David Green

Another NoSQL presentation, this time on MongoDB. This was my first run at it….hopefully will present again at Carolina Codecamp, Codestock, and MADExpo…Inshallah! As with each attempt, hopefully the style and content will get refined, we’ll see!

“...The emphasis will be primarily on the development-side as we explore how to stand up a simple data store and perform basic CRUD type operations as well as a few advanced topics. To that end, in tonight's exercise we will create a blog from scratch in ASP.NET MVC4 using MongoDB as our back end. Additionally time will be spent covering some basic NoSQL theory as it relates to MongoDB and addressing typical use-case scenarios for where best to use MongoDB.”

I've always felt that if I'm ever going to teach, there always has to be some kind of tactile learning element, esp. with software development...hence the creating a simple-blog-from-scratch example. Ironically, it took me about three times as long fighting the MVC4 framework than it did actually putting together any of the MongoDB code.

Note: You would need to become a member of TriNug (if you aren’t already) to access the .pptx slides, but the code sample is available via the link aforementioned in the comments section.

Footnote: I probably shouldn't have to say this, but my last comment about charging for my slidedeck was a joke. I have an odd sense of humor for those who don't already know me :)

After some deep soul searching, I’ve decided to venture into the world of Objective-C and the wonderful world of iOS development. Mind you, its not some whimsical fancy. As a .NET developer by trade it pains me a little to admit this.

Now I’ve been to a few “Intro to iOS development seminars” and have come away horrified at the tooling and the Objective-C language in general (in fairness, the last one of these code camp talks I attended was two years ago and I’m sure much has improved since then, with the tooling at least). Compared to the elegance of C# (yes, I said elegance!) and my comfort working with the Visual Studio IDE it was a no contest decision for me to stay solely within the Microsoft stack and not stray to the dark side…

And while I continue to work within the MS stack exclusively for work purposes, I find my interests taking me outside/beyond. For a while I went on a (short-lived) “Ruby on Rails” phase. I went on a (also short-lived) Android/Java phase too. More recently I’ve been on a RavenDB kick…and this continues as I don’t foresee that ending soon. So why are some things phases while others tend to “stick”. Maybe I’ll talk about that more in a future blog post. But I digress… The point is this, to make this stick I need a plan. And to this end, here is my plan:

• Acquire a Mac. We only have PC’s in my house, and I’m thinking of giving my 3yr old Sony Vaio to my wife (who was using a 6yr old HP) and getting a new machine for myself . And since my one year at AIS is coming up at I’ll also be eligible for our company discount (woohoo).  I’ll do a separate blog post on what Mac I decide on, but here’s a hint – it’s going to be a laptop of some kind.
• Learn Objective-C. The glory would seem to be in all the fancy-schmancy GUI stuff you can do in Cocoa developing for iPhone/iPad. But I’m kinda glad that without access to a Mac for the next month and a half I can’t do any of that stuff…I’m forced to spend time learning the underlying language. I’m thinking of working my way through Programming in Objective-C (4th Edition) (Developer's Library) by Stephen G. Kochan . I’ll do a blog post on my adventures with Cygwin and gcc later
• Develop a native iPhone app. I have a few ideas I’m mulling around. I’ll get to what I end up deciding in a later blog post.

So there’s the plan. I’ll be posting updates along the way. And so the journey begins…

Finally getting around to getting this thing off the ground. My goal for this blog is to talk about my ongoing learning/discovery of technology related to Microsoft’s .NET framework. On occasion I anticipate exploring tangential topics and the sociological/anthropological aspect of what of issues professional software developers encounter on a day-to-day basis.