Jack @ ASP.NET

As a software engineer, I focus on .NET, especially asp.net, C#, WCF and so on, and I am also very interested in Search Engine Optimization.

Entries for February, 2011

Adobe Products

Here are several products from Adobe, which are quite useful to internet users.

  • Adobe TimeTracker: It is another shot at basecamp, it has a standard Adobe user interface, it can easily integrated into a project tracking system, financial data system.
  • Adobe Helium: A tool that helps designers to create animations, widgets and interactive content using HTML5 and CSS3. It also provide the web framework, such as the jQuery, and help you build your interactive content that will integrate seamlessly into your app or website. Is that interesting?
  • Adobe Maestro: It has 100GB of storage, and support all file types, including audio and video. When there are changes or new files are created, it will syncs automatically.
  • Adobe Business Catalyst: it is a one stop shop, provides the ability to sue HTML and CSS to design and customize the dev environment. You can customize the web forms, data capture and admin presentation. Your subscription is based on affordable.
  • Adobe Drive 2: it can access to Adobe’s enterprise deployment tools, and it also provide the IUM(Internal Update Management).

There are also more adobe web products, and you can search on internet.

Interactive PowerShell

The PowerShell console runs all kinds of commands interactively: you enter a command, and the console will more or less immediately return the results. If you enter a command and execute it by pressing (Enter), PowerShell looks for the command in this order:

  • Alias: It will first look to see if your command corresponds to an alias. If it does, the command will be executed that the alias designates. You can "overwrite" any other command with an alias by using the cmdlet Set-Alias because aliases have highest priority.
  • Function: If no alias could be found, PowerShell looks next for a function, which resembles an alias, but can consist of many PowerShell instructions. You can wrap commands, including frequently used arguments, in functions.
  • Cmdlet: If it’s not possible to find a function, PowerShell looks for cmdlets, which are internal PowerShell commands that conform to strict naming rules and whose names always consist of a verb and a noun.
  • Application: PowerShell looks first for a cmdlet, and if it can’t find any, it then searches for external commands in the subdirectories specified in the Path environment variables. If you’d like to use a command at some other location, then you must specify a relative or absolute path name.
  • Script: If PowerShell can’t find any external commands, it looks next for a script with the file extension ".ps1". However, scripts are executed only when restrictions of the ExecutionPolicy are eased, allowing PowerShell scripts to be run.
  • Files: If no PowerShell scripts are found, PowerShell keeps looking for other files. PowerShell
    reports an error if your command doesn’t match any files.

NuGet

NuGet is a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries).

NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.  The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on.

NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects.

Let’s take ELMAH as an example. It’s a fine error logging utility which has no dependencies on other libraries, but is still a challenge to integrate into a project. These are the steps it takes:

  1. Find ELMAH
  2. Download the correct zip package.
  3. “Unblock” the package.
  4. Verify its hash against the one provided by the hosting environment.
  5. Unzip the package contents into a specific location in the solution.
  6. Add an assembly reference to the assembly.
  7. Update web.config with the correct settings which a developer needs to search for.