jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog

I just have to note this announcement from Scott Guthrie: jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog: "I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward." Microsoft shipping jQuery? What's the world coming to? I'm sure that Leon will be happy, even if it's not Prototype.

Chris Woodruff on Astoria

Chris Woodruff was the speaker at this week's Dayton .NET Developers Group.  He talked to us about Astoria, or what is now known as ADO.NET Data Services.  ADO.NET Data Services is a way to easily expose data via services.  He gave us a good introduction to using it and did a demonstration of how simple it is to get a basic service up that exposes a read only view of your data. 

My primary take away from the presentation is that the ADO.NET Data Services is a solution looking for a problem.  It's hard to imagine too many scenarios where it would be useful.  In its current state, it would be most useful in exposing a bunch of read-only data that you wanted to make publicly available.  I can also see how it might be useful within an enterprise to expose data in .NET to consumers in other languages.

Sadly, this was also our last meeting at Max Technical Training in Dayton since they are closing their Dayton facility.  Max has been a great supporter of the user group and we've really enjoyed meeting in their facility.  I want to publicly thank Max for their support and for their continued support of many user groups.  I truly appreciate it as both a contribute and attendee at many user groups.

We are still looking for a new home for the user group, so if you have any ideas of potential locations, or opinions about where we should meet, please contact me.

Bill Vaughn in Dayton

Bill Vaughn will be visiting Dayton Wednesday.  If you don't recognize his name, it may help to know that he is the author of Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server: Best Practice Architectures and Examples, 7th Edition (Microsoft Windows Server System Series).  In the evening, he will be speaking to the Dayton .NET Developers Group covering a topic yet to be determined.  He gave us four potential presentation topics and we are going to have a vote at the meeting to choose the winner.  The four potential topics are: Visual Studio Reporting, SQL Server CLR Executables, ADO.NET Connecting, and SQL Server Compact Edition.  For more description of each, check out the forum on the web site. 

In the afternoon, Bill has agreed to meet with group members in a less formal setting, so we're having a "open space with Bill Vaughn" starting at 3:00 at the Dorothy Lane Market in Springboro, which is just down the street from our meeting location at Max Technical Training.    For more details, you can also see the forum on the web site. 

devLink Day 2

I started the second day of devLink by doing my presentation on WPF for Developers.  It was a new experience for me speaking in a college lecture hall, and with a microphone, but I think it went well.  I had a good group of people for the first session in the morning.  I had some good feedback from several attendees and good questions.   If anyone attending my session has any questions, or comments, please feel free to contact me here.

I next went to an open space session on *DD, which covered TDD (Test Driven Development), BDD (Behavior Driven Development), and DDD ( Domain Driven Design).   I've been thinking quite a bit about TDD since that session and talking about it with Leon.  I see great potential value in TDD/BDD, but I haven't yet made the time investment to start using TDD.   Stay tuned to this blog for future developments in this area.

At the open space, someone suggested that they would like to see TDD in action which led to an impromptu lunch session.  The idea was to hook up to the projector and see someone doing TDD.  We expected five or ten people the room and we ended up with the entire room full.  It was a great idea, but with the larger crowd and spur of the moment execution, it didn't go smoothly.  But, it was great to see so many people interested in TDD.

After lunch, I went to the Essence of LINQ presentation by Charlie Calvert.  His presentation was similar to one I saw at the Cincinnati .NET User Group by Stefan Kyntchev in that it showed the underpinnings of LINQ.  In his demos, Charlie created a basic LINQ to objects implementation from scratch using Lambdas, IEnumerable<T>, Extension Methods, Expression Trees, and IQueryable<T>.  Along the way, he showed the part each language element  plays in supporting LINQ.

I next attended the closing circle for the open space event.  I enjoyed the open spaces I attended and as demonstrated by the number and energy of attendees at the closing circle, I think a lot of other people enjoyed the open spaces.  About half of the people at the closing circle had never before attended an open space event.  Alan Stevens did a great job organizing the open space event and I think as a group we've built momentum for more open spaces.  So expect to see more open space events around the region in the future.  And if you've never attended an open space, check one out at your earliest opportunity.

Joe Stagner did the closing keynote and gave us some insight into what goes on at Microsoft, and his thoughts about the future of our industry.  Somehow, I did not win any gaming systems at the closing raffle.  But Jennifer Griffin did pick up a nice monitor.  Congratulations Jennifer!

I want to express my thanks to all of the organizers of devLink: John Kellar, Tommy Norman, Leanna Baker, Keith Elder, and Alan Stevens (sorry if I missed anyone).  It was a great event and I think I will add it to the short list of can't miss events along with CodeMash.

Technorati Tags: devLink

devLink Day 1

It's my first trip to devLink and so far it's been well worth the drive.  The keynote was a disappointment, but everything after that was great; one important issue with the keynote is that we were a group of mostly developers, and I don't think that was the intended audience for the presentation.  I spent the first session after the keynote in the opening session  of the open space event.  Alan Stevens is leading the open spaces at devLink and explained how open spaces worked and moderated as people contributed session topics.   The theme of the open space event is "good enough", as in determining when you've attained the right balance of quality, purity, and business value.  The opening session got the open space event off to a good start.

