Highlights of #UKTechDays 2011 (1st day dev sessions)

UKTechDays 2011

http://uktechdays.cloudapp.net/home.aspx

Date: Monday, 23 May 2011

Location: Fulham, London

I attended 2 sessions under cloud topic and all the sessions except from the very first one (and a half!) under The Web topic.

For me, the important highlight of the event was to see presenters from outside Microsoft being invited. For Instance, Bruce Lawson Opera evangelist did a 60 minutes presentation on HTML5. Also a weird thing on Azure topic was the amount of marketing material which was stuffed into it; with three companies showcasing their Azure-Based products in length within the first session.

Highlights on the Azure Sessions:

ü  A-Z of the Windows Azure Platform by David Gristwood

·         Something to have some reading about:

·         SQL Azure: Extending SQL server for relational storage for the cloud.

o    Blob, Table and Queue types new for Windows Azure

·         Azure AppFabric : Infrastructure to connect to the cloud that

o    Connects existing app to the cloud

o    Connects through network boundaries

o    Easily control authorization to apps

Highlights on the Web sessions:

ü  HTML5 - Who, what, when, why? By  Bruce Lawson (@brucel)

·         Very cool features of HTML5

ü  Web development with HTML5 & Internet Explorer By Martin Beeby (@thebeebs)

·         Yes! The same guy who presented on MVC at LBi for the second EPiServer meetup!

·         Demo of using html5 video and audio, IE9 canvas and  JQuery

·         Also jquery.svg.js was recommended: a useful JS library that wraps the SVG and coding SVG is much easier using it.

·         Raphael for Graphs        

·         Also some cool tools recommended:

o    Modernizer: feature detection library for advanced browser features

o    Mire video converter: For converting video types to each other

ü  Enhancing sites with Pinning and Internet Explorer by Stephen Kennedy

·         On IE9 feature that enables your websites to be pinned on taskbar or start menu

·         Details of what classes, methods and properties to be used. (Too much details I would say)

·         For more code/demo on pinning enabled sites:  http://buildmypinnedsite.com/

ü  An introduction to CSS3 for web developers by Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew)

·         Some of the css 3 features

ü  Getting Tech.Days online by Martin Beeby

·         On how MS guys developed the techdays website using Umraco cms and hosted on Windows azure.

·         Surprisingly Umraco CMS been promoted and Highly recommended on a Microsoft event

ü  Getting Productive with ASP.NET MVC v3 (@Stevensanderson)

·         Vary useful and informative presentation by Steve Sanderson from Microsoft

·         With code demo of 6 items to get the most out of MVC 3

o    NuGet: Package Managing Console

o    MvcScaffolding: Command line version of scaffolding.  Scaffolding:  “quickly generating a basic outline of your software that you can then edit and customise”. Reade more : http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2011/01/13/scaffold-your-aspnet-mvc-3-project-with-the-mvcscaffolding-package/

o    Ninject.MVC3 : Dependency Injection tool

o    Razor: Updated view engine in MVC3

o    SQL compact

o    IISExpress

ü  Microsoft WebMatrix by Andy Robb

·         Open source platform by MS(!) using ASP.NET, MVC, PHP, Razor

·         Seems like a very quick platform for those who are new to development to get the site up and running quickly

·         Personally I think in practice it can only be used for demo apps or for setting up the platform on the development machine

EPiServer Developer Resources Index

http://www.frederikvig.com/2010/05/episerver-developer-resources/

EPiServer File Manager & File Summary

A useful article about EPiServer File Manager and File Summary by @frederikvig. 


Highlights:

Accessing the data:

var file = System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.VirtualPathProvider.GetFile("/Global/Images/[Folder Name]/[Image-Name]") as UnifiedFile;

"The Summary property exposes a IUnifiedSummary type which gives us access to properties like Author, Comments, Category etc, and more importantly a Dictionary for accessing other properties we create (like Website)."

file.Summary.Dictionary["Website"]

Simple example of accessing the Summary properties in code:




<div class="featured">
 <img src="<%= Image.VirtualPath %>" alt="<%= Image.Summary.Title %>" />
 <p>
  <a href="<%= Image.Summary.Dictionary["Website"] %>"><%= Image.Summary.Author %>a>
  <em><%= Image.Summary.Dictionary["Description"]%>em>
 p>
div>