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Great Free Course on Building ASP.NET MVC Apps With EF Code First, HTML5 and jQuery

Published Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:55:25 GMT

Pluralsight has developed a great training course on Building ASP.NET MVC Apps with EF Code First, HTML5 and jQuery. 

It is presented by the most excellent Dan Wahlin, and is really comprehensive.  Details of the course outline can be found here.

Free 1-Month Subscription to the Course

Pluralsight is offering a special promotion that allows you to get a free 1-month subscription to watch the above course as many time as you want at no cost.  There is no obligation to buy anything at the end of the offer and you don’t need to supply a credit card in order to take part in it.

To get access to the course you simply follow @pluralsight on Twitter and then visit this page and enter your Twitter name using the form on it.  Pluralsight will then send you a private twitter message containing the access code that you can use to subscribe to the course.  Once you are subscribed to the course you have one month to watch the course (and you can watch it as many times as you want during the month). 

Pluralsight is running the promotion through April 27th – so sign-up now to get access.  Once you are signed up you then have a month to watch the course.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. And if you are new to Twitter you can also optionally follow me: @scottgu

Announcing Windows Azure Media Services

Published Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:26:09 GMT

I'm excited to share news about a great new cloud capability we are announcing today - Windows Azure Media Services.

Windows Azure Media Services

Windows Azure Media Services is a cloud-based PaaS solution that enables you to efficiently build and deliver media solutions to customers. It offers a bunch of ready-to-use services that enable the fast ingestion, encoding, format-conversion, storage, content protection, and streaming (both live and on-demand) of video. It also integrates and exposes services provided by industry leading partners – enabling an incredibly deep media stack of functionality that you can leverage.

You can use Windows Azure Media Services to deliver solutions to any device or client - including HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Windows 8, iPads, iPhones, Android, Xbox, and Windows Phone devices.  Windows Azure Media Services supports a wide variety of streaming formats - including Smooth Streaming, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), and Flash Media Streaming.

One of the unique aspects of Windows Azure Media Services is that all of its features are exposed using a consistent HTTP REST API. This is true both for the media services we've built, as well as the partner delivered media services that are enabled through it.  This makes it incredibly easy to automate media workflows and integrate the combined set of services within your applications and media solutions. Like the rest of Windows Azure, you only pay for what you use with Windows Azure Media Services – making it a very cost effective way to deliver great solutions.

MediaServicesArch

Windows Azure Media Services uses the same award-winning media backend that has been used to power some of the largest live sporting events ever broadcast on the web - including the 2010 Winter Olympics, 2010 FIFA World Cup, 2011 Wimbledon Championships, and 2012 NFL SuperBowl. Using Windows Azure Media Services you'll now be able to quickly standup and automate media cloud solutions of your own that are capable of delivering amazing solutions to an equal sized audience.

Learn More

We are introducing Windows Azure Media Services at the 2012 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show this week, and attendees can stop by the Microsoft booth there to meet the team and see live demonstrations of it in action.

You can also visit windowsazure.com/media to learn more about the specific features it supports, and visit the windowsazure.com media dev center to learn more about how to develop against it. You can sign-up to try out the preview of Windows Azure Media Services by sending email to mediaservices@microsoft.com (along with details of the scenario you'd like to use it for).

We are really excited about the capabilities Windows Azure Media Services provides, and are looking forward to watching the solutions that will soon be built on it.

Thanks,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

April 14th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API and Visual Studio

Published Sun, 15 Apr 2012 02:19:14 GMT

Here is the latest in my link-listing blog series:

ASP.NET

  • Easily overlooked features in VS 11 Express for Web: Good post by Scott Hanselman that highlights a bunch of easily overlooked improvements that are coming to VS 11 (and specifically the free express editions) for web development: unit testing, browser chooser/launcher, IIS Express, CSS Color Picker, Image Preview in Solution Explorer and more.

  • Get Started with ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms: Good 5-part tutorial that walks-through building an application using ASP.NET Web Forms and highlights some of the nice improvements coming with ASP.NET 4.5.

  • Async Mashups using ASP.NET Web API: Nice post by Henrik on how you can use the new async language support coming with .NET 4.5 to easily and efficiently make asynchronous network requests that do not block threads within ASP.NET.

ASP.NET and Front-End Web Development

ASP.NET and Open Source

  • Overview of the WebApiContrib project: Nice post by Pedro Reys on the new open source WebApiContrib project that has been started to deliver cool extensions and libraries for use with ASP.NET Web API.

Entity Framework

  • ASP.NET MVC 4 and EF Database Migrations: Good post by David Hayden that covers the new database migrations support within EF 4.3 which allows you to easily update your database schema during development - without losing any of the data within it.

Visual Studio

  • What's New in Visual Studio 11 Unit Testing: Nice post by Peter Provost (from the VS team) that talks about some of the great improvements coming to VS11 for unit testing - including built-in VS tooling support for a broad set of unit test frameworks (including NUnit, XUnit, Jasmine, QUnit and more)

Hope this helps,

Scott

“Unplugged” LIDNUG online talk with me on Monday (April 16th)

Published Sat, 14 Apr 2012 19:45:00 GMT

April 16th Update: You can listen to an audio version of the talk I did online here. 

This coming Monday (April 16th) I’m doing another online LIDNUG session.  The talk will be from 10am to 11:30am (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic or question is fair game.

You can learn more and register to attend the online event for free here. I’ll update this post with a download link to a recorded audio version of the talk after the event is over.

Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there!

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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