I LOVE component suites !

I regularly use web components from Infragistics, Telerik, ComponentOne, Dundas, eXceed, and others.

I recently tool PureComponents Ultimate Suite for a Spin !

The first thing that struck me ........

The Price = $79

Need the source code ? It's only another $60 !

It includes controls for Calendars, Lists, Navigators, a Ribbon UI, and about every input control you can think of.

For the price, you really can't beat it.

[ Click HERE for more info. ]

Last year we held a Web Cast series for aspiring architects that was attended by over 1200 individuals and covered a number of strategies that can help developers and IT professionals to transition to the architect roles.

The Aspiring Architect Series 2008 builds on last year’s content and covers a number of topics that are important for architects to understand.

Please make sure that you have gone through the 2007 series which can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/tags/Aspiring+Architects/default.aspx .

Then - Sign up for these !

June 16th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Introduction to the aspiring architect Web Cast series
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380836&Culture=en-CA

June 17th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Service Bus – Beyond the hype
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380838&Culture=en-CA

June 18th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – TOGAF and Zachman, a real-world perspective
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380840&Culture=en-CA

June 19th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture (Web Cast in French)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380842&Culture=en-CA

June 20th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Interoperability (Web Cast in French)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380844&Culture=fr-CA

June 23rd , 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Realizing dynamic systems
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380846&Culture=en-CA

June 24th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Web 2.0, beyond the hype
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380848&Culture=en-CA

June 25th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Architecting for the user experience
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380850&Culture=en-CA

June 26th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Conclusion and next steps
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380852&Culture=en-CA

The folks at DevExpress are releasing a FREE DataGrid for Silverlight.

Here are come of the features.....

• Data Grouping against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
• Data Sorting against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
• Comprehensive Summary Computation support against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
• Column Movement
• Column Resizing
• Column Auto-Width
• Row Editing
• Row Preview (with animation)
• Template Support (for cell content, cell editing, row preview and headers)
• Auto Height Support for cells, headers, and totals.
• Virtual StackPanel Row Container (simply means we are able to handle an unlimited number of rows)
• Focused Row and Focused Cell
• Multi-Row Selection Cell Text Wrapping
• Vertical/Horizontal Lines
• Multiple column types/editors

[ Click HERE for more info. ]

Is your site powered by ASP.NET 3.5 ??

Grab a button and show your pride !

http://www.asp.net/images/pow_by_aspnet3.5a.png

http://www.asp.net/images/pow_by_aspnet3.5b.png

http://www.asp.net/images/pow_by_aspnet3.5c.png

The IIS team has released the Beta 1 (Go Live) release of the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool! The tool provides deployment and migration support for IIS 6.0 and 7.0. It incorporates many features that enable web server administrators to deploy, sync and migrate sites, including configuration, content, SSL certificates and other types of content associated with a Web server.

This tool can be used on Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 as well as Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0. Please note that this is a Beta release, support is available on the forums.

How to Get Started

Download the x86 version: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1602

Download the x64 version: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1603

Read the walkthroughs: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8100895

Web Deployment Tool forum: http://forums.iis.net/1144.aspx

Web Deployment Team blog: http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/

Features

• PowerShell Support - We have PowerShell cmdlets so that you can integrate MS Deploy commands with PowerShell directly.
• Enhanced Dependency Checking - We have IIS7 dependency information listed, plus the ability to see where a dependency is being triggered from. For example, if you have a dependency on Windows Authentication, you can now determine where this is set in the configuration.
• Detailed Help File - We have a Help chm file included in the tool so that you can browse through all the functionality and flexibility offered by the tool, instead of looking through online walkthroughs.

I'm home from TechEd Developer 2008 (for a few days anyway.) I have to admin, I've been on the road more than every other week since early March and I'm feeling very burned out.

I arrived at TechEd a bit less enthusiastic than I usually do, but it ended up being a great trip.

I arrived Monday afternoon and headed down to the convention center where I immediately started running into old teammates, partners, and friends.

