DiscountASP.NET Hosting

The Weekend of Two Code Camps and One Day of .NET

Announcements, Code camps and conferences, Marketing, Miscellaneous

This weekend, June 25-June 26, there are three great developer events being held and DiscountASP.NET will be on site at one of them.

The First developer event is the annual two day SoCal Code Camp extravaganza – San Diego edition.  The San Diego SoCal Code Camp will be held on Saturday (6/25) and Sunday (6/26) on the campus of UC San Diego.  The San Diego SoCal Code Camp is a free and is already packed with tons of sessions.  As always, the traditional Geek Dinner will also be held for the first 150 attendees at Cozymel’s.  Registration of the Geek Dinner will be done at the Code Camp.

Some of the DiscountASP.NET team will be on hand to answer any questions you may have about our hosting services, give away some swag, and even provide special discounts!  This will be our first time attending the San Diego edition of the SoCal Code Camp and we are looking forward to it.

The San Diego SoCal Code Camp is free to attend but you must register at http://www.socalcodecamp.com/Member_Register.aspx

If you happen to be in the Altanta, Georgia area, this Saturday is the 2011 Atlanta Code Camp, which will be held on the campus of Southern Polytechnic State University.  There are over 400 developers registered and over 50 sessions scheduled.  Sessions at the Atlanta Code Camp start at 9:30 and commence at 5pm.  After all the geek talk, you can then make your way to the after party at Dave & Busters.  There is no cost to attend the Atlanta Code Camp but registration is a must.

You can register at:  https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=155801 

If that still isn’t enough, the Lansing Day of .NET (LDODON) will be held this Saturday, June 25 at the Okemos MI office of TechSmith Corporation.  The last LDODON was held two years ago so the return is long overdue.  The LDODON is another free event and you will be provided with lunch, beverages, snacks, free swag and a BBQ cookout after all the sessions have completed.  Speaking of sessions, they will cover such topics as ASP.NET MVC, moving from Winforms to WPF, Windows 7 development, jQuery and more.  Registration for this even has unfortunately closed, however, developers are still invited to show up and attend the sessions, but lunch will not be guaranteed.

NuGet for Visual Studio

How-to, Technical,

At its core, NuGet is a package manager for .NET. In the past, if you wanted to incorporate an asset into your solution, you would generally find the library online, download it, read the documentation, copy it over to your project, and then make whatever changes were necessary to your configuration files to get it to work. NuGet simplifies this process in two primary ways. First, there is now a central repository for many common components packaged into NuGets. Second, upgraded tooling is now available in Visual Studio to find and incorporate these packages into your solution without any work on your part. Think of it like an “Add/Remove Programs” feature built into your Visual Studio that can add things like jQuery or ELMAH.

First things first, you need to get NuGet. To do so, open Visual Studio, click Tools -> Extension Manager -> Online Gallery. Now install NuGet.

Once you have NuGet, open a project in Visual Studio and in your Solution Explorer, right click on the References folder (If you cant see your References folder, click the little ‘Show All Files button’ at the top of the solution explorer).

Manage NuGet Packages

Choose Manage Packages. This will bring up a window that will allow you to search for available NuGet packages and install  them into your solution. You can either search the official NuGet Gallery, or look at your own (assuming you set your own up). In fact, there is even a NuGet package of a NuGet Server application available for download.

But wait, that’s not all. The truth is you don’t even need to use the GUI tools to work with NuGet. This is because you now also have Power Shell integration in Visual Studio. You can use Power Shell to deal directly with NuGet Packages. While you may not have a need to do so, this feature is still awesome, because if your like me and run network related commands from a command prompt sometimes during the day, you can do it directly in Visual Studio now. I have a feeling TFS users are going to love this feature.

To be honest, this post just scratches the surface. If you want to know more, watch this video with Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. Even if you don’t want to know more, watch the video anyway, because its probably the most entertaining presentation you will see this year.

– Michael Ossou

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Getting Started with TFS Hosting

How-to, Team Foundation Server, Technical, Video

While there is a considerable amount of work involved in setting up an on-premises Team Foundation Server, we have made our hosted TFS solution very easy. In fact, configuring a hosted TFS account only takes a few minutes.

To show how easy it is, we created a short video that goes over the complete process. The one thing you will need to have is Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010. The free download from Microsoft adds the tooling for Visual Studio to manage Team Foundation Server.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqBWC_qtrVI

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Hosted TFS Build Server is Now Available

Announcements, Team Foundation Server, ,

We are very happy to announce that hosted TFS Build Server is now available as a new add-on to our TFS hosting solution. Right now the TFS Build option is available in our US data center.

