Author: Tatham Oddie

Shout Out: WebDAV – a protocol that deserves more love.

I’m a massive fan of WebDAV.

At Fuel Advance (the parent company behind projects like Tixi), we operate a small but highly mobile work force. We don’t have an office, and we need 24/7 access to our business systems from any Internet connection. VPN links are not an option for us – they suck over 3G and don’t work through most public networks.

Enter WebDAV. It’s a set of HTTP verbs which give you read/write access to a remote folder and its files, all over standard HTTP. The best part is that Windows has native support for connecting to these shares. Now, we all have drive letter access to our corporate data over the public Internet. It’s slim and fast without all the management overheads that something like Sharepoint would have dealt us. It’s also cross platform, allowing us to open the same fileshares from our machines running Mac OS X.

IIS6 had reasonable support for WebDAV, but for various (and good!) reasons, this was dropped from the version that shipped as IIS7. In March this year, the team published a brand new WebDAV module as a separate download. This module is built using the new integrated pipeline in IIS7 and is much more nicely integrated into the management tool.

Kudos to Keith Moore, Robert McMurray and Marchel Cohn (no blog) for delivering this high quality release!

Video: The best web stack in the world

This is the demo I made for the Microsoft Demos Happen Here competition. The criteria was that it had to be under 10 minutes, and show one or more of the features from the launch wave technologies – Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.
I chose to demonstrate PHP running on IIS7 using FastCGI, then integrating this with an ASP.NET application before finally load balancing the whole application between two servers in a high availability, automatic failover cluster.
I managed to do all that with 2 minutes to spare, so I think it’s pretty clear that Windows Server 2008 is the best web stack in the world.

http://vimeo.com/1439786

Update 5-Sep-08: I won. 🙂 

Tearing down the tents (and moving them closer together)

Being fairly focused on Microsoft technologies myself, I see a lot of the “us vs. them” mentality where you either use Microsoft technologies, or you’re part of “the other group”. Seeing Lachlan Hardy at Microsoft Remix was awesome – he was a Java dude talking about web standards at a Microsoft event. The more we can focus on the ideas rather than which camp you’re from, the more we’ll develop the inter-camp relationships and eventually destroy this segmentation. Sure, we’ll still group up and debate the superfluous crap like which language is better (we’re nerds – we’ll always do that) but at least these will be debates between the sub-camps of one big happy web family. (It’s not as cheesy as it sounds – I hope.)

What’s the first step in making this happen? Meet people from “the other group”!

The boys and girls at Gruden and Straker Interactive have put together Web on the Piste for the second year running. It’s a vendor neutral conference about rich internet technologies – so you’ll see presentations about Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight at the same event (among lots of other cool technologies of course). These types of events are a perfect way to meet some really interesting people and cross pollinate some sweet ideas.

It’s coming up at the end of August, and I understand that both conference tickets and accommodation are getting tight so I’d encourage you to get in soon if you’re interested (Queenstown is crazy at this time of year).

And of course, yours truly will be there evangelising the delights of Windows Live as well as ASP.NET AJAX to our Flash using, “fush and chups” eating friends. 🙂

Will you be there?

Video: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3

Last night I gave an introduction to MVC at the Wollongong .NET User Group. We had a bit of time at the end, so I also covered off Inversion of Control (IoC) and how it can be used with the MVC framework.

The talk assumed a working knowledge of ASP.NET, but required no existing knowledge about ASP.NET MVC or IoC.

You can watch it on Vimeo:

Tip: Watching on the actual Vimeo site instead of this embedded player will give you a bigger and clearer video.

Or download it as a WMV:

http://tatham.oddie.com.au/presentations/20080709-WDNUG-AspNetMvcPreview3-TathamOddie.wmv (64MB, 68min)

Event: Wollongong .NET User Group – tonight!

I’ll be at WDNUG tonight spruiking ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3

What is this whole MVC thing anyway? Tatham Oddie will demonstrate how to use the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to take advantage of your favourite .NET Framework language for writing business logic in a way that is de-coupled from the views of the data. We’ll discuss the advantages to MVC on the web, the other frameworks that are available, and build an app with it – all in an hour.

If you live in our neighbouring southern city, come along.

See you all there. 🙂

Event: Code Camp SA 2008 – this weekend!

This weekend I’ll be scooting on down to Adelaide to take part in Code Camp SA 2008.

Now that Peter has posted the final schedule, it was high time for me to whip up an ICS feed:

webcal://tatham.oddie.com.au/files/CodeCampSA08.ics

As I’ve said previously, an event doesn’t actually exist for me until it’s lodged in my Outlook. I think I might have a problem in this respect.

Tip: Learn through sharing

Finula sent out an email yesterday asking a group of us to supply some tips for being a successful developer. The short versions will get included in this afternoon’s MSDN Flash newsletter, and we’re each blogging our full response.

My personal advice is to recognize the power of learning through sharing. Coatesy touched on the idea at the end of his own tip.

Attending user groups is one thing, but getting up and contributing your own knowledge is what really drives these groups. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much you’ll actually learn about a technology if you step back and prepare a presentation for your peers which explains what that technology is, and how it works.

One of my work mates, Steve Godbold, recently delivered a presentation about LINQ. In prepping for the talk he knew he’d need to explain expression trees, and he guessed he’d get some questions about LINQ to SQL vs LINQ to Entities. Pleasantly shocked about how much more there was to know about LINQ, he’s know turned this prep into a series of blog posts too.

Presenting isn’t for everyone though, but this is where blogging steps in. It might seem a bit egotistical at first to think that people want to read what you have to say, but the reality is people genuinely do! Think about the number of times you’ve ended up reading somebody’s blog post before to help you solve a problem. Posts don’t need to be technical wizardry to warrant publishing either – it’s often the simple little tricks that people find real value in. One of my more popular posts describes how to do a hover effect in CSS. It also opens up your ideas for others to comment on, which might prompt something you’d never thought of before.

Hopefully this will give you a bit of inspiration to get up and really participate in the vibrant technical community around you.

What now? If you haven’t already, subscribe to MSDN Flash, submit your 10 minute demo for the chance to win big prizes, contribute to your local user group, and start a blog.

What’s your tip for being a great developer?

Video: Architectural Considerations for the ASP.NET MVC framework

Update (16th July 2008): There’s a better version of this presentation available at http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/07/10/video-aspnet-mvc-preview-3/

This talk doesn’t actually assume any prior knowledge of the ASP.NET MVC Framework, so it goes through the whole intro at the start (albeit quickly). I then delve into some IoC concepts, and finally mash it all together. The IoC framework used is Castle Windsor.

This was recorded at the VIC.NET usergroup in Melbourne, Australia on 10th June 2008.

You can grab the Windows Media file directly from:

http://tatham.oddie.com.au/presentations/20080610-VICNETMelbourne-ArchitecturalConsiderationsForAspNetMvc-TathamOddie.wmv (48MB, 47min)

Or stream it from Google Video: