G's Blog

Breaking Into .NET (from scratch)

Kevin G — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:13:51 GMT

Lately I've had a few people approach me after speaking engagements or conferences and ask for some advice on becoming a .NET developer. Sometimes this has been moving into IT from an unrelated field or other times it's just been a transition of existing development skills into .NET. Now if you have been in this industry for awhile (and had any success) you have apparently demonstrated at least some capability to migrate your skills from one newly released technology to the next. In 2009 it's hard to remember an environment where we, as an industry, weren't in constant "learning mode". I've done my best to embrace the changes and keep challenging myself to keep learning more and more about technologies I find interesting. Heck, I've come to enjoy playing keep-up on some of this stuff as it keeps things interesting and I'm never bored (and I'm also never really caught up :). But, what I have found is that this constantly changing landscape is a bit difficult to find a way into from the outside. If you are new to .NET (or programming in general) how can you dive in and start down a path that will (hopefully) lead you towards the achievable goal of being a competent software developer?

I'm a big proponent of anyone's ability to learn whatever they set their mind to if they put in the time and effort and use some common sense about how to keep getting better. As an example, I've become a halfway passable guitar player by (at one point in history) simply taking the plunge and buying a guitar and book and convincing myself I could learn. I was 18 years old and I knew absolutely no one who played guitar. Did it happen overnight? Heck no! It has taken me 15 years and countless books, magazines, websites, etc. I've played in 10 or so bands with some great musicians who have taught me a lot...and, most importantly, I've put in countless hours in a bedroom (or basement or bathroom or studio or wherever) making a horrendous noise while practicing...(many people around me suffered a lot during the early years)...but, today, I can actually entertain people with a guitar. Did I do it all on my own? Nope, I quickly sought out people with the skills I was interested in who were willing to share their knowledge and I asked them to point me in the right direction. I asked what I could do to be better and then I listened to their advice and put in the effort to act on it. I'm nowhere near perfect and still consider myself a hack...but I learned a lot on my own by chasing a dream and having a realistic expectations of what I was capable of...and asking for a lot of help.

What does this whole guitar thing mean to people wanting to be a software developer? Well, first off, I think learning to be a software developer (like anything) is actually a very achievable goal for those willing to work for it. Is it easy and will it happen overnight? HECK NO! But there are TONS of resources available (and many at no cost) to help people get started. Most importantly, I've found there are a ton of people on the Internet and within local development communities who are willing to provide guidance and direction to those entering our industry. We're not exactly a stingy fraternity who hoard knowledge....instead I'm proud to say that I find our industry to be very open and accepting of newcomers. The biggest hurdle I see people having is building up the nerve to ask for that first bit of guidance to help them get started down the right path. Once the ball is rolling and people have some resources to help them build a good foundation of knowledge, then they "learn how to learn" and jump on this big technology ride with the rest of us.

So, with this post I wanted to share some of my recommendations to anyone looking to start learning .NET. I'm sure I'll miss a ton of great resources but hopefully I'll stir the pot and others can pitch in and add their own ideas. One of things that got me thinking along these lines (in addition to a number of requests), was this post which I found to cover a lot of the steps I take to learn technologies BUT was focused on someone already familiar with .NET in general who is just trying to prioritize and learn newer stuff as it comes up.

Before diving into the meat of where to start, it's important to point out that everyone learns differently I teach .NET courses for a living and I see students with many different skill levels who each excel through different learning styles. Some just need a web browser to absorb information, others crave a good book recommendation and will read every line and work every exercise. I have students who love the classroom experience and ask tons of questions and follow up with insightful questions via email while others are only there because their boss is sending them and will do their true learning at home online. Some students enter every exercise and answer textbook questions while others just skim the text and absorb the knowledge. So, the first step in learning anything is figuring out the BEST WAY FOR YOU to learn based on how you have been successful in the past.

That said...here is what I would do if I was just starting out and wanted to bootstrap myself with as much information as I could on .NET with no prior knowledge. It's not perfect and I'm not an expert in all things .NET...but it's a good start, it's all free, and it's available to whomever wants to take advantage of it to learn. (NOTE: These are in psuedo order)

Prepare for some work and plan on investing some time. Plan on studying, writing code, making mistakes, asking questions, etc. No one can learn this stuff that quickly without help and without investing some time and headaches. If you get in the mind set from the beginning that you will have to work to bootstap yourself up as a developer through hard work and perseverance you will succeed without a doubt.
Get an environment prepared for which to work and learn. There is only so much you can learn from reading books or content on the internet. At some point you will need to sit down at a computer and hack out some code. So the first step in becoming a developer is getting the software loaded on which you will work. If you are not familiar with them, Microsoft has provided free versions of Visual Studio.NET and called them the Express versions. They can be found here. You can pick one version or load them all. I'd recommend starting with the Visual C# Express version of the Visual Basic.NET Express version. So, download one of these and load it onto your home computer, your laptop, or whatever other computer you think you will be working on to learn. When prompted, make sure you load the MSDN Library. This will be a lifesaver in learning to program and I'll discuss it later. Also, it is important to note that these versions of Visual Studio.NET are the same tool that the "big boys" use. As you grow and potentially get your first development job, this is the tool you will be using (most likely). So the skills you gain using this version will go to work with you on that first day. I would also consider loading the SQL Server Express version that is available at the above link and including data access in your later list of necessary development skills.
Prepare a plan for organizing information. There are a TON of resources available to help you start to learn to write .NET applications. The trick is really to organize and keep track of it all so another first step (after loading Visual Studio.NET) will be to get a plan for tracking information. Remembering how to find something you find important or keeping up on articles, sites, blogs is key. New information is available every day and, if you want to learn as much as you can, you need to keep track of what you find. Obviously you can keep notes in a notebook or follow another manual process but I like to take advantage of technology where possible and use some electronic means to keep track of stuff. Here are a few free tools I use:

Delicious - As most electronic information is located via a URL, I use Delicious to keep track of all my links to information. As I come across a new site or blog I add it to Delicious and tag everything with a keyword that will help me organize it cleanly. By using Delicious and not my browsers favorites, I can get to this information from anywhere I happen to be and it can be organized in a logical fashion.
Google Reader - I'll include more information on this next, but, if you are not accustomed to using an RSS reader to aggregate content on the internet, this would be a great time to learn. More on this in a bit.
Microsoft Office 2007 - OneNote - This isn't a free tool and I have no idea how many of you have it, but I use it constantly as a place to keep track of ideas, notes, links, etc... If you have it, use it.

