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ScottGu, LINQ, ASP.NET, IIS 7, and Atlas rock

Ok…this is turning out to be a pretty nice summit. We’re a little more than half through the first of two days and these guys are definitely supplementing my geek needs. lol. I’ll be brief because I’m in a session right now and it is interesting.

ScottGu / ASP.NET / Atlas / IIS 7
I put these together because he covered all of them. This dude started with a blank site in Visual Studio and ended up building (in 2 hours) an ASP.NET 2.0 site with the following abilities/functionality:

  • Sitemap
    • Protected sections of sitemap via role based management setup in SQL Server.
      • This was complete user management. With this users could be protected from areas of the site by simply adding or removing them from roles. All of this setup took between 5 and 10 minutes (there was talking between).
      • Login/logout functionality was built-in within 5 or so minutes. I actually met the developer who wrote this control last night. He was pretty coo.
    • Dynamic menu and breadcrumb based on the sitemap
    • URL Rewriting (via urlrewriting.net) on sections (will expand on this in the IIS node below)
  • Full edit/delete/update/insert for products in an admin setting
  • Full paging/sorting functionality for all products displayed
  • Ajax enabled products updates, including “updating” messages, integrated with role authentication. This took him like 5 minutes as well. I actually missed it. I seriously missed him typing for a minute or two, looked up, and Ajax (Atlas) was implemented fully.

Here are my thoughts on what I like that Scott showed:

  • IIS 7 (read my previous review here. I’ll cover what Scott showed on this post though.)
    • URL Rewriting no longer needs a filename at the end. myserver.com/blah/whatever is valid vs having to add .aspx or .php after the last /.
    • Integrated control of modules is very nice. I can build a module that has certain functionality in which I want integrated into the management console. The best part is I can use my language of choice (that is built on .NET; which is potentially any language).
    • The UI is nice. It is much better.
    • SSL bindings are SUPER EASY now. I had Scott, after the session, show me how the ssl bindings work. For those of you who don’t know why this is a big deal, read this regarding wildcard certs.
  • ASP.NET just simply rocks. The fact that Scott did what he did in roughly 2 hours is amazing. Seriously, compare what he did in the time that he did to how long it would take you in PHP. Compare it to how long it would take you in CF. Scott would still be here rolling out a:
    • custom authentication framework
    • creating the paging/sorting code for the table
    • separating admin content from public site content (with the files being in the same directory)
    • (if CF) installing some sort of module in IIS (if possible, pending shared server vs dedicated) for url rewriting (or “spoofing it” with url reading/parsing)
    • creating web services (or whatever is needed for your chosen Ajax framework) for your app to make Ajax calls with the same authetication implemented
    • etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Bottom line, he rocked a full blown site that a client would buy (and do often) within 2 hours. That isn’t good for clients to know, so if you’re a client…ignore my last statement. :-)

LINQ is sweet too. I kinda get the idea now. Writing the query syntax appends methods on methods on methods and so on. These methods make the calls necessary to create the sql query that reads your object, etc. Converting the object to XML is super simple as well. I have no great info on LINQ because I am not that comfortable with it to show an example. I seriously think this is a huge “innovation” by MSFT. Nothing like this has been done previously. This completely removes the need for looping over data to find that one type of node you want. Very nice stuff MSFT.

Ok…bathroom break. I need to take advantage of this time. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II on September 21, 2006 2:01 PM |

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