Not that I havent got enough to do I've decided to complete a life long ambition, for a geek, next year and build a robot.

As I know precisely nothing about electronics but certainly with an aptitude to learn I am currently scowering the web for info and blogs.

I found these along my travels.......

www.hackaday.com

www.phidgets.com 

Instead of using the increrasingly annoying del.icio.us Im just jotting a few URLs down for personal use.  Take a look if your interested.

http://www.mythicalmanmoth.com/archive/2007/10/05/csla--step-by-step-complex-data-types--some-gotchas.aspx

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201 

www.easynews.com

www.skyscanner.net

www.popfly.com

www.publicproxyserver.com

www.techradar.com

The long awaited Visual Studio 2008 was finally released to manufacturing yesterday 19th November.

Highlights of the environmnet built upon .NET 3.5, also relased yesterday include.

• Multi-targeting of .NET2.0, .NET3.0 and .NET3.5 all from the same IDE
• Built in AJAX support - no seperate download
• Extensive changes to the web design component which is based on the expression web designer engine.
• Extensive support for CSS developement
• Language improvements
• LINQ - Language Integrated Query - Built-in Object Relation Mapper (OR/M)  - Working with data now as easy as working with a class
• Data access improvements

This really is an exciting update to the already formidable developer toolset.

Scott Gutherie has published the first of his hotly anticipated series on the new MVC architecture for ASP.NET

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx 

It's taken me a while to really take a look at this open source .NET CMS system built in c# but now I have I won't look back.

For years I've built many different CMS solutions for clients where I would target each individual site with specific additions to a basic CMS.  This became both tedious and dangerous.  Why dangerous?  Well apart from being very difficult to manage it ultimately leads to an unhappy client and potential lawsuits!  I never quite got that far but it made the projects focus the CMS and not the actual website.

Thanks to Peter Labrow at Labrow Marketing for pointing me in the direction of this great piece of software.  It's based on open standards, fully compliant and easy to extend.  Just got to brush up on the XSLT which is used to build the templates.

www.umbraco.org

Scott Gutherie the Program Manager for many .NET technologies at Microsoft including IIS and Visual Studio announces the release of the .NET framework source code.

Whilst it's not quite open source it certainly helps to see how production quality code is written.  It's .NET v3.5 and VS2008 only but it's certainly a start.

Check it out. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx 

For any of you unfamiliar with CSLA.NET I suggest you take a look straight away. CSLA.NET is a framework for building enterprise class OO .NET applications and is born out of a 10 year long almost evangelical philosophy by its author Rockofrd Lhotka.

Rocky started his series of books on distributed object orientated applications during the very early VB5 days.  With the arrival of .NET both C# and VB Rocky’s ideals were finally matched by the technologies.  I can assure you that COM and distributed computing was not as easy as Microsoft would have had us believe.

Iterating through the .NET versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 & soon to be v3.5 CSLA.NET has always mirrored the .NET roadmap and has been at the forefront of best practice.

Your objects inherit from CSLA.NET base objects and assume a whole host of additiona lfunctionality not provided by .NET itself. 

Top Features

n-level undo
Full support for object databinding in Windows Forms and ASP.NET
Strongly typed paretn child relationships
Field level centralised authorisation
Business rule management.
Database/storage layer abstraction
Web service integration

I’ve met Rocky a few times in Vegas and Orlando conferences although he wouldn’t know me from Adam and not only is his framework top notch he is one of the world’s top speakers at all .NET conferences.

CSLA.NET is described in detail in a number of books VB & C# and later versions of the books are available as PDF eBooks. 

Short of a simple and fair licence whose only major caveat is that you can’t replicate the framework (or a derivative of) to sell as an application framework it is actually free to use.  It provides create structure to your development and helps to abstract and layer a project to obtain great re-use.  Using OO principals it’s also great for hiding and masking the many Microsoft data access technologies over the years.  DAO, ADO, ADO.NET & LINQ anybody??????

As part of my reference application, see later posts, I intend developing using CSLA.NET in C# for the foreseeable future.

Cheers Rocky!!!   

Running a large server farm can be a stressfull occupation but wouldnt it be great to get some form of warning when things are not well.  Perhaps even just before a failure?

 I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I'm determeined to build a simple windows mobile app that queries a web service in my data centre.  I'm just going to use red, amber and green colours to indicate problems.

Hopefully at a glance I wll be able to see everything green and happy.

This article from the 4GuysFromRolla looks a great place to start.  http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/032107-1.aspx 

I've been an ASP & VB developer for some 10 years if not longer but never got in to C#.

After recently deciding to move on from Picture Nation I started to look at the contracting market in and around Manchester, UK.  I was amazed at the number of jobs recruiting C# over and above VB.NET.  C# really does seem now to be pushing forward as the defacto .NET language and therefore I have decided to bite the bullet and develop solutions in C# as my primary language.

It's a great time to be a .NET developer, especially C#, as the skills are so in demand.  With v3.5 (Linq et al) around the corner, fingers crossed November 2007, I think it's a perfect time for me to move over.

I'm going to document my transition if not just to help me but also others who come unstuck by the little nuisances of the language.

Wish me luck.

Matt

Time nearly up?

My involvement in Picture Nation is coming to an end soon.  I've had fun.....but working on your own to create a scalable asp.net website is quite daunting.  I'd have done a few things differently but on the whole from barely nothing to a fully working site (for the members anyway) in less than 3 months was pretty good.  We've added  to it all the time but the fundamentals of selection and purchase were completed fairly quickly.  I never quite worked out how to take a decent picture but the one belwo was my best one;