For a limited time, you can get IronPython in Action by Michael Foord and Christian Muirhead at 35% off. You can grab the discount code here at http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/ if it is still available.

IronPython is a .NET implementation of the Python programming language. It has been a long time since I looked at Python but I believe that its significant features are dynamic typing and dynamic binding.

IronPython is getting a lot of attention now and you can use it on ASP.NET, Windows, Console, and Silverlight projects. It is interesting because it offers different ways to solve problems and write algorithms, so for me I’m not looking at it as a C# replacement but as a supplement to my C# and other skills, but I’ll write a review up as I get into the book.

I got the eBook pretty cheap and I’m converting it for reading on my Kindle now.

Head over to Microsoft and download the final version of IE8. You might have had a release candidate or beta version already but this is the final release version of version 8.

IE8 has a bunch of cool features which are better detailed at the IE web site than I could do, but suffice to say that I like it a lot and it runs pretty fast.

At the MIX conference this week, Scot Gu announced the release version of ASP.NET MVC which has been widely anticipated.

You probably heard that already in the several hundred blogs and web pages that already announced it.

What you may not have read is that there is now documentation on MSDN for MVC. This is great for anyone who has been trying to learn MVC by following the increasingly out of date (but much appreciated) blog posts from since the early days of MVC.

Check out the MVC Documentation at MSDN.

You can get the latest MVC bits over at ASP.NET Downloads.

That brings up one of the other items announced at MIX, v2 of the Web Platform Installer. This is how I would recommend that you install the updated MVC bits and anything else from ASP.NET. Note though that you need to uninstall any beta or RC first before you launch the Web Platform Installer.

The Web Platform Installer has a bunch of other web and ASP.NET bits including the ability to install apps like BlogEngine.NET and even some PHP apps that run on Windows like Drupal. And since it runs off an RSS feed it will always have the most up to date listing.

Also announced at MIX is the Silverlight 3 Beta. You can get the beta and the Web Platform Installer will install the tools for Visual Studio. I haven’t installed it myself (yet) so I don’t know if the WPI will install all the Beta bits or just the VS Tools for Silverlight 3.

Here out this interview with Scot Gu on Silverlight 3 here.

One of the coolest things released are some of the new features in Expression Blend 3. You can get the current preview of Expression Blend 3 here but what you may get really exited about is the new SuperPreview feature which is a separate download (not sure if it is also included in the Blend 3 Preview). I haven’t installed Blend 3 yet but I haven installed the SuperPreview and it is very cool. Essentially what it allows you to do is see how your web pages look in  various browsers and versions of browses automatically without having to have those browsers installed AND it helps you find the tags and attributes and styles that are causing your pages to look different in each browser. The version that was demoed could show you your pages in IE8, IE7, IE6, Safari (version?), and FireFox (version?) which is very cool. Unfortunately the SuperPreview download can only compare your currently installed version of IE with IE6 but that is still very cool. I will be checking out the Blend Preview to see if it contains the full feature or the same as what is in the SuperPreview preview.

You can read more about SuperPreview here and read the Expression team’s blog entry and watch a SuperPreview video here.

You can read a summary of yesterday’s MIX keynotes here.

On Monday I did a presentation with Chad Brooks and Dave Cameron at our local .NET User Group: MaconDotNet.

My sections were on LINQ and Code Generation. Other than me running a little long, the presentation went great. Here are my slides and examples but head over to the user group page to grab Chad and Dave's slides and examples when they get posted.

If you find any errors or typos, let me know.

(Note: I did a section on LINQ and a section on Code Generation. Not "LINQ and Code Generation")

I had a long break after Christmas that I used to work on some projects. Sometimes it is hard to get any free time and it was a well enjoyed break.

I didn't get as much done on my XNA project as I would like but I've been studying the book pretty thoroughly.

My main project that I worked on was to build a web page for my dad's business. He has an old brink-and-mortar style business that was started by my grandfather. My dad is pretty tech savvy but he never got around to building a web page for his business so I thought it would be a good project.

I got a lot done on that and I'm talking to my sister and my wife to help me finish writing content for the site.

