Posts Tagged ‘Visual Studio 2008’
Waiting…to build some Silverlight applications
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under Silverlight
As I sit waiting for the Visual Studio Service Pack 1 ISO to finish downloading, I spent some time looking and reading about Silverlight and about C#. I have found one or two good websites, ones that I go to regularly to check for updated articles and source code. So three of my favourite Silverlight websites at the moment:
- Martin Grayson’s Adventures of a ‘Devigner’: The title, ‘devigner’, of the blog suggests that Martin Grayson sees himself as a real designer/developer. Maybe he has that one thing that all developers sometimes miss, the knack to design and develop in one breath. I guess neat and tidy and functional is not always good enough. Then again creativity, in my opinion, can be subjective.
- Smart Draw:I have linked to them before or written about them before and they keep the website updated with new source code all the time. I like the fact that they actually illustrate that it is possible to do something both in Flash and Silverlight.
- Silverlight Made Simple by – Corey Schuman:
Is another favourite website of mine because I got source code for a simple media player from it.
Silverlight 2 was officially released recently, which meant an entire update of tools and plugins, hence the reason for downloading the Visual Studio Service Pack 1. With the new release of Silverlight you need to download a few things:
- Silverlight Developer Tools
- The updated Silverlight Plugin
- Visual Studio Service Pack 1
I downloaded the ISO for the service pack because I wanted to distribute it on more than one user machine.
jQuery and Microsoft
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under AJAX, ASP.NET, Web 2.0, Web Development
I susbscribe to The Code Project’s newsletter and today I got some great news, jQuery will be supported in Visual Studio 2008. Now this is some awesome news. Makes one wonder if the Microsoft AJAX library will become redundant.
You can read the full article on Scott Gu’s website.
ASP.NET Navigation and Content Management
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under ASP.NET, Content Management Systems, Web Design, Web Development, Web Technologies, Wordpress
At the moment it feels like I am re-designing a navigation system that has probably already been built before. The reason for saying this is because the navigation controls provided to you by Visual Studio 2008 produce table-based layouts, which is not what I want for my website. I want my website to generate valid XHTML and use CSS for layout. So what do I need? I need a navigation system that generates valid CSS and XHTML and that is easy to administer and update without having to meddle in C#, XHTML or CSS code. How do I achieve this goal? Would I have to write my own custom navigation system? It seems so for now. The basic structure of the navigation system would allow for a maximum of three levels of navigation:
- A top level
- A second level
- A third level
The navigation system will at all times make the user aware of where they are in the website, which can be achieved with a breadcrumb navigation system. Each navigation item will display its own associated content. Second level navigation items will have top level navigation item parents and third level navigation items will have second level navigation item parents. The navigation system will also act as a source for creating the site map structure. If a visitor clicks on any item in the top navigation area then content associated with that item will be displayed and the active top level navigation item will show its active. The second level navigation items that are displayed will be associated with the top level item. If a visitor clicks any of the second level navigation items the one that is clicked will become active and content associated with the second level navigation item will be displayed and the second level navigation item that is clicked will show that is active. If the second level navigation item has third level navigation items associated with it then those items will be displayed. If a visitor clicks on the third level navigation item then that item becomes active and content for it will be displayed and that third level item shows that it is active.
The next step is to create an object-oriented design from this structure. Using an object-oriented approach would allow for easy re-use throughout. So lets say we create a class called “section” and give it the following fields:
- ParentSectionField – This will indicate if there is a parent item
- SectionField – This will indicate what the current section is
- SectionHierarchy – This will indicate where in the navigation hierarchy the section item belongs.
The other issue that is a concern for me is content management, and understanding why it is important. Content management is important because it alleviates the need to mess with the code in your website. If your website has a decent content management system you will have a consistent look and feel throughout the website and you will be able to change that look and feel with a few clicks. Wordpress is a perfect example of just that. Wordpress allows you to easily change themes by uploading it to a directory and by changing it in your admin panel. Wordpress is a clear example of design being a layer on top of the underlying function. Content management systems are ideally defined as a layer of functionality or business logic with another layer of presentation logic on top of that. Content management systems are also characterised by its development frameworks. Development frameworks can be seen as large collections of functionality assembled into one component. ASP.NET is an example of a framework technology, because it provides a whole host of features and functionality that you do not have to re-develop to make use of. The ASP.NET Roles and Membership functionality comes to mind, and is not too difficult to implement and administer without having to write much code. The advantage of this is that these features take advantage of the framework features across the whole website. The Roles and Membership feature in ASP.NET is an example of this, because you could easily manage more than one website’s user base from a central administrator control panel. You would not have to re-code the model for each website.
Reasons to like Silverlight
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under ASP.NET, Silverlight
I have been thinking a bit and there are a few reasons I like Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology.
- One reason is that the Silverlight could potentially make the need for Windows Media Player on a host machine obsolete. During the week I removed Windows Media Player from a machine and tested a Silverlight application on it that uses video.
- Silverlight is easy to host. You simply add a mime type to IIS. You can find a guide to doing that here.
- Silverlight has a Linux implementation called Moonlight.
- Integration with Visual Studio 2008. This is an important feature for an web/application developer because your C#/VB.NET skills can be used to develop and enhance Silverlight applications. XAML plays an important role here and bridges the gap between design and development significantly.
First experiences with Visual Studio 2008
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under ASP.NET
I attended the Microsoft Mix Essentials ‘08 event on the 26th of June 2008 and got two pieces of trial software, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional and Microsoft Expressions Web. Today I am installing Visual Studio, and it’s taken 20 minutes so far to install. It’s a 2.9 GB install!!
The features I am most excited about is support for Silverlight and WPF as well as intellisense for Javascript and CSS. There are also a few server controls that Brad Abrams demonstrated that I am very excited. One server control in particular allows you to specify the type of markup that should appear in a server control instead of just accepting (or being forced) to live with the markup provided. Gridview controls use tables for layout, and I am pretty sure DataList controls do as well, and the simple fact is that tables are not always desirable.
Light up the Web – Mix Essentials 2008 Review
Posted by fr3dr1k | Filed under AJAX, ASP.NET, Web 2.0, Web Design, Web Development, Web Technologies
I attended the Mix Essentials 2008 event at Canal Walk (Cape Town, South Africa) today and there were quite a few things that interested me. There were five speakers at the event:
- David Ives – Developer and Platform Strategy Group for Microsoft in South Africa – Microsoft
- Brad Abrams – Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services Team – Microsoft
- Michael Koester – Designer Marketing Manager for Middle East and Africa and Central and Eastern Europe – Microsoft
- Julian Harris – Conchango
- David Pugh-Jones – Microsoft
The event was split into two tracks, a developer track and a designer track, but it generally focussed on Silverlight, and more specifically on two software packages, Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio, and even more specifically it introduced XAML as a common way for these packages to share content between them. XAML, Extensible Application Markup Language is an XML-like language that defines graphic elements in a human readable form that can be used in vector-imaging programs as well as Visual Studio 2008. This gives designers the flexibility to design interfaces without having to worry about programmers not being able to replicate their designs in a programming environment. Julian Harris demonstrated that you can export files from Adobe Illustrator into XAML format and import that XAML into Visual Studio 2008. XAML is also used in the Expression Studio range of products which includes amongst other two interesting products:
- Expression Blend
- Expression Design
Expression Blend is, almost like Adobe’s Flash Studio, which is an IDE that allows you to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight applications. WPF is a technology that allows developers (and designers) to create applications that give users a better user experience (UX). Contemporary windows applications generally use square (often mundane) windows, whereas WPF applications allow designers to implement creative graphics into the interface. Rounded corners and transparent backgrounds for instance are used, and because Expression Blend can read and understand XAML, none of a designer’s creative flair is lost. The developer no longer has any excuses to develop interfaces that do not exactly meet the designer’s design.
