ASP.NET MVC goes Beta

I just saw that ASP.NET MVC went beta based on a tweet from Kevin Dente. Time to do some upgrades and see what is new and changed in this release.

jQuery, MIT and GPL

/*
* jQuery 1.2.6 – New Wave Javascript
*
* Copyright (c) 2008 John Resig (jquery.com)
* Dual licensed under the MIT (MIT-LICENSE.txt)
* and GPL (GPL-LICENSE.txt) licenses.
*
* $Date: 2008-05-24 14:22:17 -0400 (Sat, 24 May 2008) $
* $Rev: 5685 $
*/

This text is the header in the jQuery 1.2.6 release. It’s obvious that it is dual licensed under MIT and GPL, but isn’t it still weird that Microsoft will support and will package a library with text that says “GPL”?

Props to the people at Microsoft who took the risk to push for this really good 3rd party JavaScript library.

YUI 2.6.0

In case you missed it, YUI did a nice update recently to version 2.6.0. A lot of controls like the Rich Text Editor have made it out of beta and there are some new one added like the Carousel.

I’m looking forward to testing these updates in several ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC projects.

Continuous Integration with TeamCity follow up

The presentation last night went really well. We had a steady stream of questions and there seemed to be general interest in the topic.

We talked about what Continuous Integration is and then I introduced a build configuration that I had pre-configured around a sample ASP.NET application. For some reason I couldn’t get the jabber notifications to work, but they had worked flawlessly before.

After talking with several people I’ve clarified a couple of points that will help the next time I present the talk, likely at the Iowa Code Camp. Thanks for all of the feedback and questions.

Here are the slides from the talk if you are interested.

Continuous Integration with TeamCity (and LiveMeeting)

Tomorrow I’m presenting “Continuous Integration with TeamCity” at CRineta. We’re starting off with the fundamentals of Continuous Integration and then we are going to configure TeamCity. We have an ASP.NET project in a Subversion repository that will be the subject of much of the demonstrations.

I love this topic and am excited to get to show this to the group.

We are also are going to broadcast this presentation over Live Meeting for the first time. Thanks to Josh Flory for getting this going and providing the Live Meeting account for our first run.

If you are interested in attending the Live Meeting, email me and I’ll hook you up. If you don’t have my email then contact me through the About page on my blog. Live Meeting will be a first for us, so there are no guarantees with the quality this time around.

By the way, if you are attending the (actual/physical) meeting remember that we are changing our location to Kirkwood. The directions are posted on CRineta.org.

Update: Here are the slides from the talk.

Google Page Rank Update

In January I posted about attempting to get the #1 spot for the name Chris Sutton. If you read the original post you’ll know that there is a retired but famous soccer player named Chris Sutton. His Wikipedia entry is sitting on top of the search page and is the only thing holding me back from the #1 position.

Getting #3 wasn’t too bad, #2 took a lot of time, but I think #1 is going to be exceedingly hard.

I’m skeptical if I can pull it off in 3 months, but the goal is still to knock him off the top by end of December.

jQuery and Microsoft – Ripple Effects

So a couple of days ago we received good and surprising news that jQuery would be bundled in the next version of Visual Studio and more immediately in ASP.NET MVC.

We are now seeing the ripple effects as DotNetNuke is deciding to add jQuery support into version 5 of their platform.

I hope to see more and more good come of this decision.

World’s simplest source code updater

Update: So, I’ll fess up and admit this wasn’t the simplest. Tim Barcz did this 1 (or 2 or 3) better and simplified the script with:

@ECHO OFF
FOR /D %%a IN (“*”) DO IF EXIST %%~dpa%%a\.svn svn update %%~dpa%%a
PAUSE

I feel like I was trying to start a fire by hitting two rocks together and Tim walked in and pulled out a box of matches.

Many of the projects I watch are hosted on Subversion repositories. I’m tired of right clicking in each directory with TortoiseSVN and clicking “SVN Update.”

So I went the simplest route possible to automate updating source. I have this set of commands in a file called update.cmd. In the morning I double click it and I can see any updates from the previous day.

Of course, you need to adjust the directories and project names for the projects you watch.

rem this script expects svn to be in the path

cd witty
svn up

cd ..\ironruby
svn up

cd ..\subsonicproject
svn up

cd ..\masstransit
svn up

cd ..\spark
svn up

cd ..\crineta
svn up

cd ..\programmingmvc
svn up

cd ..\codecampserver
svn up

cd ..\coregallery
svn up

cd ..\csla
svn up

pause

Chrome

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Chrome wiped out Firefox’s market share, ended up with 10-20% of the market and relegated Firefox to an Opera-like status while everyone else stayed with Internet Explorer?

I like Firefox by the way, I want to see it thrive because of its extensions like firebug and its standards compliance.

In the late 90’s Internet Explorer soundly beat Netscape. Now Netscape’s descendant who has been working tirelessly to gain marketshare for several years could be in jeopardy.

Do you think Chrome poses a real threat to Firefox?

jQuery and ASP.NET MVC

I just saw Scott Hanselman’s announcement that jQuery is going to be packaged with ASP.NET MVC. If you haven’t already been using this Javascript library with ASP.NET development you are missing out on a great library.

For more about this announcement see Scott Guthrie’s post and John Resig’s post.

This doesn’t change anything for me as I’ve been using jQuery in my ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC projects for about 8 months, but having it packaged in will bring much wider adoption to this library. I think there will be a lot of happier web developers because of this choice.