Vista Ultimate Beta 2 5384

Microsoft released beta 2 of vista a couple of days ago which I can safely say I just managed to get working. A msdn key, swapped lan card later, she runs fine. I am still going through some issues. I have an nvidia geforce 3 card which apparently has new vista only drivers on the nvidia site. When I run their installer, I get an error indicating that this file has no drivers for my vid card. I find this hard to believe as the drivers say geforce and are for Beta 2. Odd....for now Ill just use the default drivers. I am about to load VS 2005 and begin the real testing with IIS 7 . I already installed IIS 7 [ as it isnt on by default in Vista Ultimate] and managed to point to my site easier than the 5301 beta. The only other issue I had was audio play back in WMP 11. The first build worked fine;however, beta 2 made my music choppy and would often pause the system. I plan to go download winamp and try.

A simple review
Now for the fun stuff...the things I liked.

Security
I like the new security approach Vista has. It really wont let you do anything without your permission and now greys the screen until you respond with a course of action. This obviously shows the need of new security measures. The login is quite cool because it reminds you of your password if you fail. You see...it only takes a little thinking and boom a nice OS.

Vista Aware
I also liked what I call "Vista awareness". It seems Vista is more aware of whats going on in your computing experience. For example, it knows that you have failed to install your lan card and recommends solutions. I could get used to being recommended options to fix things. It knows more about the presence of networks [ esp the internet] and shows more paths to them then just mucking with it till it works like in XP.

Hardware

Even though I had an issue with my lan card, vista worked well with PNP devices and even "safely" removing them. This option in XP was pointless in my view as it hardly ever worked and most users would just take it out anyway.

Application Speed

Microsoft has this new recent application stack that you can clearly notice working. If you load one application and close it, you will get a speed boost the second time. Of course this has been done in recent versions of Windows however there is new code from the ground up in this new approach. Applications seem to load faster than XP and more crisp with the new UI.

Conclusion

All in all, yes Im very impressed. The install was effortless and I mounted it with simple d-tools [ which needs to be fixed to work in Vista pleassssse] to install to the same drive while in Windows 2003. I still havent got into heavy programming on it and will make another entry on that. Its been pretty stable so far but I await the next release.

Cheers
Link : Paul's Review

My favorite VS 2005 popup

With all my community involvment with Rainbow 2.0, there leaves a lot of time updating 1.1 apps to 2.0. This by far is my favorite screen:

ASP.NET 2.0 Configuration

While looking for the answer to a question, I stumbled on to a nice article that explains the new config options for 2.0. It gives a quick introduction on the new ways to manipulate your configs now that 2.0 supports strongly type XML configurations [ not to mention the ability to edit your web.config directly].




Link: http://url123.com/muyde

Microsoft nears Final on Web Application Project

Looks like WAP developers can rest easy as MS nears final on the Web application project type. I know this as I just started work for a nice company that received a close to final copy. The WAP is for developers who are use to the vs 2003 style of web application development. Along side with the VS 2005 plugin, this new final includes a range of updates to have the same look/feel as the Web project type. When I get word of the final, Ill write a blog on it.




Link: VS 2005 WAP Snap-in
Link: Current Beta 2 Refresh

ASP.NET destroys J2EE

I was looking around the new asp.net site and notice this awesome review of ASP.NET vs J2EE. Here is the snippet taken from ASP.NET.

--snip
In a head-to-head comparison of performance and scalability between Sun's Java Pet Store J2EE blueprint application and the ASP.NET implementation, Microsoft .NET significantly outperformed J2EE. The bottom line: the ASP.NET implementation required only 1/4th as many lines of code, was 28x faster (that's 2700%), and supported 7.6x as many concurrent users as J2EE, with only 1/6th as much processor utilization.
--endsnip

The link below goes to the MSDN article and the code so you can test yourself.




Link: Link to full MSDN write up

ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 View State

I found this nice article comparing 1.1 and 2.0 view state. It really opens your eyes to the importance of view state that most developers take for granted. The author list a great example that if you check most asp.net websites, the view state is out of control. 2.0 gives us awesome view state control by fist adding control state and using view state the smart way when doing things declaritive [ and we all like copy and pasting code on ASPX pages and things working]. 2.0 also reduces the view state data nearly by half in some cases due to the new encryption methods.




Link: Link to Article

Magic Ajax .3 released

Today, the creator of MagicAjax informed me he released his new version. This version solves a lot of the cpu issues not to mention the ways you can now use it amoung ASP.NET applications. If you are a fan of easy deployable access, I suggest you go pick it up.

Quick review of things changed :

v0.3.0 (9 February 2006) - Major Release

Changes since 0.2.2

• If another form tag was added to page, MagicAjax did not work; fixed it
• Corrected an encoding issue
• Some controls with AutoPostBack set to 'true' were not working properly; fixed it
• Fixed reflecting scripts and css-styles that were added on a Ajax callback.
  Note: if you want to run the current MagicAjax.NET development version under ASP.NET 2.0 medium trust (as most hosting-providers are forcing), you need to compile MagicAjax with the MEDIUM_TRUST flag on. Unfortunately, this will disable MagicAjax's feature to reflect script/css changes on callbacks for now (because we now use reflection for this to call private system variables). Also, only the default MagicAjax configuration-settings will be used (because medium trust doesn't allow reading of the web.config). We're working on a non-reflection version at the moment (using regular expressions to scan through the Html output), which will run under medium trust.
• Fixed client-side ASP.NET validation
• Image buttons now return the X/Y coordinates
• Fix for incompatibility with flash applets
• Fix for the problem of the AjaxPanel not displaying its contents on VS 2005 when in a UserControl
• New MagicAjax attributes for ASP.NET controls (AjaxLocalScope, ExcludeFlags)
• Added ExcludeFlags property for AjaxPanel
• New base (abstract) controls added (ClientEventControl, BaseClientEventWrapper)
• New toolbox controls added (AjaxZone, KeyClientEventWrapper, ClientEventTrigger)
• Support for Opera and Netscape browsers added.
• MagicAjax.dll is now strongly named (public key token bf4053b35db106f3), so MagicAjax.dll can be registered in the GAC.
• AjaxCall event is renamed to AjaxCallStart
• AjaxControl/AjaxPage/AjaxUserControl invoke AjaxCallStart at Load event, PreWriteScript at PreRender, and AjaxCallEnd at Unload, during an Ajax callback
• Huge server-side performance improvement
• There were conflicts with the cookies handling by ASP.NET 2.0 and other HttpModules; fixed it
• Optimizations for the javascript client
• DropdownList and single-selection ListBox were not cleared for firefox; fixed it

Link: Link to new code