December 2006 - Posts
I saw this tool posted on Scott's blog and I thought it was really cool. There is a new tool called the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit (currently in RC) that makes it really easy to move databases from a local server to a hosting server without having to do database backups. Basically it creates a SQL script that contains the schema for your tables, stored procedures, etc, AND queries to populate the tables with data. I think there have been tools out there to do this before, but this is free and makes it look pretty easy.
SQL Server Hosting Toolkit
Scott's Post on the Toolkit
I mentioned to some of you that the names of the Expression tools have changed since the CTP of WPF/E came out last week. So here is what has changed. First, Expression Web has now been released. This means they want money for it now ($269). From what I have played with on Expression Web so far is that it is a half decent Web Designer with great CSS support. I don't think any of these tools are going to be covered by MSDN either. Next, Expression Interactive Designer (Sparkle I believe it used to be called) is now Expression Blend. It's now in Beta 1. Expression Graphic Designer got shorted to simply Expression Design. Lastly a new product showed up out of nowhere and has been released called Expression Media. Looks to be a tool to manage digital media assets.
If you are interested in learning more about the Expression products, check out the link below.
Microsoft Expression
WoW, there is a lot of new stuff coming out right now. A CTP of WPF/E has been released. This is Microsoft's holy war on ousting Flash. WPF/E by the way stands for Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere. Basically WPF/E uses XAML, AJAX, and JavaScript to do some pretty cool stuff. There are a couple of simple demos out there, so go download the runtime and check it out. Microsoft haters, start your bashing on this new product now.
One thing to note is that the runtime download is available for both Windows and Macintosh (PowerPC and Intel) and works in IE, FireFox, and Safari. I think the goal is for it to work on all sorts of mobile devices and phones (at least that is what I gathered when I was at PDC05). I think it has a lot of potential. This product is still early and probably not worth developing with yet, but it shows you where things are going.
WPF/E CTP
Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 came out this weekend. It added support for various features when using TFS but also made some a number of build performance improvements. These build performance improvements I have been very interested in since anyone that has compiled a site an ASP.NET site before knows how much this can suck. Also of interest is that project based web projects (for you SiteCore developers is now included).
If you are running Windows Vista, you definitely need to install SP1 to take care of various issues. On top of that Microsoft has released a work in progress patch for various Vista issues as a seperate download. Hopefully, this will fix the numerous memory corruption errors that Visual Studio tends to report in Vista. Go download it now.
Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1
If you ever have downloaded a compiled help file (CHM), you may have encountereed an issue where the table of contents would display, but the actualy content would give you a page cannot be displayed error. This is because some security patch at some point decided to block this.
To view the contents of the CHM file, simply bring up the properties of the file by right clicking on it and then click the Unblock button. This will allow you to see the content in the file.
This supposedly is the last release of ASP.NET AJAX before the final version comes out. One thing to note is that the namespace has changed from Microsoft.Web to System.Web to make things more consistent. Go download it now.
ASP.NET AJAX Release Candidate