My last post, I might be an elitist, but you're a misanthrope, has kicked up a great conversation in the comments.  There's one viewpoint in the comments that I'd like to challenge a little bit. What if I'm working on small projects with very tight timelines?  Many of the subjects that fall under the ALT.NET umbrella of interest like IoC, ORM, and AOP wouldn't seem to be justified on a smaller project.  Fine, maybe not, but the more basic design fundamentals th... [read more]

I've been in Seattle the past week, first at the MVP Summit and now at the ALT.NET event.  It's been good to rub shoulders with folks from outside our little ALT.NET cocoon to hear other points of view, but there's a particularly common refrain that bugs me a little bit.  It goes something like "that's great and all for you alpha geeks, but what about Joe Schmoe corporate developer at BIG CO?"  The obvious implication is that the average .Net developer ju... [read more]

Here is a 7-minute video of some Alt.Net attendees talking about why they came.  

In the March issue of MSDN Magazine's Data Points column I explore a variety of the Standard Query Operators and how they work with LINQ. Read more about standard query operators at johnpapa.net ...  

Yeah, I know its expected that when a product is in beta and its ancillary features are released in a CTP that there will be some "interesting" issues in getting set up. But its getting a bit out of control (in a good way) lately with all of the installations related to the Entity Framework. I had not noticed much until this weekend as I am preparing my laptop for my sessions at DevConnections in Orlando next week. Here is the list of installations that I had to go through just to get... [read more]

No that's not a typo in the title ... it's my poor attempt at dry humor :) I have had several questions from people over the past few months regarding my noticeable sparseness in blogging. The truth is that it took me a while to get back to setting up my new blogging home at www.johnpapa.net . I used the various beta versions of Graffiti CMS to get it started and then I recently migrated the site over to the release version of Graffiti. I must say that Graffiti is perfect for my needs. ... [read more]

MvcContrib is upgraded to account for the recent changes with the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  Eric Hexter has more details.

For those not at the Alt.Net Conference, here are videos of the opening.  I'm not a pro video guy, so there is a green bar across the bottom. Part 1 Part 2

We recently opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex Project that we will be using to provide previews (with buildable source code) for several upcoming ASP.NET features and releases. Last month we used it to publish the first drop of the ASP.NET MVC source code.  This first drop included the source for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release that we shipped at MIX, along with Visual Studio project files to enable you to patch and build it yourself. A few hours ago we published a refresh of the ... [read more]

I ran into a number of articles on the web declaring how to create a horizontal grid splitter control in WPF - most of them wrong. There are a couple of "Walkthru" articles on MSDN that show the proper way to do it, but waste time poking around the Properties window (who codes like that anyway?). Besides, they are not all consistent - the first article I found calls for setting properties that are not listed in the second article I found and seem to b... [read more]

Just today, the MVC Framework team dropped the soure code refresh on its CodePlex workspace.  This includes a big controller base class refactoring along with other enhancements. A big deal, also, is that the source code drop now includes the unit tests!  That's awesome.  Great job Levi, Eilon, Phil and Rob!!   Now we have some work to do to upgrade MvcContrib and CodeCampServer to the new drop. :-)   The biggest deal is that controllers and actions are now more DRY ... [read more]

This post is a quick rundown of action method behaviors.  This will be halfway obsolete with the next MVC drop on codeplex, but here goes: You can download MvcContrib from http://mvccontrib.org.  The convention controller is there.  The ConventionController takes away nothing from System.Web.Mvc.Controller, but it adds some useful things on top.  My example controllers inherit from ConventionController. First, To get an action method to fire and run, just make it public. ... [read more]

So after having a dormant Twitter account for a long time, I have finally found myself without a laptop, with a mobile phone, and with some 10 second increments in between things. So, here at the MVP Summit in Seattle, Washington, I've started to tweet, twoot, whatever it's called.  I'm twittering. You can waste you time reading them at http://twitter.com/jeffreypalermo

I presented a number of topics at the Sarasota Florida .NET Developer Group on Thursday Evening. I gave two 1-hour presentations: Introduction to the ASP.NET MVC Framework Data Access Tips & Techniques and we hit a number of newer technologies in the span of two hours: ASP.NET MVC Framework Unity IoC with ASP.NET MVC Framework ADO.NET Fundamentals and Best Practices Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block LINQ To SQL and LINQ To SQL API ( Executing Commands, Queries, S... [read more]

MVP Summit 2008:  Tomorrow I pray to God that American Airlines doesn't cancel my direct flight from Austin to Seattle for the 2008 MVP Summit where I will host another Party with Palermo.  As of this morning, over 220 have RSVPed for the party on April 13th at 7PM.  Eat supper before you come because the finger food will go fast!!  If you haven't RSVPed, please do so now so I have the best count possible. I'm also facilitating an open space session on Tuesday aft... [read more]

We have plenty of developers working on CodeCampServer, but we are in need of someone with the passion and time to manage the backlog, issues, and releases.  This is very important to have an organized project, so if you have interest in filling this role and you can commit to real time every week, please join the discussion list and volunteer.

I was originally only going to the ALT.NET event in Seattle next weekend, but now it looks like I will get to attend the MVP Summit as well.  See you there! 

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET More ASP.NET Security Tutorials: The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials.  His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts. Buildin... [read more]

A few months ago we released an ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview that contained a bunch of new features that will be shipping later this year (including ASP.NET AJAX Improvements, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Silverlight Support, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data). The ASP.NET Dynamic Data support within that preview provided a first look at a cool new feature that enables you to quickly build data driven web-sites that work against a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities object model.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data a... [read more]

The Austin Code Camp is ramping up and is looking for speakers.  Submit your sessions here. http://www.austincodecamp.com/

Check out this article about the rationale for the ASP.NET MVC framework on Dr. Dobbs.  Absolutely nothing you haven't heard before, but it's written by Dino Esposito.  It's fine and all to hear this sort of thing from ALT.NET leaning outliers, but Dino Esposito is virtually Mr. Mainstream in the .Net developer community.  Cool.

Coming april 24th Jimmy Nilsson will be speaking for Dutch user group dotNed. Jimmy is well known for his book Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns. A very good aspect of this book is it's style: very easy going and a pleasure to read; but in the meantime you're learning a lot. My first read was on a holiday; on a quite camping place in France. The bad thing about the coming presentation is that it's during another holiday. While Jimmy is talking me and my family will be somewh... [read more]

I read another excellent book on LINQ recently, called LINQ in Action, which provides some excellent coverage of the new language enhancements added for LINQ as well as the various flavors of LINQ. If you are looking for a single book to learn: Anonymous Types Expression Trees Extension Methods Implicity Typed Local Variables Lambda Expressions Object and Collection Initializers Query Expressions Query Operators LINQ To Objects LINQ To Xml LINQ To SQL etc... you will enjoy read... [read more]

I've been monitoring the nightly EAP builds of Resharper 4 and the latest ones have been pretty stable. While all of the features are not in yet (most notably full support for LINQ), there is enough in here to really get a sense for how it is evolving. I installed build 767 a few days ago and its working pretty well. Read more at johnpapa.net

I sat down this morning with my notes for the StructureMap 2.5 release to reacquaint myself with the remaining work I wanted to do before the release.  I wanted to just work through the punchlist, but this irresistible voice started saying "rewrite the InstanceMemento/MementoSource mess."  So apparently, the answer to what I'm going to do today and tomorrow is "rewrite a significant piece of the StructureMap core code that's accumulated trash code over 4 years.&q... [read more]