it hits the road, and the masses, you will be prepared and will make the changes to your application so that it won't break once its out... why is that?
Well, as Microsoft's Joe Stegman points out in this post, there are a few changes in the Silverlight 1.0 RC API that might make your application break, although rest assure that moving forward this API is locked so you won't have to go thru this process again.
Even though there is no preview of the RC release as for you to go and test your applications as of now, this guys have put together a small zip file with some reference material and resources, based on Tim Sneath's post, this package includes:
A new silverlight.js file that detects both the beta and the RC version;
A breaking changes document that highlights differences between the beta and RC;
An updated Visual Studio template that demonstrates the correct way to embed the new control;
A EULA that governs legal usage of the above items.
Which pretty much will guide your way between the RC bits hits their way out the oven.
Today and as part of the Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference @ Denver, Microsoft unveiled the official dates for the joined lunch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
From the press release:
In anticipation for the most significant Microsoft enterprise event in the next year, Turner announced that Windows Server® 2008, Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world.
From this, Microsoft expects to grow its revenue base out of Windows Vista during the 2008 fiscal year, given the slow adoption from the corporate and public sector who still keeps ordering Windows XP computers.
So here you go guys... let's keep waiting and playing along with CTP's and Beta bits, anyone for a Beta 2 or even 3 of all of theses products? Or should we follow AS3/Flex3/AIR in the mean time?
As I am getting my home win-dev-machine back on track after a month or so of been asleep at a friend's house, I found out today that a refresh to the SDK that shipped with Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 has been out for a bit more than a month and there was not that much said about it in blogs; I even went back to ScottGu's blog to see if I missed the news anywhere but somehow it wasn't that important of a preview given the lack of coverage.
As part of this new SDK release, an update to the .Net Framework 3.5 has been put out there as well as a refresh for the for ADO.NET Entity Framework, both sporting the June CTP postfix, even though their release mark is on July 2nd.
I'm getting the 3 of them installed right now; what has changed or improved in each of the installed base are as follow:
Orcas SDK June CTP:
The Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” SDK June 2007 CTP targets Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Beta 1. The Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” SDK June 2007 CTP is intended to let customers work with “Orcas” Beta 1 extensibility features.
This CTP adds and updates the following features:
Run As Normal User (RANU) - when the Visual Studio SDK is already installed on a computer, a user with non-administrator permissions now can create a package by using the wizard, and then press F5 to open the new package in the experimental hive.
Changes to DSL Tools include new path editing. In DSL Tools, paths are used in a DSL definition to specify diagram element maps and explorer behavior. This CTP adds richer path editing to the DSL Designer, in the form of a drop-down tree control. You can now either type the path syntax, or you can display a tree view of all the valid paths from the current starting point.
Release month, for example 2007.04, is removed from the SDK folder structure and “Microsoft” was added to the VS SDK shortcut and root folder name.
.Net Framework 3.5 June CTP:
According to the release notes, the June CTP features several enhancements including:
Increased integration of Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
Improved ASP.NET AJAX support
New web protocol support for creating Windows Communication Foundation services (AJAX, JSON, REST, POX, RSS, ATOM, and other web service standards)
Full tooling support for the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Presentation Foundation
New base class library classes
ASP.NET Entity Framework June CTP:
This CTP contains updates to the ADO.NET Entity Framework since the Visual Studio Codename "Orcas" Beta 1 release, including changes in Object Services, Query, Entity Client, and the Entity Data Model Wizard in Visual Studio. Some of the new features include IPOCO, detaching from long-running ObjectContext instances, multiple entity sets per type, support for referential integrity constraints, span support, transactions, serialization, no more default constructors in code-generated classes, improvements to stored procedure support, access to the underlying store connection, directory macros in the entity connection string to support hosted scenarios, native SQL read-only views, UNICODE support in Entity SQL, query plan caching, and canonical functions in Entity SQL.
Hi guys, just wanted to write really quick to let all know I'll be hosting a couple of sessions for Ask the Expert on the Microsoft eXpert Zone event for Latin America on going this week...
The first session was held this afternoon and I answered questions regarding WPF and best practices for data binding, the designer and developer role and a bit on WCF integration with WPF.
The second session will be next Thursday @ 11am CST, if you would like to join that session please follow this link.
Apart from this 2 interactive sessions, on Thursday my Webcast on Rich Internet Applications will be available for on demand viewing here. I think Microsoft will roll this Webcast later on for anytime watching, but for now it will be available only on Thursday as part of this event.
So I've been with not that much to do during the last couple of days and so I started to reach around the different Educational Resources I've seen lately around the web for Microsoft Technologies, specifically WinFx and Silverlight related stuff.
Update: I will try to maintain this bit as updated as possible.
