MarcosT Blog

OK OK, I know, maybe old news for you, but it's new for me ;)
Joost has one of the best UIs I've ever used... great art, but the best of all: Joost it's free TV!!!!
I'll be honest with you: I don't see much TV, only fútbol (aka: soccer), some movies and that's all, but this thing works great...and because I have a 2007WFP now I can code and watch some videos or TV series.











(I highly recommend the SI channel)

...and I love it.
Even if I am .NET developer, mostly an ASP.NET one, there are lots of things to do, learn and implement. Always there is a new buzzword, technology or an interesting project to follow... Looks like I need to learn something new now: SOA and interoperability.
The interesting thing about interop is that I need to learn (not simply know the sintax of) Java and also learn what the heck is [enter your java buzzword here]. Since some application uses BEA Weblogic, I need to figure it out how lots things work. As far I can tell, learning Java (enough to build enterprise applications) it's harder than .NET. I'm not telling it's better or worse, just an integration thing... at least at the beginning.
I've already started reading some interop blogs, articles, etc... but soon I will need to apply it. Hopefuly there are some Java guys (and girls) here to catchup what I need.
I hope (but still not sure) we can use WCF, not simply WS-*... I have some experience with the WCF/WF tandem and was awesome.

I don't know if this was a bad, good or great year regarding jobs. In this year I was in 2 different places, is strange, at least for me. First, I quit my job at Andromaco Labs. and I went to a great job: Clarius Consulting. I'm not lying if I tell you I felt all my dreams came true the first time I put a feet inside that office. You probably know who are these guys or heard about Daniel Cazzulino, Victor Garcia Aprea or Fernando Simonazzi. Maybe they are part of the elite of .NET Developers in the world. But the things didn't go well after all, I never felt part of Clarius, I felt lost, and why not, at that time maybe the job was out of my league. Anyway, that job was the worst and the best experience of my career. I've learned more than you can imagine, but just an example: I gave my first steps on TDD with the help of Daniel. I saw how the code and with the help Victor how change my way of think about programming. Awesome. But, after more than 3 months I quit. The pressure was huge, and I was living just for work, and I don't like that. I love programming, but that was an excess
I think after all, it was a good year, I learned that money and technology it's not everything, should be a balance with human relationships... I will be looking for that balance always in the future.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!.

I think I hit a record about how many books I read (and bought) this year, technical (computer related) and non computer related. This is some kind of mini list about the technical books and some kind of review.
- Head First Design patterns: Oh boy, what a book. Superb. I've learned a lot from it, even if the samples are in Java. Excellent way to show a very interesting topic like Design Patterns. I also have Mesker's C# Design Patterns, but Head First is much better, with clearer explanations. If only HFDP were C# (and why not C# 2.0) specific,maybe it would be the perfect book.
- Essential C# 2.0: Michaelis' book it's the best C# 2.0 book you can find right now. Excellent explanations, for example: he's explanation on iterators is the best one you can find in a book. If you are searching a great C# 2.0 as reference, or simply to do the transition from C# 1.0 to 2.0, look no further.
- Professional .NET Framework 2.0: Duffy's books it's great way to know better the inner workings of the .NET Framework 2.0. He gives you a low level view of the CLR, and IMHO, if you know better the CLR, a better .NET programmer you will be. An Excelent book.
- Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#: While this is not a C# 2.0 specific book, it has a lot of stuff I need: Principles. I think there is no other book that mixes C# and Principles. By knowing principles, you will become a better programmer, not matter what language you choose, but if the examples are in a language you know, even better.
- The Pragmatic Programmer: This book arrived this week, and I started to read it right away. Since a I'm not a senior programmer I mean, with lots and lots of years of experience, I was looking for a book with advices to became a better programmer. Many people said that this books is similar to Code Complete. I think Code Complete (I own it) it's a little more technical, and the pragmatic Programmer tries to share great programmers experiencie and good habits. The books has lots of analogies and I like that a lot.
I'm leaving next week for vacactions... and the pragmatic programmer will be inside my bagpack.

