Sasha Sydoruk

Another great post from Scott Guthrie about IIS 7.0.

I can’t wait for this thing to come out; but it will be a while. IIS 7.0 will be available with Vista Client for development, but the Vista Server will come out in a year. And that means you can play with it, but you cannot really deploy on it. It seems though that discountasp offers some hosting on IIS 7.0.

Anyways, the good news is that you can create more than one site in Vista Client and you can also have more than 10 connections.

There was a lot of talk recently about microformats. Things like these really intrigue me, so I had to learn more about them.

What is a microformat? It is way to markup certain types of information with the help of HTML attributes, so it is understandable to computers.

Ok, so it is just like XML? Well, not quite. It is very loosely coupled and marked with HTML attributes like these: class, rel and rev.

Aha, I see what you mean… What kind of data can I mark with microformats? I am glad you asked. You can really format any kind of data that is specific to you. Certain types of information are applicable to different industries, so they already have markup defined for them. For example: events, contact information, relationships to other people and others.

Very interesting microformat is rel=”nofollow”. This format tells search engines whether to use this link in determining PageRank or not. There is a really good post that describes how Google works with this format.

All these examples are only beginning of the massive adoption of microformats. I can see how it will be used to markup source code, stock quotes, opinions about certain sites (think trackbacks on steroids), photos, geo location and of course geo tagging.

Ok, all this theoretical stuff is very interesting, but how do I really use this stuff? Here is an example of my contact information marked up with a microformat:

   1:  <div class=”vcard”>

   2:      <a class=”url fn n” href=”http://www.sashasydoruk.com/”>

   3:          <span class=”given-name”>Sasha</span>

   4:          <span class=”family-name”>Sydoruk</span>

   5:      </a>

   6:      <div class=”org”><span class=”organization-name”>ACME Corp.</span></div>

   7:  </div>

and in html it will look like this:

Scott Hanselman has a good post describing implementation of microsummaries and how it is implemented in dasBlog. In his post he mentions that Firefox 2.0 uses microsummary as a description for all the pages that you add to your Favorites. Another example of tools using microformats is Firefox extension Tails. Tails is a microformat reader; everytime it detects a microformat on a page an icon in the traybar lights up and gives you a nice visual view of all detected entities.

Opportunities for microformats are unlimited and I am really interested to see how they evolve.

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Currently I am getting ready to take Microsoft’s 70-536. Recently I found this great list of all the topics to the exam and links to msdn that explain them.

Edit:

Kevin asked me to link to a book that I am using to prepare for the exam; here it is - MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation. I have almost finished reading the book for the first time. I am going to reread it again and throughly work through the examples.

Here is my opinion about the book. It is pretty good. It covers a lot of topics and has more than 1000 pages. Because of the sheer breadth of the covered material some topics are not described in the detail they deserve. Despite of that, it is a great study guide. My rating – 85%.

Now, the testing software that comes with this book is unbelievingly lame. I cannot stress enough how lame and unusable that stupid software is. It is designed for screens with resolution 800 * 600. It looks like it was written in VB6, thus it does not scale well on high resolution monitors. I just cannot believe that this software was actually released. What a shame… I hope that other books in the series will have better software.

or using Digg terminology - Joel vs DHH smackdown!!!

If you didn’t read Joel Spolsky’s “Language Wars”, please read it now. And now go read DHH’s response to the article -  Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt by Joel Spolsky.

I happen to like both technologies involved in the smackdown. ASP.NET and C# pay my mortgage and Rails is really enjoyable to work with and I am planning to spend more time learning it.

Currently I am concentrating on C# because I am studying for MCTS 70-536 - .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation, but when “Agile Web Development with Rails—Second Edition” comes out - I will buy it.

I am very interested to see how this story develops…

I see this debate coming up all the time. People will spend a lot of time arguing benefits of certain tools and languages instead of actually working on the project. Did I say people? I meant me. I spent huge amount of time trying to decide whether to write a web site in Ruby On Rails or ASP.NET that it is not even funny any more.The outcome?

Finally, I decided on ASP.NET 2.0; but I did waste a couple of months going back and forth between two environments. The good thing the project was my own pet project so the delay this big was not a problem.

The article also highlights the language choices for Copilot - C#, ASP.NET and C++ for Windows Client. But what is even more interesting is the development environment for FogBugz - Wasabi.

“FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.”

I think Joel mentioned this before.

Anyways, the article is really great, just like everything else from Joel. You might not agree with everything Joel preaches, but he definitely makes you think twice about the things you always took for granted. Go read the article - Joel on Software

As Kevin C mentioned in my comments, there is a way to enable Intellisense for skin files in Visual Studio 2005. This is a great comment and deserves to become a post:

Vladimir Bychkov shows us how to enable Intellisense for skin files in Visual Studio 2005.