DaTutorials Blog

This guy is 21 years old and definitely got the feeling … and the touching as you’ll see

You get it from http://sweetie.sublink.ca

150+ clean and clear icons to use in your nifty web application. They are licenced under a Creative Commons licence, so commercial use is fine. Also feel free to make derivatives with the included Photoshop documents.

Did I mentioned they are all free

That’s right, you can get a free copy of Windows Vista Business Edition or Office 2007 Pro.

It is still not officially announced by Microsoft, but it will be soon. So, hurry

This is a cool offer for developers to get them excited and ready for Office and Vista. In a word, watch 3 or more webcasts and get a free copy of Vista Business or Office 2007 Pro.

Learn more here: http://www.powertogether.com/

However it is not for international developers, only for US developers

So you are a developer, right? And you want to to work in Windows Vista environment, right? If so, here is the PC you want ( well, at least I desperately want it ):

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Processor
• 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
• 4GB RAM Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM @ 667mhz
• 1Terabyte RAID0 SATA HDDs (2×500MB)
• 48x Combo + 16x DVD+/-RW Double Layer Burner
• Dual TV Tuners (Analog)
• Dell 30″ Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
• Full 5.1 Surround Sound

This PC screams — it has a Windows Experience Index rating of 5.2!

Microsoft and Dell recently partnered up to create this super-cool custom PC in celebration of Microsoft releasing Windows Vista to manufacturing earlier this month.

Here are some pictures:

This CTP contains both a dramatically enhanced Database Publishing Wizard as well as the new Database Publishing Services.

SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard enables the deployment of SQL Server 2005 databases into a hosted environment on either a SQL Server 2000 or 2005 server. It generates a single SQL script file which can be used to recreate a database (both schema and data) in a shared hosting environment where the only connectivity to a server is through a web-based control panel with a script execution window. If supported by the hosting service provider, the Database Publishing Wizard can also directly uploads databases to servers located at the shared hosting provider.

Major enhancements to the Database Publishing Wizard include support for almost all database-level objects and data types, a wizard-based GUI, and integration with the Database Publishing Services.

The Database Publishing Services enable hosters to provide a seamless deployment story for their customers who ve downloaded the Database Publishing Wizard.  The services are designed to be easy to deploy and require minimal resources. With this CTP, hosters can do test deployments in preparation for the formal release next month.

Microsoft announced a technical preview release of FastCGI for IIS, a new component for Microsoft’s Web server platform. This release is available immediately for download to Windows Vista, Windows Server codenamed “Longhorn” and previous versions of IIS including IIS 6.0 in Windows 2003 Server and IIS 5.1 in Windows XP.

This announcement coincides with a broader announcement regarding collaboration between Microsoft and Zend to improve performance and stability of PHP on the Windows platform. This effort aims to help PHP developers achieve improved performance on the Windows platform by leveraging the new IIS FastCGI feature together with Zend’s on-going work to improve the PHP engine on Windows. For more information regarding this announcement, see the news release on Zend’s site.

What is FastCGI?

The IIS FastCGI component enables popular application frameworks like PHP be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way.

FastCGI provides a high-performance alternative to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), a standard way of interfacing external applications with Web servers that has been supported as part of the IIS feature-set since the very first release.

CGI programs are executables launched by the web server for each request in order to process the request and generate dynamic responses that are sent back to the client. Because many of these frameworks do not support multi-threaded execution, CGI enables them to execute reliably on IIS by executing exactly one request per process. Unfortunately, it provides poor performance due to the high cost of starting and shutting down a process for each request.

FastCGI overcomes this performance penalty by re-using CGI processes to service subsequent requests, while continuing to ensure single request concurrency. For more information on how FastCGI works, see http://www.fastcgi.com/devkit/doc/fastcgi-whitepaper/fastcgi.htm.

This technical preview contains an IIS7 module that provides FastCGI support on Windows Vista and Windows Server codenamed “Longhorn” Technical Preview releases, and an ISAPI extension that provides FastCGI support for previous versions of IIS on Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000. The Microsoft FastCGI component for IIS feature provides improved performance and (when the final version is released) will be supported along with the rest of the IIS feature-set. Learn more about setting up PHP together with IIS FastCGI in the article Using FastCGI with PHP.

Why is FastCGI important?

Most applications built to for IIS take advantage of the native, multi-threaded extensibility model of IIS. Many popular applications, particularly those written or originally designed for Linux, are not multi-threaded, and instead take a multi-process approach to concurrency. While the PHP engine itself is multi-thread capable, many of the popular PHP extensions are not, requiring a single concurrent request guarantee to operate reliably. This forces the use of CGI and results in poor performance on the Windows platform. FastCGI helps these application frameworks to achieve improved performance on Windows over CGI, while allowing stable operation in production environments.

Where can I download FastCGI?

IMPORTANT: This release is a technical preview and is intended for evaluation purposes. It is not intended for mission-critical deployment. Be sure to review the full license agreement before downloading and installing this feature.

For Windows XP (IIS 5.1) and Windows 2003 (IIS 6.0) customers:

Download the technical preview release of FastCGI component for IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003 and IIS 5.1 with Windows XP.

For Windows Vista and Windows Server codenamed “Longhorn” (IIS 7.0) customers:

Download the technical preview release of FastCGI component for IIS7  Windows Vista. In order to run this module, you must have a machine running Windows Vista RC1+ or the latest Windows Server codenamed “Longhorn” Community Technical Preview release with IIS 7 installed.

