Community developer blogs

Mike Ormond

Recent Posts

• Want to see ScottGu talk ASP.NET MVC? [UK]

  Posted: 30 Jun 2009 at 17:25 by MikeOrmond

  As well as doing a Silverlight session at the London .NET User Group on Thursday night, Scott has also offered to do an ASP.NET MVC session this Friday afternoon (3rd July) for Vista Squad at the Microsoft offices just outside Reading from 1pm. For Friday’s ASP.NET MVC session we originally had a 120 person limit which filled within a few hours but we’ve managed to double the room size! If you want to catch Scott in action, you can register at / On the day, registration is at 1pm.

• ASP.NET 4.0 Enhancements to Data Controls

  Posted: 29 Jun 2009 at 07:36 by MikeOrmond

  Picking up where I left off some time back on ASP.NET 4.0, today we take a look at some of the enhancements we’re making to data controls in ASP.NET 4.0. Let’s start with the easy stuff. Cleaner HTML Over the years we’ve made significant advances in making the markup generated by ASP.NET server controls standards compliant, flexible and easy to style the way you want with CSS.

• Expression Design Resources

  Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 14:12 by MikeOrmond

  Following on from my post about the Expression family, I said I’d follow up with some more details on Expression Design. Someone commented on my other post that Expression Design is “too basic” and I suppose for many people that will be a fair criticism. For someone like me, who’s not a graphic designer, I find it strikes a good balance between functionality and complexity (and I use some other tools to achieve things Design is not so suited to such as manipulating bitmap images – Paint.

• Bing Background Images

  Posted: 22 Jun 2009 at 14:01 by MikeOrmond

  I love the idea of using iconic British images for the Bing homepage. I thought the current one was particularly evocative. That said, I currently have this beautiful image as my Win7 desktop background (in focus and without the text :-)). It was the winner of last month’s Microsoft UK photography competition and it’s absolutely stunning IMHO. It was taken by David Weeks. In fact things Bing have moved on and today we have this image on the homepage for the UK.

• Microsoft Expression 1..2..3

  Posted: 22 Jun 2009 at 07:58 by MikeOrmond

  Blend, Encoder, Web, Design, Media, Studio – it’s easy to get confused by the plethora of Expression family products but given we’re nearing another release I thought it might be worth a few posts to try and to try and simplify things as well as provide a “jump-start” for some of the individual tools. Starting from the beginning, Expression is our brand for more “design” oriented products (as distinct from Visual Studio as our brand for development related products).

• Web Platform Installer

  Posted: 19 Jun 2009 at 16:50 by MikeOrmond

  I’ve realised that despite all the noise about it, I’ve pretty much managed to ignore the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) to date. Which is a shame because I know it does some pretty cool things, takes a lot of the drudgery out of configuring your machine and, from today, I’m actually convinced that I would use it myself even though I’m pretty comfortable setting up my dev environment on a new box. (when I say a new box I really mean the same box fdisk’d.

• Birmingham – An Intelligent City?

  Posted: 04 Jun 2009 at 11:47 by MikeOrmond

  I’d seen this video (as I said to Mark, I find the start a bit creepy) before I saw Mark’s blog post on the subject (which he wrote some time back). It’s a proof of concept focussing on transport and the challenges we all face when negotiating our way around the cities where we live and the cities we visit. How should I get there? Where should I park? Can I drop the car here and walk. Perhaps I should get the bus? Why don’t we have some sort of integrated transport information network?

• ASP.NET MVC Training Kit

  Posted: 03 Jun 2009 at 07:47 by MikeOrmond

  Apologies if I’ve mentioned this before – I don’t recall doing so but that doesn’t count for much these days! I came across the ASP.NET MVC Training Kit (actually, Mark Quirk put me on to it). According to the blurb “The ASP.NET MVC Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize ASP.NET MVC”.

• Starting Out in Web, SharePoint or Mobile Dev? Why not Ramp Up?

  Posted: 01 Jun 2009 at 08:04 by MikeOrmond

  RampUp is a community based learning programme created by a plethora of well respected subject matter experts that currently offers track on the likes of: Developer Basics Web Development with ASP.NET Move from ASP to ASP.NET Move from PHP to ASP.NET Develop Windows Mobile 6 Applications SharePoint for Developers and many more Best of all it’s free – just click on a track to sign-up and get started. Sounds like a great deal to me. Technorati Tags: training,.net,asp.

• Suteki Shop and ASP.NET MVC

  Posted: 29 May 2009 at 09:08 by MikeOrmond

  At last year’s Remix:UK conference in Brighton, ScottGu mentioned a local company called Jump the Gun who were running their online store on ASP.NET MVC well before we’d released it. Wanting to chat to a local company who’d chosen to build ASP.NET MVC applications, I recently did a bit of research and discovered that the Jump the Gun site is running on an open source eCommerce app called Suteki Shop developed by Brighton-based freelance programmer Mike Hadlow.

