This is my first post in this new year and was thinking about a topic to write on. Lately I have been working on varied things that flexes the brain muscles and things which I haven't done before. So a lot of learning and some unlearning this new year. One of the big issue which most people faces is learning to learn!.So, today I will share my experience of how I go about learning a technology, a skill or anything you want. The first and foremost thing is the motivation. This thing is very personal...
I’ve dated men that fall into various categories, from musicians to jocks to the average “Joe”. But my current beau falls under a new category for me: the self-proclaimed geek. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle it at first… dealing with someone who is just like me. After all, I’ve been told that I can sometimes be demanding, maybe even a bit overbearing. Surprisingly enough, I’ve really come to enjoy spending time with someone I can relate to. Someone just like me. And so I decided to list out...
I work as a Tech Lead/Web Developer, focusing mainly in ASP.NET technologies. My exploration into programming began at the age of 15;Turbo PASCAL, C, C++, JAVA, VB6,Flash and a variety of other equally obscure acronyms, mainly as a hobby. After several detours, I am here today on the VB.NET to C# channel. I now work on ASP.NET+C#+EF+LINQ+AJAX+JQu... which go together like coffee crumble ice cream. I am a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP since 2009, Microsoft Influencer and a regular contributor at CodeASP.NET...
JetBrains have recently released ReSharper 6.1, along with compatible updates to dotCover (version 1.2) and dotTrace Performance (version 4.5.2). Here is a list of common developer tasks that ReSharper 6 helps handles better than previous versions: Improve Visual Studio responsiveness: While developing ReSharper 6.0 and 6.1, Jet Brains have fixed more than 200 performance and memory consumption issues, as well as over 2900 bugs!Use proper tooling for web development: ReSharper 6 introduces extensive...
Today's $10 Deal of the day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Oracle PL/SQL Recipes"Oracle PL/SQL Recipes provides task-oriented solutions to common PL/SQL programming problems. This is your go to book for straightforward advice on PL/SQL programming."...
I have recently been turned on to the world of microcontrollers while doing some hobby development. Here is the first “real” program I have written with the Texas Instruments MSP430 LaunchPad development tool. Check it out…$4.30 to get a development board with 2 devices and a USB connection to your Windows PC for programming and debugging. It’s a lot of fun…especially if you enjoy bit-twiddling! The MSP430 processors specialize in low power operations. They accomplish this by enabling peripherals...
ASP.NET Enterpise Manager is a web based database management system designed specifically for the management of Microsoft SQL databases through a web browser, without the need for any desktop database management systems such as Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio. ASP.NET Enterprise Manager is included as default with an installation of Plesk for Windows, meaning that if you are a customer who uses Plesk based Windows hosting, you will most likely have used ASP.NET Enterprise Manager at least...
I originally heard about this website several years ago when I was attending user groups with Rob Reynolds and Dru Sellers. At the time it was still early on in my career and I didn't feel it was the right time to start something like this. Now, 5 years later, I feel it's tje right time to start giving back, or at least trying to, and hopefully help someone like so many have helped me along the way.I am a programmer in Topeka, Ks. I moved here after graduating from Kansas State University and began...
The list of 30 free programming books at http://citizen428.net/blog/... has been updated and there are now 59 links listed...
I read Dave Rosenberg’s recent article on CNET entitled “What you should do in 2012: Start a company”, which focussed on interacting with venture capitalists to raise money. I think this is jumping the gun a bit though. The reality is that you don’t need VCs to run, or even start, a company. You also don’t need to quit your day job to do it, or hire employees right away, or put up huge capital to start it. An Idea that Provides Value…or Don’t Be an Underpants Gnome The most important thing you need...
I recently accepted to do a review of “The Learn Microsoft Visual C# book 2010” by John Paul Mueller. I was in two minds on whether I really wanted to read this book – in it’s description it says it is targeting fundamentals of modern programming with Visual C#, but I wasn’t sure how fundamental it would be and since I have been working with C# for a while now, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth my while. After going through a few of the chapters of the book I would say this really targets very basic...
A little more than three months ago, Microsoft hosted the //build/ conference at which they unveiled the upcoming version of Windows (commonly called Windows 8, though I don’t know if the marketing folks have accepted the fact that that is the name most of us are expecting for it yet). They released to the developer world a build of it called the Windows Developer Preview (and Windows Server Developer Preview) along with various tools for creating the new “Metro style” apps. I wasn’t able to make...