The hosted Team Foundation Build services provides the functionality of a build lab in a hosted environment. With Team Foundation Build, you can synchronize the sources, compile the application, and download builds securely. Build managers in control of the “when and how” of the build process – from manual to continuous integration to scheduled builds.  For more information, check out our TFS web site.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

Thanks Portland for Saying ‘Hi’!

Code camps and conferences, Inside DiscountASP.NET, Marketing
Portland Code Camp Banner
ASP.NET Developers Between Sessions

For me, one of the better parts of working at DiscountASP.NET, outside of the cookies in the break room and the Alien Beef Jerky, is getting a chance to meet everyone at the conferences and Code Camps. Hearing everyone’s stories and answering questions about our services is always fun for me and of course the code camps are full of great information too. So you could guess how high I jumped (ok, I don’t really jump that much anymore, but I think you get the point) when the bosses asked me if I wanted to go to the Portland Code Camp this year.

I have to hand it to the organizers as the Portland Code Camp was a great experience. From the sessions to the Keynote by Scott Hanselman – it was loads of fun and great information. But it was everyone who came by our table that really made the event  great. We had people from every level of experience come by, newbies and students, old school developers who have hosted with DiscountASP.NET for years, and application developers who are excited to try our Team Foundation Server Hosting platform.

Scott Hanselman Speaking To ASP.NET Developers
Scott Hanselman Giving His Keynote

I hope everyone who attended the Portland Code Camp enjoyed it as much as I know we did. Like I mentioned before, these events are awesome to us, because getting to meet and chat with developers  is great. So if you happen to see us at any conference or code camp, please come by and say ‘Hi’.

Portland Code Camp – THIS SATURDAY – June 4, 2011 – DiscountASP.NET will be there!

Announcements, Code camps and conferences, Marketing

This Saturday, the yearly Portland Code Camp will be held at the Eliot Center in downtown Portland from 8am to 10pm PST and DiscountASP.NET will be on site with free swag giveaways and to answer any questions you may have about our shared .NET hosting services and about our new hosted Team Foundation Server solution.

As one of the highlights of the day long Portland Code Camp, Scott Hanselman will be giving the lunchtime keynote.  Scott will be discussing various technologies of the Microsoft Web Stack including ASP.NET MVC 3, MVC Scaffolding, Entity Framework, SQL CE 4, to name a few.  In addition to Scott’s lunchtime keynote, there are currently over 40 sessions scheduled for Saturday.

All registered attendees are also invited to attend the Saturday evening reception for great food and great brew courtesy of Widmer Brewery.  There will also be drawings for several prizes provided by the Portland Code Camp sponsors.

Admission to the Portland Code Camp is FREE, but seating is limited so if you plan on attending, you better register now if you haven’t already.   To register for the Portland Code Camp, please visit:  http://devsat.eventbrite.com/

Getting ASP.NET MVC 3 working on DiscountASP.net

How-to, Technical

Getting Errors After Deploying your Application?

After deploying your application, you might see the following error message…

Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Web.Mvc, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35′ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

This is due to the MVC binaries not being installed in the GAC on the server. But do not fret, the GAC is optional for MVC 3! To get your application to work properly, the necessary DLLs must be published to the application’s bin directory.  Visual Studio 2010 provides a simple way to deploy the needed dlls.  Here’s how:

1) Right click on your project and click on “Add Deployable Dependencies”.  You should see the following dialog box:

2) Depending on your project, click the appropriate dependency.  Once you click OK, you should see a new folder, _bin_deployableAssemblies in your project tree.

3) Deploy your application as you normally would and Visual Studio 2010 will now deploy all the listed DLLs onto the server.

Note that you can also use the same method to deploy SQL CE 4.0 dlls.

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Voted Best ASP.NET Hosting Service in 2011 CodeProject Poll

Announcements, Inside DiscountASP.NET

Best ASP.NET Hosting Award - The CodeProjectI am extremely proud to announce that DiscountASP.NET was voted the “Best ASP.NET Hosting Service” for 2011 in The Code Project‘s third annual Members Choice Poll – and this is our third year in a row for this win!

THANK YOU – THANK YOU – THANK YOU – to The Code Project community for all your support.

The Code Project is one of the largest online community for developers on the web so it is an honor to get this recognition.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

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