Site Sections
Posts
114
Comments
127
Trackbacks
10
September 2009 Entries
“The Visual Studio Documentary”

I just watched/enjoyed “The Visual Studio Documentary” on Channel 9. It brought a tear to my eye as it rekindled memories of installing VB5 from a giant stack o’ floppies.

(Did you know that Alan Cooper’s original name for (what became) Visual Basic was “Ruby”?)

 

Edit: I posted before I actually finished the thing. It’s a bit self-congratulatory at times, but then goes turns into a full-blown commercial toward the end. Up to that point, though, it’s a fun watch.

Posted On Tuesday, September 29, 2009 7:21 PM | Comments (0)
St. Louis .NET User Group – Muljadi Budiman: “What's new in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Framework”

Muljadi Budiman was the top-rated speaker at the recent St. Louis Day of .NET event, and it’s easy to see why. His presentations are energetic, humorous, and packed with useful information.

At tonight’s St. Louis .NET User Group meeting, he zipped through an overview of Visual Studio 2010 and 4.0 features of C#, VB, WPF, the CLR and the DLR in a little over 90 minutes.

Highlights included:

  • VS2010:
    • multi-monitor support
    • Call Hierarchy visualizer
    • “Navigate To” improvements
    • “Consume-First Development” (greate for TDD)
    • Code Snippets for HTML, ASP.NET and JavaScript
    • Parallel Tasks
    • a WPF designer that doesn’t suck
    • “Embed Interop Types” compiler feature to avoid having to distribute big Interop DLL files
  • VB.NET
    • Auto-implemented properties (catching up to C#) with initial values (C#’s turn to catch up now)
    • Collection initializers (catching up to C#)
    • multi-line lambdas (catching up to C#)
    • getting rid of the underscore line continuation character! (catching up to every language created since 1982 or so)
  • CLR
    • Lazy<T>
    • Generic Set collections
    • Tuples

I don’t know if Mul has had an opportunity to present outside of the St. Louis area, but if you’re organizing a regional code camp or .NET event, I would highly recommend him.

Thanks to Quilogy for providing the geek fuel (pizza & soda) for tonight’s meeting. 

Posted On Monday, September 28, 2009 8:40 PM | Comments (2)
Phil Japikse & Hope Mongers: Giving the Gift of Technology

I just finished listening to a great .NET Rocks interview with Phil Japikse, where he talked about his experiences working on Hope Mongers, a volunteer-run asp.net-based website that brings charity projects together with donators. “Chief Monger” Sam Henry says:

Whether helping orphans on the other side of the planet or families just around the corner, so much authentic living, learning and feeling flows from the intense human connection that happens when you know you are changing someone’s life. Our goal at HopeMongers is to connect you directly with people and help you find tangible opportunities to make a lasting difference in their lives. Our unique community-centered approach focuses on the holistic, long-term needs of communities so that each project is a step toward achieving self-sufficiency, economic independence, and redemption.

As you connect with people and projects on HopeMongers, we hope to ignite a fire that will inspire you to keep giving – not just from your wallet but from your time, talent, money, gifts, your life. Our vision is to redeem the world’s poorest communities and reclaim the art of personal stewardship through microgiving. This ambitious vision is not one any of us can achieve alone but together we can be the generation that helps humanity to its feet and ends extreme poverty.

It looks like a good way to donate to worthwhile causes and know exactly what’s being done with your contribution.

You can also donate your geek skills, because Hope Mongers is an ASP.NET site, and volunteers are always welcome. To find out how you can help, email phil@skimedic.com.

 

P.S. If you’re in the St. Louis area and looking to make a difference in your community, don’t forget about the Coders 4 Charities event October 16-18: http://geekswithblogs.net/brians/archive/2009/09/19/134927.aspx

Posted On Sunday, September 27, 2009 5:14 PM | Comments (0)
Book Review: C# in Depth by Jon Skeet

C# in Depth is not for beginners. It assumes a working knowledge of C# 1.0, and is not so much a tutorial of C# 2 and 3 features as an in-depth examination of how and why they work.

I don’t think I learned anything I didn’t know about using generics, extension methods, delegates, anonymous methods and lambdas, but Skeet does a great job of zooming in on the inner workings of each of these features, building up to the big picture of how they all snap together to make the game-changing programming paradigm that is LINQ. It’s like a DVD of your favorite movie with behind-the-scenes features that show how the cool special effects were created.

When he says “in depth”, he’s not kidding. After re-emerging from the Marianas Trench level examination of expression trees to the C# surface level discussion of LINQ, I got a case of “the bends”.

The book reminds me of Silverlight “Deep Zoom”. As we zoom in and out between high-level syntax descriptions to low-level minutiae, everything is always kept in sharp focus, thanks to the considerable skills of the author.

