Jan Ceulemans' Web Resort: News and Events

ASP.NET 2.0: How do I? videos

Jan Ceulemans — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:10:00 GMT

On the MSDN ASP.NET Developer Center, you can watch/download some great video series showcasing the new features of ASP.NET 2.0. Over 2 hours of video in total focusing on the most common tasks ASP.NET developers perform. Topics covered include 'How to deal with data', 'Master Pages and site Navigation', 'Membership and Roles', 'Profiles and Themes' and much more.

Great stuff this is, especially for developers who are new to ASP.NET 2.0/Visual Studio 2005 (Express). These videos could also prove to be very good material for educators, even if English may not be the native language of your students. Nice is also the fact that the Express Editions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are used to demo how things work. Check these videos out for yourself …

Community Server 2.0 available for download

Jan Ceulemans — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:13:00 GMT

After months of developing, testing and releasing beta versions, Community Server 2.0 is finally there!

Great news that is, as this major webapplication (integrated blogging, forum, photo gallery and much more) now also runs on the .NET Framework 2.0. Furthermore this version supports some very cool new functionality, like being able to blog through e-mail (Email Gateway).

Community Server 2.0 now exists in several editions: there is an Express Edition, a Professional Edition and an Enterprise Edition. The Express Edition is free and will do for probably mostly small, non-profit scenarios.

Several organisations are already deploying CommunityServer for their on line communities, including the Microsoft sites mix06.com, the hive and of course the great Channel9 site for developers.

Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days 2006 (Belgium)

Jan Ceulemans — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:50:00 GMT

If you live in Belgium, you must certainly have heard about it …

Microsoft is organizing its Developer & IT Pro Days 2006 in Ghent this year. This year's theme is the 'Connected Generation'.

From the Microsoft Belux website: Improve your technical skills on Microsoft's current products and technologies. Prepare for the next generation of applications and systems. Receive a technical drill-down on building, deploying, securing and managing solutions that can solve your real-world problems. Join "The Connected Generation" today and experience tomorrow before it arrives. Find out all there is to know at Microsoft’s Developer & IT Pro Days 2006.

This excellent conference should not be missed if you're working with Microsoft technologies, so be there! Furthermore there's lots of new stuff in the pipeline, so don't miss this opportunity to learn about upcoming new technologies.

Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0 released

Jan Ceulemans — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 23:01:00 GMT

About ten days ago Microsoft released the Enterprise Library 2.0, a collection of building blocks speeding up development of common tasks in .NET 2.0. Awesome work of coding: certainly check this out for your future development projects!

From the Microsoft Download Center: The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a library of application blocks designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Application blocks are a type of guidance, provided as source code that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on enterprise development projects. This release of Enterprise Library provides similar functionality to the previous releases for the .NET Framework 1.1; however, Enterprise Library has been redesigned to use the new capabilities of the .NET Framework 2.0.

In order to download the Enterprise Library for the .NET Framework 2.0, you will need to register. Powerpoint presentations about the new Enterprise Library are available here. More information about specific webcasts covering the Enterprise Library etc. can also be foulnd at the gotdotnet codegallery.

Happy New Year!

Jan Ceulemans — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 18:37:00 GMT

Best wishes for all who have been reading this section during 2005! Well, I hope 2006 will be a good year for all of you, not only professionally but also socially.

Let's hope for a year full of interesting professional challenges, nice work in a good team, meeting interesting people and enjoying life in general …

Technology is great these days and there's lots of new stuff to explore. So save some time this year if you haven't worked with .NET yet: you won't regret it! If you develop highly dynamic websites, ASP.NET is a must-have. Especially ASP.NET 2.0, which really rocks!

.Text lives on as 'SubText'

Jan Ceulemans — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:12:00 GMT

Did you know that .Text, the popular blog engine originally developed by Scott Watermasysk, lives on as an open-source project? I didn't until yesterday.

Have a look at the blog of Adam Sills, software engineer living in Dallas. You can visit the SourceForge project homepage here or check out the SubText project website.

Unfortunately, it seems impossible to download the code at the time of writing: the green bar "Download SubText" renders an error. I assume there's no official release yet ...