Start to gather resources to get support when starting out and to eventually go beyond the basics. This needs to be done up front as well. Once you have a plan for organizing information, you need to start keeping up on the content you find. New content and new resources are added to the internet every day through new articles, blogs, newsgroups, etc. Once you dive into learning these technologies you are going to need to have some "go-to" places for support and information.

Here are a few links I commonly use personally to get support. I'd start by adding these links to your favorites (or Delicious) and add more as you find them. Go to these sites and look around at the type of information they contain and make a note of things that interest you. Sites like StackOverflow and CodeProject have very active forums where you can ask ANY .NET question (however advanced or however simple) and get support from a large community of great developers. This will be a HUGE help as you are starting out...and we'll talk about it in a bit. Here are the links:

Learn to use Google Reader (or any RSS aggregator but I'll use Google Reader as an example) and start adding sites and blogs to your own feeds. This will be an indispensable help in keeping up on content and support from various sources. If you've never done this start here with their "Getting Started" information. This will give you ONE PLACE where you can keep up on all the information on all your favorite sites, blogs, forums, etc. Once you sign into Google Reader go to all the links I shared above and add feeds to their information. Then add any other RSS feeds to blogs, etc as you find them. For example, you could add a feed to my blog ;) Here are a few RSS feeds I highly recommend to get started (and some are from the above sites) but hopefully this post will draw some feedback of other recommendations:

Geeks with Blogs - I can't recommend this feed enough. I have learned more since being able to aggregate all the recent postings by this great pool of resources I highly encourage you to add this feed and follow along..
The Latest Microsoft Blogs - Latest blogs by MS employees
Local (US) MSDN Highlights - Save yourself from having to keep checking MSDN's site by having it all here
The Latest Codeproject Articles
The Latest StackOverflow Questions (and answers)

Gather a list of trusted friends, advisors, and/or mentors and add them to you IM client (MSN, Yahoo, or whatever). At worst, gather their emails. Let them know that you are starting to teach yourself .NET and ask if they'd be willing to answer a few questions as you hit some stumbling blocks. Prepare them to help out as necessary. Anyone who is worth a darn as a developer (or a friend) should gladly agree to be utilized as a resource this way. We all started somewhere and many of us were lucky to have people to answer our silly newbie questions :)

Start at the beginning and learn a core .NET language like C# or VB.NET. Finally, we have some resources ready, VS.NET loaded, and it's time to learn something. Many people want to skip this step and want to jump into writing games or fancy websites or nifty WPF applications. You will have a heck of a time picking up a new .NET language through learning an advanced technology like WPF or WCF and will be better served by starting with the constructs of a language and learning VS.NET in the process. Those advanced technologies will come later and you will pick them up much quicker if you know VS.NET and C# (or VB.NET) like the back of your hand. So, how do I learn a language?

Here is one of the few places I'd recommend a book (and thus something that costs $$$). When I teach introduction to programming I use a set of textbooks by Murach's. They have a C# version and a Visual Basic.NET version. So why do I recommend these books over the 1000's of other books out there? These books are written from the standpoint of LEARNING TO PROGRAM. I'm sure there are others but I've had great success with these (thus the recommendation...since I make no money if you buy them :) I would recommend picking either C# or VB.NET as a language to learn....as to my recommendation on which is better...I don't have one. I spend most of my time coding in C# so learn that one if you need a reason to choose. What do I do once I have this book? Sit down, open to page one, read and do the examples. These books have tests and projects to complete at the end of each chapter. You will actually have to write code to complete them. They step you through everything you need to build up a decent foundation and get your hands dirty. If you get stuck on a section, use Mr. Google to find some answers. I personally think 80% of being a great programmer is the ability to find answers when you are stuck (the other 20% IMHO is common sense :). I wouldn't skimp on this step and would instead walk through every chapter in order and do the work. There is no substitute for hard work and this is where it starts. I'd pay special attention to all the object oriented concepts these books cover.
Once you complete the basics of C# and/or VB.NET I would also recommend getting their ASP.NET book (if you are interested in web programming) or their ADO.NET book (for those interested in data access). These are still relatively beginner books and you get a good foundation in ASP.NET or ADO.NET which are both great technologies every .NET developer should be familiar with.
As you start to dive into VS.NET and a new language take full advantage of the built-in help resources available with Dynamic Help. Just click the Help->Dynamic Help menu and a dock-window will appear that will provide context sensitive help about ANYTHING you may be doing or typing (assuming you have the MSDN library loaded). More info on this can be found here. This is a great resource when you are starting out and the first thing I teach new developers to use.
Once you are working through the basics of a new language and a new tool, feel free to stop and review web sites, ask questions of friends or peers, post questions to news groups, or take advantage of any other support mechanism you have. Don't go past a concept if you don't understand it and if you have any questions on it, now is the time to get clarification. My one recommendation would be to keep a realistic expectation of how fast your total comprehension will come and to take all the time necessary to grasp the core concepts first. Like anything, focus more time on the areas you feel you struggle the most at and not just doing the things you are already good at.
CODE! CODE! CODE! Don't just stick to what this book (or any book) says. Write little applications to test your skills. Play with the sample projects from the book and add new features. Play with the various project types in VS.NET to see what they do. Look at (and edit) some sample projects you find on the internet. Anything you do in VS.NET is just building experience to be a better software developer. So dig in and play!

