DiscountASP.NET Hosting

DiscountASP.NET Customer Profile – Dave Campbell

Customer profile

Dave Campbell is a Silverlight MVP and the author of the Wynapse.com and SilverlightCream.com sites. He is the Phoenix, Arizona Silverlight User Group Leader, and a veritable font of .NET knowledge. He was kind enough to agree to be the first, in what we hope will be many, customer profiles.

Dave Campbell of WynApse.com and SilverlightCream.com

Hello Dave, please tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m an independent software developer and a Microsoft MVP. My MVP is in Silverlight, but I’ve done many years of .NET and win32 development. My primary website is WynApse.com. This is a data-driven site with Many articles and tutorials primarily on WPF/E and Silverlight. I use the site as a portal of sorts. The menu on the right-hand sidebar is a collection of good reference links, and the tag cloud listed on the left-hand sidebar is a gateway to over 10,000 blog posts. My secondary site, SilverlightCream.com is a database application backing up my blog, providing search capability for users.

Which technologies are you using for the sites?

WynApse.com is a hand-rolled .NET C# MS SQL web application. I’m pretty certain the application began life as .NET 2.0, and is probably still at 3.5. Considering how long the site has been up, it is probably SQL 2003 or 2005. I can’t remember (I just searched email and found it is actually SQL 2000, unless it’s been upgraded under the covers).

How long have you hosted your site with DiscountASP.NET?

It was December of 2003 that I started hosting with DiscountASP.NET.

Wow, you were an early user, that’s great. Why did you choose us as your web hosting solution?

DiscountASP.NET had a good reputation with the folks at AZGroups (Arizona .Net User Group).

What do you consider to be the key benefits of using the DiscountASP.NET web hosting solution?

Uptime is amazing, plus you’re on top of all the technology as soon as it hits. Knowledgeable people to work with, too. I’ve recommended DiscountASP.NET to many people and have not had anyone give me negative feedback on that.

That’s what we like to hear, thanks. What are the future plans for your site?

It’s due for a makeover. I don’t know if I want to do it in Silverlight or not. I keep evolving my secondary site, SilverlightCream.com, and the next thing in the works for that is an OData feed of the database there.

Which future technologies or trends are you most excited about?

Obviously Silverlight, since that’s my MVP, but I’m also interested in what we’re going to learn at the conference this fall, BUILD.

We would like to thank Dave again for taking time out of his day to answer our questions.

Would you like to be featured in a profile? Let us know what you’re up to.

Add Michael Phillips to your Google+ circles.
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Does Being Social Really Make Sense?

Internet, Marketing
Lunch At DiscountASP.NET - ASP.NET Hosting
Lunch Time!!

Let me guess, you don’t care what I had for lunch today, do you (it was a cup o’ noodles, chicken flavored just in case you did care).  You don’t care that I’m about to go to a movie or that I’m checking in at the local coffee shop for the 4th time this week, making me the supreme ruler of that shop and everyone in it. Nope, you don’t care, and that is all that Twitter and Facebook are good for, so why bother with either of them?

Actually, that was almost the exact reason I did not look at any of the Social Media sites back in 2005 when I first started hearing about them. It took a friend of mine to convince me to give them a chance.

Don’t get me wrong, my conversion to Social Media enthusiast was not overnight by any means. It took months of stumbling and fumbling around to discover that with the right tools, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social outlets can be one of the more powerful resources on the Internet today.

For many of us, places like Twitter and Facebook are there just to provide a public outlet for telling the world what we are doing at that moment. From the mundane and pointless all the way to the exciting and important. For others it’s a way to see what old friends and colleagues are up to, without having to really interact with them (that is my sister – I keep telling her she’s Internet stalking people).

Either way, social media has become the #1 way for people to interact and stay in touch. Without Facebook I can guarantee you that my 85 year old Aunt Bev (Love you Aunt Bev) would have no idea what my sisters and I were doing today, but now she is fully engaged in our lives and keeping us up to date on hers.

So I guess you are wondering how this fits into your life as a developer (yeah, I could hear a few of you saying, “get to the point”). When you have time, head on over to Twitter Search and search “ASP.NET MVC.” When you do this you may be amazed by the number of people who are talking about, asking about, or helping others with something like ASP.NET MVC on Twitter. Used properly, Twitter can easily become one of the most powerful resources in your developer library. It also doesn’t hurt that many ASP.NET celebrities (You know who you are Scott Hanselman and  Scott Guthrie) are using Twitter daily to let everyone in on the latest and greatest in ASP.NET and other things.