DotNetNuke 3.2 and 4.0 released

Jan Ceulemans — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:41:00 GMT

DotNetNuke, the popular open source ASP.NET content management system, now runs on ASP.NET 2.0. The DotNetNuke team, lead by Shaun Walker, managed to release a version of DNN (at the 7th of November, the same day Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were launched) that runs on the .NET Framework 2.0 and can be modified in Visual Studio 2005.

The best news of all is that module development is going to become dramatically easier using Visual Studio 2005. Shaun Walker wrote some articles on the new facilities included in the 4.0 release, which you can read in the dedicated ASP.NET forum.

So, what can I say? The future for DotNetNuke certainly looks bright … The new release already supports the use of AJAX.

Taken from the DotNetNuke website: "Although AJAX ( Asynchronous JavaScript and XML ) has been getting significant industry hype lately, there are actually a substantial number of client-side techniques which developers can use to produce higher performance, more usable web applications. Based on the innovative work of DotNetNuke Core Team member Jon Henning, a specialist in client-side web development, the latest DotNetNuke release contains support for AJAX and advanced client-side behaviors which developers can leverage in their modules. In addition, the site navigation information for pages and actions have been abstracted into proper providers, allowing for more extensibility and easier migration to the SiteMap capabilities of ASP.NET 2.0."

Now, if you want to try out the 4.0 release yourself, check out the article "DotNetNuke 4.0.0 Starter Kit and Templates...".

VistaDB 2.1 database for .NET has been released

Jan Ceulemans — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:38:00 GMT

This 2.1 update includes over 60 improvements, including new support for .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. VistaDB is a small-footprint, embedded SQL database alternative to Jet/Access, MSDE and SQL Server Express 2005 that enables developers to build .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 applications. Features SQL-92 support, small 500KB embedded footprint, free 2-User VistaDB Server for remote TCP/IP data access, royalty free distribution for both embedded and server, Copy 'n Go! deployment, managed ADO.NET Provider, data management and data migration tools. Free trial is available for download.
- Learn more about VistaDB
- Repost this to your blog and receive a FREE copy of VistaDB 2.1!

Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server 2005 Express Editions released

Jan Ceulemans — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:27:00 GMT

Yesterday the Express Editions of Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2005 were released on MSDN Worldwide. Cool!

Out of personal experience I can say that these 'entry level' editions of Visual Studio 2005/SQL Server 2005 really rock! Visual Web Developer indeed has everything starting webdevelopers, students and hobbyists could dream of, and much more. Think of support for Master pages, full IntelliSense, built-in FTP functionality, database development functionality and so on …

Then there is SQL Server 2005 Express, which equally awesome. Note that this database runs on the same database engine as its bigger brothers and has all the features you could possibly dream of, like CLR support for writing stored procedures, XML capabilities, a nice front admin tool (SQL Server Management Studio Express) and so on ...

Visual Web Developer Express, Visual C# 2005 Express and Visual Basic 2005 Express will be available for free for one year: after that period of time, these products will be offered for 49 USD. SQL Server 2005 Express Edition however will remain free …

Check out these products if you haven't already. Last week I advised a Java developer to try out Visual C# 2005 Express and a few days later he mailed me writing that he had been blown away with it …

Database vendors warming up for fierce competition?

Jan Ceulemans — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 23:15:00 GMT

Well, it seems indeed that thing are heating up these days in the database world.

While Microsoft is readying for the worldwide launch of a buch of awesome products - including SQL Server 2005 Express - Oracle made the announcement that they've released Oracle 10g Express Edition. How about that?