First in the list is the Lynda.com set of tutorials available free for Blend and Design. The Blend set was taught by Lee Brimelow from thewpfblog.com and the Design one was done by Ted LoCascio. Between these two you guys you will find over 10 hours of video tutorials.
Next, Tim Sneathposted today about this Hands On Lab that will guide you on creating an Outlook-look-alike application based on WPF. With this lab you will go thru a bit more than 90 pages and by the end of this tutorial you will have a resemble of Outlook plus a vast experience in putting together a fairly complex application yourself using this new presentation framework.
Moving towards books, a few weeks ago I saw Chris Anderson published a new book on WPF called Essential Windows Presentation Foundation. From that book SearchVB.com is hosting Chapter 1 which I think serves as a really good introduction to this new way of building user experiences, I think this will go handy before the Hands-on 90-page-thing.
Anyway, I went also yesterday thru the Quickstart for Silverlight 1.0 (currently in Beta), I found it really nice and easy and holding a good structure as to guide you thru what the possibilities are with this first approach to building Rich Interactive Experiences on the web, with all its limitations and bugs, moreover I think it serves as a good ground base moving forward to the more powerful Silverlight 1.1 Quickstart (currently in public Alpha), which will be the more natural approach to all of us C# coders.
Celso Gomes, an interactive designer @ Microsoft, has also made available his website nibbles, which on his own words, it is a series of snack tutorials for hungry designers. Here you will find a good set of tutorials for creating both WPF and Silverlight applications using Expression Blend.
I also found this post from Tim Sneath on a series of training for Microsoft technologies going over this summer across the states, so if you happen to live near by any of this stops (they are quite a lot) then you might have the opportunity to attend one or more of those.
So here you have, a good set of resources to entertain yourself for a few days and get some new stuff in your Microsoft box of knowledge,
ScottGu posted this morning about the new release the team over the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit put together.
This release comes with the release number 10606, and as with previous released versions it is available both in its binary format as well as its source code, the later which you can extend and modify accordingly to your needs.
For this release over 125 bugs were fixed plus animation support for some extenders, event support across the Toolkit, a Script combiner for reducing Toolkit scripts' download time, Dynamic context support for controls using Web Services, fixes to make ASP.NET Validators work with Toolkit extenders and Accessibility improvements.
On the ASP.NET website there are over 39 free videos with "How-to" and Tutorials showing you how to leverage Ajax technology on your web applications and more.
Work has been really hard on me the last couple of weeks, but I just found some time today to read down my rss feeds and found out that Visual Studio Orcas has been refreshed with a March CTP just as I wrote this.
It's been released both as a VirtualPC image and as a selfextracted file, I recomend to go witht he VPC one since in that way u won't have to mess your current system.
Be aware that this release is quite big, near the 6GB of size so be patient.
Any way, I have to go back to my emails, I leave you here with the links to the download and to a post that Scott Guthier wrote introducing some of the new stuff shipping with Orcas CTP.
I found myself today googling about how to interact with IIS thru a batch script so that I can start, stop, create, delete... u know to be able of performing most of the tasks you can do by using the IIS Management Shell.
I found this article over TechNet and got quite impress about this shell application called iisweb that comes with Windows Server 2003; that enables you to do this and some other tricky actions over an IIS instance in the machine where it runs or even access remote servers and work on them.
Go check it and save it in your pandora box, you never know when you will needed...
Found this morning in my daily RSS reading a post in the ASP.NET Daily Articles that shows how to bring an application down for maintenance or upgrade without even getting to open IIS and stop the service.
It seems that ASP.NET supports a feature for routing requests to a special singleton file (called app_offline.htm), making the rest of the application unavailable for serving those requests. Allowing webmasters to work behind the scenes on the maintenance of the site or application (just make sure u set enabled=true in the httpRuntime tag)
I know that for most of us this feature will come handy during those days of build release and critical fixes.
For more information here is a list of related posts:
During the last weeks I've got meself into working in a mashup application for a friend of mine, essentially is a Real State website that will enable my friends to post the properties they have up for sell and rent, as well as to be the first point of contact for the company.
Part of this work I've done is to choose a mapping techonology to be used throught the application, as of now I've gone thru Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth. I currently live in Costa Rica and as u might suppose we don't have that much of support as the guys @ the US, UK and other big cities around the world in terms of address match and mapping options, other than satellite imaginary; which in terms of usability I need a service that provides the best support in terms of me contry and those where my friends offer their services, which right now are Nicaragua, Panamá and Chile.
I pretty much have tried all three though in terms of setting up the mash up there is one that offers better support for techonologies like ASP.NET and that is, of course, Virtual Earth. Eventhough in terms of API all three expose pretty much the same functionality I found this screencast posted by th
