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...
Paul Schaeflein wrote this yesterday: http://www.schaeflein.net/b... First off Paul is awesome so do not think of this blog post as an attack it is just my opinion. So first off I was there at the first SharePoint Saturday and I knew it was happening well before it happened. I have been an attendee, volunteer, speaker, and sponsor. I have thrown thousands of dollars and effort into these events. I am sold on the idea. Michael Lotter once told me that the whole point of...
In January 0f 2009 something crazy and awesome happened for me, SharePoint Saturday was born. I was a 26 year old girl from Saint Louis Missouri who was living in Olathe, KS. About 5 month prior I went to the most pivotal event in my career and life in Washington DC, the Regional SharePoint Conference, where I met Michael Lotter, Paul Galvin, Tony Lanni, Bob Fox, and Rachel Appel. Several months later I was visiting Michael at a code camp in Raleigh North Carolina and he told me we’re going to have...
If you're interested in hacking (and by that I don't mean programming, I mean cobbling together various wires, circuits, bits and gizmos to form something new and innovative) then you've probably come across MAKE magazine. The folks at MAKE have released a special edition: MAKE Ultimate Kit Guide 2012. At 101 square-bound pages, and a $9.99 price tag, it's something more than a magazine but not quite a book. The first 30 pages are devoted to the kit "industry" itself, with articles on: The Rally...
There’s an ongoing discussion in the community about various aspects of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) awards and this is a quick contribution I’ll make to share a few thoughts. Recent events in this discussion include MVPs who either weren’t re-awarded and/or declined their award. There are alignments and differences between their perspectives and mine, particularly in the areas of expectations and values. This is one of my contributions to that on-going discussion. In it’s simplest...
If you follow the MVP program a bit, you might have heard about Rob Eisenberg and his struggles with the MVP program. If you haven’t, well, just move along, there’s nothing interesting to read here. Still here? Good. For those of you who don’t know who Rob is: he is the creator of Caliburn and Caliburn Micro, a MVVM Framework I truly love, support and have written about here before. He is one of the bigger contributors to the Open Source community in the Microsoft technologies. If you work on anything...
I received the good news on Jan 1st that, for the 4th year in a row, I was awarded a Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET/IIS. There’s some movement as there always is – some people not getting renewed their MVP award, new people attaining it. Some people have publically voiced how they turned down the award or just didn’t bother working for it for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into here. There’s also been some passionate Twitter discussions around community and groups and how valid they are,...
Happy New Year! I am excited to be speaking at the first meeting in 2012 for the Tampa Bay Windows Phone 7 User Group As usual at Tampa WP7UG there is a jump start session for beginners before the meeting: 5:30PM An Intimate intro to WP7 Development with a local MVP Kevin Wolf in room 1, or a work session in the main room. Come on by early to hangout with other developers or attend the intro sessions. Here is the description of my presentation starting at 6:30PM: Live Tiles, Toasts and Push Notifications...
With TFS 2010 a basic installation of TFS has been reduced to a matter of clicks, the pain however lies in getting an appropriate environment provisioned from the Infrastructure team. There will be planned and unplanned downtime as the infrastructure team takes the environment down for patching. There are various TFS hosting services available out there that’ll take this pain point away from you. Some of the leading players amongst others include DiscountASP.net, TeamDevCentral, Praktik Hosting…...
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...
2011 started with a bang and ended with a boom for me. Anyway that’s not what I want to talk about in this blog post. I am not looking back I am walking forward. I was reckless with my life for several years and thought it was the best idea to act in a certain manner. I was reckless because I was neglectful of my happiness. I am changing that in 2012. I am instituting a travel policy where I will be traveling only once a month for an event or user group and no more than once a month. That means I...
January 2012 will go down as one of the most memorable months! What a fantastic way to start the year, received an email from Microsoft telling me that I have been presented with the Microsoft MVP Award in the Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management Competency for 2012. Dear Tarun Arora, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise...
The latest release of the Community TFS Build Extensions include a brand new tool called Community TFS Build Manager and has been created for two reasons: An implementation of the Team Foundation Build API which is referenced by the Rangers Build Customization Guidance V2 (available H1 2012) Provide a solution to a real problem. The Community TFS Build Manager is intended to ease the management of builds in medium to large Team Foundation Server environments, though it does provide a few features...
