Old News: MSDN Solve is online

One of the many things that have kept me busy during my first months at Microsoft was producing content for MSDN Solve. It is a new section on the German MSDN portal that aims to provide solutions (read “how do I?” as opposed to “why do I?”) for developers trying to get their feet wet with .NET development. After much discussion and thinking, the team decided to produce a format called “CodeClips”. That's pretty much like a recorded 20 minute web cast that focuses on a showing how to handle a very specific .NET development task. And watching CodeClips pays off: You can get a Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition for free! Get the details here. Note that German language skills are mandatory.

One of the goals of MSDN Solve is to provide interesting content for Java and PHP developers interested in ASP.NET. Thus, the team asked me to cover the Java part. Alas, providing content that appeals to every Java web developer is incredibly difficult. Unlike ASP.NET or PHP, there's really no such thing as Java web development. There is Java web development using JSF. There is Java web development using Struts. There is Java web development using Spring Web MVC. There is Java web development using Tapestry. The list goes on, and on, and on. The lowest common demoninator is not even JSP, it's Servlets. That's why I tried to show how to implement typical web application components like a compression filter or the Synchronizer Token pattern in ASP.NET, because these are canonical Java web development examples without any bias for a particular framework. I'm going to blog more about my CodeClips during the next couple of days.

If you have any questions or feedback reagrding my CodeClips, feel free to contact me via msdnsolve@joergjooss.de. The guy who runs the show is Daniel Walzenbach, and he blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/walzenbach/.