I understand Jon Skeet is hard at work on updates to the book for C#4. When that comes out, I wish there would be a free upgrade to the book that I could download (I don’t think that’s going to happen ;) ), but that’s one book that I’m sure will be well worth the price.

If you’re serious about C#, “C# in Depth” is a must-read.

Posted On Saturday, September 26, 2009 8:43 PM | Comments (2)
Getting Serious About JavaScript

Like many ASP.NET developers, I’ve gotten by for years knowing just enough JavaScript to get by. I’ve spent many frustrating hours cursing the language, when the problem was not really JavaScript (although it has more than its share of weirdness), but my assumption that I knew how it worked, just because it looks like C#.

Now, thanks in large part to jQuery, I actually enjoy client-side programming.

jQuery makes things so much easier (replacing dozens of lines of code that I painstakingly figured out in the past, “Rhino book” at my side), that it almost seems like magic. I don’t trust magic though, so I’ve been making an effort to learn how JavaScript really works, and the best practices for working with it.

Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts” should be required reading for any web developer. It’s a short book, and this video is a great summary of the main points.

This presentation by Sergio Pereira is also a very good overview of JavaScript programming.

Another very interesting video is Learn jQuery with FireBug, jQuerify and SelectorGadget by Dave Ward, with Craig Shoemaker.

Posted On Monday, September 21, 2009 9:32 PM | Comments (0)
How do you pronounce “WPF”?

Someone asked this on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1448995/how-do-you-pronounce-wpf

I pronounce the “W” as in the word “two”, the “P” as in “pneumonia”, and the “F” like the last letter of “off”.

Posted On Saturday, September 19, 2009 7:04 PM | Comments (0)
St. Louis Coders-4-Charities: October 16-18

I’ve heard good things about last year’s Kansas City event, and am excited that we’re doing it in St. Louis. Thanks to the organizers for this great opportunity to help out some good organizations…

Are you interested in volunteering your time and technical talent to help our community?

On October 16th through the 18th we have organized a local charity event called Coders 4 Charities.  This event will benefit many St. Louis-area non-profit organizations by providing them IT solutions that would traditionally be outside of their budget or that they might not know are even possible.  We are accomplishing this through the volunteer efforts of talented people like yourself.  We have identified 9 charities in need of support and worked with each of them to identify a tangible project which can be completed over the course of a weekend.  These projects include such things as website redesigns and extensions, internal applications to streamline record-keeping, network configuration and maintenance, automated invoicing, and the online acceptance of donations.

For us to accomplish our goal of helping our community by helping these organizations, we need your help.  Washington Universities CAIT center has donated the use of their classrooms around the clock from Friday evening October 16th to Sunday evening October 18th.  During this time we will have full access to their computers and internet connections (including wireless).  Each of their classroom computers is already loaded with many of the design and development tools and technologies we use regularly as part of our "day jobs".  Our goal is to gather volunteers who will be organized into teams that will work throughout this weekend to provide these solutions to these organizations.

We have some generous sponsors who are providing refreshments and meals throughout the whole weekend (i.e. breakfast, lunch and dinner) and we have other sponsors providing some great prizes to be awarded at an awards ceremony on Sunday evening.

What types of people are we looking for?

We need many different types of skill sets with expertise in many disparate technologies.  From developers to designers and network engineers to project managers.  It takes a lot of people to implement great solutions and we are open to many people helping out for a good cause.  Most importantly we need enthusiastic people willing to work together with others on a team towards a common goal.  We need people who are willing to wear a lot of hats over short period of time and take the initiative to do what is necessary for your team to successfully help your assigned organization. 

How can you volunteer?  Please go to our website at http://www.c4c-stl.org and read the FAQ for answers to many of the commonly asked questions.   Then, if this sounds like something you are interested in, provide us with some basic information about yourself on our Volunteers page.  If you have any questions about this event that are not answered on our site, please do not hesitate to drop us an email at volunteer@c4c-stl.org.

If your organization is interested in sponsoring our event with food or prizes, please have them contact us at sponsors@c4c-stl.org.

Thank you for your support,

Coders 4 Charities St. Louis Organizers

organizers@c4c-stl.org

Posted On Saturday, September 19, 2009 7:39 AM | Comments (0)
Scott Hanselman's 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

Scott has updated his insanely useful list of insanely useful tools.

If you find something useful there (and it would be hard not to), please consider Scott’s request to make a tax-deductible contribution to the American Diabetes Association.

http://www.hanselman.com/tools

Posted On Wednesday, September 2, 2009 5:50 AM | Comments (0)
Archives
Post Categories
Links
Twitter










Tag Cloud