It's been a while since I've been along to a meeting (...again) mainly due to me working in Burwood while the meetings are in the city, but I managed to drag myself in (by train) and was very glad I did.

I also learnt that the Victoria Dot Net User Group (VDNUG) now has a twitter feed ... sweet!

Visual Studio Tips, Tricks and Techniques

Mahesh Krishnan ran through some of the sides he presented at the TechEd 08 in Sydney.  At first I wasn't sure what I could learn here being the hard core Visual Studio developer that I am *ahem* - but I was pleasantly surprised to learn or be reminded of several cool features in the IDE.

He's written up all his notes into a detailed blog Visual Studio Debugging Tips and Tricks

My top take-aways were ...

• use Ctrl-'.' to automatically popup the Smart Tag menu  ... I had been using Shift - Alt - F10, or ReSharper's Alt-Enter.
• use Ctrl - Shift - 'V' to cycle through the clipboard - hmm, should have known this Window OS feature.
• use Ctrl - 'F3'  to go to the next occurrence of the word your cursor is on, which is much quicker than the  Ctrl - Shift - 'F' (open Find Dialog), Alt- 'F' (do the find).  Although I have been using ReSharper's Ctrl - Shift - F7 to highlight the current word.
• use Ctrl - '/' to jump to the Find text box and open up the shell - had know idea you could do this, and is definitely worth exploring.
• Alt - Shift - Enter - full screen mode - good for presentations
• Debug into specific method (need SP1)
• Debug to ignore stepping into Properties (need SP1)
• Trace points (need SP1) - like setting breakpoints visually, you can now do the same with TracePoints.

He also went over macros as expected, but I've been a long time advocate of this little gem, spreading the joy everywhere I go ;-)

I still feel the best way to become more productive with Visual Studio and the entire Windows Operating System for that matter is to have a "No Mouse Day" - this will force you to use the keyboard, learn the shortcuts, and after an hour or two of pain you'll be much better off for it.

Also, do yourself a favor, and get a copy of ReSharper 4.1 installed ... try it free for a month then convince your manager you need it.  There are loads of productivity enhancements tucked away in there.

There are loads of tips out there which are easy to find, but a good place to start would be to check out Sara Ford's blog

Using the AJAX History Control with AJAX/Silverlight

Jordan Knight took us through a couple examples of how to use the ASP.NET AJAX History control which was packaged into .Net 3.5 SP1.  Basically the AJAX History control allows for more control when dealing with the pesky browser back button which has been the woe of many a web developer in recent times. 

His examples showed how to add history points to the browser which would record specific state values and allow the application to retrieve these values when the browser back/forward button is hit.  It was great to see a Silverlight example using the DOM Bridge which allows .Net classes to be exposed to the html page and accessed via javascript.

This functionality looks particularly useful when dealing with wizard style applications using an RIA technology such as AJAX/Silverlight.

He has a blog article which covers his talk in great detail including the Silverlight example with code and a screencast.

He also acknowledged Jonas Follesoe's blog post covering a similar example which minimizes/encapsulates the javascript involved.

Introduction

As this site is currently hosted on a shared hosting environment with limited bandwidth and disk space we decided we would start hosting some content on Amazon S3.

I first saw S3 when a guy from Amazon presented it at a VIC.NET user group meeting. I thought it sounded pretty cool and signed up for an account as soon as I got home. I quickly found a use for S3 in a web application I was building at the time. I used S3 for all the files users uploaded to the site. I also used it for hosting some web components like static CSS, JavaScript and image files.

This works fine when you just want to reference static content on a web page. To do this you just need to upload the components to S3, make them public and modify the URLs in your HTML output to point to the S3 resource. 

I did run into cross-domain browser security restrictions when I tried to host the entire site on S3 and use web services to get dynamic content. In this case I persisted and got dynamic behavior by dynamically inserting dynamic script elements into the DOM.  While Google Maps does this very well to dynamically get map tiles, it doesn't work so well for scripts as the browsers blocks the page while a script is downloading. I would defiantly be looking at the alternatives before doing that again. In this case we just want some of the larger downloadable files off the web server and onto S3, which shouldn't be a problem.

Tools

I've always used S3Fox which is a Firefox plug-in to manage files on S3. But when I fired it up this morning it isn't accepting my credentials.

I tried using S3Drive which is a Windows Desktop application. This defiantly wasn't what I wanted. It makes S3 look like a "drive" in Windows that has files and directories. This hides the fact the S3 is actually a flat file structure. It seems to use a database to manage the virtual file structure (like a file allocation table). Anyway this would be really good for backing stuff up as you can treat it like a normal drive and drag and drop entire folders. Its no good for us as our content needs to be accessed by HTTP GET Requests.

I ended up using s3:/// which is an "experimental" Firefox plug-in. It works fine but doesn't seem to have the tools to manage the access control list (ACL) that S3Fox has. Anyway its enough to create a bucket and upload some files (Note: The files were already public and didn't require me allow public access. This is fine for me now, but might be a problem if you were uploading sensitive information you didn't want to share)

Virtual Sub Domains with CNAME records

One of the many things I like about S3 is that you can add a CNAME record on your domain and point it to an S3 bucket on account at amazon. So while you can still download your public content from the amazonaws.com URL:

http://static.sharpthinking.com.au.s3.amazonaws.com/sharpthinking.jpg

You can also download the same resource from a sub domain of your own URL:

http://static.sharpthinking.com.au/sharpthinking.jpg

But as you can see with trusty Firebug the image is still hosted from Amazon servers

Reading and Writing to S3 with .NET

I have an S3 project I used previously to read and write files to S3. I wrote it ages ago, copying large parts of Amazon examples from memory. Although it looks a little shabby, the one and only test still works, so I'm confident its still working OK. I'm sure there a better .NET wrappers around these days if you did a quick Google search.

Here is the source code. You'll notice it still has the namespaces from the original project, but hopefully my S3 credentials have been removed. You'll also need to add a reference to an NUnit assembly to run the test.

BlogEngine.NET, Live Writer and S3

As we use Live Writer to publish content to this blog, I am going to update the BlogEngine.NET Metablog API to upload the media elements to S3 instead of the file system. I've looked into it and it should be pretty straight forward. I'm pretty sure you can already get WordPress plug-ins that do this. I'll post the code when I get it working.