Web 2.0 ASP.NET

Hold your breath, back up EVERYTHING, cross your fingers and hit install… 4 hours later and wow! Not a blip on the Windows 7 horizon this is IMPRESSIVE, so long vista!

Sounds like a long time for an upgrade? But you have to bear in mind we are talking about a dev machine with 3 flavors of Visual Studio on it and all the other gunk from SSMS to Japanese mobile phone emulators or in Geek Speak some 80 gigs worth of software.

I kid you not, aside from having to uninstall daemon tools (which was picked up as incompatible by the install process) that really was it. Actually, I went out to a meeting while 7 did its stuff and came back to a MUCH more responsive notebook.

By much more responsive I mean that programs start and close noticeably faster, the notebook boots up and is useable noticeably faster.

There are really only a couple of things that I don’t like, but 2 of them at least have a work around,  these are the absence of the quick launch toolbar, the removal of the classic startup menu and a lack of easy access to the file menu in Windows Media Player 12. The first can be got around by adding a custom toolbar to  the Taskbar and pointing it at your Quick Launch folder, the second can be hacked using the CSMenu software but I hear it is slow and that you cannot right click the icons so I have not bothered and the last is really more of a niggle in that at whatever point if I am watching a movie or listening to a tune etc etc I want to be able to right click the player anywhere and to be able to browse for a different file (some would say this is really picky but as it it is now, unless I am mistaken, you have to go to the library tab first and then right click. Just seems like an unnecessary hoop to me).

Obviously my notebook is relatively new (A Dell XPS M1530) but I should imagine given the total lack of driver issues and program problems I have had so far that most machines already running Vista should be able to run Windows 7. Notably DELL have  said that my notebook wasn’t compatible with Windows 7, but that was actually for the Beta version. Also you have to upgrade to the same or better version i.e. you can upgrade from vista home basic to windows 7 ultimate or Vista Basic to 7 basic

Seriously give it a go! I didn’t actually need to do the backup first but it is always a good idea regardless and to actually be able to do an in place upgrade like this to a noticeably better OS and have all your existing programs run fine is truly a breath of fresh air, I can’t applaud this point enough, some serious effort has gone into this and dare I say it even a non-techie could manage it!!

Is just me or does the ASP.NET mobile controls site look a tad moribund these days? Visual studio 2008 saw the removal of the mobile project templates removed from the standard installation and the lack of examples and real world applications really makes development a labor of love.

Noticably in Japan where mobile net usage is astonishingly high, I have literally been laughed at when mentioning the possibility of building sites on the platform.

But even so, I cannot help but think this is due to a lack of unerstanding of the technology. Also, in a market where developers can charge for the development of separate sites for each type of mobile markup, being able to generate a single site which dynamically renders the same content could decrease revenues. But this is a very simplistic view. As devices become more powerful, so do the mobile browsers with support for javascipt and standard xhtml becoming the norm. But there are still many millions of users with very basic phones.

Enter MVC! recently Scott Hanselman published a tutorial using MVC to build a mobile version of the Nerd Dinner sample application for the IPhone and Blackberry. Also Microsoft Ireland have been almost secretly updating the browser caps files to include the latest devices (Ireland being the European hub for all things mobile these days). I really think it would be a crying shame if the ASP.NET mobile controls were to dissolve into obscurity as they are essentially a great idea and although the upkeep could be costly I think it is a great reason for using asp.net as it provides a crossover for web developers to lever their existing knowledge and allow a diverse selection of devices access to essentially the same application.