Slashdot Mirror

You need to run them on Windows. Deal killer.

It's not 2005 any longer. Modern versions of ASP.NET, C# and .NET Core run on Windows, Linux and macOS, in addition to being open source.

Here are some links to browse if you're interested in getting up to date:
- https://www.asp.net/open-source
- https://github.com/microsoft/dotnet
- https://github.com/aspnet
- https://dotnetfoundation.org/
- https://www.microsoft.com/net/core#linuxredhat
- https://www.microsoft.com/net/core#macos

Even SQL Server is being ported to Linux.

The Microsoft of 2017 is not the Microsoft of the early 2000s.

The idea of not hosting your own local copy is that if everyone uses a common source for the library, then the browser should already have that resource cached even if it's the first time you hit the page. For large enough libraries that the Google CDN (or another CDN) includes it, it's worth it.

https://developers.google.com/...
https://www.asp.net/ajax/cdn
https://www.keycdn.com/support...

Now, for obscure libraries, you're better off hosting your own so that you can control the version and not worry about the referenced script changing/moving/breaking stuff.

Performant isn't a word

The path and domain are not authenticated to make sure site A does not set a cookie fraudulently for site B.

These are called "third-party cookies", and browsers (for example, Firefox) already have knobs to disable them. That's not the real issue here, however.

Another problem seems to be, the browsers present all the values associated with the name to the web site, even the cookies not set by that site.

Not only that, a site could get cookies set by "parent" and "child" sites. Furthermore, a lot of web-programming languages (including PHP, ASP.NET, Classic ASP, and GWT) expose the cookies as a key-value store where the key is simply the name of the cookie, and don't document which cookie they use if the browser sends multiple ones with the same key. (Java is a bit better, it just exposes a bucket, but that's harder to work with.)

You've made the standard anti-Windows-guy mistake of confusing ASP with ASP.Net.

ASP is horrible crap. It depends heavily on pre-built COM binaries to do anything useful. Sure, you can find them (and buy them, bleh), but making them is nothing but pure pain. COM is crap. Thus, ASP is crappier crap.

ASP.Net is good. It separates markup from code, and presents a reliable web application base that can be extended in just about any way you can imagine. Like PHP, you can build anything with it, and if you really have to, you can use those terrible (but already paid-for) COM binaries if you need them. And it's not Windows-only anymore. It's open-source. It's on GitHub. And it's going to integrate with Mono fully. Be sure to use it only for good (C#) and not for evil (VB). And don't bring your damned COM binaries to Linux. They won't work, thank god.

It depends on what you mean by "asp.net".

Over the last 3 years asp.net has evolved from "gui controls you compose on a page with TONS of overhead" to "a lightweight framework that looks a LOT like spring". What most people who have used asp.net in the last 10-12 years think of as asp.net is basically dead.

http://www.asp.net/web-api for example. Many people us this and knockoutjs for dotnet based web projects.

Lastly there's the attitude of a small but vocal minority of Lispers who believe Lisp(s) are the One True Approach, are condescending towards anyone who doesn't accept that as an article of faith, and argue that every drawback of Lisp(s) is actually an advantage that lesser programmers don't appreciate. If their goal is to keep Lisp(s) a niche language used only by the self-proclaimed cognoscenti, they're doing a damn good job of it.

Citation needed. The closest I've seen is Lispers trying to convince C++ programmers (for example) that what appears to be a drawback of Lisp is actually not such a big deal (sometimes known as "Old Shoe or Glass Bottle"). Almost all of these that I've seen have since been proven in other languages. For example, C++ programmers would traditionally complain that they don't have enough control over memory allocation, or that anonymous functions are too hard for common use. Today there are millions of people writing Javascript and Ruby and other languages without any apparent trouble. I've heard lots of complaints about Ruby and Javascript, but lack of C++'s memory model or presence of anonymous functions have never been among them.

I guess your perspective determines how you see history. I would say that Lisp's numerous innovations, thanks to their vocal support, are now commonly found in most of today's mainstream languages. I can think of one or maybe two features of Lisp that have not been used in at least a half dozen newer programming languages.