• ASP.NET MVC Localisation

  Posted: 29 May 2009 at 07:38 by MikeOrmond

  I mentioned in my Developer Day Scotland session that ASP.NET MVC enjoys the benefits of the underlying ASP.NET platform such as caching, membership, profiles and localization. Guy Smith-Ferrier politely questioned the accuracy of that statement wrt localization (and who am I to argue - Guy knows more about ASP.NET localization than I ever will). We discussed it over email afterwards and Guy has written up his thoughts on ASP.NET MVC localization on his blog.

• Integration via the Cloud

  Posted: 28 May 2009 at 07:41 by MikeOrmond

  I sat in on a Windows Azure session given by my colleague David Gristwood recently. He talked a great deal about the fundamentals of the Azure platform, the compute and storage capabilities, as well as talking about other components such as SQL Services and .NET Services. At one point he played a short video showing integration between an application running on Windows Azure and another running on Google App Engine.

• ASP.NET MVC and iWantGreatCare.org

  Posted: 27 May 2009 at 10:30 by MikeOrmond

  I recently dragged colleague Mark Bloodworth out to the lake at TVP to chat about ASP.NET MVC and working on a proof of concept with iWantGreatCare.org, a free service for those looking to find the best healthcare for themselves, their family or those they look after. I was particularly interested in the migration from Ruby on Rails (from around 4.00) and the extensibility that ASP.NET MVC offers – Mark talks about easily adding mobile support to the app (from around 5.

• VS2010 Download Link (for MSDN Subscribers)

  Posted: 18 May 2009 at 17:10 by MikeOrmond

  Download Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Fx 4.0 Technorati Tags: visual studio 2010,.net fx 4.0

• A Few VS2010 Beta 1 Screenshots

  Posted: 18 May 2009 at 13:17 by MikeOrmond

  As I blogged earlier, VS2010 will be available to MSDN subscribers later today (and everyone else later in the week). I’ve just finished installing and thought I’d share a few screen captures of the experience (and the F# templates). Performance is *much* better than the CTP and earlier interim builds that I had access to. Will report back any other useful findings in due course. Technorati Tags: visual studio 2010,vs2010,install

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Available Today to MSDN Subscribers

  Posted: 18 May 2009 at 08:08 by MikeOrmond

  One of the many benefits of being an MSDN Subscriber is early (and sometimes exclusive) access to early bits. Today the long awaited beta of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 will appear on the MSDN Subscribers site. It’s not there yet but it will appear later on today. Keeping an eye on Twitter is usually a good way to see when it hits :-) Later in the week (probably Wednesday) updated documentation will be released on the Visual Studio 2010 homepage.

• Remote Media Streaming on Windows 7

  Posted: 15 May 2009 at 17:15 by MikeOrmond

  I’ve just been reading about a new feature in Windows 7 RC – Remote Media Streaming. This reminds me of Orb which I’ve previously used with some success on my Media Centre. I can still remember being at TechReady (an internal Microsoft conference) in Seattle when, during an idle moment, I decided to see if I could connect to the Media Center back home to watch an episode of Top Gear on my iPAQ. To my amazement, it worked remarkably well.

• Phil Winstanley and Dave Sussman Reflect on WebDD09

  Posted: 15 May 2009 at 09:31 by MikeOrmond

  Technorati Tags: developer,community,webdd,asp.net,silverlight

• Interested in Azure?

  Posted: 14 May 2009 at 14:32 by MikeOrmond

  If you saw my Azure videos you’ll know that I went along to what was the first meeting of a new usergroup specifically interested in Azure – UK Azure NET. Their next meeting is on Tuesday 19th May from 6.15pm to 9.30pm at the Microsoft London office. The agenda is as follows: 6:15 - 6:30 Arrive 6:30 - 7:30 The Cloud: An Architects Dilemma - Andy James 7:30 - 8:15 Break with food and drinks 8:15 - 9:15 Azure Application Demonstrations - Ray Booysen & Marcus Tillett

• Virtual PC Beta

  Posted: 14 May 2009 at 08:04 by MikeOrmond

  As a follow up to my previous post, I thought I’d try and give you an idea of the Virtual PC Beta experience in Windows 7 RC if you haven’t seen it yet. For one thing, there were parts of it I found less than intuitive. I started by running the appropriate installer to get Virtual PC Beta on my system. Note Virtual PC Beta is available for Windows 7 RC only. I then get a Windows Virtual PC node in my Start –> All Programs menu.