Wishing a very happy and blessed New Year to you in advance! A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on December 29th. We expect that its 11 new code samples covering typical programming scenarios in Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Shell, and WDK would ease your development in the coming New Year. You can download the code samples using Sample Browser or Sample Browser Visual Studio extension. They give you the flexibility to search samples, download samples on demand,...
Every now and then I go to Tiobe to see their ratings on the popularity of programming languages. Usually there is nothing exciting out there, just a few small moves of languages so I was interested to see in December Tiobe had a headline of C++ about to be dethroned by C# Looking at the stats, sure enough, according to Tiobe C# is on the verge of taking the number 3 spot. It will be interesting to see what happens when Windows 8 hits the market with what seemed to be a revival of C++ during Microsoft’s...
Bug or Feature? © 2012 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved. I was born in a time and place where avant-garde accountants used a handle-powered adding machines, old-fashioned ones still used pencil and paper, and all used their heads. As a child I did most of my calculations mentally and reverted to paper and pencil only for the really tough ones. As a young statistician I did most of my calculations on an Electro-mechanical calculator which had the ability to do the sum of x while computing the...
Agility needs to get onto the next level – that´s what I tried to explain in my previous articles. After a reality check – what´s missing from Agile practice? –, and some general musings about how a next level of Agility could look like, here now some very tangible suggestions. Crank up the frequency Current Agile practice is suffering from too little attention to Acceptance. To change this, very, very clear Acceptance dates need to be set. Acceptance can only get into a real pulling mode, if dates...
Todays's $10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Windows Mobile Game Development"This book will provide you with a comprehensive guide to developing games for both the Windows Mobile platform and the Windows Phone using the industry standard programming languages C# and VB .NET."...
A co-worker was showing me an in phone scripting environment on the iPhone and I knew I had seen one mentioned for the Windows Phone before. TouchDevelop is an app from Microsoft Research that allows you to create small applications that do a wide variety of operations including using most of the capabilities of the device. So could this be a fun way for us geeks to waste some time while waiting for our oil to be change or a table to open up at your favorite restaurant? So what does this language...
In the last installment I discussed delegates, which have been in C# since version 1. The problem with delegates in some cases is that having to create separate, named methods to describe the function to be performed can be a bit unwieldy in cases where the method being called is simple and will not be used other than by the delegate invocation. This brings us to a feature added in C# 2.0 – anonymous methods. Anonymous methods distilled down to their most simple explanation are methods that are defined...
At http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... there is an excellent deal of programming books including how to buy for the geek in your life:The hardest person on your list to shop for is Andrew. Why? Because he just won't tell you what he needs or wants. It's not because he doesn't want anything; it's just that telling you isn't logical. If he needs it or wants it, he'll get it himself, right? In the meantime, you're left with trying to figure out the perfect gift for someone who spends...
As someone who works a lot on Silverlight and as someone who have presented lots of trainings / talks over Silverlight; i am been getting a lot of questions based on future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/m... These are often from end-clients, managers, architects or even consumers. Sometimes also from guys who have little exposure to Silverlight; but still want to engage in the conversation as it is "happening"...
What could you build with the XBox Kinect? Well we want to know! Connect your Kinect to your PC and build an application using your favorite .NET language. Kinect for Developers is a 2-day workshop for developers, artists and technicians interested in Kinect hacking or 3D scanning. This hands on workshop will teach you the basics of programming for Kinect and the potentials for developing on video and depth sensor cameras. Expect live demonstrations, presentations, food, and lots of hacking. You...
As someone who works a lot on Silverlight and as someone who have presented lots of trainings / talks over Silverlight; i am been getting a lot of questions based on future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/m... These are often from end-clients, managers, architects or even consumers. Sometimes also from guys who have little exposure to Silverlight; but still want to engage in the conversation as it is "happening"...
I read two blog posts recently that got me to thinking. The first is a post entitled Programming Isn't Fun Anymore by Eric Allman. The second is a response to the first by Dean Wampler called Programming can be fun again. These brought the question to my mind as to whether or not new and young programmers are missing out on some of the fun parts of programming. Eric’s post explains that some older programmers are realizing that most development work (especially in the OOP world) involves learning...