Lisp is kind of like the Mac of programming languages. Everybody thinks the advocates are kind of dicks, and it never had anywhere close to a majority market share, but its technical influence is far out of proportion with the number of people actually using it on any one day. The average person isn't using a machine with "Mac" printed on the label, but they are using pull-down menus and push-buttons and scroll-bars and other technologies which were developed into their current form by Apple. The average programmer isn't using a programming language with "Lisp" in the name, but they are often using garbage collection and if-statements (yes, really!) and lambdas and bignums and recursion.

Do you think that it is more important that people get to use these concepts, or that people only use these concepts if they are called "Lisp"? It's just a name. (I'm a Lisp programmer, and even I think it's a pretty dumb name.) I say, it's better that people get to use ideas like garbage collection, even if not in Lisp.

Fix is here.

http://www.asp.net/

How about these to name just a few?

• ASP.NET MVC
• Castle Project
• NHibernate
• NAnt
• NUnit
• CruiseControl
• TortoiseSVN
• DotNetNuke

Plus tons more available on:

• CodePlex
• CodeProject
• Sourceforge

I also worked in Qbasic back in the day, but I would never mention that to an employer because it would make me look dated. There is a shortage or programmers out there and ANYONE can get a job in the field if they are willing to work at it. You can download free programming software such as Visual Studio Express from http://www.asp.net/get-started They also have free tutorials and videos. If you spent an hour every night learning this for a few months you would be an entry level programmer. The question is are you willing to put in the work?

Not quite. Entity Framework is actively accepting contributions.

I use dark themes in Visual Studio and it was pretty easy to set up. Take a look here or here. This is what I use.

Google is your friend, too.

2. Start your own company, or
3. Learn MVC. Unit testing. Factory Methods. DRY.

But MVC is mainly what you mean by "woefully out of date." That's the biggest wrinkle in the Microsoft world for you to get your head around. Get your head around it, it's not that alien.

http://www.asp.net/mvc

Don't choose "Expert Install" at boot time. Here is a walkthrough. When you get to this screen, selecting "Desktop Environment" will install the default desktop. Currently Gnome on the "stable" set of CDs, probably now XFCE on the "testing" CDs.

Don't choose "Expert Install" at boot time. Here is a walkthrough. When you get to this screen, selecting "Desktop Environment" will install the default desktop. Currently Gnome on the "stable" set of CDs, probably now XFCE on the "testing" CDs.

I wonder what you think about Page Inspector in VS. Though, given that its main feature is the ability to map any element to the code that generated it, it makes most sense for ASP.NET MVC apps... but it would be interesting to see the same concept implemented for other web frameworks.

It's not just developers and managers as groups. Remember, that these days Microsoft is a huge organisation and is full of many different divisions. There's Windows, Office, XBox, Windows Phone etc. amongst many others.

The guys that are responsible for this move are the "Web Dev Div", who are a sub-group within the "Developer Division".

It contains many people, including guys like Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack (who recently left to join GitHub) etc., who have always done things that don't seem very Microsoft-like, like releasing ASP.NET MVC as an open-source product - albeit one that didn't accept outside contributions - back in 2009 along with such moves as bundling things like the open source jQuery library with Visual Studio and openly committing improvements back to the core project without trying the usual embrace, extend, extinguish tactics.

Within certain parts of Microsoft, they can, have done, and are continuing to do some very interesting, worthwhile and generally community-friendly (and not-so-evil) work.

"Windows .NET" makes sense because Windows Server 2003 was the first version of Windows Server to be bundled with a version of IIS supporting ASP.NET, a web application framework built on the .NET Framework. Microsoft even registered ASP.net.

All of the sudden I'm having to create my own custom controls that inherited from repeaters

Welcome to Object Oriented Programming. This is exactly what you are expected to do. Or to do a very simple change, override a base function with your version of the code. In your case, the DataBind event

The difficulty of .NET is that there are so many controls with different events, methods, members, it's hard to find what you're looking for. There is too much to memorize, and it is not as consistent as I would like it to be, so you can't easily transfer learning from one control to another.

But I've never failed to find exactly what I needed, a complete working example, by throwing a few keywords into Google. A few app-specific tweaks and it works.