Their story continues stating that 'students now have a free starter database to develop and deploy their applications'. A few remarks on that:

First of all, I hope that Oracle has worked on their tools lately … I still remember those days when I was working with Oracle Personal Edition: out-of-the-box tools' support was simply awful. That particular Oracle Personal Edition came with a slow, barely usable Java GUI. Terrible, it was. Absolutely not encouraging students and young people to use databases at all.
While Oracle certainly has been present in higher education and universities, it is absolutely non-present in secondary education. What that means is that nowadays young people are exposed to mainly three database products at age of 16-17: Microsoft Access (which is used a lot in secondary education as it is not too heavy in relation to hardware requirements and has had an educational licencing system for quite some time), SQL Server and MySQL in the IT-related sections. Personally, I don't believe that Oracle will enter lower education too easily, even if they give it all away for free … Microsoft is 'planets' ahead in education in comparison with Oracle.
What do young people use databases for? For their websites, of course. Where is Oracle as a database back-end in this field? Nowhere. For years ASP.NET developers have been using SQL Server as their database platform, open source guys used MySQL in combination with PHP. So what's the verdict: Oracle has no tradition at all in the field of database hosting. Now tackle that: ASP.NET or PHP-developers are not going to change their favourite database platform because of the fact that Oracle released their 'Express Edition'. Developers will keep on using what suits their preferred platform best.

It seems like Oracle these days is facing the competition of two serious contenders, who're not really newcomers in the database world … At the contrary, I'd say:

Microsoft with it's 'SQL Server 2000' delivered an awesome product five years ago. Through the years, SQL Server has proven to be reliable, powerful, extensible and very flexible and usable overall in many different scenarios. Meanwhile Microsoft developed SQL Server 2005, which brings with it a load of new functionality. It certainly is the greatest SQL Server release ever ...
Only recently, MySQL released version five of their product, which did not go by unnoticed in the developer community. While it still is not as reliable and powerful as other contenders' products, it slowly is becoming a more serious player in the database world.

And what did Oracle do? It bought the company (InnoDB) that provides MySql with the more robust storage engine … Let's find out what effect this will have on the development of MySQL.

Is Oracle fearing the competition of the rich, fully-featured, vastly powerful and surprisingly flexible 'SQL Server 2005' at one hand and the success of the free open-source database 'MySQL' at the other hand? Who knows, time will bring an answer ...

One week before the Belux launch of Visual Studio 2005 - SQL Server 2005 - Biztalk Server 2006

Jan Ceulemans — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:22:00 GMT

One week before launch of Visual Studio 2005 - SQL Server 2005 - Biztalk Server 2006 in Belgium and counting …

The afore mentioned products are already available for download for MSDN subscribers, other people can download the SDK's and the .NET 2.0 redistributable packages here.

At the 10 th of November 2005, Microsoft Belux will celebrate the launch in Court-St-Etienne. S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp. (Redmond headquarter), will present the keynote on that event. Furthermore there will be sessions presented by Clemens Vasters (Newtelligence AG) and Astrid Hackenberg (Class-A).

Be there!

ASP.NET Jumpstart: Introduction to the Media Share Library Starter Kit

Jan Ceulemans — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:55:00 GMT

The ASP.NET Developer Center (MSDN Worldwide) published the first part of a four-part article written by seasoned author Bill Evjen. The article is titled: "ASP.NET Jumpstart: Introduction to the Media Share Library Starter Kit".

Introduction taken from the article: 'Learn how to build your own starter kit using Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition. '

Interesting stuff this is: nice application, demonstrating how to use key elements of ASP.NET 2.0. Furthermore this certainly is an interesting concept … Develop your own starter kit, provide all the code with it and clarify coding techniques by writing a four part MSDN-article. How nice is that?

Read the article here. Part two of this article series 'ASP.NET Jumpstart: Building the Data Tier of the Media Share Library Starter Kit ' can be found here.

Cross-Site Scripting Worm Hits MySpace

Jan Ceulemans — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:23:00 GMT

Rather spectacular, but unfortunately true!

From BetaNews.com: With the advent of social networking sites, becoming more popular is as easy as crafting a few lines of JavaScript code, it seems. One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, "Samy" had amassed over 1 million friends on the popular online community.

Oh boy, is this how newer emerging technologies are going to be misused? Read the complete article here.

Article: 'ASP.NET Spiced: AJAX'

Jan Ceulemans — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 15:05:00 GMT

The biggest news for ASP.NET developers at PDC05 certainly was the beta release of project Atlas (also check out the Atlas quickstart tutorial), the Microsoft approach in relation to integrating AJAX with ASP.NET.