Get involved in an online community and ask questions. As mentioned above, there are a ton of online newsgroups and forums with GREAT developers who actively answer questions on a wide array of topics. StackOverflow.com is a great example. Take advantage of these resources to either search existing answers or to ask new ones. Don't get stuck for too long without getting some support.
Get involved with the local development community. Many cities have .NET user groups or special interest groups (SIGs) on more focused topics like C#, SharePoint, etc, etc. Find these groups in your city and make it a point to begin attending meetings. Not only is this a great way to keep abreast of technologies but it is also a networking opportunity to mingle with other developers. Here is where to pepper some experts with questions or two talk about the latest job openings. In St. Louis we have an active .NET user group that meets once a month which draws between 80-100 developers from all over the region (more info about our group can be found here). If you are struggling with learning a new concept, pop into a local user group meeting and ask around for where other developers might find out the answers you are looking for.
Go to Amazon.com or Borders and begin researching books. I spend many lunches either in a book store or on Amazon.com looking through the recently released books just to see what technologies are out there and what interests me. I don't buy them all but, if I see a highly rated book with good reviews that is on a topic I might want to know about, then I'll add it to a wish list to buy when I get the funds.
Subscribe to magazines. Again, this is something else that isn't free but its a cheap and easy way to get support and keep up on new technology. I recommend MSDN Magazine and/or Visual Studio Magazine or CoDe Magazine.
Decide on your next area of focus. Once you feel pretty confident in VS.NET and the core language (i.e. you can open VS.NET, create projects, debug simple applications, etc, etc) then it's time to begin to grow your skills. It is here where you have some options and need to prioritize between a number of possible paths. These paths will dictate what books, resources, and other means of support you will use but there is obviously no hard and fast rules here. You can focus on everything, or pick and choose the most interesting pieces from each. It's up to you what direction you take your skills but you should be ready to devote more time and effort to learn them. Also, as many of us experienced guys already know, you will never know everything and something you spend a lot of time becoming strong on might change significantly in the near future and your level of knowledge will be knocked back down to that of everyone else. So be warned but keep working.

Do you want to be a web developer? Then you have to focus more on web server based technologies. For these technologies I'd focus on ASP.NET books and sites. One of the best starting points is Microsoft's own http://www.asp.net/ and especially the learning section (http://www.asp.net/learn/). Click that link and look through all the available (FREE) support for getting started to learn to program browser based applications in ASP.NET (please realize that you will still use the same C# and VS.NET skills you should have previously became comfortable with :) Also, AJAX, web services, ADO.NET, and possibly WCF are also technologies that could fall under this category and worth researching. Also, if this is going to be your focus then you'll need the ASP.NET version of VS.NET Express. Go to Amazon.com and search for ASP.NET and you'll see a HUGE selection. Do a bit of research or ask around for which books work for people you trust. I like the WROX books on ASP.NET (Bill: You owe me some commission :) but I'd find what works for you.
Do you want to develop WIndows applications that are NOT browser based? Then focus on WPF or WinForms technologies. Find books and other resources focused on these topics. Again Microsoft has a great site to get started at http://windowsclient.net. It also has a HUGE getting started and learning section here http://windowsclient.net/learn/. There are videos, podcasts, articles, and sample projects plus a ton of other content. You should definitely be able to grow your skills in this area here. There is also a nice WPF bootcamp site here that has complete videos and walkthroughs. ADO.NET and WCF are also technologies you might want to beef up on.
If neither of the above cover your ultimate goals as a developer, then what do you want to do? Database design? Many books and sites are out there to help. SharePoint development? Again, tons of online support. Game development? Search for XNA and start there. Anything else? Ask around to see where to start, use the internet, post on newsgroups...I promise there is a community or sites out there ready to help you get started no matter what your interest. The key is to never stop learning. Pick what you want to learn and make a list and keep gathering information and resources and studying. That is the nature of our industry.

Work as a developer. This is something else I can't stress enough. If you love developing software...you should be working as a developer. If you are just starting out, take an internship, volunteer to work on charity projects, develop small projects for friends, or contribute to a community project on the internet. Whatever gets you coding and writing software is a great start. The most important thing here is to find an environment where you will grow. Work with the best teams you can find and (this is important) find an environment where people give you the support to learn and contribute. Even if you are just starting out, people tend to take chances with eager developers who want to learn and grow and contribute. Writing high quality software is a science that goes well beyond one person writing code. Becoming involved in an environment where you can be a part of that process is the most valuable thing you can do to grow as a developer. Working alongside other coders, designers, DBA's, project managers, testers, or any other technical resources all with the common goal of delivering a quality software product is the ultimate goal of most developers...so do what you can to put yourself in that situation.
NEVER STOP LEARNING! Never quit trying to keep up with technology. I read through my Google Reader feeds every day and focus on specific areas that interest me (making note of the others). I keep a list of technical books I want to read in a priority order (and read them). I always track new sites. I try to always put myself on projects or near smart people I can learn from. I encourage people to challenge every technology decision I make. All this just so I keep learning. At this point you can refer back to this post and put yourself in a cycle to keep learning. Ask a lot of questions of your peers or on forums...if you want to know a good "next technology" to learn based on your skill sets...ask someone.
GIVE BACK! At some point (sooner than you would imagine) you will find yourself in a position to start giving back to other developers (both new and more experienced). So instead of just asking questions on sites like StackOverflow.com take the time to answer a few. Help out peers or coworkers who are stuck on a problem. Start a blog and write about your successes or failures. Volunteer to present at user groups or company training events. Find some way to keep our industry growing by helping out the "new guy".

So, at the end of my life's longest blog posting...all describing how to get started in .NET...what have we learned? Hopefully, some of you out there (especially the newbies) will get some ideas on how to start your own journey to be a developer. Like anything there are no hard and fast rules and sites which I find useful might not work for everyone and other people might have additional recommendations on this or that. The important thing to realize is that support is out there and asking for guidance is a great thing. Don't expect overnight results and plan on immersing yourself in technology for a long time before coming out with the ability to be considered a good developer. Is it hard? That depends on how much you want to learn...but the help is there.

Finally, after writing all of this, I'm left feeling curious about what I missed. If you know of other sites, books, resources, etc for new developers I'd love to know about them. I get asked about this stuff a lot as an instructor and an architect and it's pretty easy to accumulate info to pass on to others. Drop me your ideas at kvgros@sseinc.com or just comment on this post. Anything I get I'll slowly start to put back into here.

Thanks for reading all this and I hope someone gets some use out of it...

