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the folks at componentart have done it again.  they just announced their webui 3 component suite in beta.  if you already use their existing webui platform, you know how great their stuff is!  if not, install it and see what you are missing.

more info on the webui 3 release: http://www.componentart.com/whatsnew.aspx#news26

view live demo: http://webui30.componentart.com

Highlights are a super functional Grid, Callback (AJAX) controls, and Calendar controls are added to the already great WebUI suite!

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are you an absolute beginner to .net and visual studio 2005?

here’s some videos (free and over 10 hours) for you to peruse…

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/beginner/

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okay, definitely one of the coolest dev debug tools i’ve seen…

nikhil updated his helper tool and i finally got around to using it — VERY cool…

ASPNET Dev Helper

want to see view state, done.  want to view cache stuff, done.

ViewState

those are two minor things, but it is super cool…

install it: http://shrinkster.com/710

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a free tool from rick strahl to config/deploy your asp.net apps...

http://www.west-wind.com/Tools/WebSiteConfiguration.asp

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i’ve recently been getting more into open source technologies, specifically those that tough .net a bit in some way shape or form — mono, cocoa#, ruby, struts.

i’m frustrated.

check that…i’m pissed.

okay, fine, i get it — open source is cool because you always get source code and for the supergeeks, it is cool to see how things work…

but take someone who is a developer but hasn’t done development on alternate platforms before…wouldn’t you want an easier way to get them adopted?  wouldn’t you want the learning process — or at least setup process — to be smooth so that adoption would be easier?

case in point…(for me at least): cocoa# and monodevelop on mac osx.  figure you’d go to www.monodevelop.org and get some goodies right?  sure.  download and install them right? um, kinda.  download, yes.  install?  well, not unless you have “slash bin’d” in a previous life.  navigate to your monodevelop-0.5.1 directory (note: you must do this in terminal mode—if you don’t know what that is, rewind to linux programming 101–-remember, these guys don’t typically think GUI is a friendly acronym) and type “./configure” — watch all the output that you have no idea what it is doing (that’s okay—on other platforms I’m sure you’re not watching the registry GUIDS fly across thinking “ah, yes, it just installed the fitzer protocol”).  then if configure worked, run make.  then if make worked, run make install.  seriously? yes, seriously.  okay, MS may not have everything in order but i dare anyone to say we allow anyone to get going fast on ANY of our products…dare i say even betas…at least we provide a method to install it for the brainless (most of the time).

so i’ve not successfully got cocoa# and monodevelop on mac osx running…and a quick google/msn/coolest-ajax-site-of-the-day search tells me i’m not the only one…several have given up.  others keep trying.  monodevelop’s site provides some “instructions” that apparently the community has invalidated, but guess what — nobody is stepping up to create a correct one (even the cocoasharp wiki is flooded with “OUTDATED” notes, but there aren’t any updates!).  i did manage to find some that provide “better” instructions…here’s a snipped…

view: http://shrinkster.com/709 and tell me that doesn’t read like a 4th year latin book to a first year spanish student.  c’mon…for real.

view: http://shrinkster.com/708 — i’ll spare you the read, here’s the gem:
“Install mono, gtk-sharp, gecko-sharp, gtksourceview-sharp, and probably a bunch of other stuff (monodevelop will let you know what's needed when you run ./configure)”

brilliant.

so i still don’t have monodevelop running on mac osx — which kinda sucks…i want to see it, compare it, etc.  i guess it might even be unsupported on macosx anyway (even though it is a FreeBSD distribution)…so any mac users can’t be mono developers with all the cool tools — you’ll have to keep grep’ing your way around…

well at least i got the eclipse ide working with some c# plug in to allow me to write some code:

Eclipse with C# Improve

if anyone can point me to getting a mono ide running with cocoa# ide as well on mac osx, email would be great.