UK Launch - Building Web Applications with VS2008 Demo

Thank you to everyone who came along to my session at the launch in Birmingham yesterday - it was certainly pretty packed! I promised a lot of people a copy of the demos and they'll be here soon. In the meantime, I've uploaded a "live" version of my demo site if you want to have a play with it.

The demo source code should be up by the end of today. I've had to change a couple of things in my server control to make sure it works in FireFox as well as IE. Note - you can now get the demo code here.

Click below to see the demo site.

It's only 4 pages and you probably had to see the session for it to make much sense - here's a quick summary:

• I created a standard CSS 2 column layout using the new CSS features in Visual Studio 2008 and turned this into a masterpage for the site
• Default.aspx (Home) uses a little bit of JavaScript to display a Virtual Earth map overlaid with the properties in my Houses database and traffic information for the local area
  • The properties come from a SQL Server db queried using Linq to Sql
  • The traffic information comes from the BBC queried using Linq to XML and then "localised" by using Linq to Objects
  • Both are exposed as web services and called from JavaScript
• GridView.aspx (Properties 1) was a demo of a GridView control binding to a Linq query expression and a LinqDataSource control
• ListView.aspx (Properties 2) was similar but using the new ListView control and adding sorting and editing capabilities
• ImageView.aspx (ImageView) also uses a ListView (and paging) to display the same data in a very different way. It uses an ASP.NET AJAX server control to display a picture of the property and a Virtual Earth map that appears if you mouseover the picture. The page also uses the RounderCornersExtender from the AJAX Control Toolkit and an UpdatePanel for partial page refreshes.

Technorati Tags: asp.net,asp.net ajax,ajax,visual studio

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2008
  Following on from the live demo , here's the demo source I used for my launch session. Download the slides

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2008
  Hi, I've been watching your blog for quite a while now and I just wanted to thank you for such a great session! I'm not really much of a "Web Guy", the closest I get is Web Services, but you put all the info across in a really interesting and engaging way. I came back to the office the next day and sang the praises of the new CSS and JS features to our Web Devs, although I'm sure I didn't do them as much justice as you did. Thanks again :D

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2008
  Thanks to Scottish Developers for inviting me to talk at their event last night. I think the Rangers

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2008
  Hi Mike, I came to your launch session on 19th March, and thought your demo was absolutely superb. Really great to see it on here, as I was racking my brains as to how it was done. As you can see from my URL, my site is a collection of churches across my home county. It makes usage of mapping, just Google Maps at present, but your session made me wonder just what I could get up to using Virtual Earth maps instead! :) Thanks again, John

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2008
  Andy, John - thanks for the comments. Glad you enjoyed the session and it caught your imagination. John - I want to see that site in Virtual Earth when you're done! :-) Mike