First of all, Happy new year to all, hope that 2010 will be more successful that the previous years. It has been almost a year and I haven't wrote anything on my blog, and even more than a year since the last technical blog post, I know it has been a bad year for me; well I have some reasons but mostly just because I got lazy, but I was wanting to get back to the community as I gained a lot from it, I think its time to payback a very small portion of what I have learned from them.

So, I think no time is better than the very first day of the year for this turnover and getting back, after more than a year away from blogging, new technologies have came out, and my interests changed too.

Whats new for Amr Elsehemy in 2010 :

As a starter, I need a new blog theme; I won't let this take my time but I will be working on one these days.

What you will see regularly in my blog (hopefully  ) in general is anything technology related, but specifically one of the following topics:

Silverlight

I was an early adopter of this great new technology I even remember when me and moses where reading the very poor (that time) SDK; oh yes and it was called WPFe for Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, it didn't even have a Z-index property in Elements. But now all my knowledge about Silverlight that its API's are written in managed  code, rather than Javascript, and also the latest version out there is the Silverlight 4 beta which was announced at the PDC.

I have been looking around silverlight for a very small time now, and I collected some topics or just outlines for me to work on, or you can call this as a learning plan; I will also blog what I have learned along the way with many resources and links which I used and helped me along the way. 

ASP.NET MVC 

I also was an early fan of the great new framework when it came out in its 5 RC's!! :) then betas, I also started a series which unfortunately I haven't finished, I was building a very simple but complete blog engine, it was for learning purposes and not meant to be used professionally. So, my 2010's years resolution is to learn more and more about this framework also finish or rather restart the jBlogMvc series but this time with the new versions of (ASP.NET MVC, jQuery).

As I mentioned I will re-write my small blog engine to get the most of it. 

Mac world

mmm, 2009 I first got my iPhone 3G in February and soon in August I had my MacBookPro, and so fast I am being a fan of ObjectiveC and XCode, and wanting to build iphone apps and Mac Os applications as well, I expect that I blog from time to time the latest things I have known in this great world. 

Information Retrieval

I mentioned many times my Masters studies, I talked about the courses and so, but now I am in a new phase; the thesis phase, so I will also frequently write about topics in my research.

Finally, my next post will most probably be my silverlight learning plan, and the first lesson I learned, so wish me luck. 

NOTE: In this series I build a blogengine using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery from scratch in order to learn more about these new technologies. If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the jBlogMvc category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

jBlogMvc is converted to be used on ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 if you haven't downloaded it yet you can find it here, to read about the changes and additions in the beta 1 I do recommend reading ScottGu's asp net mvc beta1 announcement if you haven't already read it.

This part had witnessed a big change in project structure hence the new release of the beta1 and building a themable folder structure as shown in the pic.  More...

NOTE: In this series I build a blogengine using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery from scratch in order to learn more about these new technologies. If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the jBlogMvc category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

What about new features this part will cover :

1. Configuration is saved in the database.
2. Managing Posts (Editing, Deleting).
3. Posts are now paged.
4. Some jquery magic is used.

So, lets have a tour in the project one more time. More...

NOTE: In this series I build a blogengine using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery from scratch in order to learn more about these new technologies. If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the jBlogMvc category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

In this part of the series, I build the administration area of the blog engine I am building using the ASP.NET MVC and jQuery, in this part I will cover more basic features used in any blog engine, so lets get started.

What will part 1 cover ?

Basically it will cover how to build an administration area, I chose the wordpress blog engine and tried to clone its structure and some look and feel of it, the operations I will implement in this part will be :

• Visitor
  • Login -- I will just reuse the code available with the default project template for membership stuff.
• Admin
  • Logout
  • Add Post

The stuff I collected and used all over the net from blogs and used in this part can be summarized in the following,

1. Using membership for validation
2. Using the Authorize attribute
3. Using Model Binders
4. jQuery Client validation
5. Small validation framework for business rules and server side validation.(originally written by scott gu)
6. Using nested master pages in ASP.NET MVC
7. Applying the "Post/Redirect/Get" (aka PRG) pattern.
8. Applying some css to make it look nice (based on wordpress blogengine admin layout) More...

Long time no posts, well I was studying Sharepoint 2007 technologies and actually started a series for development a while ago I just managed to write two  introductory posts and didn't write more I have some ideas I'd love to share in sharepoint development which I hope to write about them some time in the future and complete the series. However, recently the new ASP.NET MVC framework has gathered some fame and actually I too got attached to it and I am keen to learn new technologies and so, also the jQuery javascript library has been the choice of most the .NET web developers community.

Its Time to Learn

So, I have read alot of blogs and articles on ASP.NET MVC which has a massive amount of resources (while not being beta yet), I also read the excellent book "jQuery in Action" and learned a lot from it I do recommend it for learning jquery. Now its time to utilize this learning in a simple application that experience the stuff I read about, then I stumbled across this article Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine so be it, I will build a (Simple-Fully featured) blog engine in order to learn more and use these two new kids on the block.

Of course, I will use ASP.NET MVC, jquery and finally I will use Sql Express as the datastore and Linq to Sql for dal.More...