Overview C++ AMP is a GPGPU API – it allows you to define functions (kernels) that take some input, perform an expensive calculation on the GPU and return the output to CPU. GPU supports fast calculative operations across many SIMD-like cores - NVidia Tesla supports 512 cores compared to the paltry 10 cores available on the CPU today - even Intel's Knights Corner will only support 60 cores next year. Suitable only for certain classes of problems (i.e. data parallel algorithms) and not for others...
Threading was never so easy since .NET 4 with the TPL has been released. I know I am a bit late but there are so many nice things which might still be new to many of us. The IEnumerable interface has become famous with the introduction of LINQ but many of us have not yet realized that IEnumerable<T> and T[] or List<T> can be exchanged in many cases but there are cases where it is important to fall back to a pure IEnumerable<T> if you want to support lazy evaluation. .NET 4 has for...
Today’s $13.99 Deal of the Day from O’Reilly at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... is Head First HTML5 Programming “HTML has been on a wild ride. Sure, HTML started as a mere markup language, but more recently HTML’s put on some major muscle. Now we’ve got a language tuned for building web applications with Web storage, 2D drawing, offline support, sockets and threads, and more. And to speak this language you’ve got to go beyond HTML5 markup and into the world of the DOM, events, and...
Here is a list of programming forums I visit for: Seeing what programmers are currently learning Seeing what makes programmers struggle Answering programming questions Asking programming questions The sites require (free) registration and, in different ways, keep track of points you earn for participation as well as a reputation score. Here they are in no specific order: http://www.daniweb.com http://social.msdn.microsof... http://stackoverflow.com/ http://stackexchange.com/ http://www.experts-exchange...
Todays Deal of the Day from O'Reilly at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... is CLR via C#, Third Edition at $23.99 "Dig deep and master the intricacies of the common language runtime (CLR) and the .NET Framework 4.0. Written by a highly regarded programming expert and consultant to the Microsoft® .NET team, this guide is ideal for developers building any kind of application-including Microsoft® ASP.NET, Windows® Forms, Microsoft® SQL Server®, Web services, and console applications. You'll...
I recently was going over a great book called “Dependency Injection in .Net” by Mark Seeman. So far I have really enjoyed the book and would recommend anyone looking to get into DI to give it a read. Today I thought I would blog about the first example Mark gives in his book to illustrate some of the benefits that DI provides. The ones he lists are Late binding Extensibility Parallel Development Maintainability Testability To illustrate some of these benefits he gives a HelloWorld example using DI...
UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback and comments. I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations. I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping. According to Wikipedia...
O'Reilly are offering a series of good offers through to Jan 19, 2012. The main page is at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... Already available are: JavaScript path to Mastery set at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... I recommend JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition- PDF is 50% off at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... HTML 5 Programming set at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... Again the PDF's are 50% off. Can't...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates...
In this Issue: Michael Crump, Andrea Boschin, Michael Sync, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Erno de Weerd, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Antoni Dol, Walter Ferrari, and Jeff Blankenburg(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #2: Device Status" Jeff Blankenburg Metro/WinRT/W8: "Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Target" Derik Whittaker Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael...
The Obscure C competition is back at http://www.ioccc.org/ The Competition is open to the 12/Jan/2012. The aim of the competition is: To write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program under the rules at http://www.ioccc.org/2011/r... To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way. To stress C compilers with unusual code. To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language. To provide a safe forum for poor C code. :-) Even if you are not a C programmer, it is worth looking at...
In this Issue: Pontus Wittenmark, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Colin Eberhardt, Charles Petzold, Dhananjay Kumar, Igor, Beth Massi, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Shawn Wildermuth, XAMLNinja, and Peter Kuhn(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Page Navigation Framework - Learn about UriMapper" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "31 Days of Mango" Jeff Blankenburg WinRT/Metro/W8: "An Introduction to Semantic Zoom in Windows 8 Metro" Colin Eberhardt LightSwitch: "Common Validation Rules in LightSwitch Business Applications"...
© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Adventures with JavaScript rendered in IE 8, Chrome 15, and Firefox 8.0 I have written a little monogram about the advantages of Math and wrote a few JavaScript applications to demonstrate them. I was a bit careless and used elements on the page in my JavaScript without using any of the GetElementsByXXXX methods to identify them. Say I had a text box named tbSeqNum into which I entered a number to be used in a computation. In my code I simply referred...
