Do you know this guy ? Hire him.

His name is Andrew Stopford. I met him years ago after reading a book he wrote.

And we've stayed in touch. He's been to Redmond for some of the "private" events we've had.

Anyway, changes at his company (outsourcing or something) have made him AVAILABLE.

He's in the UK.

His blog is here - http://weblogs.asp.net/astopford/

Use the contact link to ask for his full resume.

I'm "aesthetically challenged" !

Doing good "look and feel" work doesn't come natural to me, and I want to change that. For both the demo applications that I will be using in 2008's webcasts and videos, as well as for my "pet projects", I want to build great LOOKING web applications (as well as great WORKING ones.)

Visual Studio 2008 has some GREAT new designer and CSS support.

I've recently finished recording a series of 8 videos on "What's new in Visual Studio 2008". They are currently in post-production and will hit the web within a week or two (I'll blog a notice when they do.)

The tool support really helps me use the technology, but I've still been struggling with the "what and why" of it. So, I started doing research, thinking I should doa vedeo series on the "designer" process of building ASP.NET application.

There really isn't much ASP.NET specific reference on the subject, but I though I woul share some of the stuff I came up with.

First - you gotta read this book!

Next, did you know there are hundreds of "ready-to-use", free / Open Source" web designs out there ?

Check out these sites for many of them.

• Open Source Web Designs
• Open Web Design
• Open Designs
• Open Source Templates

Of course, CSS is a MUST.

I found these 2 books useful.

CSS Mastery was a good tutorial, but the CSS Cookbook has a bunch of great examples that really helped me "wrap my head around" how to use CSS and what you can do with it.

Here are some cool CSS oriented wen sites!

• W3C CSS Home Page
• CSS Tinderbox
• CSS Layouts
• Zen Garden

And don't forget the CSS Control Adapter Toolkit !

CSS Control Adapter Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0

Do you have some great "Designing for ASP.NET" resources, tools, or ideas?

Please send them to me!

Did you know that there is an open contribution model for submitting new controls in the AJAX Control Toolkit ?

This document provides some guidelines on how you could get your custom ASP.NET AJAX control added to the toolkit and therefore used by developers around the world !

The document also contains pointers on how to submit fixes and feature additions for existing controls.

Contributing to the Toolkit

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a shared source project released under the Microsoft Permissive License and built on top of ASP.NET AJAX. It has a set of over 35 controls, many of which were written by members of the ASP.NET AJAX community. The Toolkit has matured into a stable and feature complete product through work with the community over the past year. We would like to continue our organic growth by defining a process for all Toolkit contributions.
Contributions should add sound value to the Toolkit and serve its customers' needs. Anyone wishing to contribute should be committed to a high quality bar and take responsibility for their code. There are two ways that our users can contribute to the Toolkit: use the Toolkit Patch Utility for bug fixes and new features for existing controls, or become a Toolkit contributor by adding new controls.

If you already have a great control and would like to share it with us or if you would like to write a new control from scratch this is a great opportunity to challenge yourself to write great reusable controls, show-off your technical and design skills, get plenty of visibility, learn more about Shared Source at Microsoft.

If your control goes into the AJAX Control Toolkit - email me, I'll do a video about it !

I got this recently in an email from a developer friend.

“Is Microsoft committed to Ajax? If so, why is development so slow? (Yeah I know, Silverlight, that means nothing until it is at least version 2 and wide spread.) I am seriously disappointed, and I think others are too. After the 1.0 excitement, there is nothing to get excited about. (What's up with ASP.NET Futures anyway, how about right now?)”

I guess that it's hard to keep up with all the new stuff in our profession, so I thought I would hi-light some of the new AJAX related stuff that we've been building, especially in ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 (currently in Beta) as an illustration our investments in AJAX enabling technologies.   

* Core Integration of ASP.NET AJAX - ASP.NET AJAX is no longer an add-on to ASP.NET. It is now a first class concept like XML Web Services or Data Access. This means full support, full feature lifecycle, etc.

* Full and Dynamic JavaScript Intellisense support in Visual Studio 2008. This includes the JavaScript language and all the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions as well as dynamic support for the code that you write.

