2.5 hours of new ASP.NET 2.0

Over the course of the past few months, my team and I worked to develop and film 2.5 hours worth of content on ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer. The idea was to build a series of short, ~12 min. videos, to introduce ASP.NET 1.x developers and people new to the platform, to the power and new features of ASP.NET 2.0. Internally, we called this the Hilo project, as we name all our projects after U.S. cities.

They are currently the featured news at www.asp.net. The permanent home looks like http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/learning/learn/newtodevelopment/default.aspx under the ASP.NET HOW DO I banner. It doesn't look like the source code has been posted, so I'll add it here in another blog entry (once I figure out how).

A few questions were asked on ScottGu's blog http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/02/26/439088.aspx. I'll consolidate the answers that I can give at my blog.

What Did We Use For Production and Filming?

We used Microsoft Virtual PC to host a clean dev environment with nothing but Visual Web Developer and SQL Express installed. For one video that used SqlCommand caching, we had to use SQL Server 2005 developer on a different box. If the star of the video is Virtual PC, Camstasia is the cinematographer, with both running simulatneously on a dual-core AMD 64-bit 4GB RAM box with 1900x1200 real estate. This lets me crop exactly a 1024x768 image of Virtual PC, with plenty of room for notes and Camtasia.

We use two approaches for the audio. Sometimes we record with a high-quality Plantronics USB head-set mic, properly placed, for a clean digital signal.

Or we use a Neumann KM 184 cardioid microphone on a shock mount, fed to a Mackie mixer for pre-amp and outboard compression in our dedicated audio room. All depends on my mood.

We do some pre-processing on the Audio using Sony WaveHammer to remove pops and clicks. Then we bring in the audio / video tracks into Sony Vegas 6, in my opinion, the best NLE for the money out there. Plus it's written in .NET and uses its own private instance of SQL Server, which is karmic goodness.

 

Once we finish editing in Vegas, we render out for WMV 9 Screen (~300kbps) and Audio 9 (fairly high resolution--audio is an extremely important part of the experience). I could post the exact details in another blog if I get comments.

Why Tables instead of DIV/CSS for Layout?

Only a small portion of the development and design world has clued into using tables and 1x1 pixel clear GIFs is a bad idea for layout. Once you master a few hacks to work around browser compatibility (See some of my CSS links at http://del.icio.us/seesharp), building a really clean masterpage with DIV tags is straight-forward. And fun too--swapping in different themes based on CSS is trivial. And the code looks really really clean.

My Introducing video takes the DIV/CSS approach. I was very happy with the results. The Masterpages video (and maybe a few others) uses the Table approach. We had to cover the new Table dialog (not bad) and some of the interactive table design features. Just learn how to use both then drop tables in favor of float:left!

Reference Materials

I only used 3 reference materials myself for these videos:

  • The first is Scott Guthrie's incredible 1.5 hour one-take video tour of everything. I shameless stole some ideas and even did my own high-level transcription of the video. If you're looking for more than the 2.5 hours that I did, check out his video. I have no idea where it is.
  • Homer, Sussman and Howard's ASP.NET 2.0 (Beta) book. It's the best I had at the time. I'd love to see their final copy.
  • The ASP.NET team released some visual templates. The templates are pretty good, but the readme file that comes with them is awesome. I learned some good tricks in there. Very worthwhile reading--something you'd probably pass up (who reads README.html anymore?)