There are some interesting debates out there around scaling ASP.NET. How do you do it? Please fill out this poll and tell the world:
Interested in a blog post on this? Take it to the comments section.
Cheers,
@mkennedy
With Guerrilla .NET from DevelopMentor coming up on May 7th, it’s time to refresh my .NET reading list.
Want to get ready for this class or a class like it or just get a quick-start on .NET? Here’s what I would recommend. There are many books covering the topics (but no small list covering most). Instead of trying to read them all in-depth (a fairly unattainable goal), I would suggest that you read the first 2 – 3 chapters from all of these books listed below. This would cost about $250 if they buy them all, but they are all available on Safari Books Online.
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/
You can get the free trial for 10 days and if you like it you can then pay $19 / month and have access to all these books (see the coupon at the bottom of the trial page on safari online).
CLR via C#, Third Edition (foundational knowledge)
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/csharp/9780735640467
WPF 4 Unleashed
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/microsoft-wpf/9780132174367
Silverlight 4 in Action
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/silverlight/9781935182375
Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework, Third Edition:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781430234043
Programming Entity Framework
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/software-engineering-and-development/9780596807276
RESTful .NET
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/microsoft-dotnet/9780596155025
Learning WCF
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/microsoft-wcf/9780596101626
C# in Depth
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9781935182474
jQuery in Action
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/jquery/9781935182320
Host Your Web Site in the Cloud
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/9780980576832
MongoDB: The Definitive Guide
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/databases/mongodb/9781449381578
Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/csharp/0131857258
Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET (sections on WinDBG)
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/microsoft-dotnet/9780735645349
Cheers,
@mkennedy
Thanks to all who attended my webcast yesterday. Here is the recorded video, slides, and demo application.
[Update: View the recordings and downloads.]
Want to learn more about building great forms in MVC? Attend my free DevelopMentor webcast this Tuesday.
Webcast: Building Rich Input Forms in ASP.NET MVC
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/559059054
In this webcast we will explore the powerful features of ASP.NET MVC that allow us to build rich forms that accept user input. We’ll begin by discussing the built-in HTML Helpers and Model Binding. Next we’ll add validation and show how we can do both client- and server-side validation using DataAnnotations. Finally, we’ll see that sometimes using domain models as our form-bound objects doesn’t make sense. We’ll look at more advanced scenarios using View Models.
Cheers,
@mkennedy
Do you think you need a Window’s app for your next project? Here’s a thought: No you don’t.
Let me give you one less reason choose the rocky-road of desktop apps today. You’ll hear people tell you that if you build applications for business users (so-called LOB apps) that are input heavy or have complex navigation, your only choice is to build a Windows application.
Why? Because your power users will want hot-keys. They don’t want to use the mouse and navigation and all that stuff that makes the web less usable. They’ll just want to hit a few keystrokes and jump from place to place and do that quick look-up or data entry.
If you haven’t looked carefully around the web lately, here’s a revelation:
Real web apps have hot-keys too.
Here’s a common problem. You want to make all of your links on your site that would lead visitors away to open in separate tabs. For example, if I wanted to tell you about this cool article by Troy Goode about working with LINQPad as part of a larger conversation, I probably would have it open in a new tab (as the one above does).
Of course, you can do this by adding target=”_blank” to all your external links, but that’s tedious to say the least. So here is a simple jQuery plugin I created to do the trick. (Yes I know there are others, but none seem quite right, so here is yet another.)
Download: Query.externalLinks
The usage is pretty easy. Pick a section to scan for external links and say go:
Here is a simple example (from my previous post on hotkeys). Click on the title or the twitter icon in the lower right to see it in action.
Currently, it works by adding target=”_blank” to all fully-qualified links. For example, the first link will be a new window, the second won’t:
<a href=”http://www.google.com”>google</a>
<a href=”/contact”>contact me</a>
Hope you find it helpful.
Cheers,
@mkennedy
Hot keys (or accelerator keys) have been an important navigational tool for desktop applications for many years. Finally, web applications are adopting this functionality too. Check out this simple example of a web app with hotkeys.
Expect a more general blog post on the topic soon. For now, I’d like to share my jQuery plugin that enables this capability with you.
Announcing jQuery.hotKeyMap.js: A jQuery plugin that allows you to add complex hot-key functionality and navigation to your web apps with very little effort.