* First Class JavaScript Debugging Support in Visual Studio 2008, complete with Break Points, Watch, Immediates, Call Stack, everything you would expect from a first class debugger PLUS, both design time and run time code images so you can drill down into your applications exact JavaScript state and collection at runtime no matter how much dynamic JavaScript is involved in your application.

* JSON, RSS, and POX support for WCF so that all your WCF services can me AJAX Callable.

* The AJAX Controls Toolkit has grown to 34 controls.

* 64 ASP.NET AJAX  How Do I Videos offering tutorial and prescriptive guidance on how to use the features of ASP.NET AJAX

* Forthcoming soon....new ASP.NET AJAX controls like the history control, selector support, and other improvements on both the client and server side.

To me that seems like allot of work in a fairly short time (since ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 was released.)

What's with the "Futures" ???

The current "Futures" include ....

* History support for the Safari browser, inclusion of “titles”, encoding and encrypting of server-side history state and the ability to handle history in the client without a server requirement.

* CSS Selectors APIs have been modified to be applicable to W3C recommendations.

* A script resource extraction tool that allows you to create script files on disk that originate from embedded resources in assemblies.

The reason the Futures are not "Right Now" is simple.

Developers have asked to be more involved in defining the end products we create. "Futures" releases gives folks the chance to get their hands on VERY early bits of the new stuff that we're working on, and that means you can provide feedback early enough in the process to effect the final outcome.

Most folks tell me that they LOVE the fact that we're being so transparent in much of our development process.

So in short - YES :) We're very serious about AJAX !

Spammers really bug me.

I've been working on this on-going sports related portal project (that probably will NEVER go live :)

I love of hobby community sites degrade quickly because they lack the moderation resources to keep the user submitted content quality high and I've been thinking about this problem.

I thought I would share some interesting links that I found on the subject.

• The Official Captcha Site
• Microsoft Research HIP (Human Interactions Programming) 
• MSR Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access)
• Subkismit on CodePlex.com
• ASP.NET AJAX NoBot
• ASP.NET CAPTCHA Server Control on CodingHorror.com
• ASP.NET CAPTCHA Server Control on CodeProject.com

HTML make you queasy ?

I've been playing with Visual WebGui, which is, from my humble perspective, Windows Forms for Web Applications. The development experience is exactly Windows Forms.

Download it yourself, it's free and Open Source.

http://www.visualwebgui.com/

I'm toying with using it as the interface to a large web based media aggregator. Send me your experiences with Visual WebGui!

Some years ago I got an email from an interesting young man named Michael Pham and we discussed PHP IDEs.

I am NOT one of those guys who insist on using a featureless editor to write code (and prove how geeky I am.) I love good IDEs.

For my PHP work I routinely use all the "biggies".

• PHPEd by NuSphere (Which is AWESOME if you are a Windows User - $229 Pro, $119 Std, Retail)
• Active State Komodo (Great, Multi Platform, not PHP Specific - $295 Retail)
• Zend Studio (Strong, but moving to an Eclipse based Version - $299 Retail)

Michael remembered wishing for a commercial quality PHP IDE that was frugally priced when he ws a student - so he wrote one !

He just released the 2008 version and, as with all his new releases, it's packed with new features.

The personal version (last version) is FREE !

The Pro Version is €39

10 Users is €249

Unlimited Site Licence is €499

And the Academic licence for the full version is €29

I hope you'll check it out. Michael originally gave me a free evaluation copy and I liked it so much I paid him for it!

I started with .Text and it served me well.

When .Text was folded into CommunityServer, it was time for a change.  I considered community server. You have to know it's a great product (and I'm using it elsewhere) but it was too much for my meager single blogging needs. (Note: The Telligent guys are working on a more "personal" product called Graffiti - Click Here to Sign Up to be Notified about the Private Beta)

While I use DasBlog on a couple of other projects (and I LOVE it), I wanted a database backend. I chose Subtext. And it has also served me well. But alas, my needs have outgrown SubText and I've been pestering SubText's principal (Phil Haack) too much. Especially since Phil now works at Microsoft.

Subtext has an active community, a good themes selection etc. but it lacked some features that I was needing and I couldn't get the BlogML export to work.

