Daily Archives: October 24, 2006

A new Developer Evangelist for New England .NET Devs

dotNET

Though we selfishly were sad to see Thom Robbins leave the D.E. position for New England, the local community was thrilled to see him move to an awesome new job at Microsoft. But the big question was who on earth could fill his shoes?

Happily, Thom has made a wonderful choice in a successor. Chris Bowen, a local developer who has been very involved in the community and someone for whom I have always had a ton of respect, will be our new D.E.

Thanks Thom! Thanks Chris!

Code Camp 6 Devs on a Plane Rehash

Just Rambling

Code Camp 6 was this past Saturday. It started out with a somewhat nervewracking 200 mile drive to Waltham due to torrential rainstorms and high winds. But I had a fun companion in the car who kept me well entertained throughout – Dave Burke, who was ridiculously kind when I was adamant that we needed to go south on Route 91 (totally wrong) and let me get away with it for 10 miles before I let him convince me to turn around. I suppose it’s one thing to deal with female logic when it’s your wife, but a totally different conundrum when it’s another chick.

When we arrived at the event on Saturday morning, I learned some wonderful news. Athough we are all sad to see Thom Robbins go (and thrilled at his new job at Microsoft) he made a fantastic choice for our new Developer Evangelist in Chris Bowen. Chris is a local guy who has been involved with the .NET community in Boston for a long time and is someone I have a huge amount of respect for. So I was very happy to hear this great news.

Since people quickly disappear into the conference rooms, it’s always hard to tell how many are really there, but at lunch time, it certainly seemed like major swarms of people heading for the pizza. I did only two of my three talks. As I expected, the Persisting Ink on the Web talk, which I was hoping to practice prior to Mobile Connections in a few weeks was waaaaaay to narrow so nobody showed up. But the Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Websites and Moving Big Data with ADO.NET 2.0 talks were both well attended.

I spent most of my free time futzing with the impact of the “click here to activate and use this control” issue that is now a permanent part of IE7 and has a big impact on the embedded winforms controls that I use to do ink on the web, rather than sitting in on other talks, so I missed out on Richard Hale Shaw’s C# talks where I’m sure he couldn’t resist a dig or two against VB ;-).

There were a bunch of VTdotNETters there which is always great to see.

The other very nice surprise was seeing Noah Coad who I have known for a number of years, originally through the MVP academic community. He has been at Microsoft for a while now (they scooped him up the day he graduated from college), but I didn’t realize he had recently moved to the east coast. So I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of him.

When all was said and done, Dave and I hopped in the car for the drive back to Vermont in what was thankfully great weather on a beautiful fall night.

Scott Guthrie and Brian Goldfarb’s ASPConnections Keynote

Connections

DevConnections (combination of 6 conferences: ASP, Visual Studio, Mobile, Sharepoint, SQL Server and Office) is only a few weeks away. I’m going out to present 2 sessions for ASP Connections (Managing & Deploying ASP.NET 2 Sites and Asynchronous ASP.NET), one for Mobile Connections (an advanced Ink on the Web talk) and a 1/2 day post-conference workshop on Advanced ADO.NET 2.0.

I’m sorely disappointed that my flight schedule is having me miss the Monday night keynotes, especially this one that Scott Guthrie and Brian Goldfarb are giving: Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and ASP.NET AJAX.

There is going to be so much going on at DevConnections, including some Microsoft “hear it for the first time in the U.S.”) announcements from Microsoft. I hope I don’t end up holing myself up in my room trying to perfect my talks again (so that means they need to be perfect before I go to the airport! :-)). Of course, there’s always the lure of the gambling tables and the girlie shows (just kidding – not really interested in either), but still Vegas is certainly a fun place to be when you do want to take a little break from the geek fest!

CSS Friendly Control Adapter Toolkit Version 3 is released

Tools

From Russ Helfand, creator of the CSS Friendly Control Adapter Toolkit, announcing a new version! (Of course, this comes just weeks after my article about them in aspnetPRO is published :-), but I knew that was coming…)

I’m pleased to announce that we have upgraded the CSS Friendly ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter kit.  The new release is Beta 3. 

The whole kit now serves as a sample of designing markup and CSS that scales gracefully. This includes scaling of the menus, trees and forms.

All forms rendered by the adapters (think: membership controls) now implement a solution for the accesskey issue. It’s simple but incredibly effective… and totally addictive.

There are other things in beta 3 besides accessibility improvements. The TreeView adapter now restores the tree’s expansion state. That’s a huge usability improvement but more importantly it’s our first demonstration of an adapter that leverages the ASP.NET view state framework.

To get familiar with all the new features, please read the “what’s new” section of the kit’s home page at http://www.asp.net/cssadapters.  Also, try out the “quick cool demos” listed in that section.  They are:

  • Go to the Menu sample. Increase your browser’s font size. In Internet Explorer use View > Text Size > Larger.
  • Go to the CreateUserWizard sample. Navigate with accesskeys. If using Windows, press Alt + e to set the focus to the textbox for the Email address. (In Internet Explorer you must also hold down the Shift key to use the accesskey for the password textbox.)
  • Try out the redesigned TreeView sample. Expand several nodes in the tree. Select a node to cause the page to post back. Notice that the tree maintains its expansion, visibly marks the selected node and uses its value to change the page’s sample content.
  • Play with cascading checkboxes.
  • Validate that these pages conform to the XHTML 1.1 Strict standard.

    Best regards,

    Russ Helfand