Karl Seguin has written an nice article on AJAX on MSDN Worldwide: 'ASP.NET Spiced: AJAX'. What is especially nice is the fact that he has provided sample code with the article.

Also check out the AJAX-article Karl Seguin wrote for Developerfusion.com. Highly recommended reading this is …

Instant Messaging by Google: Google Talk

Jan Ceulemans — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 12:13:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, Google released a new product (in 'beta', as usual) for instant messaging: Google Talk.

What is nice about their instant messenger is that it integrates with Gmail (contacts) and adheres to open standards, thus making use of the standard XMPP protocol for authentication, presence, and messaging. At the moment, the software isn't compatible yet with other IM clients and messages are not encrypted. If Google succeeds in clearing these two issues, I guess it can enjoy a bright future, gaining popularity like some of their other products (Google's Desktop Search, Toolbar, Maps, etc.).

Just think of Google's Gmail -- which certainly is a hit -- having a bunch of neat little features that set it apart from other web-based e-mail offerings. Above all, I really appreciate the fact that Gmail has proven to be spam-free (at least to me).

So yes, there's a lot of talk about how cool Google really is these days. They're really doing quite some innovating things on the net

Interesting article: 10 Things You Shouldn't Do with SQL Server (Data Access Developer "Don'ts")

Jan Ceulemans — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 11:29:00 GMT

Seasoned .NET book author Doug Seven published an article on www.dotnetjunkies.com describing 10 things you should not do with SQL Server. In this article, Doug Seven discusses some points of attention which are often to be considered trivial in good application development.

One of those trivial aspects concerning SQL-statements in code:

Include SQL Data Manipulation Language in Application Code
Embedding SQL code in your application code is simply asking for trouble. Not only could you be opening yourself to a SQL Injection attack, you are also creating code that is harder to maintain than it should be. With hard coded SQL in your application code, any time you want to make even a slight change to the SQL code, you have to recompile the entire application.

Recommended reading this is …

.NET in the Belgian academic world

Jan Ceulemans — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 23:55:00 GMT

It seems like .NET technology is gaining more interest and support in the academic world over here in Belgium.

'Universiteit Antwerpen' (or UA = University of Antwerp), runs its renewed website on ASP.NET. As such, this is quite remarkable, as universities often are quite reluctant working with Microsoft technology.

Frank Piessens (a professor in the research group DistriNet - department of Computer Sciences, KULeuven) and Bart Jacobs (a PhD student and a member of the Security Task Force of the DistriNet Research Group - department of Computer Sciences, KULeuven) are participating in a project of Microsoft Research called 'Spec #'.

The afore mentioned academia have even participated in writing (at least) two .NET related articles: 'Support for metadata-driven selection of run-time services in .NET is promising but immature' and 'Software security: experiments on the .NET common language run-time and the shared source common language infrastructure' (PDF-document).

Interesting … .NET viewed from an academic perspective …

Major Changes for Visual Web Developer 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 from Whidbey Beta 2 to RTM revealed on MSDN

Jan Ceulemans — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 23:21:00 GMT

On the Microsoft ASP.NET Developer Center (MSDN), you can now read what changes will affect the final releases of Visual Web Developer 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 (things that have changed since the release of beta 2 -- the 'Whidbey' release).

Brian Goldfarb also announces that more information will be posted soon on API changes that will help developers gain even more insight in the final product.

101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005

Jan Ceulemans — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 22:45:00 GMT

Interesting stuff worth checking out …

At http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/downloads/101samples/default.aspx you can download 101 Samples, in both Visual Basic and C#, featuring many of the new features available with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0. The samples have been written and tested with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005. The sample code focuses around four areas: Base Class Libraries, Data Access, Web Development and Windows Forms.

Note however that at the bottom of the page, you will read: "The remaining 51 samples are coming soon. Stay tuned". …

Acrylic, a graphics tool combining pixel-based painting and vector graphics features

Jan Ceulemans — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 12:45:00 GMT

This has been out for a while …

You can read an article on news.com here about the descendant of Expression, a graphics package which was originally developed by a company called MetaCreation (in the era when Mac OS 7 was way cool).

The software can be dowloaded here. Note that the current version will stop working in October 2005.