ASP.NET Developers at Portland Code Camp
Developers Enjoying Code Camp

Facebook on the other hand takes you from being an individual to being a group. Facebook has created Fan Pages and Group Pages where people with common interests (say ASP.NET Developers, hint, hint) can come together in one location to share thoughts and ideas. Another added benefit of Facebook is the ability to create an event (hey Code Camps are events!) and send invites to the events (and I like going to Code Camps!).

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to convince everyone to give social media a try. I understand that this will never really be for everyone (we aren’t all social butterflies). But remember that social activities online are a lot like real life; there will always be value in connecting with those people whose opinions we value most, even if it’s only online.

Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 and You

Internet, Technical,

As some of you may know, Microsoft released version 1.0 of Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011. In a nutshell, its a development tool that allows you to easily build business applications. What does that mean in non-marketing terms? Think of Microsoft Access of old. You could click, drag, tab, and wizard your way into building  an application. Only this time, everything is compiled into a Silverlight application for you. Yes, you could customize the application and write code as well, but my question to you is…would you want to?

As an initial test, I downloaded the bits, built a phone book application and deployed it. This whole process took me all of 30 minutes without reading a single article or watching a video. Granted, it’s a silly example, but the point is, with 30 minutes of time invested, I have an application hosted that’s accessible from anywhere, backed by SQL server, and can be used by multiple users at the same time. Doing it a second time around, I could probably do it in 10 minutes. That makes for a pretty compelling story for any development tool.

Looking at the other side of the wall, we don’t live in a world of phone book apps. The more complex the application, the more you have to dig under the abstraction that LightSwitch provides and get your hands dirty, the more some may question its usefulness. There is a huge grey area in between. How much of that grey area LightSwitch can effectively address will ultimately decide how successful of a product it is. And the final judge of that success is you.

So I want to know what you think. Do you plan on hosting a Visual Studio LightSwitch application? Do you have a wish list of applications that you would have liked to have built, but didn’t think they were worthy of building out a full blown web project for? Are you of the opinion that “real developers” build all applications, no matter how trivial, by hand in assembler? Or…do you think the world has gotten too complicated and want to see more stuff that will make life easier?

There is a comments section below. Use it, let me know your thoughts. In fact, feel free to fight it out this time.

– Michael Ossou

Add Michael Ossou to your Google+ circles.
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Using the tf Command-Line utility to recover from a “minor” catastrophe

How-to, Team Foundation Server

We published the “Can I use the tf Command-Line utility against a DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server 2010 server?” Knowledge Base article and there’s been some questions regarding some extended use since there’s only an example of the “undo” command.

There are several tf commands that are available but I’ll just provide an example based on the most frequent question that I typically see in the support queue.

So, you’re working with a developer, Joe who wasn’t feeling very well and went home for the rest of the day with all of his belongings, including the laptop that he normally works on.

All that’s required are some minor changes to the Default.aspx file so you connect to your DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server, connect to the WebSite project, you get the latest files that are available and you notice:

Hmm, maybe I can just check this file out and it’ll let me do the work when:

Ok, this isn’t looking good because I must finish the work but how am I going to undo the lock and check-out since Joe took his laptop home?

Now is when the tf command comes in handy!

First, make sure that you have administrative privileges at the Team Project Collection level or at the Team Project level.

To get to the tf command, you can do any of the following and I prefer the first two methods (assuming you’re using Windows 7):

1. Click the Start Orb and search for Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010).
2. Click the Start Orb, access All Programs, then Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, then Visual Studio Tools and then open Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010).
3. As an alternative, you can open up a Command Prompt window and then change paths to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE. If you’ve installed Visual Studio to a different path, you’ll need to access the correct folder.

Depending upon your workstation configuration, you may need elevated privileges so it may be best to run the Command Prompt as an administrator.

So the error message that we encountered actually provides us with all of the information that we’ll need to undo the lock. We have the path to the item, the user and the workspace name.

The command that you’ll run would look something like this:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE>tf undo /workspace:”Joe’s Workspace”;COLLECTION_dev01 collection:https://tfs01.discountasp.net/tfs/COLLECTION $/WebSite/Default.aspx

The results would be:

The operation completed successfully. Because you do not have Use permission on the workspace Joe’s Workspace;COLLECTION_dev01, you must perform a separate get operation in that workspace to update it with the changes that have been made on the server.

Success! Time to make the changes and call it a day but as you’re working, you delete the file and somehow manage to check-in the change. The day seems to be getting worse but this is also something that we can recover from.