Lunch was next and was unremarkable.  I took my normal route and got the vegetarian sandwich, which usually works well.  Didn't work so well this time.    The good part of lunch is that a group of us went to the open space area and ate lunch and got an early start on the discussion.

The next official session I attended was the open space covering several closely related topics, including encouraging critical thinking and motivating developers.  In particular, we discussed how to share the passion that we have as devLink participants with our fellow developers who may not attend this kind of event, or user group meetings, or think about software development after they leave the office.   It was a great session.

The next session I attended was Parallel Computing in .NET by Keith Rome of Wintellect.  His presentation was directed toward using threads (or not) in today's .NET framework.  He began by taking about some basic thread information, including processor cores, and hyper-threading.  He then described the circumstances under which you should use threads and when you should not.  He did a great job of explaining a complex subject and I left with several things I'm going to take back to a couple of my current clients.

The last session of the day I attended was Steve Andrews speaking about Automation with MSBuild 3.5 and Team Build 2008.  Steve gave a great introduction to MSBuild and the various elements of MSBuild files, such as targets, tasks, properties and item groups.  He also gave us several tips for working with MSBuild.   He then went on to show how to use Team Build to perform builds and schedule those builds.  There were a lot of questions/conversation in this session which I really enjoyed.  I left Steve's session with a good idea of how to proceed with builds and continuous integration in Team Foundation Server.

Somehow every time I went to the attendee party tonight there were very few people there.  The first time I dropped by, I think that most people were still at dinner.  And  by the second time I dropped by, they were giving away Xboxes and the crowd really thinned after that. 

I'm looking forward to doing my presentation on WPF for Developers Saturday morning and I hope I can live up to the great presentations I saw today.  Stay tuned for more after day 2.

Developer Events this Week

There are several developer events this week that you might want to attend.  On Monday, the Cincinnati Java User Group will have James Carman discussing Advanced Wicket.  On Tuesday, the Cincinnati .NET User Group will be having a panel discussion from  Ed Sumerfield, Tim Apke, and Jim Holmes on Software Development: A Career.  Both of these meetings will be at Max Technical Training in Mason.

The latest ArcReady event will be Wednesday morning at the Microsoft office in Mason.  The topic presented will be Architecting for Scalable and Usable Web Applications.  According to Dan Rigsby, who saw the session in Indianapolis, it was a valuable session.  Register at the ArcReady site if you're interested.

On Wednesday, I will be speaking at the Cincinnati Programmers' Guild and will be doing my presentation on Pragmatic Software Architecture and the Role of the Architect.  Like the other user groups, this meeting will be held at Max Technical Training in Mason.  If you haven't seen this presentation and are interested, it is likely one of the last times I'll be doing it locally (or maybe at all).

West Michigan Day of .NET Wrap Up

Saturday's West Michigan Day of .NET was another great event.  I really enjoyed the facility at Davenport University.  There were many places to sit and chat with people.  Not that I did much other than go from one room to the next.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The weekend started with  Dan Hounshell, Justin Kohnen and I heading up on Friday and picking up Mike Eaton along the way.  We stayed at the Crowne Plaza where many people traveling from out of town stayed.  After dinner with many of the speakers and organizers, I got a good night's sleep, unlike some of those traveling with me.

One reason I needed to get to sleep early was that I was speaking during the first session of the day.  I gave my presentation on Pragmatic Software Architecture and the Role of the Architect.  The room was very quiet, but I had a few questions and lots of head nodding, which is always a good sign that attendees are with you.  And the room was almost full, which was great.  After having done my latest WPF for Developers presentation sans bullet points, it was a little different to go back to a presentation with tons of bullet points, but I'm not sure I'm going to recreate it at this point.

After my presentation, I attended An Introduction to Boo and DSL from Jay Wren.  As he said in his presentation, it seems like everyday we hear from someone else that we should be using DSLs, but nobody ever shows us how.  He first talked a little about DSLs in general and a little about Boo.  The meat of his presentation was showing how to create a simple DSL leveraging Boo.  He used Rhino.DSL, which is available in source as part of the Rhino Tools project.   I enjoyed the presentation and see a clear path to implementing a DSL if the need arises.

For the last session of the morning, I attended Mike Eaton's session LightReader - The Anatomy of a Silverlight Application.  LightReader is a Silverlight 2  RSS reader that Mike started and put out on CodePlex, and his presentation described his development experience to date, including the current architecture and challenges he faced.  Some of the interesting tidbits were that there is apparently no easy way to render HTML in Silverlight.  And the TextBlock control does not allow you to copy text.

After a few slices of pizza for lunch, I saw Dan Hibbitts speak on Windows Mobile Tool-Chain Improvements for 2008.  Since I don't do mobile development, I just got a flavor for what is available for mobile development in 2008, and a lot of the specifics went right over my head.