-Kevin

St. Louis Day of .NET 2008 - Recap

Kevin G — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:54:31 GMT

Before I move on to other topics...I wanted to do one last post on STLDODN 2008. Now for some random event thoughts:

The event was held this last weekend and it was one of the longest weekends of my year. As an organizer I spent last week stressing over many of the final details and anxiously awaiting final shipments of swag. I also spent a significant amount of time with my assistant* packing take-home bags. At one point I even paid each of my three girls $10/apiece to help stuff pens into bags for attendees.

The day of the event was a whirlwind as I was exhausted from the night before during which we did all the setup of the 230 extra chairs we had to order plus all the PA equipment, signs, registration area, etc, etc. While not everything worked out quite like we planned, fortunately we made it through the day without any riots or bloodshed. Time will tell if it was a success I guess but I walked away extremely pleased. My biggest worry in the weeks leading up to the event was how we were going to fit 250 people into the CAIT facilities as that seemed a little much. We had some snafu's during the registration process which led us to keep registration open for longer than we intended and we ended up with more people than we initially planned for. In actuality we had nearly 100 people attempt to register AFTER we shut down registration so we are cautiously optimistic that STLDODN 2009 will be even bigger. As it turned out, all attendees moved between rooms very effectively for the large numbers and we even handed out 250 lunches in about 15 minutes. So that was a HUGE relief.

I did volunteer to give a presentation on the day of the event and, while I'm very used to presenting, I was unsure if I wanted to spend my time simply making sure things ran smoothly or do that AND present. I tried both and it worked out well I guess. No one threw rotten eggs at me when I presented and the event didn't fall apart either.

One debate we had early on was over how much content to pack into one day and whether 50-55 minute sessions were too short. My session was an overview of all new technologies announced at PDC 2008 and I was able to stay at 10,000ft and get done in 50 minutes. I'm fairly longwinded anyway (if you can't tell from my classes or my emails) so keeping myself down to 50 minutes was somewhat of a challenge and it seemed that I had just introduced myself and I was done. While I was fine with the timeframe, I'm sure many other presenters struggled to get enough detail into such a short session to be of value to hardcore developers.

The speakers for the event were awesome. Although I spent my time making sure everyone could be heard and their computers actually worked with our projectors (which was an issue a few times) I heard great things from many attendees. We hosted a speaker dinner the night before the event and I met some great guys (and gals) with a TON of .NET expertise. We couldn't have asked for a better group and they helped make the event what it was by being flexible and cooperative when something wasn't going perfectly and helping everyone succeed. They all put in a significant amount of preparation time as well getting their demonstrations and PPT's ready to go. Most people don't realize that presenters at these community events prepare for these things outside of work hours for no direct benefit to themselves (other than some local visibility and name recognition). The time spent adds up but I think it's a huge benefit to the person doing the research as they become experts in their field whereas people who do not put in this effort to present or study get left behind. I've always thought a huge learning opportunity can be found by volunteering to be a speaker at events like these and making yourself work hard to prepare a presentation and be knowledgeable enough to sound like and expert and field questions from experts. I took this to the next level and found a teaching job :)

We had over $15,000 in raffle prizes donated to the event and some of the most significant were XBox 360's and Microsoft Zunes. The lady who was drawn to win the nicest XBox 360 didn't know what it was and passed. That was rather humorous :) The guy behind her in line gladly accepted her "hand me down".

As to the "grunt work" of setting up and tearing down...we, as organizers, are pretty fortunate to have some great friends and co-workers who didn't leave us out on a limb. We had a lot of hands pitch in and make small work of a big job. We were able to leave the facilities in as good or better shape than when we left it and everything went smooth. If you were one of those individuals I tip my hat (and my glass :) to you! Thanks!

In addition to myself, Jeff Fattic from Quilogy and Scott Spradlin from Covenant were conference organizers. I know they stressed out as much as I did and took time away from their families for months to send emails, field calls, and to finalize last minute deliveries or setup the venue. I have known Scott for many years as he coordinates the local .NET user group where I present and sponsor frequently. I had never met Jeff until about 3 months ago when we met for lunch with the idea of hosting an event. But now that seems like a lifetime ago now but I had a great time planning with these guys and now we are back to the drawing board and eager to jump on STLDODN 2009.

As to next year, we are currently setting up our conference post-mortem meetings and initial planning meetings for STLDODN 2009. The only thing we know for certain thus far is that we are shooting for a more "conference center" type venue which will enable us to hopefully draw(and support) many more attendees. We were all excited about the sheer number of St. Louis .NET developers who showed interest in an event like this and we hope the community can continue to grow and provide value to all it's members. We are currently taking input from anyone with ideas on what would work better next time or what did we not think of this time. So, if you have some ideas, feel free to write me at kvgros@SSEinc.com.

Anyway, enough about an event in the past... While I still have final shirt orders and other things to coordinate before this event is officially "closed", I've got some huge projects at work getting ready to get underway so I've got to get back in "learning" mode and ready to start ramping up large teams.

Which reminds me....ARE THERE ANY GREAT C# DEVELOPERS IN ST. LOUIS LOOKING FOR A JOB? I NEED SOME SENIOR PEOPLE INTERESTED IN COMPOSITEWPF, SMART CLIENTS, WCF, WINDOWS WORKFLOW, ETC. We do some cutting edge stuff at SSE and have some awesome projects lined up for 2009 and I can't seem to find people capable enough to help. The people with the skills and enthusiasm I'm looking for are all gainfully employed (which isn't to say they can't be more gainfully employed working for me). Anyway, I'll probably blog more later about my struggle finding good candidates but, for now, if you might be looking for a better situation please drop me an email..

Till next time...thanks for coming to STLDODN 2008!

-Kevin

* My "assistant" was actually my wife and I only call her that if she gets roped into helping me with "work" stuff...

St. Louis Day of .NET 2008 - It's Approaching Quickly

Kevin G — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:17:49 GMT

Just wanted to write a bit about the upcoming Day of .NET conference coming soon to St. Louis. We are putting the final pieces together this week and currently have nearly 200 people registered. The conference will be on December 13th, 2008 and, if you want more information or just want to register, please check out the site at www.StLouisDayOfDotNet.com. If you are waiting to register, please be aware that our registration closes on Monday, December 8th and we cannot accept on-site registrations.