I quit my now old job, and now I'm in a very exciting place. I'm not sure if I can say where I am, but trust me, this place rocks.
On thing is sure: I will be doing Mobile devices stuff.

Few months ago, I discovered the power of WF, and I told myself, "well... maybe in a future you can be an expert in this technology...". Of course, I´m not an expert in WF yet, but I'm still trying to become one.
Today I visited the WF forum to see what´s new, because I didn´t visited since a week ago (this week was a very strange one...) and for the first time (believe me or not...) I see the "Top answerers in this forum (30 days...)" box. I'm #10 in the list :), but the best of all (at least for me...), I'm the only one not related to Microsoft (SDE, SDE/T, Program Manager, etc (no... Matt doesn´t count), just a Kid who likes WF and tries to understands it better.

Happy weekend start...

Hi there. Maybe you already read K. Scott Allen's Workflow Readling List , well, this is my version.
I've been reading, coding, watching, etc. all kind of stuff related to Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). It´s my favourite WinFX technology, so, if you are new to WF, this could be useful.

Windows Workflow Essentials:

• Introducing Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation: An Early Look
• Getting Started with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation: A Developer Walkthrough
• Simplify Development With The Declarative Model Of Windows Workflow Foundation
• Introduction to the Windows Workflow Foundation Rules Engine
• What Is Windows Workflow Foundation?

Windows Workflow Articles:

• MSDN Magazine Cutting Edge Column: Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 1)
• MSDN Magazine Cutting Edge Column: Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 2)
• Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating a Custom Composite Activity
• Simple Human Workflow with Windows Workflow Foundation
• Manage Application Processes with Windows Workflow
• Working with Windows Workflow Foundation in ASP.NET (a little old)

Windows Workflow Foundation interesting info (blog posts, forum threads, etc...):

• Which Style of Workflow When? : Read this if you don´t know what workflow style use...
• Which Workflow Style should I use?: More approaches...  : More advices from Ariel Schapiro
• Managing Workflow’s Lifecycle 
• Setup and Enabling SqlTrackingService
• SqlTrackingService Data Maintenance 101
• Coming improvements to ASP.NET hosting of Windows Workflow Foundation after WF Beta 2.2 : A must read if you are doing WF with ASP.NET
• ASP.NET and DefaultWorkflowSchedulerService : Another must read about WF and ASP.NET
• Window Workflow Foundation Runtime Services: The Persistence Service
• Windows Workflow Runtime Service: The Transaction Service
• Using WF to run a page-flow : Nice and complex application sample...
• What kind of Host Application to use? : Interesting forum thread about where host our WorkflowRuntime...
• ASP.NET And a State Machine Workflow : Another interesting thread.
• Windows Workflow Foundation Videos : Great demos from Mike Taulty and Microsoft UK.
• Windows Workflow Foundation Webcasts
• Hello, Workflow : Scott´s article ;)
• Authoring Workflows  Scott´s article ;)

Well, I'm tired. Maybe there are more valuable resources out there. I will try to keep the listing...
And of course, don´t forget www.windowsworkflow.net and www.windowsworkflow.net/forums .

Hope this helps in your Workflow Foundation project ;-)

The new podcast from Scott Hanselman, Hanselminutes, talks about "Top Ten Utilities you Didn't Know you Had". Some of the utilities are related to fonts. So, maybe it would be useful to anyone some links to programming fonts resources:

Proggy Fonts
Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer's Fonts
Keith Devens' Programming fonts

I'm pretty sure there are more links, at least one more but can't remeber it. My bookmarks are only in my brain ¬_¬.
In case you ask, I use the "Proggy clean (Slashed 0, blod punc)", but Monaco also looks really nice.