I next attended A Trip Around the Block with Rhino.Mocks from Steve Harman.  He first talked about mock objects in general and discussed the various flavors of mocks, stubs, fakes, etc.  Most of his presentation was showing how mocks (Rhino.Mocks in particular) are used to support testing in various open source projects.   There was also a lot of interaction from attendees and discussion of various mocking frameworks and experience using mocking.  He showed an interesting Specification base class he uses for testing that encapsulates some of the mechanics required to use Rhino.Mocks and helps support BDD.

In the last session of the day, I saw James Bender talk about Reliable Messaging in WCF.  It was a great way to end the day.  I've been working with WCF quite a bit recently, but I haven't really paid much attention to reliable messaging, because I haven't needed it. So his presentation was good summary of why I might want to use reliable messaging, and how to go about it if I need to.   He had a slide deck with lots of illustrations and great animations to help show messages going from clients to services.  I also picked up a couple WCF tips.

To round off the day, I won a copy of Pro WPF with VB 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation with .NET 3.5 (Pro), which was great since I enjoyed the previous version of the book and have been doing a WPF presentation where I talk about the book.    So now I can actually say something about it other than I haven't seen it.

If it sounds like a great day, it was.  If you get a chance, I recommend that you attend a Day of .NET or Code Camp near you.  Or even if you have to drive a bit.  The Cleveland Day of .NET is coming up this Saturday May 17.  I'll be speaking on WPF for Developers and there will be a lot of great presentations.  I hope to see you there.

Remote Desktop Crash and DirectX SDK on Vista

So I'm about to start development work today and I crank up remote desktop to access the virtual machine on my development server.  And it crashes.  So I try accessing other virtual and real machines.  And it keeps crashing.  So I disable anti-virus and close everything possible.  Keeps crashing.  If you're interested, this is the error:

Faulting application mstsc.exe, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549b425, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549bdc9, exception code 0x80000003, fault offset 0x00042ea8, process id 0xd28, application start time 0x01c8ac7a33dfff9c.

So I do some Google searches and don't find much of relevance.  But I do try disabling UAC (I'm running Vista Business).  Still crashes.   Then I try to remember the last time it worked and what I've installed since then.  And I did install something interesting yesterday, namely the DirectX SDK (March 2008).  So I do a system restore to the point I saved before I installed the SDK.  Still crashes. So I undo the restore, which fails...  But I'm not ready to give up yet.  So I uninstall the SDK.  And remote desktop starts working again.

So, it appears that installing the DirectX SDK hosed remote desktop on my Vista Business machine.  Don't understand why, but there you go.

Indianapolis Code Camp Wrap Up

Saturday was the first  Indy Code Camp.  Mike Wood, Dan Hounshell and I drove up together and each had the opportunity to speak.   I did my presentation on WPF for Developers and I think it went pretty well.  I paced it a little better this time and actually had time to talk about all of the slides and not fly through the ones at the end.  The attendees represented a wide range of experience with WPF, from some who were brand new to WPF to those who had WPF applications in production.   If you attended my session and have any suggestions on how I can improve it, please let me know.  You can use my contact form to send me a message.  And if you attended the code camp and have not filled out your evaluation, you can do that here.

After speaking, I attended several sessions on Silverlight, applying  AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) to business objects, TDD with ASP.NET MVC, and WCF.  I enjoyed all of the sessions and as usual, came away with a few ideas that I'll try out for myself.  There was a good mix of speakers from around Indianapolis and outside the area.   It was good the chat with my tweeps and meet some of them in person.

I especially enjoyed speaking at this event because it was another step in breaking down the invisible barrier between Indiana and Ohio created by the Microsoft district boundary.   We're in the Heartland District here in Ohio, while Indiana is in the Midwest District.  Indianapolis is about the same distance from me as Columbus, but I know so many more people in Columbus than in Indianapolis.  I wrote about not recognizing many speakers or attendees in my wrap up of IndyTechFest last year.   It's great to have the opportunity to speak in Indianapolis and I hope to get some speakers from Indianapolis to speak at the Dayton .NET Developers Group.

And speaking of IndyTechFest, this year's event will take place on Saturday October 4 and more details should be available soon.  I enjoyed last year's event and I will very likely attend again this year.

Indianapolis Code Camp and other upcoming events

Tomorrow is the Indy Code Camp.  I'll be doing my WPF for Developers presentation again that I first did at the Central Ohio Day of .NET.  I've been tweaking the presentation this week based on the feedback I received from the first one (thanks to everyone who responded).  I'm looking forward to doing the updated version. 

I'll also be doing my WPF presentation at the upcoming Cleveland Day of .NET  (May 17).  And at the West Michigan Day of .NET (May 10), I'll be doing my presentation on Pragmatic Software Architecture and the Role of the Architect.  I'll also be doing my software architecture presentation at the Cincinnati Programmers' Guild meeting on May 21.  If you'd like to see my architecture presentation, I'd recommend you come check out the guild.  I think it will be a great venue for this type of presentation, because it is normally a small group, and this presentation benefits from a lot of group discussion.

I also got another piece of great news this week; I'll be speaking at DevLink (August 22-23, Murfreesboro, TN)!   Interestingly, I'm not sure what I'll be speaking about, since the email I received said I have been selected as a speaker, but not the session that was accepted.  Stay tuned for updates.