We are finalizing our agenda and have been pretty aggressive in trying to schedule almost 30 sessions into a one day conference. Most presenters have volunteered to present twice so our attendees will have some flexibility in hitting the topics they want and coordinating a pretty full day. Each session will only be 50 minutes and we are focusing presentations on being thorough in their topic but providing enough resources and materials for attendees to easily grasp where and how to get more information. Planned right you can pack a lot of information into that time. We're trying to provide a mix of sessions ranging from the cutting edge topics like Windows Azure, Live Services, etc to the more current topics such as ASP.NET/AJAX, WPF, MOSS 2007, etc. We're hoping to provide topics that appeal to a wide range of developers and skill sets...only time will tell if we succeed.

As to giveaways, we currently have over $10,000 in gifts to raffle off throughout the day and more than a few people will leave with some pretty sweet swag. Microsoft gave us some X-Boxes and Zunes plus tones of games and licenses. Many of the bigger .NET publishers threw in more than a few books and a number of the component vendors all provided free licenses to their products. Throw in a few T-Shirts, some gift cards, and various other odds and ends and we'll spend a good amount of time giving stuff away. Simply as part of registering, every attendee will receive a conference Polo shirt and a 2GB USB flash drive with all conference materials (in addition to the other standard swag provided by our sponsors).

Washington University is hosting the event at their CAIT center in Clayton, MO so we will be putting our final onsite planning meeting together this week in an attempt to make sure we have thoroughly thought through the logistics of organizing that many people. Hopefully, in two weeks I'll be blogging about how successful it turned out to be...(albeit with numerous lessons learned I'm sure)

At the conclusion of the conference I'll be sure to post on how it went and there will be more than a few notes of thanks to the other organizers and the vendors and sponsors who we are working with daily to make this thing a success. Putting on a conference of even this size is quite the undertaking and, so far (knock on wood), things are going very smoothly...we'll see how the next few weeks go.

ps. If anyone has any questions on the conference please let me know...I'll be glad to answer whatever I can.

.NET Extensibility talk at the St. Louis' .NET User Group

Kevin G — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:36:10 GMT

Last Monday night I gave a presentation at the local St. Louis .NET user group (www.stlnet.org). My presentation was on some of the new extensibility infrastructures available in .NET. More specifically, I talked about IoC/DI containers, the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), and CLR Add-Ins via the System.AddIn infrastructure.

While these user group presentations usually range from 10,000 foot marketing overviews of products all the way down to "in the weeds" developer discussions, I intentionally picked a topic that was probably more technical than most and which covered a lot of technologies not generally thought about by the average developer. I'm sure more than a few of the attendees were out of their comfort zone in terms of how they approach designing software. With frameworks like the CompositeWPF guidance bringing IoC to the attention of more and more developers every day, I think it is important that even the less experienced developers start putting thought into the correct way to design extensible applications.

My guess is that designing software for change (or growth) isn't necessarily something that is a priority to your average developer although, with technologies like IoC containers and MEF it's actually something that is much easier to do today than it was just a few years back. As part of my day-to-day job at SSE I am involved heavily with the design and architecture of frameworks and platforms which our clients use as the foundation of their key applications. As part of this responsibility, I am forced to design frameworks that are extremely flexible and most (if not all) of the key subsystems of my frameworks must be replaceable or customizable with very little effort by my clients. Don't get me wrong, I also like to think that my frameworks actually DO SOMETHING out of the box, but, if the client doesn't like what a certain piece does, they can swap it out seamlessly for their own implementation. Designing frameworks to be this flexible is not a new goal and neither are most of the patterns and technologies used to achieve that flexibility. I think the issue is really that too many developers have spent too long simply opening a form, slapping a button on it, and putting code behind the button. Unfortunately this is too easy to do and you aren't really forced to design for change until you are backed up against a wall and asked to change what you've written. Even then, unless you understand and appreciate the elegance of extensible applications you probably see nothing wrong with simply editing your code over and over again when asked. If your application needs new functionality, slap on a new button and go. It's as simple as that, right?

Anyway, let me know your thoughts if you find yourself reading this.

Also, if you are interested in learning more about these infrastructures, check out the following links:

www.codeplex.com/unity (Microsoft's Unity IoC/DI Container)
www.codeplex.com/mef (the Managed Extensibility Framework site)
www.codeplex.com/clraddins (the System.AddIn stuff)

Also, the MEF team recently shipped a new tech preview of the next version. Check out Brad Abram's blog about that here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/11/25/mef-preview-3-shipped.aspx.

Anyway, more extensibility discussions to follow...so stay tuned!

St. Louis Day of .NET

Kevin G — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:11:23 GMT

I'm finally happy to announce the upcoming St. Louis Day of .NET conference.

As some of you may have seen in my recent blog postings, I recently got back from PDC in LA. Unfortunately not everyone gets that opportunity (and I haven't been to a conference since Tech-Ed in 2001 so I know the feeling :)

So, as there are no great, easy to get to conference opportunities here in St. Louis and we do have a very active and growing community of .NET developers, myself and a few of my peers from other local organizations engaged in organizing the first St. Louis Day of .NET. So here you go:

The conference will be held on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 and will be hosted by Washington University's Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT). I'm actually an instructor for their .NET program and feel like I'm inviting all these developers to my own home :) We have 28 speakers so far and will have 28 one hour sessions broken up across seven rooms. Our total capacity will cap out at 300 people and I hope and pray that the St. Louis development community steps up and fills us to capacity. We hope this will be the first of many successful conferences and are excited to see the enthusiasm that has sprouted up after hearing about what we are out to accomplish.

