I will be speaking at the Orlando Code Camp on Saturday March 27. I will be giving two session; one on Simplifying deployments with MSDeploy and Visual Studio 2010 and the other on ASP.NET MVC View Helpers. By the way, the other name for MSDeploy is the Web Deployment Tool.

If you have ever had issues with deploying web applications (which includes everyone who has ever deployed a web app :) ) then you need to attend my session. I will discuss the three major scenarios of deploying web applications:

• Deploying to a local IIS server
• Deploying to an IIS server on the intranet
• Deploying to a 3rd party host

I will be demonstrating how to perform 2 of the 3; deploying to local IIS server and to a 3rd party host. Since I won’t have any other machines besides my notebook I will not be demoing how to deploy to an IIS server on the intranet, but it is very similar to the other 2 scenarios. There has been a lot of work in the area of web deployment (deployment in general actually) recently which could really help spare you of a lot of headache. I presented this at the South Florida Code Camp a couple weeks ago and a person actually stated in the session “There are a lot of people who wish they were in here right now”! If you are in the area then you should attend my session, you won’t regret it.

Here is the abstract:

Visual Studio 2010 will be shipped including integration with Microsoft’s Web Deployment Tool, MSDeploy. For quite a while web deployments have been very difficult to manage and automate. With MSDeploy you can manage the complexities of web deployments. One of the great aspects of the Web Deployment Tool is that it is integrated into Visual Studio with MSBuild tasks and targets. Since Team Foundation Build can leverage MSBuild we can take advantage of those tasks and targets to automate web deployments using Team Build.

My other talk will be on creating leaner views with ASP.NET MVC View Helpers. If you are using ASP.NET MVC then this is one of the sessions you’ll be interested in. I will be getting in depth about ASP.NET View Helpers, and just talking ASP.NET MVC in general. I gave this talk at the Jacksonville Developers User Group last week and it was great. I’m very excited about these two talks, I’m sure they will be great. Here is the abstract.

If you have been using ASP.NETMVC then you certainly have been using some of the built in view helper methods that are available, you know those expressions like Html.TextBox("textBoxName") and Html.ValidationMessage("Required"). View helpers are nothing more than extension methods which create HTML that is injected into your views based on the method and its parameters. Creating your own view helpers is very simple and can be extremely beneficial. By writing your own custom view helpers you will benefit in at least the following ways

• Simplifies Your Views
• Eases Re-hydrating HTML Elements with ModelState Values
• Standardizes the Creation of Common HTML Components
• Helps you Implement the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) Principal

I have published a 22 page paper discussing custom ASP.NET MVC view helpers along with a sample app at http://mvcviewhelpers.codeplex.com/ if you are interested.

If you are in the area this weekend its going to be a great event. I think there were >400 people there last year, so it should be a good turn out this year as well. I hope to see you there.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi