Monday, December 29, 2008

VS 2010 for Web Developer Previews

 

At PDC 2008 in LA and TechEd EMEA 2008 in Barcelona we announced key new features for Visual Studio 2010 for Web Developers...  Apart from our focus on MVC, Dynamic Data, Silverlight and other key ASP.NET runtime functionality, this was the first time we announced the key investments pillars for Web Developers in VS 2010...  Over the next year or so we will be writing in details about these new features, but to start off  I thought it would be great to share various videos which are available to view online today ...

Visual Studio 2010 - Web Development Overview

In this talk we provided the glimpse of the major investment areas in VS 2010.  The talk is divided into following key areas

  • Design View - Improved CSS 2.1 Support &  standards compliance
  • Source View
    • HTML Snippets
    • JScript Intellisense
  • Web Deployment
    • Web.Config Transformation
    • Web 1-Click Publish

Jeff did a great presentation at PDC on this topic which can be viewed at the link below:

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL48/ (77.32 mins)

I also presented a similar talk at TechEd EMEA which is available for viewing below:

http://www.vimeo.com/2667207 (62.42 mins)

Visual Studio 2010 - Web Deployment

In this talk we talk about Web Deployment in detail and how next wave of Web Deployment technologies will make deployment a much easier task.  The key focus areas of this talk are:

  • Web Packaging - Packaging your web applications into .zip files
  • Web.Config Transformation - Transforming your web.config file (i.e. connection string, debug flags etc) from dev environment to production environment
  • DB Deployment - Packaging and deploying your SQL Server databases along with your web application
  • Web Publishing - Using Web 1-Click Publish functionality to deploy your web application with ease.

I did a presentation on web deployment at PDC and TechEd EMEA; the PDC presentation can be viewed at the below link:

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC33/  (84.42 mins)

If you would like to see a more compressed version of the talk then I also did a talk with Jason Olson in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 Week! you can view this video at the below link:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Web-Development-and-Deployment-with-Visual-Studio-2010/ (34.40 mins)

Hope you will enjoy these videos...

Friday, December 26, 2008

KritZu: Zune playlist generator based on folder structure

 

Some time back we got Zune and uploaded our thousands of songs on to it... 

One of the things that we had earlier done was arranging all the songs based on playlists on our computer hard disk in folder structure; things like "Classic Rock", "Heavy Metal", "Jazz", "Ghazals", etc... Many a times we also had multiple level of folder hierarchy set up like My Music --> English --> Rock --> Classic Rock OR Hindi --> Ghazals --> Movie Ghazals and so on...

Anyway's we painfully learnt that Zune's software runs out of meta-data; although it allows me to sort songs based on genres, album, artist etc it does not create playlists based on the directory structure on my computer hard disk...  Well we initially started off doing this manually but soon realized that this will take days for us to complete...  So I wrote this quick utility which will create Zune playlists based on the folder structure on the hard disk...

Following are the easy steps to use it:

  1. Download KritZu from https://cid-c4e57bdd18ff6eaa.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public
  2. Unzip KritZu.Exe at the location you want...
  3. Launch KritZu... 

KritZu-Help

Few points to note:

  • KritZu will pick up .mp3, .wma, .m4v, .mp4, .m4a, .m4b and .mov files inside the playlists...
  • To find out the location where Zune playlists should be placed (i.e. second textbox on KritZu) follow below steps:
    • Open Zune software, on top right you should find settings options:image
    • Go to the Zune Folder section as shown below and note the location of Zune folder image
    • Notice that the Audio location in the above example is C:\Users\user\Music\Zune... In this situation the playlist location for audio will be C:\Users\user\Music\Zune\Playlists
    • If the Playlists folder does not exist then feel free to create it or else KritZu will create it for you...  Now the output of KritZu will automatically be picked up by Zune next time you connect to your machine.

Hope this will help...

-Vishal

PS: Do make sure that you have atleast one media file in the root folder coz KritZu is little silly, it gets confused if no media file is present in the root folder :-)