To install FastGCI, follow the instructions in the readme.txt file in the download package.

Where can I get more information?

The IIS team has created new forums for FastCGI for IIS5/6 users as well as IIS7. Use these forums to discuss the FastCGI support, and file bug reports.

For a walk-through article describing the exact steps to get FastGCI and PHP running, see the Using FastCGI with PHP article.

To get an inside scoop on this feature, check out blog entries from IIS team members involved in the project including Bill Staples, and Mike Volodarsky.

With the upcoming Vista Microsoft has released the final 3.0 version of the .NET framework. It is just an addon to .NET 2.0 used to be called WinFX and includes Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation.

NetFX 3.0 is included with Vista. You can also download it here for XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1.

There are some new designers for building workflows in VS.NET 2005 here.

For more info go here.

The second Beta of Microsoft AJAX library was released. You can download it from here.

New Features in ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2

In addition to a number of bug-fixes, the ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 release contains a number of feature improvements worth calling out:

UpdateProgress Control: The UpdateProgress control is now included in the fully-supported “core” ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2 download (in Beta1 it was still in the Futures CTP download). The UpdateProgress control has also been enhanced over the version that shipped in the earlier Atlas CTPs, and now supports the ability to have multiple UpdateProgress controls on a page (and show/hide depending on the UpdatePanel that is being updated). The UpdateProgress control also now has a useful “DisplayAfter” property that allows you to easily control the wait time before the UpdateProgress animation should display (to avoid you displaying an animation if the response comes back super quick).

Partial Rendering Auto-Degrade for Non-AJAX Browsers: A ScriptManager.SupportsPartialRendering boolean property has been added to indicate whether or not an incoming browser supports AJAX. By default this is automatically set using settings configured via ASP.NET’s BrowserCapabilities system (meaning you can override or customize the setting using .browser files). If you configure or set this value to false for a particular browser or device, ASP.NET AJAX will auto-degrade and not use partial page rendering with UpdatePanels - and instead just use normal postbacks and full page refreshes.

Simplified Client-side Event Binding API: The client-side AJAX JavaScript library now has a cleaner mechanism for binding and detaching multiple event handlers to a DOM element, which reduces the amount of code you have to write and can also helps avoid memory leaks. Read Bertrand’s great blog post to learn more about the new model.

Client-Side JavaScript Localization: Client scripts can now automatically retrieve localized resources from the server, making it possible to more easily create locale and region aware web UI.

Client JavaScript Debugging and Tracing Improvements: A number of additional improvements have been added in Beta2 to identify and diagnose issues in JavaScript. You can also now use debug.trace and debug.dump to output JavaScript trace statements to either a textarea element you embed within a page, or to the popular FireBug browser add-in or Nikhil’s WebDevHelper add-in utilities.

The ASP.NET AJAX team has also built a number of useful JavaScript source management utilities for adding debug parameter validation into JavaScript source code, and have it conditionally be stripped out depending on whether you process the script in “retail” or “debug” mode at development time. We are going to be shipping the source for these utilities as part of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit in the near future, which will enable developers to easily take advantage of them within their own projects (we’ll even have some cool MSBuild tasks that you can add to-do it for you automatically as part of your standard build process).

Client-Side JavaScript CSS helpers: There is now a useful JavaScript library included that enables developers to easily add, remove and toggle CSS class associations on client controls and elements.

Drag/Drop Support for ASP.NET Web Parts in Safari and FireFox: You can now enable drag/drop of ASP.NET Web Parts using both FireFox and Safari (this later support was not available in the earlier CTPs). Read all about it in David Barkol’s blog post here, or click here to see a screen-shot of web part portal drag/drop customization in action with Safari on a Mac.

Performance and Stability Improvements: The ScriptManager API has been improved with richer support for handling timeout situations with dynamically loaded scripts. Script components can also now register for dispose semantics to avoid possible memory leaks.

ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 Downloads

Included with the Beta 2 release are three downloads (each of which supports a go-live license)

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta2: This is the “core” ASP.NET AJAX download and contains the features that will be fully supported in the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release (meaning Microsoft product support is standing by 24×7). The download includes support for the core client-side JavaScript type-system, networking stack, component model, extender base classes, and the server-side functionality to integrate within ASP.NET (including the super-popular ScriptManager, UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, and Timer controls).

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: This download contains 30+ free ASP.NET AJAX controls (with full source code) that make common AJAX scenarios super easy (cascading dropdown lists, animations, modal dialogs, in-place pop-up extenders, etc). The toolkit is community supported, and built by an open source team containing both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers. It only uses AJAX features contained with the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta2 “core” release above.

ASP.NET AJAX Futures November CTP: This download contains a preview of future AJAX features that we are working on and will likely move into the ASP.NET AJAX “core” download once they are fully baked and understood. If you want to use APIs that are non-changing and fully-supported, you should target the “core” download above. But if you want to push the envelope this download provides a bunch of features to take advantage of.

Rob Howard (former Microsoft guy turn entrepreneur with a company called Telligent that creates Community Server) has posted in his blog a great article explaining their software development philosophy.

In few words, Rob states that they are caring less about the underlying technology to how their software solves the user’s problem. This is opposite to most common programming practices, but read it, you’ll most likely find it a very interesting approach. Link to the article. 

Comments and suggestions are appreciated.