Announcing the 2010 Encosia Holiday Giveaway
General By Dave Ward; Posted December 7, 2010Each year around the 21st of December, I’ve ended the year with a brief recap and a list of the year’s most popular posts. That has worked well in the past, but this year I find myself in the position to give more than just information back to the community. So, as I close in on my fourth full year here at Encosia, I’m going to try something a bit different this time around.
This year, I’m going to precede that yearly recap giving away some great prizes, including a full free year at TekPub and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with a year-long subscription to the MSDN library.
Additionally, I know that many of you will already be spending time offline with your friends and family by the 21st of December. So, I’m also going to move things up a bit this year to make sure that everyone’s able to participate.
What you can win
One month membership to TekPub (x3) – Three promo codes, each redeemable for one free month of membership at TekPub. As a monthly member, you can access any video on the site during your membership, including episodes of my series: Mastering jQuery and Ask the Expert: Dave Ward.
One year membership to TekPub – A promo code redeemable for an entire year of free membership at TekPub. As a yearly member, not only will you have access to every video on the site for a full year, but you will also have the ability to download any of those videos for offline viewing.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with one year of MSDN – A promo code redeemable for one year’s subscriber access to MSDN, in addition to the top-tier version of Visual Studio. The MSDN subscriber area gives you access to every piece of software that Microsoft sells, including Windows, Office, and SQL Server – a truly unparalleled toolbox for anyone who wants to develop on Microsoft’s platforms.
How to win
There are four ways to enter the drawing. You can choose just one of them if you like, any combination of them, or all four for the best chance to win:
Twitter – The easiest way to enter is to post this message on Twitter:
I just entered to win VS2010 Ultimate with MSDN or up to a year of free TekPub membership. You can too: http://encosia.com/1071
Click here to open Twitter in a new window, with the message pre-filled.
Comment – I’m always eager to hear your feedback. Leave a comment on this post with suggestions for what you’d like to see me write about next year or which post(s) here in the past you found the most helpful.
Suggest a video topic – I’ve been happy with the first four episodes that we’ve recorded for my new “Ask the Expert” series on TekPub. It’s ongoing success depends on your questions though. Anyone who suggests a topic for the series gets one entry into this contest.
As an added bonus, unrelated to this contest, you’ll get free access to the entire series if we use your suggestion to record an episode.
Vote on video topics – Vote on the topic suggestions that you find most interesting. Voting on any of them is good for another entry.
Schedule
The contest is open to entires until 10pm Eastern time (GMT -5) on this Friday, December 10th.
Entires will be tabulated and the five winners chosen at random, via random.org. The results will be posted here on the following Monday (December 13th).
Good luck!
Similar posts
What do you think?
I appreciate all of your comments, but please try to stay on topic. If you have a question unrelated to this post, I recommend posting on the ASP.NET forums or Stack Overflow instead.
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I’ve entered via Twitter to spread the word but wanted to say a heap of thanks here as well. Not just for the competition, but for your blog that I’ve found insanely easy to follow and loaded with gems and excellent examples.
Even without winning one of the prizes, I feel like I’ve won already because of the quality and value in your blog posts. Thank you.
I find tutorials that make use of jQuery and ASP.NET MVC very useful. I’d like to see more about the new jQuery plugins, and the way in which jQuery can interact with ASP.NET MVC3.
Rich
I found the tutorials that make use of jQuery Ajax and MVC really useful.
-Adrian
Your tutorials on jQuery templates are very helpful, keep on writing more articles!
The video tutorials are hugely beneficial. As they say a picture is worth 1000 words and a video is probably worth a whole lot more than that.
Thank you for very interesting and useful posts about jQuery templates. I will glad to see more posts about new jQuery fitures, tips etc. Thank you!
Thanks for all your posts, they’ve been insightful and a great reference. I look forward to more. I’d like to see some posts on combining JS code to be optimized, combined, etc. and the options we have.
I’m very interested in how to architect ajax applications (think gmail or harmony app from ordered list). I’d love a tutorial on how to get started with designing an application where the UI was all javascript with ajax calls to load both data and new “pages”. Thanks for all the hard work!
I first found this site via your article on using web services with jquery. It was invaluable. I got to meet you at Mix 2010. Cool guy and very knowledgeable.
We want to see Nerddinner for wp7. That is all.
I appreciate the articles on improving performance with jQuery, especially the CDN topics. Thanks for a great site; keep up the great work!
Dave–I’d like to see you write early next year on using dynamic JS loaders such as Lab.js, JS templating with jQuery, and about partitioning large JS apps well. Thanks,
rp
Maybe how jQuery fits in the mobile web and where jQuery mobile is trending.
Thanks for the contest, and all the jQuery goodness. Keep it up! :-)
I’m jumping on the “performance based posts” bandwagon. Simple ideas like where to place the js includes and using CDNs are very helpful for us less informed individuals.
I’d like to join the contest and at the moment, I’m looking for good/cross-browser AJAX upload options.
Loved your interesting posts about jQuery templates. And I am actively looking for the TEKPUB subscription
This is a great idea! It’s always interesting to read your posts. You could maybe use some posts to spotlight some of the jQuery plugins that you’ve found exceptionally helpful?
Keep up the great work!
I’d love to see articles for how to properly organize jQuery/JS files when it comes to large scale development. It’s something that I find we struggle with in several projects. It often seems difficult to handle. So advice is always welcome on that front (and also why I had to vote up that topic on Tekpub!).
I wanted to say thanks to you Dave for being such a wonderful programming resource. I have used many of the examples on your website in my day-to-day work. I like that you give examples that will work in the real world and you explain how it works, along with the code.
I would love to see more articles about jQuery Templating. I see myself as a developer using this more and more in my tasks.