Meanwhile Mads Kristensen has been emailing me about the progress of the BlogEngine.NET team.

It's a young project, but looks very well thought out, so after some research I thought I'd give it a try.

BUT, I had a big problem. Subtext kept crashing when I tried to export the data and I really could NOT lose all my posts and start over. I did that when I switched from .Text and my readers were not happy.

I emailed Mads to see if maybe there was a tool or he had some code I could start with. He pointed me to Al Nyveldt who he called THE Import/Export Guy.

Al is my new Hero !!!!

He offered to do the conversion for me. He did in a day what it would have taken me ages to do. And my new boog is up and running on BlogEngine.NET - THANKS AL and MADS !

A few observations.

• SPEED - It's FAST FAST FAST !
• Features - lots of cool stuff.
• Pages - I can now ad static pages easily in the context of my blog.
• Good code !  I've started to look at the code as I want to write some additions. It's well written and easy to understand.
• Themes - too few!.

So .......

If you read me with an RSS Client, please change the feed : Subscribe to JoeOn.net

Build some dark colored full width themes for BE.NET.

I'd do it myself but I have no artistic ability at all.

   In their blog, the JScript team at Microsoft is addressing incompatibilities between Microsoft JScript implementation and the ECMA Standard.

   From their blog......

"...the first step is knowing where the divergences are. We in the JScript team are looking into where various browser based implementations diverge, where our engine is incorrect in its interpretation of the specification, what if any de facto compatibility conventions have been reached, and the value of codifying such conventions into the standard. We’ve published the first draft of JScript Deviations from ES3 as a starting point."

Kudos to the JScript team. The haters are quick to slam the IE (and by association the JScript team) for IE's incompatibilities.

It's hard to be FIRST, be innovative, and do things exactly the same as everyone else.

Now that the browser "market" has matured and there is more than one browser that matters, I think it's great that they are taking the heat and addressing the incompatibilities.

Credit where credit is due!

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/29/ecmascript-3-and-beyond.aspx

Have a chance to win stuff like this just by posting at DotNetSlackers.

Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET - Worth 799US$

XBox 360 Elite - Worth 449US$

Second Prize

The second prize winner will receive a redgate ANTS Profiler Pro license and a book of "The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks" worth in total of 534.95US$. Sponsored by Redgate Software.

http://dotnetslackers.com/contest/peers/

Add "Connect With Me" Buttons to your blog, web site, or email signature.

Click HERE to get started.

One of my friends in India has launched a new website where he will be publishing free .NET programming articles.

His first article is on building custom ASP.NET Server controls.

Check it out here : http://www.bipinjoshi.net/

eWeek Says that Linux is Losing Market Share to Windows.

Click HERE to read the article.

Posting code to your blog ? 

Check out these links to a Visual Studio Add-In to let you Cut  and Paste code as HTML.

Click HERE and HERE.

Here a nice bit to "understanding" from eWeek.

Click HERE for the article.

DotNetSlackers has just released Ajax Data Controls (ADC) as open source. The project is hosted at codeplex and there are several live examples which can be seen at the samples link below. 

The ADC contains an AjaxGridView, AjaxDataList, AjaxRepeater and we are going to add more controls very soon as well.

To get a feel for them, check out the samples page. Very cool stuff by “TheSlackers” !

Project home: http://codeplex.com/ajaxdatacontrols
Live Samples: http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/ajaxdatacontrols
Team Blog: http://dotnetslackers.com/community/blogs/sonukapoor/default.aspx
Team Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid
Forums: http://dotnetslackers.com/community/forums/71.aspx

Check out Dave Wards advice on Update Panels and Postabacks at Encosia HERE.

http://encosia.com/2007/10/24/are-you-making-these-3-common-aspnet-ajax-mistakes/

For us old timers that miss ASM, now we can code assembly for .NET.

Check it out here.

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/asmil.htm

Check out this interesting post on wy Jumptree selected ASP.NET as the technology on wich to base their internet startup !

This cool JavaScript image cropper came through my inbox this week.

Check it out – easily integrated with MS AJAX and the ACT.

http://www.defusion.org.uk/code/javascript-image-cropper-ui-using-prototype-scriptaculous