Greetings, this is my first geeks with blogs posting. so forgive me if it looks so sloppy. Purpose: To calculate additional shipping fees for a shopping cart full of items based on product name in Magento 1.4. We will assume the same shipping rate for all services here. Most items in our store are the same size and weight, except for a few items that are a little larger. We will identify those large items by name and add some amount onto them. First we shall start off with a free open source Magento...
If you've ever had a poke around System.dll or System.Core.dll in Reflector, you may have noticed TypeForwardedToAttributes applied to the assembly: [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Lazy... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Lazy... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Acti... This post has a look at what these are,...
In November Alex Groß (http://therightstuff.de/) was in Uganda for holidays and we hijacked him to speak to us on some .NET geek stuff. In the image above you see Allan Rwakatungu, Jude Opima, Myself and Alex Groß. More pictures http://www.flickr.com/photo... These are some of the topics that were discussed. Test Driven Development. Alex shared a great amount detail and a step by step tour of how you can work with unit tests and went on to show MSpec as a BDD tool....
First off for those of you who attended some presentations the past few weeks here is the link for the code samples: https://skydrive.live.com/#... Here is the link for the slide decks: https://skydrive.live.com/#... Now I wanted to explain why the blogging has been very few and far between. As you guys know I went through some craziness in the past few months. I am just coming out of the tunnel and I can see...
I have been a member of GWB for a while now, and have really enjoyed it. There is a sense of community and I enjoy some of the feedback and comments I get from other posters as well as reading other community members blogs. Part of the reason of joining GWB was seeing what other people with similar interests were blogging about and interacting with them. What does worry me is lately I have noticed an increase in spam by some of the other bloggers… By spam, I don’t mean reviews of products as blog...
When Rob Conery left Microsoft I gave a blog retrospective on possible reasons behind his exit. Today I’m happy to reload the cannon and aim it square at the latest Microsoftie to hand in his blue badge – Phil Haack. Phil has been a huge part of why Microsoft MVC is a success, and his contributions have changed the way web development is done on the Microsoft platform. So why leave, and why leave to Github? Couldn’t he have just switched to the TFS team if he liked code repositories so much? Well,...
I've been at GeeksWithBlogs for 6 years now, and over the years its been great to see new people join the GWB community. I wanted to highlight a few blogs that started up this year that you might want to add to your RSS feed.Simon Cooperhttp://geekswithblogs... has some crazy deep, low level type posts on .NET code which I'm sure some people would think is fantastic. But what I really like is the insight into RedGate. Simon works for RedGate software, and shares experiences...
Normally, virtual method overrides in .NET are done implicitly; if a subclass has a virtual method with the same name and signature as a virtual method in a base class, then the method in the subclass overrides the method in the base class: .class public BaseClass { .method public instance virtual string Method1(int32 i1, object o1) { ... } } .class public SubClass extends BaseClass { // this method implicitly overrides BaseClass::Method1 .method public instance virtual string Method1(int32 i1, object...
For a while I’ve been working on an idea and whitepaper around analyzing source code to measure the size and complexity. There are some tools around which can do this but my differentiator is that I was interested in BizTalk projects and wanted to look at how these could be measured. Note however this can be easily used for non-BizTalk projects too. The aim is to be able to understand the size and complexity of a solution and to allow some real metrics to contribute to your understanding of the Total...
I sent out an email newsletter to my local user group members recently to discuss the benefits of putting their IT skills to use. I felt it was important to reiterate that message here, just in case someone happens to actually read it and finds value in the message. So here’s the excerpt from that newsletter: The holiday season is approaching, which means it’s the season for giving! Why don’t you consider volunteering your time and your super mad .NET skills to a good cause? Visit getvolunteering.ca...
Anyone working with developing custom activities in TFS 2010 Build has run into the following dreadful error message when running the build: TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition \TeamProject\MyBuildDefinit... Cannot create unknown type '{clr-namespace:[namespace]... What the error means is that when the TFS build service loads the build process template XAML for the build definition, it can’t create an instance of the customer workflow...
This was a very interesting event, I had never spoken in an event with so many developers in one place. It was cool! I had two talks, one on HTML5 and IE9 where I demonstrated the HTML5 and CSS3 coverage in IE9 and performance improvements, the second on ASP.NET MVC Best Practices where I talked about a fraction of things that you need to be aware of and possibly use when you are developing an MVC application. The HTML5 and IE9 talk was more of a showcase and focused on new features that will continue...