And if you want to skip that and write your own from scratch, or use things from CodeProject or MSDN or other sites, there's nothing stopping you there. It took me a long time to realize this is how it works, but now it makes sense and I see that it is very easy to get up and running, and likewise with a bit of work customize just about any aspect of any control.

For your example, there are many options. I searched for the binding events on MSDN, decided I'd like to add a row before or after some event, and googled "add row after RowDataBound" and within a few clicks found this:

http://forums.asp.net/t/1251362.aspx

The example is verbose, but essentially you handle RowDataBound() and then insert a new GridViewRow with DataControlRowType.Separator specified. It should be 4-5 lines max, including the function declaration.

Honestly, with so much to know Google writes half of my applications. I get paid to know what to search for, and to strip down the responses to their basic implementations. Nothing is ever directly copyable, as people have their own application logic in there.

to minimize google's already too-effective data gathering... there's things like the refcontrol addon for firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

you could also build your own repo and redirect the common cdn subdomains to it.. a bit of work but could be worth it in the long run for some.... have actually been looking for some way to automate at least the fetching and organization of all those files, but haven't found anything yet (and not quite to the point of rolling my own)

as for cdn's that host libraries... google isn't the only game in town...

http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx
http://code.jquery.com/

we use the last one (hosted by mediatemple) for the sites that we use a cdn for libraries.

FUD. I remember the original slashdot FUD article you're referring to as well. WPF and Silverlight are not all of .NET or C# and even if it were the source cited didn't really say that at all.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/11/04/silverlight-questions.aspx

It's not very hard to know if you're in a VM. http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/10/27/Can-Operating-Systems-tell-if-they_2700_re-running-in-a-Virtual-Machine_3F00_.aspx

There's no reason, in principle, you couldn't create an OS that is hack-proof. But exploits continue to exist.

2. can't stop to note that all the examples are LINQ-based. Is this an attempt to grow LINQ in a "standard"?

No, it's an attempt to promote understanding and usage of monads. LINQ is arguably the most widely used implementation of monads, it's just that many people don't realize it.

Brian Beckman's Don't fear the Monads

An excellent article explaining how LINQ is extensible to work with any monad

A video by Erik Meijer explaining the duality of IEnumerable/IObservable and IQueryable/IQbservable, as stated in the original article

First off...it's not a "decrypted cookie" - it's not that at all. The entire bug allows an attacker to download server-side information (such as web.config) which can potentially contain (and often does) information that should not be public.

Scott Guthrie wrote up a very detailed post on the vulnerability. It's fairly easy to exploit (there are videos available showing the ease in which it can be exploited), so it should be of concern to administrators and individuals writing websites/web applications running on ASP.NET.

Per Scott Guthrie's blog, even if it's on, using anything other than a single default redirect still leaves the app vulnerable.

Has anyone seen MS ever do something pro open source/pro free software?

Off the top of my head:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/10/jquery-globalization-plugin-from-microsoft.aspx

They could have combined it with the "history stealing" exploit, registered domains bananas.com and peaches.com, and picked for each victim the "appropriate" site to like.

But they are doing that? The /. article was just written by an idiot who didn't check his shit and wrote bunch of bullshit without any reference.
asp.net MVC 2.0 sourcecode, dated 11 march 2010 http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41742
freshly updated MS blogs regarding asp.net http://weblogs.asp.net/
forums regarding most MS technologies seems pretty much alive also http://forums.asp.net/
etc...
seems to me everything is very much alive, unlike some other open source projects...

But they are doing that? The /. article was just written by an idiot who didn't check his shit and wrote bunch of bullshit without any reference.
asp.net MVC 2.0 sourcecode, dated 11 march 2010 http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41742
freshly updated MS blogs regarding asp.net http://weblogs.asp.net/
forums regarding most MS technologies seems pretty much alive also http://forums.asp.net/
etc...
seems to me everything is very much alive, unlike some other open source projects...

Proper JS support has been the feature which all mainstream IDEs have been chasing recently, competing on achievements. It's not just Java IDEs, either - VS has just added a bunch of goodies, too.

Why don't you turn off Debug Mode first?

