ChrisNTR

For the past 9 months I have been working at Lightmaker Manchester. Since last Friday I am now working at Great Fridays (GFGP Limited) with the same great team from Lightmaker Manchester, with the same enthusiasm and skills from Lightmaker Manchester.

Great Fridays, despite putting together great creative and design work, will be using the latest technologies such as ASP.NET MVC to deliver outstanding work - building on our our previous knowledge of using Monorail and Flash.

At the moment we have a holding page for our website - GreatFridays.com but I’m hoping in the next few week that we can put together a little portfolio site of our work. If you want to see some of the work we’ve done so far, send over an e-mail to manchester@greatfridays.com

Chris

The guys over at Channel 9 have created the first blogging engine/content management system (CMS) based on the open source ASP.NET MVC framework. It’s named Oxite and is avaliable to download now (in a Alpha version) on the Codeplex website. The first site that’s built with it? Mix Online. Nice!

Oxite on Mix Online

Out of the box it has everything from RSS, Atom, Trackbacks, Pingbacks and it even has Live Writer support! Can’t wait to play around with the code.

Chris

This weekend I attended DDD7, a free community conference held at the Microsoft Reading Campus. I presented a short Grok talk during the lunch hour on Open Source and Microsoft. Since the event didn’t seem to have a internet connectivity, I used Dom Green’s laptop to allow me to prepare for it. After downloading Firefox on the machine, something was blocking it access to the web so I had to stick with IE8 *shudder*. To make sure all the sites were big and clear on the screens, I made sure I had put up the size of the text on the screen… only to find out that when I plugged it into the display - it automatically resized the screen resolution leaving me with horrible big web pages… for every tab I had open… anyway, enough of the excuses and on with the links.

Here’s a list of the links that I showed:

• Lightmaker: The company I work for… (Lightmaker Manchester).
• Codeplex: Microsoft’s Open Source Project Repository.
• ASP.NET on Codeplex: For out of bound ASP.NET releases (ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data, Dynamic Data + MVC etc).
• IronRuby: The main site for the IronRuby project.
• IronRuby Source: IronRuby source on RubyForge.
• jQuery Intellisense Support: There’s a clue in the title.
• jQuery Documentation: A great place to find out how to really utilise the power of jQuery!

I was also going to mention these sites too:

• IronPython: The main Codeplex site for IronPython.
• jQuery Form Validator Plugin: Simple but effective.
• Lightmaker Manchester Blog: Our Manchester Company Blog

It was, if you couldn’t guess, my first time speaking on geeky things at a conference and hadn’t prepared (although grok talks are meant to be unprepared…) as much as I would have liked but I hope that some people took away something from it and realise how they can help out these open source projects by contributing code or by blogging about the projects.

It was great to meet some new faces and some old ones and hope to see you all in the future.

Chris

At the recent developer gathering, Google I/O, Google announced the new Google Earth API. As many of you may be familiar with, Google Earth is a desktop application which allows you to view the Earth (and now Sky) in 3D. The Google Earth API now allows users to view and manipulate Google Earth from within their browsers (currently Windows only).

Within the API, you can place your own 3D model files created with Google’s SketchUp directly onto the Earth and you can also call KML files to use, which is Google’s own XML format, which is heavily used with the desktop version. Google have also put up some examples of what is possible using this API along with all the source code to see here: http://www.google.com/earth/plugin/examples/samples/

One great example of using this API is the “Monster Milkman” example which allows the user to drive through the earth as a milk truck. The 3D Buildings are turned on which allows you drive through places such as New York with a rather realistic view. Go have a fun drive - http://www.google.com/earth/plugin/examples/milktruck/

One problem I have had with it was driving through Everest often caused the milk truck to disappear off screen…

Over on my weblogs.asp.net blog I recently wrote a blog post on a gripe about using the LinkButton control which, when Javascript is not avaliable, will not work at all.

I also post one solution to this even though they may be a better way to handle this,

http://weblogs.asp.net/chrishardy/…./webform-gripe

I finally got round to upgrading Wordpress from whatever version I had installed before (it was pre 2.5) and it’s now on shiny 2.6! One of the main reasons for updating is the new Wordpress iPhone app which only works for blogs 2.5 and above. I’ll do a proper update soon probably mentioning what I’ve been doing since middle of Feburary.

Stay tuned,

Chris

Last week the new website for the Zion Arts Centre, based on Stretford Road, Manchester, went live. Let me know what you all think of it. Zion Arts

Chris

Recently Scott Guthrie mentioned what the ASP.NET MVC Road-map looked like and more importantly what features will be included in a special MIX 08 preview - which as you can guess - will be released around MIX 08, which is happening in the next few weeks in Las Vegas. Sadly, I cannot make the event; however, the preview will be available for everyone to download and use so that’s pretty good.

A few of the changes to the framework that stick out for me are the updated changes routing rules, which have always seemed a bit limiting (without having to customise it too much) so this will be a welcome addition. Something else which is nice to see is the removal of [ControllerAction] before the action in the controller to explicitly announce it as action method which will help with making the controller code look a little bit cleaner.

With all these ‘preview’ changes, I feel that this shows that the ASP.NET MVC team (Rob Conery, Phil Haack, etc) are really listening and are helping to build the best MVC framework they can. The framework feels very open-source to me. Although you can’t manually patch the core code (though you will be able to patch your own build soon), the framework will allow complete customisation to fit your needs as well as the MVC Contrib providing many different extensions to add to it.

I’m excited to see where this goes because I think it can only get better!

The website ASP.NET provides a whole host of information about ASP.NET including videos, podcasts and community forums. Recently, Joe Stagner kindly set me up a blog at weblogs.asp.net (along with a few others…) so I think it’s where I’m going to posting most of my asp.net/.net ramblings in the future. You can find my blog here: http://weblogs.asp.net/ChrisHardy. My first entry goes into a bit of detail about Monorail, MS MVC Framework and why you would use one or the other.

Hoping to get Windows Server 2008 installed on some kind of machine soon so I can play around with hosting a little bit more.

Chris

For those that don’t know, I recently received (for Christmas) Guitar Hero for the Wii! Oh, it’s brought many hours of fun just trying to get through the medium stage. I then recently found out that I could sync my game account with the online account at guitarhero.com ! Great! Now everyone can find my account and see how bad I really am at Guitar Hero.

One thing that I did notice was that in some of the URLs was this:

So, I checked the headers out and it turns out that it was running on nginx v. 0.5.26 and what I can only presume is Ruby on Rails from the query string. This comes quite a shock to me to see quite a main stream game site using the rails framework. Good work Guitar Hero. Shame it always seems to be slow when I go on it…