And of course, I'll teach her the little I know.
When she told me: "I want to learn programming", it was a total surprise. She studies fashion design at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA)!
The first thing I thought was what language I would choose, but few seconds later I tell her : "We are going to learn Ruby. Now, let me tell you something: I don´t know Ruby. She either of course. We´re going to learn Ruby both of us :).
OK, why Ruby? Because the syntax it´s clear, it doesn´t have a lot of symbols like C/C#, it's elegant (not like VB) and it's full OO, and the most important thing: looks fun.
In my case, no language learning can be done without a book, so we get a copy of Learn to Program and she started playing with it, code the first samples and like it a lot, and actually gets it :). The books it´s very funny and she likes the way Chris explain, I think it was a great choice, I mean, the language and the book.

Shane Perran posted 10 very very nice SharePoint Designer 2007 Screenshots!! I love that toolbox.

A few months ago I started to read about WF (Windows Workflow) because we need a workflow solution for our projects. First, we considered Skelta to use it with SPS but, honesty, it was out of our budget. At that time (almost a year ago), we heard about "a new workflow engine" (WinOE if I remember correctly) coming from Microsoft but nothing else, but we thought it would be a good idea wait to see what happen later.
As all of you maybe know, on PDC WF was presented and we are very excited about this. I said before, I started to play with WF but also, was my first real expose with C# 2.0. I read about the new features of C# 2.0 some time ago (partial classes, anonymous methods, generics, nullable types, etc.), and I did some code but nothing special, the classic foo/bar thing, but now if you plan to use WF, you should know all the new features of C# 2.0 and more. If not, this is a great chance to start playing with it using a new technology doing interesting stuff. Just download the Hands On Lab to start.
Now I will be focused in WF for our new project, and I'm almost sure this is the first post of many more to come.

Few days ago, in my company developed a new control to replace the navigation control that appears in the left in SPS. You know, the "CategoryNavigationWebPart" control. Our control looks much better, and has a nice feature: sub-levels. If an area has a child, it´s visible in the control. If the area has a child but the user doesn´t have permission, it´s invisible to him and of course can´t access the area.
We tested and developed the control in our test portal, *but*, when we deployed it into the production server everything worked fine, except the security feature: The area was still visible in the control even if the user doesn´t have access permissions. In fact, if the user click the item menu of this area, the "you don´t haver access permission blah blah" message was displayed. That feature was the main reason of our control.
At first we thought it was a bug, but we checked everything was OK, then we realize that production portal was a SP1 level but our development portal is SP2!.
I wasn´t sure if the SP2 install will fix the error, so I searched for the changes in SP2 and there is nothing about security. Even if there is nothing about area security en SP2, that was the only difference with our dev portal, so we installed SP2 and guess what? That solved the problem. I still don´t know what is the exact difference between SP1 and SP2 about area security, but if you have a similar problem, please check the portal service pack level.

Reading Jimmy Nilsson's Weblog maybe I have found my future birthday present.

Today was the end of my humble vacations, and back to work.
As I told some weeks ago, I was looking for some time to try ReGhost.NET because in our development portal, many many pages were unghosted.
The installation is quite simple, just install in your Sharepoint portal and you´re done. Next, is time to run the application. First is required a SQL Server instance running to select then what "_SITE" database you are going to look for unghosted pages. After that, you will see a listing with all the unghosted pages, and who you should "blame" for that.
In our case, the portal has the company "branding", so we use an area template to have the same look & fell across the different areas. Because that, the same page (the default.aspx from the template) was listed many times and, at least for me, at the beginning looks confusing. Sadly, there is no way to know to "which area" correspond the unghosted page. So, if for any reason you want to keep an unghosted page, you're out of luck unless you know who to "blame". An area in the portal was created and unghosted by my boss doing some tests, because that, I knew to which area correspond the unghosted page.
Well, ReGhost.NET works great, there is no doubt about that. Just try it, tell me if you want your experiencies.
Maybe needs improvement:
- UI.
- Know to which area corresponds the unghosted page (I don´t know if that is possible).
- Some better docs.
Kudos to Matthew Cosier.

I told myself: "You are not going to blog on your vacations". Well, i´m still on vacations, but this blog post worth a look. It describes Sharepoint (specially WSS) more focused in development than document management. And of course, with support for WWF .
Great news.