Yes, I was. Recently, I’ve taken a good hard look at JavaScript. I’ve used it before but mostly in the capacity of web design. Using JQuery to make your web page do cool stuff is different than really creating a JavaScript application using all of the language constructs. What I’m finding as I use it more is that I may have been wrong about my assumptions about it. Let me explain. I enjoyed doing cool stuff with JQuery but the limited experience with JavaScript as a language coupled with the bad...
Today's $10 Deal of the Day from Apress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Pro Dynamic .NET 4.0 Applications Data-Driven Programming for the .NET Framework "As a developer, you are likely painfully aware that not all features of an application can be anticipated when the software ships. In order to cope with these eventualities and save yourself time (and perhaps money), it makes sense to write your applications in such a way that end users can be made as independent of the developers as possible....
I don’t usually do a product profile unless I either really like the product and use it myself, or I’m genuinely curious about the product and what it can do for me. While I haven’t used InRule before, it does fit the latter of those criteria because of my interest in similar products I have used in the past. A Quick Intro to my Life in Rules… Flash back to my college years (when 5.25” floppies were king) and you’d see a young guy in an Artificial Intelligence class learning about a Knowledge Based...
· For the last decade, the majority of my dev work has leveraged the .NET Framework for construction of information systems. However, my interest has lain in numerical computing. · Is it possible to have an increasingly higher level of abstraction and at the same time achieve underlying high performance computing? The prevailing winds say no: C# is aimed at productivity, and C++ is for performance. Garbage collection was great, but do we still need it with the availability of smart pointers? Would...
Motivation During programming suddenly this error (“Failure has occurred while loading a type”) was thrown by accessing a artifact of a referenced library. In such cases I take the assembly fusion logger fuslogvw to search for problems of loading assemblies. Sometimes an old version from a not expected folder is binded. But all bindings were correct. Problem After several hour I got the right hint. Because the assembly is a COM+ one, there are some registration things in die background – and I don’t...
Today O'Reilly have two excellent deals! Data Science Starter Kit Fundamentals of Microsoft .NET Programming Grasp the basic concepts that drive all Microsoft® .NET-based languages—and prepare yourself to learn .NET programming. If you have absolutely no previous experience, no problem—simply start here! This ebook provides the foundation for all other .NET programming language books in the Start Here! series. You’ll explore programming concepts and techniques with clear explanations, easy-to-follow...
I recently have had the humbling experience of pair programming with several developers where I was just astounded at the speed at which they were able to get code generated. One thing I noticed is that most of their coding was done with the keyboard with very little use of the mouse – everything was shortcut based. When it was my turn to take over the wheel I found myself extremely slow compared to them, partly because I was not familiar with their keyboard and layout, but the majority of the slowness...
Here are the slides and code samples for MVVM Programming Introduction given at TechEd Africa 2011...
For those that attended my session on the complexities of asynchronous programming in WPF & Silverlight, find below the latest slide deck and code samples for download...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Previously, I had created some posts about the Task Parallel Library’s Concurrent Collections – which are very efficient collections designed for concurrent use with minimal contention – but in this next series of Little Wonders posts, I’d like to explore the parts...
In the closing keynote at TechEd Africa 2011, Clifford de Wit (Microsoft South Africa) made improvements on his previous years attempt to geekily give away a prize, but unfortunately still got it wrong… here’s why. At Teched 2010 Clifford gave away an amazing prize of a wheel barrow full of tech goodies – if my memory serves me right, it included a laptop, xbox, kinect as well as a whole bunch of other fun stuff – a geeks delight. Unfortunately he was given some flack on how he decided to pick the...
Today TechEd Africa 2011 ended. It was a great conference and the first time I have ever had the opportunity to present an hour long topic – I had the joy of presenting two sessions at this conference, one session based on a topic which I should have been able to cover easily and one with a topic that I battled with and felt totally out of my depth. In retrospect, there are a few bits of advice that I would like to give other people that are thinking of presenting at a conference like this for the...
It was another engaging presentation at this month’s CITAG meeting as Joe Hummel presented functional programming and its implementation using F#. Some times it is fun to attack a mind bending problem and this was one of those times. Leaning about functional programming caused about the same brain cramps as moving from procedural to object oriented for the first time. Of course when you start to get it the effect is almost euphoric. I would suggest that if you haven’t looked into functional programming...