At work we are going to do a big refactoring on a ASP.NET MVC project. I learned a lot of this project. One hard lesson was: the code base is as good is the guidance of the senior coders. If you know the power of the Entity Framework, then you also know the countless possibilities to write wicked code. But I’m present at the office only for days a week. That’s why I’m planning to write some articles in the next time.

Hello Students,

tomorrow we will do some live coding. You should watch the NerdDinner video, if you haven’t done that already.
This time, no special preparation is required.

Please make sure that:

• Visual Studio 2010 is running
• MSSQL is running, too
• you have ASP.NET MVC 2 on your machine (use the Web Platform Installer)

Update:
Download the codes from http://code.google.com/p/lecture-hoppe/ .

In this lesson I want to concentrate on the server side of our application. As you already know, web applications are a very big topic. This time you will not need a lot of preparation, if you are already familiar with a scripting language like PHP or even a web application framework like Ruby On Rails.

But it is generally a very good idea to get in contact with ASP.NET MVC now! I can recommend the famous reference implementation “NerdDinner”.

In the next time am going speak about a lot about stuff that can be found in NerdDinner, too. So the following video is worth watching it:

I thought a lot of the practical part of my course. As you already know, I want you to develop a small but functional rich internet application. You asked me to use server and client-side programming language of your choice.

Generally it is great idea to have diversity. But in our case a free choice could have drawbacks:

• skilled programmers probably don’t learn something new
• you could reuse an existing software, which would be unfair to the other students
• I cannot help you

So my specification for you application is as following:

Last week my lecture contained only boring PowerPoint slides. As compensation we are now going to be creative!

In most cases developers and customers speak a completely equal language.* Every party has a clear vision of the software in mind. It is so clear, that even a boring requirement specification is completely unnecessary. Don’t waste time, start coding! NOT! ;-)

But luck is on our side. We have a lot of free and cool tools that save us a lot of pain. One of them is Microsoft Blend 4 with SketchFlow. (SketchFlow is only available in the Ultimate Edition!) Basically I will teach you exactly the same as the smart guy in the following video:

Some students asked me for some good books that I would recommend.
The module description (Modulbeschreibung) of the lecture lists some skills, which are all required and obligate:

• General knowledge in programming
• General knowledge in computer networks
• HTML / CSS / JavaScript

For these skills I would recommend the followings books / resources.

German:

• HTML / CSS / JavaScript: SELFHTML – free!
• Programming (C#): Visual C# 2010 – free!
• Networks: Computernetzwerke by Andrew S. Tanenbaum

English:

• JavaScript: Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
• Programming (C#): C# Cookbook by Jay Hilyard, Stephen Teilhet

For the lecture you should have installed the following tools on your laptop:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Pro / Ultimate)
  • Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools für Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft Expression Blend 4 Ultimate
• TortoiseSVN
• Firefox with Firebug Extension

@My students
Our university already paid for your licenses and joined the MSDN Academic Alliance (MSDN-AA). So get the software while it’s hot!

Log into the universities VPN portal and install and run the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client. Your machine must be a part of the universities network or the MSDN login will fail! (even with the correct login credentials!)

I’m happy that you found my new blog. As promised, I will use this website to collect all my stuff for the lecture “Rich Internet Application Development”. Every post that can be found in the Category “RIA lecture” could important be important for the exam. Everything else is just for interest.
I will start with the first slide that you have seen at Wednesday, the 6th of October: