Recently we decided to add a searching feature for the different sites we run on gaiaware.net: main site, blogs, forum, tracker, docs and API reference. We wanted to be able to search each site separately and still have all the results presented in a intuitive way. And of course, it should be built using Gaia Ajax, so it could be quickly developed (our customers say they increase the productivity by 30-50% on the ASP.NET platform when using Gaia Ajax) and give a responsive and ajaxified user experience.

We have purchased a Google Site Search subscription so we don't have to reinvent the wheel again and make our own site spider. The Google Site Search gives us the search results in XML, and we can parse and present them in any way we would like.

The challenge: multiple search sources with ASP.NET

Since we wanted to present the results from each sub site in separate sections, we needed to overcome some limitations of what Google Site Search gives us. E.g. you can return max 20 results per search. Since we wanted to separate the results in each sub domain (e.g. forum.gaiaware.net) we needed to use the useful "site:" parameter in a Google query. That meant that we needed to fire off 5-6 Google searches for each search we executed on our own page. Our immediate concern was how long time it would take to perform so many Google searches, return them, parse them and present them on our ASP.NET page.

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We're excited to announce the first official Gaia Ajax course. Many have been asking for this and now it's here!

This course will teach you how you can build everything from small web portals to enterprise applications using Gaia Ajax on the ASP.NET platform. We will be spending most of our time in Visual Studio.NET exploring required ASP.NET skills and the essential Gaia knowledge.

Quick Facts

Registration: Via contact form or email us: support@gaiaware.net with number of participants.

Target Audience: .NET Developers
Max Participants: 12
Language: English

Date: June 10-11th at 09.00 - 15.30
Price: EUR 1100 Incl.lunch. excl.hotel

Location: Gaiaware HQ (Klosterøya), Skien – NORWAY
57 km from Torp International Airport
134 km from Oslo
View map

Hotel suggestions:
Thon Hotel Høyers
Clarion Collection Hotel Bryggeparken

Agenda

• Quick introduction 
• Important ASP.NET semantics 
• Get to know the Gaia Server Controls 
• Unleash your productivity with Aspects in Gaia 
• Effect library 
• Skinning Gaia 
• Extending Gaia 
• Data management with Gaia 
• Debugging, error handling and security with Gaia

At the evening we're planning to do a bit of socializing and exchange experiences with building web applications using Gaia.

Instructor: Jan Blomquist (MVP)

Jan Blomquist has many years experience in software development and is one of the core architects behind Gaia Ajax. Jan has also been awarded Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional) since 2005. Jan Blomquist has trained thousands of people in building software and has often been a presenter at various Microsoft events. Jan has also appeared on DotNetRocks TV (http://dnrtv.com), which is a very popular TV show for .NET developers worldwide.

Includes complete course on DVD

The entire course will be screen-recorded for later viewing. Each student is granted a non-transferable viewer license to the course recordings. The student will receive the videos on a DVD or in a downloadable package either on-site or at a later time.

Gaiaware HQ in summer

Gaiaware HQ entrance

Clarion Collection Hotel Bryggeparken - in walking distance

Many users of ASP.NET has over the years created various helper classes and utilities to simplify traversing the ASP.NET Control structure. Samples include the Generic FindControl<T> function which I've seen countless implementations of.

Well, we all know that re-inventing the wheel is unwise if you want to leverage high productivity. Fortunately with the arrival of C# 3.0 we've got this little thing called LINQ which is basically just a collection of related inventions like Extension Methods, Lambdas, Anonymous Types, Object Initializers, etc. It turns out that LINQ enables us to apply some powerful querying on top of ASP.NET and in many cases with simple one liners. Using Linq directly makes code alot easier to read. Here's an example of how using Linq to validate if a Question is answered correctly just to show the power of the syntax. 

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public class OrderedListControl<T> : Control 
where T: System.Web.UI.WebControls.ListControl, new() {}

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