I have learnt from Serge Baranovsky ofSubMain that work has started on the new version of GhostDoc and the first beta is expected in January.For more details see http://community.submain.co... too can make suggestions about the next version of GhostDoc at http://feedback.submain.com...
Let me clarify what I mean by “3 role” environment. When looking at the division of roles with products, solutions or environments, it has been very normal to break it down into IT Pros (Admins), Developers and End Users. And many approach SharePoint in the same style. Does it fit? Sure. Is it the most effective approach? HECK NO! Let’s look at it piece by piece. Now the question is where do we start? We need to redefine this. In all cases leaving it as IT Pros, Developers and End Users is too broad....
We are almost at the start of the new year. The group is currently on our December break from presentations but we are looking to return full steam in January. The Chicago Information Technology Architects Group is community driven and as such we are looking for speakers and topics to keep our community thriving. If you have a topic that you would like to present or know someone who has a topic that they love to talk about in the IT Architecture space please contact me through this blog. del.icio.us...
Today is the first day of my fourth year at IdentityMine. I can hardly believe how fast it went, and how exciting the trip has been so far. In the past three years, I have had the chance to work on exciting technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation (which is still very much active, and even more exciting since we now have the possibility to add Kinect interactions to any WPF application!), Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 (for which we have a lot of work right now), Microsoft Surface (for which...
I haven’t written a blog post in a while. I understand there is blog neglect going on, but there is a lot going on in my life. I am trying really hard to embrace the change and roll with everything thrown my way. I had a really hard year it was not my best and it was not my worst. I cannot say it was entirely hard, because January 1st I received the MVP Award. If you know me you know the three things that happened starting in August, but if you really know me it was miserable for a substantial period...
On Tuesday November 22th, VISUG User Group has hosted an event at Microsoft Belgium about Hosted TFS by Hassan Fadili see http://www.visug.be/Eventde... This event was very interactive and many as 60 people have taken part. The topic was about Build, Relase and Deploy with TFS2011 and MS Deploy. A combination of Slides and Demo's was perfect to explain this common mechanism for developers.To learn more about this topic check the earlier article pubished by Hassan...
Paul Thurrrott recently posted an article on the future of SkyDrive and I was asked what I thought about its future by @UserCommunity. So let’s take a look. The breakdown from Microsoft that Paul described I believe is an accurate representation of users and usages. While I can’t say that I leverage SkyDrive to the extent that it was meant to be I do enjoy having OneNote hosted their and being able to consult and edit it from the desktop, web and Windows Phone. Taking that one step further is the...
For several years, I use TDD (Test-Driven Development) to produce code. I no longer plans to work without using TDD. The use of TDD significantly increases code quality, but does not guarantee that the code is the code that corresponds to the requirements specifications (write the "right code" with BDD as opposed to the write "code right" with BDD). Dan North has described in an article in published in 2006 the foundations of the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development). In this article, he introduces the...
Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there...
Herve Roggero, SQL Azure MVP, has created a virtual community to focus on Azure. Here is the outline from Herve: User Group Name: Azure Florida Association Purpose: Start a virtual Florida user group that targets the Azure platform Venues: Most meetings will be virtual; however I plan to host a few physical events across Florida if possible from time to time; physical events may be a few hours long with potentially more than one speaker Possible Topics: The topics will touch Azure generally speaking,...
Today's$10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is "Beginning GIMP". "In this fully-updated second edition, author and long-time member of the GIMP community Akkana Peck introduces the GIMP and shows you everything about it that you'll want to know—including how to prepare images for display on web pages, touch up digital photos, tap into powerful filters, effects, and plug-ins, and automate tasks using scripts." For those of you unfamilar with GIMP it is the GNU Image...
I am proud to announce the creation of a new virtual user group: the Azure Florida Association. The missiong of this group is to bring national and internaional speakers to the forefront of the Florida Azure community. Speakers include Microsoft employees, MVPs and senior developers that use the Azure platform extensively. How to learn about meetings and the group Go to http://www.linkedin.com/gro... First Meeting Announcement Date: January 25 2012 @4PM ET Topic: Demystifying SQL Azure...
When The Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) decided they needed a web application to allow easy access to the expenses management system they initially went to ASP.NET web forms combined with CSS. The outcome, however, was not satisfying enough as it appeared bland and lacked in richness. So in order to enrich the UI and give the web application some glitz, Visual WebGui was selected. Visual WebGui provided the needed richness and the familiar Windows look and feel also made the transition...