For my dad's web page I decided to investigate what it would take to add an eCommerce section and see if he was interested in selling a few items over the 'net as well as in person. So I started looking for a good ASP.NET based free eCommerce solution preferably that had built in support for PayPal's free (mostly) services. I figured there had to be lots of them out there but I didn't know one off the top of my head so I decided to look.

Turns out I was wrong, or at least I couldn't find as many as I thought. osCommerce seems to dominate the PHP world with several other strong competitors, but I didn't find as many stand-out ASP.NET kits.

However I did find 2 that seemed to be the best.

Microsoft used to have an eCommerce starter kit that you could download for ASP.NET. I don't know the details of how this happened but the kit has now been taken over by someone else and is called dashCommerce. The code is published under a free open source license and a commercial license with the main difference being a support agreement and the requirement that the free version must always display a message at the bottom of the page that reads "Powered by dashCommerce".

The other good product I found, which is also listed on Microsoft's ASP.NET web page, is DotShoppingCart. This product has as far as I can tell the same general options as dashCommerce, that you can use a free open source version as long as you leave the "Powered by DotShoppingCart" message at the bottom of every page or you can buy a commercial license with a support agreement.

I downloaded both products and tried them out using PayPal's sandbox. (btw, PayPal's sandbox is a pain to use.) I liked both. They are both similar in the features that they offer. They both have basic CMS tools and product catalogs. Both allow products to have configurable attributes like Size or Color or whatever you need. dashCommerce gives each product a different SKU per attribute while DotShoppingCart seems to give a product one SKU no matter the attributes. Both require SQL Server 2005 Express (or greater) with Advanced Services. I believe the main reason for this is that both use the Full Text searching. I don't know if either uses any of the other Advanced Features. Both have source code. dashCommerce uses SubSonic and log4net while DotShoppingCart uses the MS Enterprise Library. Both appear to have IPN support but I didn't test it.

I would also like to point out that ComponentOne also offers a free control library for dealing with PayPal. I haven't downloaded it or looked at it but it might be worth checking out and kudos to ComponentOne for offering it for free.

What do most people use? Either of the items I've listed or do you roll your own? Or is there another free or low cost kit or product that I have missed?

A little update on the Zune issue I mentioned in my last post. Aeroxperience gives a good explanation of the bug and shows some source code here. The problem ended up being a bad way to calculate years and the date combined with a while() loop with a case that can loop forever. Check it out.

This may have came and went without you even noticing.

On 31 Dec 2008 all 30 GB Zunes locked up and stopped working. If you think that MS doesn't make a 30 GB Zune, your confusion is understandable. the 30 GB models were the original Zunes which had the circle style navigator instead of the touch based squarish navigators all the new ones have.

(quick side note: I like the new Zunes. I got my Mom a 4 GB Zune for Christmas and I hadn't realized until I played with it that the little square is touch sensitive. I thought it was just a square version of the circle joystick that mine had but its actually very nice upgrade. It was new to me even if this feature has been out a while. Now back to my main point...)

I use my Zune quite a bit. In fact I had just used it on Tuesday when I went running. But I hadn't used it yet on Wednesday when I saw an article on Slashdot about Zunes mass crashing. I said to myself, "That's weird." and turned mine on to see that it too was locked up.

Turns out there was a bug in the original Zune in how it dealt with leap years. 2008 was a leap year and the Zune got confused because it was one day longer than it expected.

I was wondering how long it would take for a fix to come out but it was pretty quick as it turns out. In fact I didn't have to do anything except let the battery run down. See here for the details from MS, but all you had to do was let the battery die then wait until after the new year started in GMT and re-synch your Zune and the leap year problem went away.

So I guess it was mostly a much ado about nothing unless you were using your Zune for your New Years party music.

(another side note: Over my Christmas break I've been reading about XNA Game Studio 3.0. Thats MS tools to write games for Windows, XBox 360, and your Zune. I mention this here because I remember reading that if you want your game to work correctly on the old 30 GB Zunes like mine that you had to be careful how you used the joystick/navigator because it only has up, down, left, right, and click while the new ones have a much more precise control which can detect a greater degree of movement in every direction. Kind'of interesting, to me at least.