There is a $40 cost for the conference but we are providing a lot of nice "conferencey" type things such as a polo shirt with the conference logo, a 1g USB drive pre-loaded with all conference materials, breakfast/lunch/snack, and the opportunity to win a ton of great prizes (not to mention 28 technical sessions by the regions best and brightest :). Hopefully people won't balk too much at a mere $40 to help us offset costs. In actuality, many St. Louis organizations have already stepped up to sponsor this event and provided a ton of cash to help us out (I'm not sure if it was actually a "ton" but it was significant and generous). I can't say enough how thankful I am and encourage you to check out the sponsors page on our site to see who they are and thank them (http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/sponsors.aspx)

Microsoft has graciously provided us with a number of the PPTs and other session materials from PDC and we are happy to represent some of that content as well as a large amount of custom content by local presenters. We are hoping this conference gives local and regional developers the opportunity to come out and hear about and see technologies which they will be using in their day to day work very soon. And we're hoping events like this one help foster the community and raise St. Louis' stature among centers of .NET expertise.

I will be blogging more about this conference over the coming weeks but for now I encourage you to check out http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com and register for the event or share the invitation with your friends or coworkers (or both if they happen to be the same people). Also, let your managers and your bosses know what we are doing so they can spread the word even farther. We are still accepting sponsorships as well and would love to work with your organizations to help get more of their employees to the conference.

PDC Recap and Session Recommendations

Kevin G — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:36:34 GMT

It's been a three or four days now since I returned from PDC. After seeing all the other bloggers give detailed descriptions of the sessions and parties I didn't feel too obligated to add too much of my own spin on topics heavily covered by others. Instead, I thought I'd wait till the recordings were available and share links to the highlights I was witness too. As to my thoughts on having the recordings available so quickly after the conference and of such a high quality, I can only say I am very impressed. It doesn't mean I'm not eagerly looking forward to attending next years conference because the networking opportunities and social interaction with some great developers were priceless (heck just seeing the planning and coordination that went into providing snacks and meals to thousands of developers was worth the trip). I just think having these recordings available just enhance the value of the overall conference experience by allowing me to catch up on all I missed after the conference. Plus it is great to have these available to go back through as a reference to pick out pieces I've forgotten the specifics of.

So here goes the start of my recommendations to you:

The Future of C# by Anders Hejlsberg

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL16/

I can't describe how impressed I was with this presentation. He came off as extremely bright and a fluent speaker and answered every question with ease. Also, just listening to him and seeing the massive crowds he drew (plus all the overflow rooms and repeat presentations) caused me to come back and evaluate my own organizations career path to see how I could grow to be a "Technical Fellow". Funny but couldn't find it on our org chart. I actually caught the repeat of this because the first session was full and I wanted an actual seat in the room he was in. The greatest point he made in terms of how C# and VB.NET have diverged and came together at various points in history was that the fact that you are either a VB or C# programmer is just a quirk of history. Most people just stuck with what they were familiar with.

The highlights (IMHO):

Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR...and not DLR as in David Lee Roth)

Very slick way of incorporating this into the language to provide the best of both worlds: strongly typed syntax plus late-bound dynamic binding. Plus it appears very extensible so I'm sure we'll be seeing a number of vendors (MS included) plug in their own DLR adapters to support different bindings.

Optional and Named Parameters in C#

As a .NET instructor and training I always find it difficult to explain why VB and C# differ on some simple concepts like this. I'm glad to see C# finally add these.

Parallel Execution

This was a topic covered all over during PDC but he gave some good reasons why this is something we should be more concerned about. I personally write a TON of multithreaded code and do a significant amount of teaching on the subject...but I also realize that it's a complex subject which most developers never fully grasp.

The NoPIA Option for COM Interop

This is a long overdue solution to a very difficult situation in terms of COM interop. They did a nice job and came out with an elegant solution the incorporates MUCH less memory overhead, simplified deployment (as there is no longer the need for a Primary Interop Assembly), and a cleaner syntax (made possible by optional and named parameters). If COM interop is your thing, check out a better/more detailed overview of this new capability here: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL02/

Compiler as a Service

This was the final and slickest part of his presentation and you'll have to watch the video to truly appreciate it. It's really nothing more than a managed C# compiler made available as a nice component in the Microsoft.CSharp namespace. You can use it to evaluate expressions, classes, etc (really just any code you want). It works without all the overhead involved with the current reflection components and the need for isolated AppDomains etc). He finishes with a very cool little console app/C# evaluator. This type of stuff leans heavily towards imbedding this into an app as a simple (but powerful) scripting language.

Microsoft CLR Futures by Joshua Goodman

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC49/

Another great low-level description of the CLR and where it's headed (regardless of whether you are a C# or VB.NET fanatic). It was interesting to hear this discussion from guys who treat both the language teams as their clients. These guys just write and maintain the runtime, the JIT compilers, the GC, etc. and treat all the language providers equally.

The highlights:

Interesting discussion on how the .NET framework evolves and how they version things

Why does 3.0 and 3.5 differ from 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0? (They didn't answer the question I had which is: WHY THE SCREWY NUMBERING SCHEME?)

More COM interop/NoPIA discussion

See above...

Code Contracts

These looked VERY cool and were very understated in terms of the overall PDC content. I'll blog more on these later after some homework and research.

How the CLR added support for DLR to support languages like F# and IronPython
A very cool discussion of how the GC has been optimized
Handling exceptions that corrupt the CLR state and the issues therein.
The new ability to use VS.NET to debug dump reports

XNA Game Studio 3.0 by Frank Savage

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL43/

I'm actually a longtime fanatic of game development and have a huge collection of game development books. I went to college to do a lot of graphics development but the real world caught up with me and I found that my career path pointed me to the enterprise (although I'm currently recruiting an underground game dev team here in St. Louis to build some casual games...so if you are interested get in touch with me :).

This session was kind of a guilty pleasure and I was amazed at the size of the crowd. I've been using the beta of XNA 3.0 for awhile and was excited that the final release hit the last day of PDC (I've loaded it on a few boxes already).

If you have always wondered what it takes to build a game and want to see a neat little 3D game build quickly using tools you are already familiar with...this is well worth an hour of your time. Sit back and watch a great presentation.

I can't say there was anything in this session that was radically new to me but I found it fascinating and recommend you watch it. It's a great intro to XNA and game development in C#.