Keep up the great work.
Karl
Just have to say thanks for this opportunity and for creating content so that people like me have a great way to gain some skills or hone existing skills.
So far I’ve been using UpdatePanel, and although I didn’t like it, it’s been easy to use.
Now I have a client that doesn’t accept compromise and want me to use javavascript as much as possible.
This is a challenge, but a fun challenge for me.
Thanks to your posts, this will be come a really pleasant task, with not so steep learning curve.
Especially “Using jQuery to directly call ASP.NET AJAX page methods”.
I am a noob on this topic, so I can’t really suggest new topics, but be sure that I will soon enough jump in with some suggestions :)
Thanks and keep up the great work!
Zoran
thanks for the nice post , i already suggested a topic in tekpub and twetted about this on twitter
ahmad moalla
Hi Dave,
I think next year most hot topic would be Mobile Website Development.
I would really appreciate if you can post on how we can create “Cross-Device” website supported by most of the device (not all though) using asp.net/MVC and jquery mobile.
Thanks and Regards,
Vishal Astik
I really enjoyed your post titled ‘Improving client-side development in Visual Studio’. http://encosia.com/2010/07/27/improving-client-side-development-in-visual-studio/
Thanks for all you excellent posts. The community needs more members like yourself.
Loving your jQuery series on tekpub. What I’m missing is a good tutorial on javascript/jQuery unit testing. There are so many frameworks that it’s easy to get lost.
Also good to have a ‘.net-perspective’ on things; How to test your javascript code from within Visual Studio ( test-runners, command-line interface for continuous integration etc)
Best JQuery articles ever! Keep them coming.
First I want to say I have found Encosia extremely useful. Particularly in understanding how things work, but also working through common problems that are faced by developers. I would recommend keeping the focus on core strategies, addressing the common problems, and misconceptions about the ever changing technology. Some of my favs you have done:
http://encosia.com/2009/03/25/document-ready-and-pageload-are-not-the-same/
http://encosia.com/2009/04/27/how-i-handle-json-dates-returned-by-aspnet-ajax/
http://encosia.com/2009/06/29/never-worry-about-asp-net-ajaxs-d-again/
Your site has saved me from a lot of frustration, so keep up the great work.
A couple of my favorite posts were:
- Improving client-side development with Visual Studio
- Understanding jQuery’s impact on Microsoft and ASP.NET AJAX
Also, I would like to see more information on jQuery mobile and how it can leveraged from a .net development perspective. I also second the request from Pavneet Singh Saund about more information related to JavaScript and jQuery unit testing.
Thanks for all of your great posts.
I found the “Why ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels are dangerous” most code life changing post that changed my way of coding and made me interested on jQuery.
-Ashfaq
The post which gave me the most immediate boost was the one regarding using jQuery and AJAX insteadof UpdatePanels. It was brilliantly concise and to the point and not only did it solve an immediate problem for me, it’s changed the whole thrust of my approach.
Thank you
Your series of posts on using jQuery to invoke ASP.NET Web services and page methods were a huge help to me. We have an old (7 years) Web application that’s getting a nice, modern makeover, so anything that speeds the process up is wonderful!
Now I’m looking forward to getting familiar with jQuery templating and I’m glad to see you’ve got some posts on that topic, too.
I think you do an excellent job of explaining the hows, whens, and whys of leveraging client-side processing to speed up the responsiveness of Web sites and applications. I’d love to see continued posts about overcoming the real-world issues you encounter, such as the “.d” issue and complicated templates, as learning by example is quite effective.
I would like to see how well ASP.NET performs or can perform in the term of UX and usability and how to improve them :)
Hi, first thank you for the great blog, you saved me many times.
How about a post about why didn’t you went into rails?
Would love to see you and others write more about their workflow. How you solve problems on a day to day, what are some best practices you’ve employed over the years, etc.
Originally found this website when looking for a solution to a problem I had with jQuery. Read a number of jQuery and JSON posts on the site and found then invaluable. I solved my problem, though eventually ended up rewriting the whole thing anyway, with help from your posts. One thing I’d like to see more often is something about mobile development, possible with jQuery.
jQuery, jQuery, jQuery!
I would also like to see HTML5, web sockets, jQuery Mobile, and templates with jQuery.
TekPub is awesome. Would love to see some content going through the various cloud platforms.
Dave,
I would love you to record a screencast which details how you developed the jquery .tmpl compatable view engine for mvc ;) maybe a xmas project for you!
Like everyone else here, I enjoy your posts. The most helpful post are those related to jQuery. While I love the route the MS is taking with MVC, it is beyond challenging to get MVC buy-off at the management level. Management doesn’t really ‘get it!’ Furthermore, many developers are comfortable with the Web Forms paradigm and getting those devs to move to MVC is difficult to say the least. Hopefully, my struggles will conquer in the end, but in the mean time I’d love to see articles on implementing jQuery with Web Forms via REST over WCF and other ways to have the benefits of VIEW_STATE and the perf of jQuery (ajax) coexist. Anyway, thanks for all your input to the community. Being a MS developer is more exciting than ever…
Would love to see more HTML5, JQuery and AJAX! Keep up the good work!
I’d like to see how you and other .NET developers deal with internationalization. I wrote a lot of programs for various .NET CMS platforms, and recently had some issues dealing with the differences between English/Other Latin-based European languages and completely foreign character sets like Japanese. While MS supports these different character sets, I find it very challenging to try and make or phrase certain aspects of my applications for an international audience (except for Europe..European languages are almost all pretty close to one another).
Anyway I’m sure someone else has run into some of these issues and I’d love to hear how they are generally tackled.
I would like you to make a series on WCF 4.0 and JQUery. And architecting a full fledged application using ajax, wcf and jquery