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Shiju Varghese's Blog

December 2010 - Posts

  • NuGet – My favorite .Net OSS project of the year 2010

    NuGet is a free, open source, package management system for the .NET platform.NuGet is a member of the  the Outercurve Foundation. NuGet is very useful tool for .NET developers who are using open source libraries for their applications. NuGet enables .NET developers to easily discover, download, install and update packages into .NET projects. NuGet will also handles dependency management between libraries. Today, the .NET open source community is widely growing and providing huge set of useful libraries. Using NuGet, .NET developers can easily find and update these libraries into their .NET projects. The client-side NuPack tools provides full integration with Visual Studio 2010. You can get NuGet form its project site  http://nuget.codeplex.com. Read the Getting Started page at Codeplex to learn how to use NuGet

    The below screen shot shows NuGet package window for adding library package reference within the Visual Studio 2010.

    NuGet_PackageRef

  • My .NET Technology picks for 2011

    My Technology predictions for 2011

    Cloud computing and Mobile application development will be the hottest trends for 2011. I hope that Windows Azure will be very hot in year 2011 and lot of cloud computing adoption will be happen with Windows Azure on 2011. Web application scalability will be the big challenge for Architects in the next year and architecture approaches like CQRS will get some attention on next year. Architects will look on different options for web application scalability and adoption of NoSQL and Document databases will be more in the year 2011.

    The following are the my technology picks for .Net stack

    Windows Azure

    Windows Azure will be one of the hottest technologies of 2011. Adoption of Cloud and Windows Azure will get big attention on next year. The Windows Azure platform is a flexible cloud–computing platform that lets you focus on solving business problems and addressing customer needs. No need to invest upfront on expensive infrastructure. Pay only for what you use, scale up when you need capacity and pull it back when you don’t. We handle all the patches and maintenance — all in a secure environment with over 99.9% uptime.

    Silverlight 5

    Silverlight is becoming a common technology for variety of development platforms. You can develop Silverlight applications for web, desktop and windows phone. The new Silverlight 5 beta will be available during the starting quarter of the next year with new capabilities and lot of new features. Silverlight 5 will be powerful development platform for both web-based business apps and rich media solutions. We can expect final version of Silverlight 5 on end of 2011.

    Windows Phone 7 Development Tools

    Mobile application development will be very hot in year 2011 and Windows Phone 7 will be one of the hottest technologies of next year. You can get introduction on Windows Phone 7 Development Tools from somasegar’s blog post and MSDN documentation available from here.

    EF Code First

    I am a big fan of Entity Framework’s Code First approach and hope that Code First approach will attract more people onto Entity Framework 4. EF Code First lets you focus on domain model which will enable Domain-Driven Development for applications. I hope that DDD fans will love the EF Code First approach. The Entity Framework 4 now supports three types of approaches and these will attract different types of developer audience.

    ASP.NET MVC 3

    The ASP.NET MVC 3 will be the hottest technology of Microsoft web stack on the next year. ASP.NET developers will widely move to the ASP.NET MVC Framework from their WebForms development. The new Razor view engine is great and it will increase the adoption of ASP.NET MVC 3. Razor the will improve the productivity when working with ASP.NET MVC 3 Views. You can build great web applications using ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery with better maintainability, generation of clean HTML and even better performance. In my opinion, the best technology stack for web development is ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework 4 Code First as ORM. On the next year, you can expect more articles from my blog post on ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework 4 Code First.

    RavenDB

    NoSQL and Document databases will get more attention on the coming year and RavenDB will be the most notable document database in the .NET stack. RavenDB is an Open Source (with a commercial option) document database for the .NET/Windows platform developed by Ayende Rahien. RavenDB is .NET focused document database which comes with a fully functional .NET client API and supports LINQ. I have written few articles on RavenDB and you can read it from here.

    Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

    Many people didn't realized the power of MEF. The MEF lets you create extensible applications and provides a great solution for the runtime extensibility problem. I hope that .NET developers will more adopt the MEF on the next year for their .NET applications. You can get an excellent introduction on MEF from Anoop Madhusudanan’s blog post MEF or Managed Extensibility Framework – Creating a Zoo and Animals

  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 2 Released

    Microsoft has shipped Release Candidate version 2 for ASP.NET MVC 3. You can download the  ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 2 from here . If you have installed Visual Studio Service Pack 1 Beta, you must install ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2. Otherwise it will break the IntelliSense feature in the Razor views of ASP.NET MVC 3 RC1.

    The following are the some of the new changes in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2.

    • Added Html.Raw Method
    • Renamed "Controller.ViewModel" Property and the "View" Property To "ViewBag"
    • Renamed "ControllerSessionStateAttribute" Class to "SessionStateAttribute"
    • Fixed "RenderAction" Method to Give Explicit Values Precedence During Model Binding

    You can read more details from ScottGu’s blog post Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Release Candidate 2)

  • Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta Released

    Microsoft has been released beta version of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1. The Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 beta comes with a go live license.

    The following are the download links for Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

    The SP1 Beta comes with few bug fixes and also provides new features. The following are the some of the new features comes with Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

    • HTML5 Schema Support
    • IIS Express Support
    • SQL Compact Edition 4 Tooling
    • Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010

    If you have ASP.NET MVC 3 RC installed, the SP1 will break the IntelliSense feature in the Razor views. This will fix in the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 release and it will be release soon.

  • Speaking on Razor View Engine

     I will be speaking at the K-MUG (Kerala Microsoft User Group) on Razor View Engine. The event details available from here . In this session, I will give an introduction to Razor view engine and will demonstrate Razor syntax in ASP.NET MVC 3 Views and ASP.NET Web pages.

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