Oct 2009 Philly.net CodeCamp a grand success

This was my second attendance at Philly.net Code Camp at DeVry in Fort Washington (Oct 17) and I found it extremely interesting.The joie de vivre was contagious and all pervasive; the attendance was massive; the tracks were plenty and plenty of tracks covering most of everything about Microsoft products. The organizers must be congratulated for their excellent work.

I attended and sampled the various talks and the impression I carry is very positive. There were tracks for the beginners as well as for those who were already adept with many years of field experience.

I attended the following talks:

In Joshua Lynn's, ‘Advanced Workflow Process in T-SQL', he discussed the subtle differences between Exec and sp_executesql; executing dynamic strings; inversion of control, DQSM etc.

Miguel Castro did an excellent job of uncovering the innards of ASP.NET in his 'Understanding ASP.NET Under the covers'. He had seriously prepared and the talk (mostly on HTTP) was very informative and detailed.

John Angelini in his 'XAML Animation' did a good job of explaining Xaml animation both using Code and Expression Studio. I wish I were nearer to the screen. The code is too crowded to see from a distance.

Tim Dodd's 'Case Study: Clouds Demystified' was very informative. This was mostly infrastructure related and would have been more interesting if a portion of the talk was spent on laying the ground work for the general audience.

Chris Rolon's 'Introduction to SQL Azure' was very informative as he described his own experience in working with this product which is still in CTP. His presentation was clear and concise.

Well, I plan to attend the Code Camp coming April and if any of you are near Philly or South Jersy, I urge you to register with Philly.net.

Do you want to create a web page with Microsoft CDN?

Recently Microsoft placed javascript files that can be used to create web pages a la ASP.NET AJAX on their CDN. You can use them for free and create web pages. This article shows you how with an example and some background information. You can also access jQuery from the CDN.

Read this article [brought to you by eggheadcafe.com].

Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX on Mhttp://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/0c44e024-1c33-4910-b8ca-b9d5d1348f25/aspnet-ajax-on-microsoft.aspxicrosoft CDN

Web page on IE 8.0

Web Page on other browsers

Oct 22, 2009 Updated the link

EnterpriseDB ratchet up its Postgres Plus Standard Server one more rung

With the release of v8.4 today this open source database is moving ahead full steam. The new release is reported to include many new features such as,

Parallel Database Restore
Per-column permissions
Per-database collation
ANSI SQL 2003 windowing functions
Provide pre-integrated and pre-installed enterprise add-on modules
Value integrated testing of add ons
and many, many more...

Download page for Postgres Plus Standard Server 8.x is
here.

For getting one-up on working with EnterpriseDB read my comprehensive earlier articles on this product at:
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/05/here-are-my-recent-articles-on.html

You want to chart XML Data?

You can use Microsoft's Chart Control in ASP.NET 3.5 and craft your chart with ease. The following article brought to you from Packt Publishing shows you how. You can chart both attribute-centric as well as element-centric data with this chart control. The article also shows the code you need to write to add title and configure the axes.

Microsoft Chart with XML Data

Finally SVG in Visual Studio

I really liked SVG from the time it surfaced. Few tags are all that is needed for stunning graphics and amazing animations that can be scaled up and down. It's cute. Previously (even now, perhaps) all kinds of plug-ins were needed for visualizing, but now it appears that VS studio supports SVG files and what is more you can get even intellisense support.

According to the referenced link the author extrapolates that it would work in VS 2010. With the VS 2010 on my Windows 7 RC, it could not be repeated. However, the browser (internal as well as IE 8.0) seems to recognize the svg canvas. The intellisense also seems to work (so,so) but perhaps the SVG.xsd file may still have some cleaning up remaining.