James Senior's Blog

"This was the best training I've ever had, this was even more useful than TechEd" – Gabriel Cruz

Last Friday, Phil Haack, Jon Galloway and I ventured to Los Angeles to deliver a Web Camp at the downtown Microsoft office. 

Photo – “What do you mean you drive on the other side of the road in the USA?”

Agenda and Content

After we got to the venue safely, we delivered an agenda on the following topics:

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Fundamentals
• Entity Framework (including a sneak peak of code-first)
• Validation, Localization
• ASP.NET MVC + jQuery, jQuery Templating, jQuery Globalization
• ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor

NEWS – You can now get the Web Camps Training Kit – September Edition!  This includes much of the content we covered at the event.  (note – we don’t have jQuery Glob or MVC 3 content, yet – that’s coming in November).

Feedback and areas for Improvement

Feedback from the event was great with average scores really high:

• Overall Eval Score: 8 out of 9
• Overall Instructor Score: 8.8 out of 9

This is what people told us about the event:

• “Love the flexible agenda”
• “One big advantage of the training is to learn first hand the trends in the industry and be able to direct appropriate amount of resources toward training and tools.”
• “The course was great. As a web forms developer, I was particularly interested in learning more about MVC 2 and 3 and this course provided a huge amount of information. Not only was I able to see how sites can be created using MVC, but just by watching the instructors write code in Visual Studio I was able to learn tips and coding shortcuts that I didn't know about before, and that will help me work more efficiently in the future.”
• Great course. Even better that the price was free.
• “Were the presenters good? It was friggen Phil Haack, Jon Galloway, and James Senior. They were great.”

There’s always areas for improvement, from what you said we need to work on some things for next time:

• Make sure we have time for labs
  • Yes – we overran slightly due to questions but next time we’ll try and leave more time for hands-on building instead of doing the extra ASP.NET MVC 3 session
• Get the wifi working
  • We hear you.  It’s always hard because we can’t control the venue and piping in dedicated broadband is super expensive.
• Make sure the content is available at the event or on the website
  • Yes – due to timing the Web Camps Training Kit September Edition wasn’t available, that shouldn’t be an issue moving forward

We are on the cusp of releasing more dates for even more Web Camps, around the world. I’m very excited about this and I’ll have more news on this very soon! For all the information make sure you follow @jsenior or @webcamps on Twitter and check the www.webcamps.ms website.

Today I blew my machine away and ready for the Web Camps events starting next week in Toronto – getting everything from Visual Studio 2010 to IIS and more installed.

Part of the demos will be covering Web Deploy – the technology that makes it easy to deploy websites on IIS from Visual Studio 2010 and IIS.  I normally get it installed via Web PI but for whatever reason (I may have installed something in the wrong order) I wasn’t getting the UI features showing up in IIS – where it should give me options to import and/or export a deployment package:

This was curious because Web PI was telling me that Web Deployment Tool was installed too, so I decided to try install it “raw” using the MSI – which is available under the main Web PI download link:

When I ran that MSI I had the option to change the installation and this revealed where the problem was.

The components for the UI Module in IIS Manager were not installed as you can see above.  Once I installed them, sure enough, the options appeared in IIS.

I have no idea why the options for importing/exporting packages didn’t show up in IIS – nor do I care :) – but hopefully if you come across the same problem, this will help you out.

Today we launched the Windows Server 2008 R2 Learning Centers on Channel9 – congrats to the team!  There’s great content on there including labs, videos, presentations etc covering a wide range of topics from performance and efficiency to extensibility.

Learn deployment, scale and extensibility

As a web developer, there are some lessons that of particular interest to me that teach me how to deploy and scale my web application and make sure it’s running lightning quick.  All this is covered in the “Extensible Web Platform” lesson.

Give your native code apps an API just like web apps

Also, I often want to create APIs for my web applications that allow other developers to interact with it and help create a rich ecosystem of apps that add value on top of my platform (think Twitter).  We’ve already showed you how you can do this using REST APIs (check out the Web App Toolkit for REST Services).  The Extreme Web Services course shows you how you can now do the same for your native code applications built in C++ etc.

Need Scale? There’s an extension for that!

If you need ultimate scale for your web applications be sure to check out the free extension called Application Routing Request which allows administrators to optimize resource utilization for application servers to reduce management costs for Web server farms and shared hosting environments.  Check out the blog post from the product team and see how Inernap are using it today to cut costs whilst improving scale and reporting.