Here is the XNA book I'm reading now. It doesn't get into super complicated aspects but it covers all of the basics so I would recommend it as a good getting started book.

Here are some other XNA 3.0 books that are coming out in 2009 that I'm interested in. When I bought the above book there were only a few other 3.0 books slated to come out soon. Now it looks like there are quite a few so I'm only listing a few of the most interesting looking ones:

)

I've been running SQL Server Express 2005 and the Express Management Studio for all my DB development. Ever since SQL Server 2008 came out I've been thinking about upgrading and today I decided to. However, after I upgraded I noticed that my SQL Management Studio didn't upgrade. After a few minutes I couldn't figure it out so I did a web search and found that Luis Rocha had already figured out the solution to the problem.

You can read his solution here. Some of the screen shots weren't working when I read it and I think he mis-named one of the items to click on Step #4 but much thanks to him for figuring it out.

Essentially, the solution is to close the installation program after upgrading SQL Server. Then, re-run the installation program and select Installation->New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation. When you are prompted for a new install or add features then select your current instance. Finally, on the feature tree you can select the features to add including the Management Studio.

I first wrote this up as a post on the ASP.NET Client Side Web Development Forum when I realized that my blog is badly neglected and I ought to be writing stuff there. You can find my forum post here to see if anybody responded over there.

Yesterday I was reading the Visual Web Developer Blog. They have a really good article on JavaScript Intellisence in Visual Studio. http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/11/18/jscript-intellisense-faq.aspx

In the article and comments the author was really encouraging users to post their issues with the technology because they really did use it to improve the products.

That request got me to thinking about the different little issues that I run into as a developer and I was reminded of something that I deal with countless times every day. I started writing it up as a comment in that blog post but I stopped because it was a little off topic and I didn't want to pollute the blog comments with off topic stuff.

So I decided to write up my little rant here .

I don't know how many other people this affects but the following issue affects me every day. In order to be able to debug JavaScript in web pages, I leave my browser in "debug" mode all the time because it is a pain to switch it on and off. This allows me to quickly jump into some JavaScript if I find a problem. However, the consequence is that now every page I browse to with IE pops up that little dialog asking me if I want to debug a script error on the page. It is amazing to me how many pages have so many script errors (at least in IE). I also think this causes a lot of my IE crashes especially when I get 2 or more dialogs in deadlock with each other on different tabs. Does anyone else get this?

Every time I go to cnn.com I know before I even type in the address that I'm going to get at least 2 Debug popups.

Something that compounds the problem for me is that I'm a "Right Click -> Open in New Tab" browser. As I read, if I encounter a link that I'm interested in I open it in a new tab and keep reading. After I finish the page I'm on, I go to the next tab and start reading. But this causes conflicts and lockups when multiple tabs popup Modal Debug Dialogs and I think that leads to a lot of the crashes that I get.

But it is annoying even if you don't browse that way. This problem is at its worst if you even encounter a page that causes a LOT of JavaScript errors or if you browse to a page that triggers an error when your mouse hovers over an element that you have to cross in order to get your mouse out of the browser window so you can close it. Every time you try to get the mouse out you trigger a modal dialog. After you close it, you try to get out again and re-trigger the modal dialog.

So how do other people deal with this? Is there a trick that I don't know that would make this more bearable?

How about the IE team? Could that change how this works so that it wouldn't cause so many problems and halts when I'm working? I would love to see a way to turn debugging on and off easier. I would also love to see the modal dialog removed and replaced with something else like a little error icon or something. The work on IE 8 has been awesome so far. the new debug and dev tools are pretty neat. How about making it easier for web developers to browse the web normally when not debugging?

I've gotten behind on my posts here but this is worth recording. I don't know how many other people were having this problem but when I first searched for a solution I couldn't find one.

The problem I was having was that when I would try to view a document's Properties in Word or Excel 2007 I would get the error "Document information panel was unable to load".

It turns out that the problem is a missing DLL in one of Office's folders.

Thanks to Roman Hnatiuk for finding the solution. You can can read his fix here.

I also want to thank William Boyer for pointing me in the right direction when I couldn't find the answer.