You had better asked why the hell they felt the urge to shoehorn JavaScript into a terribly bloated monster of an OOP-imitation with laughable Visual Studio support.

Microsoft has a policy to not use open source, because they can't guarantee it's pedigree. If a malicious person puts stolen code into an OSS project (or more realistically, if a programmer uses company resources to develop the code, without permission from the company; or somebody pastes GPL code into a BSD project) then people who rely on the code might be vulnerable to lawsuits. http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2007/05/02/why-microsoft-can-t-ship-open-source-code.aspx

At least, that's their excuse.

If open source was such a dangerous thing to touch, then I think Google, IBM and Apple would have been hit already.

And warn these people:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2006/12/20/ribbon-ui-control-roundup-for-developers.aspx

as long as Microsoft continues to push Silverlight ... any alternative approach within MS is going to stagnate

Yes and no. MS clearly have no strategic interest in encouraging SVG. But I doubt there's all that much overlap between the Silverlight and IE teams, and I'm sure that a lot of the IE guys are decent enough engineers to be embarrassed about their product's foot-dragging. So far, MS have been able to keep SVG off the mainstream Web by refusing to support it. If Google's SVG-on-Flash takes off, and they switch Maps etc to it, this will no longer be the case. People will be using SVG, and will be able to see that their friends with FF/Chrome/Safari/Opera are having a better time with it than they are.

The best chance I can see of IE getting solid, native SVG support soon would be if they switch to using WebKit as their primary rendering engine, with Trident relegated to a compatibility mode. Yes, it sounds implausible. But:

• Apple did it. And have been doing it long enough to have flushed out any lurking patent trolls.
• IE isn't the strategic weapon it used to be; standards-compliance is pretty good and improving, and you don't see significant IE-only sites on the public internet these days. If it's not locking end-users into the Windows client, and it's not bringing in any revenue, why keep throwing dev resource at it?
• Some bits of Microsoft - don't ever think that any organization that big is monolithic - have been quietly getting a clue of late. I was stunned when they announced they'd be shipping and supporting jQuery with Visual Studio. Seriously, jaw-on-the-floor stunned.

There were rumours along these lines soon after IE8 shipped. I suspect they were largely wishful thinking, but it does make a lot of sense.

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2009/07/09/the-firefox-3-5-fiasco.aspx

I would recommend to use Subversion. You could setup your own server but there is also hosted solutions available. I searched Google for "hosted source control" and I found this link :

http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2005/04/27/Hosted-source-control.aspx

The bonus would be to teach your student how to use version control and how to work together on the same files. Subversion (and older CVS) integrate into Eclipse and most other development environment. There is also standalone clients available if your students use a simpler editor like vi or notepad ;-))

remote exploitable security problems, very slow startup on windows, creating havoc with antiviruses, maxing out CPU problems

its a bad week for 3.5
3.11 is safe for now (ill take the mem leaks over exploits and a slow startup)

what happened ? did the Mozdev team rush it to satisfy the fanboys and bigger-version-number-must-be-better crowd ?

lets hope these problems get fixed ASAP because if cant recommend it to clients when they come back to me complaining with these problems (doesnt make us look good) whats left ?

A

The developer tools in IE8 are pretty decent, certainly far better than what comes with Mozilla Firefox by default.

Actually, I wonder if they consider JavaScript debugging via Visual Studio as part of "IE developer tools". IIRC it doesn't work with any other browser (though I don't know whether the API is open, so e.g. Firefox could support it too if they wanted), but it is pretty nice when you're developing a Web application - you can debug both client code and server code at the same time in one IDE session, setting breakpoints wherever you need. Very handy for tricky AJAX stuff.

ASP.NET MaskedEditExtender

In ASP.NET's AJAX Control Toolkit, MaskedEditExtender masks a TextBox, while MaskedEditValidator uses regular expressions to validate it. That takes care of the web-based prior art pretty neatly.

So... you've chosen to be locked into the biggest current software vendor, and hope that they don't drop something from .NET in the future. Not like Microsoft would ever do something like that.

