I was scheduled to speak @ the Richmond.NET User Group's December meeting on last Thursday. Around 40+ people showed up for the meeting including Kevin Hazzard and Justin Etheredge.

Decent crowd showed up (40+) and I had fun speaking about IIS 7.0 and its integration with ASP.NET. I am making the slides available on this blog; I hope that would help.

IIS 7.0 Architecture and Integration with ASP.NET [ Presentation ]

I will be speaking @ the December Richmond .NET User Group meeting which will be on December 4th. The following summarizes what will be covered in the presentation.

Microsoft recently released IIS 7.0, new version of good old IIS. IIS 7.0 bring new concepts and architecture. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the new features of IIS 7.0 and also discuss what it brings to table for the ASP.NET developers. We will discuss IIS 7.0's integration with ASP.NET as well.

We will be meeting @ the Markel Plaza which is located @ 4600 Cox Road, Glen Allen, VA 23060

Hope to see you there!

Last night I spoke @ the Richmond .NET User Group meeting. The topic was Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks. A decent number of people showed up (around 40+) and I sure had fun delivering the presentation. I hope the attendees also had fun and were able to grasp some of the concepts and techniques that I shared with them.

After the presentation I received the email addresses of around 16 people who wanted me to email them the copy of the presentation and the code. I will do that tonight and I am also making the presentation and the code available for download from the following links.

Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks [ Presentation ] [ Code ]

As described in this post, I was scheduled to speak @ the Richmond Code Camp 2008.1 on last Saturday.

Oh boy, that was fun. Decent crowd showed up for the code camp; around 15-20 people attended my session on "WSS and SharePoint for Developers". Presentation went smooth, no hiccups except the quality of the projector in my room L The projector was of a poor quality and attendees of the session complained about it. Setting aside the projector related problem, ECPI has been a great host for such events; kudos to them for providing their facility and for making sure everything goes smooth.

Following is the link to the presentation download.

WSS and SharePoint For Developers [ Presentation ]

During the key note, Andy Leonard announced that he is leaving VA and going to Atlanta GA. That's for sure is a great loss for the developer community in Richmond and surrounding area. He is a fine architect, author, speaker and one of the few good people around us. I wish Andy and his family best of luck in their future endeavors. Andy and the family, God bless you.

In the end, big thanks and appreciations for Kevin Israel, Andy Leonard, Darrell Norton, Robin Edwards, Susan Lennon and the team for making this code camp one more success. Guys, you rock!

I will be speaking @ the May meeting of the Richmond .NET User Group. The topic is Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks.

You might be wondering why I chose this topic. Well, let me bring you in context. I have been interviewing .NET candidates for quite some time now. My personal experience from those interviews is that most of the developers lack the knowledge of some of the powerful ASP.NET concepts. So I decided to share some of my knowledge and personal experience with those technologies.

I am sure it is going to be fun. So stop by.

Information about the event is as follows.

Thursday, May 1, 2008, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Social Time starts at 6:00!

Location: Markel Plaza

4600 Cox Road

Glen Allen, VA 23060

I will be speaking @ the upcoming Richmond Code Camp on April 12, 2008. The topic is "SharePoint for Developers" and I am going to share couple of development options available to a .NET developer for extending SharePoint. I will also share couple of tips and tricks that I have learned while working with WSS/MOSS and would also have two cool demos. :)

You can see the tentative schedule for the sessions here

Roanoke is having its first code camp on 3rd March! Lots of technical sessions on state-of-the-art technologies along with prizes :) You don't want to miss that.

More information can be found @ http://www.rvnug.org/CodeCamp2007Flyer.html

By the way, I will be speaking @ the same code camp!

It was a great speaking experience for me last Wednesday; I presented in front of the Richmond dot net community and I think it went well. The topic was WCF and how it differs from the existing ASMX web services.

I could not make two demos work during the presentation. At that time I had no clue what went wrong! I just found out why those demos did not work :)

Actually I keep my technical stuff (files, presentations, books, etc) in a separate folder. So I created demos for the presentation and that folder existed under my technical stuff folder. IIS virtual directories were pointing to the folders underneath that and everything was working fine!

One day before the presentation, I copied the folder that had the actual presentation file to the temp folder on C drive. I did not realize but I had also copied the samples folder along with that to the temp folder. During the presentation, I opened up the Visual Studio 2005 project right from the temp folder (instead of opening it from the technical stuff folder), hence whatever code changes I made during the demo did not work because code was not getting updated in the folder that were mapped to IIS virtual directories!

I ran the ASP.NET compatibility mode demo and it worked as expected.

I got the following message when the mode was turned off:

And the following message when the mode was on (remember I was trying to return the HTTP headers?)

Anyways, I have attached the sample code with this post, so download it. Make sure to unzip the files to a folder, and create two virtual directories named Services and ASMXServices which should point to the respective projects.

I have also written some basic tips in the web.config file under the Services project.

The samples solution contains four projects:

Contracts – contains the service and data contracts (I have added a data contract also just to show how a simple data contract is defined)

Services – contains the actual WCF service implementation. It has two services; Calculator and ServerInfo.

ASMXServices – contains an ASMX web service, Config.asmx; I have used WCF attributes to expose this service as a WCF end point as well! This simple sample shows how you can expose your existing ASMX services as WCF services.

Client – contains the client code, proxies and the config file.

Any questions, comments? Let’s discuss those here.

WCF and ASMX Web Services Presentation and Samples.zip (4.02 MB)

Tomorrow I will be speaking in front of the Richmond developer community about WCF. The details of the presentation are as follows:

Title: Introduction to WCF and the differences b/w WCF and ASP.NET Web Services

Description: WCF is a new technology from Microsoft for building distributed applications. We will discuss the basics of WCF and then would go through a list of differences between the ASP.NET web services and WCF services.

For more information, please visit the Richmond dotnet group web site @ www.richmonddotnet.org

Hope to see you there.

Manny