*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I’ve got to catch up on a few blog entries from a few sessions today but I want to take a little extra time to write up a little nicer article on them.  Until then I thought I would throw out a few IE 7 tips that Dave Massey spoke to us about.  Here is the first one up.

I’ve been using IE 7 for a few months and I really like the tab browsing.  But that’s not the only reason users are going to like IE 7.  However, I’m a keyboard hot key nut.  One of the features I like is the tab browsing preview.  Let’s say you have 6 tabs open and you want to go to a certain tab, but you can’t remember which one it is in.  The best way to accomplish this is to use the quick view.  Here’s a screen shot:

(hotkey – CTRL-Q)

Once you hit CTRL-Q you can view all the tabs you have open and then use arrow keys to navigate.  Another useful feature is one Jason mentioned earlier whereby you can type in something like “apple” and then press ctrl-enter and it will add http://www.  and .com to the end giving you http://www.apple.com. 

Dave also turned us onto a quick reference guide on the IE7 blog where they have a quick reference that lists a lot of the hot keys.  Some other ones that are worthy of mentioning are ALT-ENTER which opens a search in a new window.  IE 7 also allows you to add your own search engine into IE 7 really easy.  Go here to look at companies that are already adopting this.  Kinda interesting because if you add this HTML into your page, IE 7 will auto detect your site’s search and allow users to add it to their browser.

<link rel=”search” type=”application/opensearchdescription+xml” title=”Ebay” href=http://yourdomain.com/file.xml />

Here is a sample Ebay xml file from the list of sites:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/“>
<ShortName>eBay</ShortName>
<Description>Search Online Auctions</Description>
<Url type=”text/html“ template=”http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle={searchTerms}“ />
</OpenSearchDescription>

For more information about how to use the Open Search definition see this url:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/external/overview/ie7_opensearch_ext.asp

Latest update from the Asp.Net Technology Summit is geeks are going wild!  In particular Scott Guthrie.  Last night we were at Trader Vic’s eating and mixing with the presenters along with the attendees.    Andy Stopford and Scott were chatting about LINQ and Scott couldn’t resist pulling out his laptop and doing an adhoc show and tell to show off the new data binding bits with LINQ and Asp.Net.  Conversation is great but a picture is worth a thousand words, and Visual Studio + LINQ is worth a couple of million.

Here is a video I took with my phone of Scott, Andy and myself geeking out and talking about LINQ.

 It is interesting to see what others are saying about the summit and the best way to find out is just read people’s blog.  John C Bland is the CEO and founder of Katapult Media.  He is sitting in front of me at the summit and he’s been blogging all day.  We spoke during lunch today and he has a lot of experience in PHP and Cold Fusion so it is interesting to see what his take aways are from the perspective.   Check out these two posts from John on his blog.

1. Microsoft folks are cool

2. ScottGu, LINQ, ASP.NET, IIS 7, and Atlas rock – see this post if you want to get more details on what Scott showed during his session and what John thinks about what Scott showed. 

On Wednesday I left the warm comforts of Hattiesburg, Ms and headed to Redmond, WA for the Asp.Net Microsoft Web Dev Technology Summit.  Upon arrival guess what the weather was?  Rainy.  Guess what today’s weather is?  Rainy.  Guess what tomorrow’s weather is?  Rainy.  Ok, so it is rainy here, you get the idea and needless to say I miss my 90 degree weather and sunshine.  But I am not here to talk about the weather, I’m here to talk about the summit. 

Asp.Net Summit Wednesday

Last night we had a meet and greet at the hotel and I got to meet a lot of the guys attending.   At the meet at greet I got to finally meet Joe Stagner.  It was an earth shattering experience as the clouds parted in Seattle and the sun shown through.  I think I even heard singing as we shook hands.   Ok, so it wasn’t quite like that but it was great to finally meet him.  And of course I couldn’t go without mentioning Drew being here as well (even though I shouldn’t mention him because he has the Ohio State ring tone on his phone).  At the greet I got to talking to Susan and Dan who had a great interest in hosting.  Having years of experience I showered them with thousands and thousands of things they could do better in the hosting space. Hopefully they didn’t hit information overload.  Toward the end of the meet and greet I got to talking to Reg Cheramy.  We decided to go get some wings down the street since both of us enjoyed spicy food.  Reg told the waitress to insult the cook and make them as hot as they could.  She thought we were joking so when the wings came out, they were mildly hot.  The wings were so good in flavor we decided to get another round and we really told her to insult the cook.  She came back and said “Game on!”.  They threw everything they had at us on the second round.    While they were hot, they were not earth shattering, but worthy of a runny noise and eyes nonetheless.

ScottGu in Action

Thursday morning we took the shuttle to the Microsoft Campus where we had breakfast.  After breakfast Scott Guthrie showered the summit with about 2 hours of Asp.Net 2.0 and IIS 7 goodness.  There are a lot of PHP programmers at the summit that were seeing Asp.Net 2.0 for the first time so it was cool to see them going “cool, wow, ahhhhh, hmmm”.  And who better to show them .Net but Scott.  After Scott’s session I was talking to a few of the guys that introduced themselves as PHP developers and asked what they thought about the session.  The common response was they were shocked at what Scott was able to build in just a few hours complete with database updates, Ajax, etc.  A couple of takeaways that should be noted were URL rewriting and Control Adapters (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/67276kc5.aspx) . 

URL Rewriting Example for web.config

<rewriter>

<rewrite url=”/products/(.+)” to=”/catalogue.aspx?category=$1? />

</rewriter>

In the above example it would turn a URL like this:

http://mysite.com/catalogue.aspx?category=1  (which isn’t the prettiest URL) to….

http://mysite.com/products/refinance  (which is much more user friendly)

The rewriting example Scott showed is done with http://www.urlrewriting.net which is community sponsored and a free download.  But as Scott said, this will be baked into the system later on.

Control Adapters 

Another takeaway of Scott’s session was Control Adapters.  Microsoft got a lot of feedback about controls that send their output such as tables.  For those junkies that want to do extreme compliant HTML but want to still have properties of the object to use control adapter is the answer.   For example the TreeView control renders itself as a table.  While the control is extremely powerful, what if you wanted it to render itself with dvi tags?  Essentially what the control adapter allows you to do is override the output of a control like the TreeView and have it output the HTML as div, ul, and li tags. 

Other Sessions Today

Bill Wilson presented on http://www.codeplex.com which is a web site that Microsoft launched to provide developers familiar with windows software an easy way to build and publish an open source project.  Similar to http://www.sourceforge.net but SF is primiarly Unix driven which if you don’t know Unix, CVS etc you aren’t going to have a clue how to use SF.  CodePlex fills the gap for developers by using Team Foundation Server as the source control system and provides an easy way for developers to host an open source app.  Good stuff.

Jeff Atwood posted an article about serializing objects in the web.config file a few weeks ago on his blog.  I recently gave a presentation on creating custom configSections in web.config by creating custom SectionHandlers.  One day I’ll write it up and post it to here how its done.  Until I get time to write that up, you may want to check out what Jeff has going on with creating an object, then serialzing it, and then storing it in the web.config file.  Of course you could use app.config as well.

The most interesting nugget that came out of the comments was a reference to the ConfigurationPropertyAttribute that Jarrod Dixon pointed out.   I hadn’t heard about this but it is a nice thing to know because it declartively instructs the .Net framework to instanatiate a configuration property.