And yes it is officially supported, on the other hand Moonlight, the OSS Slilverlight implementation which is the only way to get it to work on Linux really has no backing from MS

No backing from Microsoft? You sure about that? I would call releasing their video codecs for use by Moonlight and publishing a covenant not to sue Moonlight users to be pretty far from "no backing".

Granted, this is Microsoft's version of playing nice so of course the whole covenant issue is really just a wedge to drive portions of the OSS community against each other, but I think it's difficult to assert that Adobe is being more open than Microsoft here.

When it comes down to it, both companies are going to be only as open as absolutely necessary to help promote their format. Of course hopefully SVG and HTML5 features like <video> and <canvas> tags etc. will make the whole point moot if all the non-IE browsers can gain critical mass to force Microsoft into supporting them. Then we'll see both companies in the position Sun is now with Java: wishing they had truly opened up their formats before it was 10 years too late.

Plagiarizer... from http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-1-0.aspx ...

# re: ASP.NET MVC 1.0
Thursday, April 02, 2009 6:34 AM by Alastair Smith

Scott, this is fantastic news! The EULA in the installer seems incompatible with this milestone, however:

"2. Scope of License. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not

  * work around any technical limitations in the software;

  * reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that applicable law expressly permits, despite this limitation;

  * publish the software for others to copy;

  * rent, lease or lend the software; or

  * __transfer the software or this agreement to any third party.__"

We rely on ASP.NET MVC for a couple of products that we sell to customers (for them to install locally, not in a SaaS-type environment). That EULA clause would appear to prevent us from re-distributing ASP.NET MVC in any form (even the pre-packaged installer). Please could you clarify?

2nd time today I've nailed you, but this is getting old. Have you tried cordless bungee jumping? Blog about that, wouldja?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=asp+under+apache

http://weblogs.asp.net/israelio/archive/2005/09/11/424852.aspx
"How to make Apache run ASP.NET / ASP.NET 2.0

Don't ask me why... but i've been asked to make Apache run ASP.NET.

IT Worked !

Even worked with ASP.NET 2.0 Site !

Following are the instruction to make Asp.Net work under apache:"

Questions and Answers
Why isn't my scrolling location saved?

This is a known issue related to a facility called AJAX within Microsoft .NET 2.0. Scrolling position is easily maintained, but it either causes page failures or decreases response time by 300%. A solution is being explored. In the meantine, the Skills widget enables you to be highly selective in list formation for Skills pinning. We recommend that you use this facility.

Oh, that pesky AJAX facility! There's a lot of info on performance issues using the ASP.NET AJAX. A quick read of the forums on asp.net suggests that this is only an issue if you don't actually think about the use and placement of controls while designing your page(s). In short, like anything else, if you use the wrong tool, and then use it excessively, load will be an issue in production. Too much to ask, I guess.

http://forums.asp.net/p/1296488/2518160.aspx#2518160

Shouldn't this be on idle.slashdot.org?

A little off-topic, but here http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2009/02/19/soft-deletes-are-bad-m-kay.aspx you have an interesting opinion on soft deletes

Maybe he's from the future and thinks they're using ASP.NET 4?

http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2009/01/05/political-the-truth-about-the-palestinian-loss-of-land-1946-to-2000.aspx

Read it if you dare.

Israel has been attacked from day one. They were never the initial aggressors. They took barren desert and created their nation. Add to that the fact that there has never been a state of Palestine.

You bring a knife to a gun fight, be prepared to get your head blown off. If you shoot at someone from behind your wife and children, you are responsible for their deaths.

The unfortunate reality about Silverlight is that Microsoft's own reps arent entirely sure about what it does, or when its features will be released.

We were doing a prototype on SL 2 Beta 2 two months back, and attended a MIX session where we were pointedly asking the rep for any possible dates for the RTW version. The rep specifically said at least a month. ScottGu announced SL 2's final release 12 hours later.

Moral of the story: listen to the community. They know better than MS's sales-drones.

Your post was sounding reasonably good, until the part about "ASP.NET is going to need some serious help gaining AJAX support...".

Does this not count?

• jQuery and Microsoft
• jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008

The old asp.net ajax components are still there, but since one of the big benefits of jQuery is that it plays nice with other libraries, you can use either one or both on the same page.