Inacom Tech Blog

The ASP.NET MVC Framework is a new option for web development from Microsoft.  ASP.NET MVC takes advantage of the Model-View-Controller organization pattern adapted by so many other frameworks for web development such as Ruby on Rails and CakePHP.

After using the ASP.NET MVC Framework I am quite pleased with the direction it is heading in.  I really applaud the MVC team and their frequent code releases on CodePlex and their responsiveness to community feedback.

Recently I was able to give an Introduction talk to the Black Hole .Net User Group in Marshfield.  A few questions were brought up that I will have to do some research into to answer.  I will try to get that information together and get another blog post up soon.

As promised to the Black Hole .Net Group, I would post the materials from the presentation.

While working on a presentation for the upcoming Twin Cities Code Camp. For the presentation I am using the Northwind database provided from Microsoft.  I have found a unique situation where they are using a 5 character string as the primary key.  Since the goal of this presentation is to develop a rails site around an existing database I took on this challenge to overcome rails standards.

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Recently Inacom had the privelage of hosting the Madison Web Design & Development Meetup. The topic for this meeting was Advanced CSS. I put together a slideshow to try to keep the presentaiton more guided, but because of the depth of the topic we wound up going quite a bit over our loose 1 hour timeslot. I just wanted to thank everyone for sticking around and seeming quite interested! I had a great time presenting and I hope that you all enjoyed our discussions. If you're looking for the demo files and the presentation check them out in the full article.

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Some very shocking and awesome news has recently hit the ruby community. Merb is being merged into Rails and will culminate with a release of rails sometime around February next year. Sporting the name Rails3, this marks only the 2nd time any 2 major web frameworks have put down the gloves and hugged it out. I'm excited to get some of the performance optimizations promised by the merb core, and am looking forward to a unified community. This merge should push rails even closer to being the de-facto standard for building a web application. See posts at http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/ and http://rubyonrails.org/merb, and http://loudthinking.com/posts/36-work-on-what-you-use-and-share-the-rest for more details.

Javascript libraries like prototype, it's friend scriptaculous, and the newcomer jQuery have been making web developer's lives easier for a few years now. With a javascript library you can turn a verbose DOM selection like:

document.getElementById('products')

into something a little shorter and sweeter:

$('products')

They allow for so much more including animations, but that is the subject of another blog post entirely.

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