James Senior's Blog

Today, we are releasing the Web Camps Training Kit: July 2010 Edition – Download it here.

The kit includes all the content we presented around the world at the recent Web Camps events; presentations, demos, labs and more.  Inside the new kit you’ll find content that covers the following technologies:

• ASP.NET MVC 2
• ASP.NET 4 Web Forms
• jQuery
• Entity Framework
• Visual Studio 2010
• Deployment

We’ve also included the agenda so if you want to run your own Web Camp with some of our content, you can do that. Let the team know if you are planning to run your own – we’ll help get the word out (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

As a bonus we’ve also included scenario based content which comes in the form of complimentary slides, demos, demo scripts and hands-on-labs.  These scenarios show you how to take your own web application from an idea and prototype all the way to getting more visitors and optimizing for performance using the Microsoft Web Platform and other technologies from Microsoft.

• Prototyping Your Web App
• Building Your Web App
• Enhancing Your Web App
• Getting More Visitors to your Web App
• Optimizing Your Web App for High Performance

We are going to be adding new scenarios as well as fresh content covering the latest on WebMatrix, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, jQuery and more as well as brand new Web Camps!  Stay tuned!  Again, we’re open to hearing your feedback and requests – if there is anything you would like to see in the next version of the training kit, let us know (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

Download the Web Camps Training Kit!

Over the past 3 months we’ve visited 12 cities across the world delivering free training and fun on the Microsoft Web Platform.  It’s been an awesome experience to see so many talented and passionate developers, from universities, startups, large businesses across the globe – all learning to build cool web apps on the Microsoft Web Platform. 

On Day 1, everyone got to hear about the latest developments in ASP.NET including a tour of ASP.NET 4 Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC 2, Entity Framework, Visual Studio 2010, Deployment and jQuery.  There was a lot to cover in one day and we’ll be looking at how we can slim the content down a little bit so we can drill into more details on the most popular sections.

On Day 2, the building day, people have been building some really cool applications in teams – it’s amazing to see what you can build in one day with a group of people that you have never met before!  Some of the applications that stood out for me were:

• Shopaholic (Redmond Web Camp) – these guys knew how to leverage existing code! They used all the components of the Microsoft Web Platform including MVC 2 and EF nicely.  They also worked really efficiently in their team and got a hell of a lot accomplished
• Ontario Fast Ball (Toronto Web Camp) – father and daughter put together a website for their local softball league using Web PI and DotNetNuke. Great to see how they put this together with no prior programming experience. 
• Online Chat Room (Shanghai Web Camp) – created by a group of three this was entirely based in jQuery and used the new templating engine that Microsoft has been working on with the jQuery core team – impressive having chats across the network with other Web Campers!
• Calendaring (Mountain View Web Camp) – the team put together a really nice web app based in MVC that integrated lots of social networking APIs, iCal and Bing Maps.
• Noisy Neighbor (Sydney Web Camp) – a web app to register pesky neighbors. This app made great use of ASP.NET MVC 2, Bing Maps with drag and drop pins, WCF and a Script Manager for generating proxy classes (from Telerik)

In all there were around 80 applications built at the Web Camps and the list above is just a small sample of the cool stuff people were building!

Some things to look out for in the coming weeks:

1. Web Camps Training Kit – we’ll be giving you all the content from the Web Camps in just a couple of weeks from now
2. More Web Camps! We’ll be announcing new dates for Web Camps very soon – we’re just planning where we should go first!  Sneaky hint – we are going BIG!
3. Web Camps and content for Web Matrix
4. New Web Camps website – time for a remodel, we’ll be launching in a couple of weeks

If you would like Web Camps to come to your city then leave me a comment on this post – we are listening!

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.