Since the file is still available locally, you can undelete the file using a tf command as well. You’ll need to know what folder you’ve created a workspace mapping to and for this example, the workspace that I’m using is set to C:\WebSite. Here’s the command:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC>tf undelete C:\WebSite\Default.aspx

C:\WebSite:
Default.aspx

Check-in the undelete operation and you’re back in business.

If you ever need to get a list of deleted items for a particular folder, you can use yet another tf command:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC>tf dir $/WebSite /deleted /collection:https://tfs01.discountasp.net/tfs/COLLECTION

$/WebSite:
$Account
$BuildProcessTemplates
$Scripts
$Styles
About.aspx
About.aspx.vb
Default.aspx;X4
Default.aspx.vb
Global.asax
Site.master
Site.master.vb
Web.config

12 item(s)

The deleted file is denoted with the X4 which is the deletion identifier.

While I hope that you’ll avoid having a day like this, in the event that it does happen, you’ll know what to do.

There are several other commands that are available and if you have any questions, feel free to post in the TFS Forum for help.

MS DOS – The Big 3-0

Miscellaneous, Video

microsoft dosI’m totally dating myself – but I remember the olden days of BASIC programming on MSDOS with those 5.25″ floppy disks.

Back then, I would have never predicted all the technological advancements that would come. It’s been incredible being in the middle of it all.

So, it was hard to believe that it’s the BIG 3-0 for MSDOS. According to PCMag, “MS-DOS came into being on July 27, 1981” and it was a year or so later when it was made available to the public.

Here’s a video on MS DOS – the early days…

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

The St.Louis Day of .NET is fast approaching

Announcements

That’s right, the event filled St. Louis Day of .NET is right around the corner.  In fact, it’s THIS WEEKEND, August 5th and 6th, being held at the Ameristar Casino & Resort in St. Charles, Missouri (Did someone say CASINO!!! WOOHOO!!).

With almost 800 attendees attending nearly 100 sessions, this St. Louis Day of .NET is expected to be the largest yet.  Sessions will cover such topics such as ASP.NET, Entity Framework, Security, Azure & Cloud, Project Management (i.e. Agile development), Windows Phone 7 and much much more.  In addition, the keynote will be delivered by Jay Schmelzer, where he will announce to the St. Louis community the release of Visual Studio LightSwitch, a new development tool that makes it easier to create high-quality business apps.

To start off the St. Louis Day of .NET right, on Friday, August 4th, registered attendees are invited to the Nights of .NET in the Ameristar’s casino nightclub.  The Nights of .NET is an 80’s theme so dressing in your favorite 80’s gear (although not required) will give you the chance to win a price for outstanding costumer.  There will also be food, giveaways, music and possibly gambling (after all, it is a casino).

This year’s Day of .NET has a regular full price registration of $200 per attendee.  The registration includes:

–       Attendance to any of the nearly 100 technical sessions

–       Breakfast and Lunch for 2 days

–       Attendance to the Microsoft keynote

–       Nights of .NET social event

–       Access to the Charity Book Fair

–       Free Swag

Hurry, registration closes soon:  http://stldodn.eventbrite.com/

See you at HostingCon?

Hosting Industry, Inside DiscountASP.NET, Internet

HostingCon is an annual conference/trade show/get-together that brings together a couple thousand people involved in the hosting industry. It’s in San Diego this year, and Takeshi, Mark, Derek and I will be roaming around looking for trouble attending.

All those geeks and nerds in one place should be something to see. Kind of like Comic-Con, only without the teenaged girls in Sailor Moon costumes. There may be some pale, chubby guys in Sailor Moon costumes, but I can’t guarantee what you’ll see. Most likely a lot of khaki pants and polo shirts with company logos. But that costume has it’s own subtle charm and fan base, after all.

If you spot a DiscountASP.NET badge, grab us and say hello.

Add Michael Phillips to your Google+ circles.
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Meet new DiscountASP.NET staff member, Tonny

DiscountASP.NET Staff

Peace!!!I would like to introduce you to our staff members so you can see who is on the other side of the support tickets and forum posts. Today we have a new support staff member, Tonny.

My name is Tonny, with two n’s. I’m the newest member of DiscountASP.NET tech support team.

I have an Associate Degree in computer science from Santa Monica College, and have been working as an associate in countless projects with a friend who is also a senior software engineer.

I have a background in Web design and programming, experience in E-commerce, and am interested in computer graphics and iPhone mods. I like playing PC games, listening to music, and cooking. I enjoy good food, good music, and of course a good companion. I’m very happy to contribute my experience and knowledge to help our customers have the best web hosting experience.

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