There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed...
On November 12th 2011, I gave a presentation at Chippewa Valley Code Camp titled, “Kinecting the Dots with the Kinect SDK”. As promised, here is the Slides / Code / Resources to my talk. (click image to download slides) The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a starter kit for applications developers that includes APIs, sample code, and drivers. This SDK enables the academic research and enthusiast communities to create rich experiences by using Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect sensor technology on computers...
Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll...
Microsoft is hosting another Windows Phone Accelerator lab this December 13-15 in Dallas: Do you have the next million dollar idea that you just can’t find the time to finish? Do you already have an app for Android and iPhone that you want to expand into new markets? It’s time to turn your napkin sketches and leverage your hard work into real, sellable apps for Windows Phone in ONE WEEK! Join us for a special Windows Phone event you don’t want to miss - Windows Phone Accelerator! In this 3-day developer...
One of the groups that I am currently President of (IASA Kansas City) is hosting an event by Rachel Hack (Google Community Manager) about the Google Fiber Project in Kansas City. The event will be hosted at Balance Point’s office off 92nd and Ward Parkway on the Missouri side of the state line. If you are interested, please check out further details here and get registered. It is after work hours from 6 to 8 PM on the night of November 29, 2011. It is free to attend and open to anyone who gets registered....
Two months ago, almost to the day, I opened Big Robot Games. This is my 4th game store (the 3rd actual Brick & Mortar store, in the 4th physical location.) I opened my first store in 1999. It was called Roanoke Hobbies and was located in Roanoke, VA. I partnered up with a buddy from the Navy to open it. It was a really small space, in a terrible location, but the rent was dirt cheap. Even then, we built up a pretty loyal group of regulars and friends. We carried all the traditional fare: Games...
Yikes... left off all my information last night! In this Issue: Jay Kimble, Charles Petzold, Peter Kuhn, Adam Kinney, Ollie Riches, Abhinaba Basu, Mike Taulty, Erik Mork, Kunal Chowdhury, Cheryl Simmons, Beth Massi, Joost van Schaik, Timmy Kokke, David Catuhe, Igor, and Dhananjay Kumar. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "New version of Babylon engine for Silverlight 5 and Silverlight 5 Toolkit" David Catuhe WP7: "A behavior to show the Windows Phone 7 camera as background" Joost van Schaik Beth Massi:...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jeremy Likness, Mike Taulty, Erno de Weerd, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Sumit Dutta, Asim Sajjad, Dhananjay Kumar, and Avi Pilosof. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using Jounce Navigation to Create OOB Child Windows in Silverlight 5" Jeremy Likness WP7: "Video on How to work with WCF Services in Windows Phone 7" Dhananjay Kumar Metro/WinRT/WIndows 8: "Development Tip – Tab Control" Avi Pilosof LightSwitch: "Connecting To A .CSV or Excel File...
There’s been a lot of discussion around Scott Hanselman’s recent blog post around profanity in presentations. He discusses whether the use of profanity is appropriate in conference presentations, and the feedback through comments and the Twitterverse are varied. Some say its ok, others say it isn’t. Everyone seems to be discussing about the presentation itself, the “artistic license” that presenters are granted when creating their presentation. I wanted to give a different take on the subject – the...
Aims if this chapter Explain what is meant by communication and collaboration Describe the social mechanisms that are used by people to communicate and collaborate Outline the range of collaborative systems that have been developed to support this kind of social behaviour Describe some of the new forms of social behaviour that have emerged as a result of the proliferation of mobile devices, web-based services, and applications Summary Social mechanisms in communication and collaboration Underlying...
I was pleasantly surprised to find out this week that I am now part of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program. It is hard to believe that it has been 5 1/2 years since I started blogging here. It has always been a great community and it is great to be able to show off how much I appreciate having this soapbox here to share ideas. I look forward to being here a lot longer. Finally, thanks to Jeff and the crew for keeping the lights on and continued improvements. del.icio.us Tags: GWB,Geeks With...
Once the installer for the AdventureWorks Community Sample Database has finished, we then need to complete the process (not mandatory, but nice to do to play with the OLAP content). The first thing we need to do is make sure we note the location of the script files and samples. The path if you are working with SQL Server 2008 R2 is as follows: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Samples\Ad... 2008R2 Analysis Services Project\enterprise” I am working with the developer edition,...