Tag: software-development

Scott Hanselman was touring Scotland and taking in some of our country as well as some talks in Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and finally Glasgow. You can read more about the event on his site Scott’s tour of Scotland. The following is my review of his talk in Glasgow which was on Friday 13th of July.

Scott was delivering his – One ASP.NET (super everything talk) covering almost everything going on that Microsoft are working on/have to offer for developers within Asp.Net

The talk covered the following areas – Visual Studio 2012, SignalR, WebAPI, Webform improvements, Azure and also what to look forward to when .Net 4.5 is released.

Visual Studio 2012 – Scott was kind enough to demo a build newer than the RC which had some unseen bits.

CSS improvements – Scott demoed some of the new features when you have a .css file open in the VS 2012 editor, actual colour pickers where you can choose the colour, including a droplet for choosing a colour out with Visual Studio which will be picked up when selected. Styles are also indented so for example you can have an .li tag and a .li a tag nicely formatted and indented below the .li tag.

Browse with option – you can now select from any browser which you have installed on your pc as well as iphone and ipad and this will display your website rendered in which ever browser you wish, you can also mark several of these as default, this means that when you run your site in VS 2012 and say you have selected FireFox, IE and Ipad as your default browsers the site will open up in all 3.

Javascript improvements – VS 2012 has much better intellisense and by this I mean true intellisense, if you define a new function within your javascript file or webpage and then call it elsewhere you’ll get full intellisense for the function your calling – impressive stuff indeed.

WebAPI – Scott demoed WebAPI as there were quite a few people myself included who hadn’t really looked into this as yet, it looks cool though and a lot easier than WCF, also if you’re using MVC seems very easy to pick up. Scott demoed just how easy it was to create a class and change the response from a method to return XML or JSON just by changing the content-type from within Fiddler, this means that you can have your methods returned using XML or JSON as well as other formats and then send this data off to whatever system requires data in whatever format it requires – nice!.

Find more info about WebAPI on the Asp.Net website here.

SignalR – and the SignalR demo Scott showed are both available on Nuget using the following command from the package manager console:-

and the demo Stock Sample application

Azure – Scott talked about the hard work Scott Guthrie and his team had recently put into Azure and showed the latest release of Azure and it all looked pretty impressive stuff, you can create up to 10 websites and have them deployed and hosted on Azure for free. Also available is VM’s with different operating systems such as Windows Server and Linux.

Within a couple of minutes Scott had created a website and added it to Git and deployed to Azure, then made an update and deployed the change, he then rolled the deployment back to a previous version of the website all in seconds – cool stuff indeed.

You can get a free trial of Azure by following this link here.

.Net 4.5 – Scott talked about Tasks and the new asynchrony possibilites coming with it, showing some nice additions you can use to have truelly asynchronous code – you can read more on this on msdn blogs here.

Feedback on his Talk
Scott is obviously a great speaker and a funny guy too and the content of the talk was excellent, I like demos and the content he showed was pretty neat, VS 2012 looks very promising. I liked how he gives his opinion on things that aren’t the Microsoft opinion and will openly slate something he doesn’t like. The questions asked by the attendees were very good too and he covered a fair amount of stuff in the time given – hopefully he will return sometime in the future and I hope he and his dad enjoyed their tour of Scotland.

You can follow Scott Hanselman on Twitter here.

I know i missed some of the content out, forgot to take notes, if anyone wants to ask questions or comment on this post please by all means do – I’ll update this post If i remember anything I missed.