Tips and Tricks for the Visual C# IDE by Dustin Campbell

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL46/

This was a very interesting presentation and I think it was partially funded by DevExpress as much of the demo's included how to use their CodeRush tool (which now has a free version available here: http://devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/CodeRushX/). Don't get me wrong, I didn't mind much, it was just that it was the most commercial piece of any of the sessions (if you ignore the fact that all of PDC is a Microsoft sales pitch :). I'd recommend downloading it and installing it if you don't already have it. I'm a ReSharper person myself but I see advantages of both.

Highlights:

Control-. (Ctl-Period): Anywhere in the coding window of the IDE when a "Smart Tag" menu is available (and you see the smaller/thicker underscore) you can click Ctl-. and it will open the smart tag window or (if only one option is available) it will execute that option. Very cool.
Source Code Outliner Power Toy : http://www.codeplex.com/SourceCodeOutliner

Just forget reading about it and click that link and install that thing. It should just come in VS.NET by default

VS.NET Snippet Designer: http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetDesigner

If you've ever wanted to increase you (or your teams) productivity by creating your own code snippets for common coding patterns....this is the tool for you. Watch the video for a nice little intro.

I'm done typing highlights...if you work in VS.NET I'll bet you'll learn one or two (or twelve) timesaving ideas from this presentation. I'm kind of proud I knew most of it...but I still learned some killer things. Watch this sometime and share what you learn with your friends.

Day 2 Keynote

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02/

If you read this blog and got down to here you must be pretty hardcore (most eyes would glaze over when reading about these types of topics). If you watch NOTHING ELSE from PDC, I encourage you to take the time to site through this keynote. Even if you watch it in sections...please watch it. This keynote reminded me why I love my job and what I do for a living. I felt like a little kid watching some of this stuff.

I'm not even going to list highlights...it was all a highlight to me...

My jaw dropped at some of this stuff and all we talked about afterwards was home much our industry is changing and how much the world will change over the next few years.

Anyway, more highlights to come...if you have any questions let me know....if you were at PDC and want to swap some war stories let me know...some of it is a blur...I think at one point I saw Verne Troyer (aka Mini Me) and, if my memory serves, I also got my picture taken with the Laker Girls...only Microsoft could pull something like that off..

Till next time...

PDC Day 1 Underway

Kevin G — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:07:26 GMT

This morning Ray Ozzie, the Chief Architect at Microsoft, opened the conference with a great keynote and the official announcement of Microsoft Windows Azure and their Cloud Services initiative. You can find out more about this whole initiative at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx.

The keynote itself was a very high level, "marketing" pitch for a new hosting model for .NET applications and there will definitely be a shift in the way we think about large distributed applications when this thing takes off. It's such a unique shift in how we think about coding I think I'm going to have to actually build something that get's deployed into the "cloud" before I truly appreciate how it works. The big thing to point out is that it is not "free", Microsoft has not announced pricing but it will be priced based on service level agreement and resource consumption. But, if it ends up being competitively priced then it will be a very compelling offering as opposed to just leasing servers or buying cheap hosting. Also, Microsoft is shifting every one of it's primary product offerings into the "cloud" and organizations will have the opportunity to "lease" access to these applications. They will provide Sharepoint, Microsoft Dynamics, Office, SQL, etc all within the "cloud".

If it says anything about the vibe at PDC, there are tons of sessions on new upcoming technologies like Azure and parallel computing plus there are a few related to more applicable current technologies that we are much more likely to use within a reasonable amount of time. One of these sessions is an advanced session on recent advances in the .NET type system. Since this is session is more applicable to what I do today I decided to attend this session as opposed to the "Cloud services" session. Apparently so did 500 other people. They had to shut the door as this session is at capacity with easily 100+ people standing around the walls. And this is an advanced level type system talk focusing on COM+ interop and Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA's).

-Kevin

Live from LA: PDC08

Kevin G — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:25:35 GMT

I know it’s been a LONG time since I’ve updated this but there is a bunch of very cool stuff going on so I thought it was time I jumped back on the horse and started using my public blog more. Plus a number of people have asked me this week why I haven’t blogged in awhile…

Anyway, I’m in LA this week at Microsoft’s Professional Development Conference (PDC) and it’s shaping up to be a great week with lots of great technical content and thousands of other devs and architects to meet. The conference is at the LA convention center attached to the Staples Center (of Jack Nicholson and LA Laker fame) and it’s my first time out to LA so it’ll be an interesting week. I’ll try to post regularly to let everyone know what is happening.

I’m actually here with a friend (Bill Evjen) and last night Bill was kind enough to let me tag along to a Microsoft RD party which was a blast and we got to play with a Microsoft Surface. Bill has some pictures on his blog here: http://geekswithblogs.net/evjen/Default.aspx. I was VERY impressed with this thing and will be blogging more about it as the week goes on. I think I’m changing some of my schedule around to catch a few sessions on programming for it. We had the debate as to whether it has any household purpose and whether it would show up in our homes sooner rather than later. We’ll see…

Today I spent the entire day at a pre-conference session on WPF put on by Charles Petzold. It was a very well done session but, in hindsight, I wish I would have picked a different session. Not that the content was bad but, I probably should have picked a session on a topic I was so familiar with. Since I do so much with WPF already, most of Petzold’s content was very familiar to me. The last few hours were by far the most informative and I’m going to have to see how to get my hands on some of his XAML. in terms of the bootcamps and classes I teach on WPF, Petzold had a very nice and streamlines means of teaching XAML using his Xaml Cruncher and some scripts. If nothing else, I learned how I should be presenting XAML without typing all day...

