A co-worker of mine sent off a Fox News article yesterday about a Former Microsoft employee that is “fixing” Windows 8. After reading the article, my first take away was another person explaining the Windows 8 UI flaws. Seriously? Those articles are a dime a dozen. Whenever you change the user interface of any system there will always be resistance. Don’t believe me? How about when Facebook users were upset about the Facebook UI changes? They didn’t up and leave to Google+ now did they? Rather than dive into what’s right with Windows 8, I’d like to explain my second take away a bit more.

Have you ever created a web application for something specific such as a standalone web app (forum, photo gallery, web service, etc.) while using ASP.NET and received this:

For the longest time, If I needed to use an onclick event for navigation (div or some other page element), I’d use something similar to:

Earlier today, Microsoft released Windows 8 Beta. Of course, when I was downloading it, I had to leave and head to another building. So, I paused my download in the Microsoft File Transfer Manager. However, I couldn’t find it easily again. I finally found a blog post saying it was called TransferMgr.exe. I searched my machine and found it at “C:\Windows\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe”. Be sure to look for it there first in the event of needing it.

Earlier today Microsoft released Visual Studio 11 Beta as a general release. One of the first things you may notice is that the installation customization of VS11 Beta has been removed. If you are installing VS11 on Windows 8 Beta, you’re looking at consuming around 20GB of disk.

Starting with .NET 4 or MVC3, a developer could use a data annotation on a property to force data validation. This is extremely powerful especially for MVC developers. The same data annotations can also be used when building custom modules for Orchard CMS.

Have you ever noticed an exception being thrown by your application stating something like the following:

Ever want to check out the latest technologies but have been too busy dealing with kids, co-workers, or angry birds? Now’s your chance. Push everything aside and get ready to attend the coolest conference in town. Well, it’s not in a town. Pennsylvania only has one of those. Rather, it’s at Luzerne County Community College in Nanticoke, PA. If you’re not familiar with Nanticoke, it’s a small township just south of the City of Wilkes-Barre and approximately 30 minutes south of Scranton, Pennsylvania. While the registration page is not available for TECHbash 2012 just yet, it doesn’t mean that you can’t prepare for the event. It’s really, really important that you do the following. It’s confusing so I’ll outline things for you:

HTML5 will introduce many new and exciting features including the addition of geolocation. Geolocation allows a device to determine a global position of the device (latitude and longitude), it’s accuracy (horizontal accuracy and vertical accuracy), altitude, and speed. The Geolocation feature in HTML 5 is already supported by most mainstream browsers. According to research performed by Mark Pilgrim, the following browser support Geolocation:

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta and Web API Beta have just been released. You can visit the asp.net, msdn.microsoft.com, or Microsoft Download Center to download the latest bits.