The conference sessions started Tuesday morning with a keynote by non other than Bill Gates (his last as a full time  Microsoft employee.)

Check out the BillG's last day video HERE.

Then Soma joined him to show off the latest from DevDiv !

John Galloway has an interesting summary of the Keynote HERE.

Though I spent much of the week meeting with partners and various DevDiv team members, I did get to see some GREAT talks.

David Chappell did a session entitled  - Choosing Communication Styles: SOAP/WS-* vs. REST

I've seen David present many times over the years and he is absolutely one of the best speakers in Technology. His talks are not only full of facts and useful opinions as well as very entertaining, but he's the kinds of speaker that you hear and then spend days brain storming about what you heard.

Read more about David HERE.

Jeff Prosise did great talks on ASP.NET Asynchronous Programming and ASP.NET AJAX internals. (Though after seeing his talk I had to come up with new demos for my AJAX talk :( 

Tom Gallagher (co-author of the super Developer Security Book, Hunting Security Bugs [ Click HERE ] ) gave an awesome talk - Making Security Testing Part of Everyday Development.

All I can say is - keep this guy away from your network :)

On Thursday I gave a talk on developing applications with the Microsoft AJAX stack. I had 360 attendees, which was great since Jeff did his MS AJAX talk earlier in the same day, and many folks stayed around for over an hour of Q&A after the talk.

On Friday I did a FishBowl session on Developer Security with Georgeo Pulikkathara (it will be available on line is a week or so and I'll post the link on SecureDeveloper.com)

Later Friday I did a talk on PHP on the Windows / IIS 7 Platform !

I arrived home EXHAUSTED - home for a week and then off to South Africa for Re-Mix in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

THEN - I'm home to CODE FOR THE SUMMER !

Click on my Technorati Profile ?

Thanks to the awesome folks at Microsoft Japan....

My blog will now be available in Japanese.

http://blogs.msdn.com/JoeInJapanese/

Thanks to Seiichi Sato for taking the lead !!

WUX315 - PHP on Windows: Not an Oxymoron!
Session Day/Time: 6/6/2008 10:15AM-11:30AM
Room: S230 A

Is it a well kept secret? From Microsoft Internet Information Services, to AJAX, to Microsoft .NET, Windows is a viable platform for your existing PHP based applications. In this session, see how to configure PHP on Windows for performance and reliability and how you can take PHP applications to the next level by leveraging .NET and Windows.

WUX314 - AJAX Programming with the Microsoft AJAX Technologies
Session Day/Time: 6/5/2008 4:30PM-5:45PM
Room: S320 C

Microsoft AJAX Developer technologies are a collection of offerings that make AJAX programming slick and productive, but have you wrapped your head around all the pieces? This session provides a soup-to-nuts explanation of the Microsoft AJAX Technology Stack and demonstrates how to use Microsoft Visual Studio for AJAX, The ASP.NET Extension for AJAX, The AJAX Control Toolkit, and non-Microsoft third-party AJAX Libraries to develop true RIAs.

ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Pocket Guide by Matthew Ellis Read more about this book...

Ok readers. Check out this little nugget.

Matthew Ellis and Magma Interactive just released the ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Pocket Guide.

It contains concise chapters packed with useful info for the ASP.NET AJAX Developer including a Client Side Reference, a Server Side Reference, Web Services, Extender Controls, The Control Toolkit and more.

At $1.26 per chapter - It's almost FREE !

Just click on the book image above to get the details over at Amazon.com

Daniel Crenna shared my frustration that Visual Studio drag-n-drop doesn't always leave our markup nicely formatted.

So, he wrote a plug-in to do it for us.

Click [ HERE ] to get it for Visual Studio 2008 or 2005

He also offers up the source code so if you want to add some custom formatting rules, you can !

THANKS DANIEL !

I'm a jQuery Fan !

Lance Fisher has made an update to jQuery for Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008

[ Click here to read about it and download jQuery with the Intellisense updates. ]