Tonight I’m off to a Party with Palermo (http://pdc08.partywithpalermo.com/) I’m not sure who Palermo is but some friends I haven’t seen in awhile invited me and it appears to be the place to be. I’ll post an update tomorrow…

Finally, I’ve only been on Twitter for a week or so but it appears to be the thing to do here at PDC…if you are so interested and know what Twitter is…feel free to watch me at http://twitter.com/kvgros. I’ll be updating as the week progresses…

Upcoming "Smart Client" Webinar - Tues, Aug. 14th at 11: 00 AM (CST)

Kevin G — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:30:07 GMT

One focus of my job here in St. Louis is large-scale “Smart Client” development. One of our “niche” areas of expertise at SSE is architecting and designing Windows-based apps. Over the years we’ve built a huge framework that we call the SSE Smart Client Container™. The container itself is a really cool and extensible host for Windows functionality that supports a flexible add-in infrastructure we use to build new apps. It’s all written in C# 2.0 and comes in at around 150k lines of code (not that line count is a valid measure of much anymore). The UI itself is 100% built using the Infragistics NetAdvantage 2007v2 Windows-forms components and was built to provide a very “Windows-standard” type experience for end users. It provides a tabbed MDI interface with all the toolbars, dock-windows, Outlook-style navigation that we are becoming used to in many applications. Thanks to the Infragistics components, the entire container we’ve built supports a concept called “AppStyling” that allows us to “skin” every element of the UI through an external tool. We also incorporated the ability to tightly integrate help (and even provide “dynamic help” ala Visual Studio.NET). All of this is built on top of an extensible “add-in” infrastructure that loads all the new functionality via external DLL’s and XML manifest files. It’s a very flexible yet robust system that we’ve used on a wide array of client products and applications.

While the above description might not do it justice, it’s a very cool framework that I’m excited about because we are just starting to market it as a standalone offering and have our first few customers onboard. In June, one of the teams I am involved with just finished rolling out a huge product based on this framework that was built by a team of 25 people from around the world over the course of 12 months. They had teams in Thailand, England, Denver, and St. Louis and the entire UI was based on this framework. When the product launched we supported the ability for users to switch languages on the fly and translated EVERY UI element into one of 8 provided languages. Thanks to the “add-in” infrastructure, they are currently working on the next features of their product that will be available as up-sells and plug right into the same container.

So why all the talk about this framework?

Next Tuesday (August 14^th) at 11:00am (Central time) I will be giving a Webinar on the framework and “Smart Clients” in general. The webinar will be a high-level discussion of what these types of applications are, how they can benefit a business, and how our framework can speed their implementation. Like I said, my company (SSE) is starting to license this framework to other organizations to which it may be of a benefit. So if you think there might be a fit, feel free to sign up for the webinar. Even if you aren’t really into licensing frameworks or don’t have an immediate need, then the webinar might still be a way to see something cool and get some development ideas.

So, if any of you are interested feel free to sign-up here https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/471405797. If you’re not able to attend the webinar but would like more information, drop me an email at kvgros@sseinc.com and I’ll gladly send you over some materials.

My XP to Vista transition experience...

Kevin G — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:15:50 GMT

I'm back from one vacation and preparing to head south to Mexico for another but, with a little downtime available, I thought it was as good a time as any to upgrade to Vista and Office System 2007. So, I write this while waiting of various software packages to install (with UAC OFF :)

First, I work primarily from a laptop which goes with me wherever I go. To help me in moving around I do have a couple docking stations at various offices I'm at frequently (one at SSE and the other at Reuters). At home I don't use a docking station but just boot up the laptop wherever I happen to be. My current laptop is a Dell XPS M170 with the nice 17" widescreen, a 100g HD, a 256meg gForce 7800 video card, built in wireless, and a DVD burner. I've had it for a few years now and LOVE the laptop and my only real complaint is it's sheer size and weight. With the laptop, my optical mouse, the power adapter and my 100g USB HD I pack around, the weight of my laptop bag comes in at around 15lbs. Late last year I found myself lugging this thing around Bangkok for a week and silently wishing I had something a little more travel ready.

Anyway, on to Vista....

I'm not new to Vista (or Office 2K7) and have a desktop at work with Vista Business on it. I only use this desktop for email and web browsing though (and the occasional game of chess). I've reloaded it a few times as Vista progressed through Beta's and into production so I never put too much software on it. Upgrading my laptop would be my first real "I NEED IT TO WORK RIGHT" experience with Vista.

My laptop came with XP Pro and in the few years I've had it I've taken full advantage of it's speed and power. My installed programs list filled my 17" screen. I'm also a pretty hardcore developer so I had TON's of add-ins, components, productivity tools, etc, etc loaded. Some of them I could live without and some of them I couldn't. So in an effort to do a little housecleaning, I decided that my move to Vista would start with a reformat of my HD and a clean start putting on only what I needed. Thus my first step was to use Norton's Ghost 12 to get a clean image of my old HD onto an external drive. Next: "Format C:". (Actually I just formatted during the install process but I just wanted to type "Format C:" :) Ghost 12 worked great and has some very nice features, I highly recommend!

Next, I installed Vista Ultimate (which I chose for the Media Center capabilities in addition to everything else). The overall install went very smoothly. Next, I installed Office System 2007 and patched everything up with Windows Update. I fortunately had no real driver compatibility issues and everything ran great. I restored all my documents from my Ghost image into my documents folder, joined my work domain, and got ready for the hard part....loading all my necessary software.

I'm pretty good at keeping around all the installation packages and serial number information for all my tools and other software packages. In working with large teams of developers it's a science keeping everyone up-to-date and on the right versions so I make it a point to be somewhat careful about having everything handy.

I started with the big stuff (VS.NET, MSDN, SQL 2K5 Developer) and worked my way down to the smaller stuff (widgets, addins, small utilities, etc). I finally even put the only game I'm currently playing on there (Neverwinter Nights 2).

I tried to get as far as I could leaving UAC on but, ultimately, I just turned it off and everything seemed to move quicker. Vista was very cool about notifying me of potential software incompatibilities and was usually right. A few tools didn't load at all and after checking with the vender, it was due to known issues they had with their packages. Unfortunately I ran out of HD space sooner than I should have and had to do some digging through files to clear out unnecessary usage of space. Vista puts a bunch of sample files and other bloat here and there that I purged. A few packages even forced me to contact their vendor for new license files which are tied to my OS.

As I near completion I'm very happy with how smooth it has gone (for the most part). I've almost got a very complex development environment rebuilt in a bit under 3 working days of time. I can't say it would have been any quicker if I would have had to rebuild my box with XP in that time-frame. Once I'm pseudo complete I'll get another Ghost image of the new OS and then start coding. Then we'll really see how compatible Vista is with what I do from day-to-day :)

For now...I think I need another vacation :)