DDD

DDD Scotland - Virtualisation for Developers presentation

Liam Westley — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:55:23 GMT

Thanks to all the guys who turned out to the first presentation of the day at DDD Scotland where I gave my presentation, Virtualisation for Developers. As promised you can download the PowerPoint slide deck using the link below. Check out the speaker notes for all the resources and URLs I mentioned along the way.

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddscot/virt4dev-DDDScot.zip

Thanks again for inviting me up to speak at DDD Scotland and creating a fantastic event.

UPDATE

And a video of an earlier version of this present, given at DDD7, is now live at, http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1591

WebDD 2009 - a review

Liam Westley — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:54:27 GMT

A tad later than I would have liked, but finally here’s my review of the superbly organised event that was WebDD 2009. Held at Microsoft UK’s Reading campus, it was held on Saturday, with around 200 delegates enjoying a free day of Web goodness. Hats off to the organisers on delivering another full day of great info for free, with Phil Winstanley and David Sussman working hard to make sure everything went smoothly.

ASP.NET 3.5 – Miss Something?

Dan Maharry (http://blog.hmobius.com/, @hmobius)

I like the idea of a session taking an older* technology and reviewing it to ensure everyone has spotted all the useful bits and has got up to date with the service packs and add-ins that they may have missed. Apparently it was Dan’s first presentation but it didn’t really feel like it, and he knows his stuff, having co-authored the O’Reilly book ‘Programming ASP.NET 3.5 Details and Downloads’.

Thanks to Dan I’ll be downloading the Lightweight Test Framework from the ASP QA team, available on codeplex; http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=22739. Dan also mentioned that Steve Sanderson (ASP.NET MVC author) also has some good blogs on how to use it; http://blog.codeville.net/2009/03/27/first-steps-with-lightweight-test-automation-framework/

* older is by no means a derogatory term, this means code which is actually released and can be deployed rather than a preview, CTP or beta in a state of flux

What’s good in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010

Alex Mackey (http://www.SimpleIsBest.co.uk, @alexjmackey)

I’m not sure when Alex managed to get a chance to breathe during this presentation. Nearly 100 slides in the deck and he did a superb job of attempting the impossible; highlighting all the new stuff which we will have to play within in the next year or so. A walking, talking RSS feed for .NET 4.0/VS2010. Keep an eye out for his APress book ‘Introducing .NET 4.0 with Visual Studio 2010’

P0wn3d! (Or how to redirect your friend’s website to katyperry.com)

Barry Dorrans (http://www.idunno.org )

Security sessions are always amusing for how the room becomes more subdued the more weaknesses in application development are exposed. You can almost feel the self doubt increasing as time goes by. It’s also great when specific comments get the biros scribbling hurriedly.

I liked the idea of using the PrincipalPermission attribute to decorate methods, especially in code that might be shared by a team of programmers. Defence in depth is always a better solution than the false assumption that you have constructed a single impenetrable barrier around the entire application.

An Introduction to jQuery

Andy Gibson (http://www.andy-gibson.co.uk, @ARGibson)

With the ASP.NET team encouraging the use of jQuery via blogs as well as decent intelligence docs within VS2008, I was looking forward to this introductory talk. I was not disappointed. This proved to be a great jQuery tour for people comfortable with solid javascript skills but not necessarily experience with jQuery.

As for jQuery itself, anything that makes my life easier on the client and is multi browser is a winner in my book.

ASP.NET MVC best practices

Sebastien Lambla

Seb managed to survive a complete BSOD on his Mac Book Air (Apple hardware, tsk!) with good grace and without it completely derailing his talk. It did mean the detail was somewhat compressed, which was a shame as this was a very relevant topic.

Best practices are hard to get right with the ASP.NET MVC framework partly because the default project structure and a much of the demo code that comes with the framework doesn’t actually do a good job of demonstrating good practices.

I know why the standard demo code takes a simplified view – best practices can result in quite complicated code to understand. Especially true when you add IoC containers which can be quite intimidating for programmers who haven’t had the experience of struggling to create their own mock objects and marshalling their creation.

It’s not quite the JFK quote, ‘We do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’. More like ‘We do hard things at the start, because in the long term it makes everything else easy’. We sometimes need hard to understand demo code if the end result is a greatly improved solution that is more reliable and easier to update with confidence.

ASP.NET 4.0

Mike Ormond

Well done to Mike for giving up a marvellous sunny day which could have been spent on the allotment, to be stuck in a room with us geeks. There were some good peeks at the next version of ASP.NET 4.0 and he coaxed a VS2010 interim build running under VirtualPC into life to provide some good demos of what will be possible in the next version of Visual Studio.

Post conference

Post conference it was off to Revolution, where the staff were again horrified by my request to add Tabasco Sauce to my Sol beer (honest, it’s really nice. I know you don’t believe me either). Then it was onto Pizza Express for a great finale to the evening. Seb Lambla was on great form as usual and it was good to be able to chat with Andy Gibson and Andrew Westgarth, both of whom travelled quite a distance to present at WebDD. I’m happily returning the favour, travelling up to Glasgow for DDD Scotland on May 2^nd. I’m less happy that I’m up against Andy Gibson with what I think will be another popular jQuery talk.

Thanks to all for a great day.

@westleyl

Afterthought; WebDD - a replacement for ReMix?

Someone at the conference did comment that due to the economic situation ReMix might not happen this year, and that WebDD might be a ‘partial replacement’. Unlike the first WebDD I attended, this second event did not have the content to attract designers, so I hope no one at Microsoft thinks that this is a replacement for ReMix. Microsoft do need to capture designer mindshare and get developers out of the mindset where design is an afterthought – that’s the duty of the ReMix events and with Silverlight as a potential platform it’s needed more than ever.

2nd May 2009 - Liam bringing Virtualisation for Developers to DDD Scotland

Liam Westley — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:46:12 GMT

The voting is over, and my session 'Virtualisation for Developers' has been voted in for DDD Scotland. You can find out about the other proposed sessions, register to attend and sign up for the geek dinner at http://www.developerdayscotland.com/.

Definitely looking forward to Glasgow and seeing you all there.

Thanks to NxtGenUG Birmingham for a great evening out

Liam Westley — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:39:40 GMT

Thanks to everyone who turned out for the NxtGenUG Birmingham meeting. Obviously so good, one of the guys from the Oxford meeting last week turned up again - ah, the lure of free pizza.

You can download the updated PowerPoint slidedeck here, most of the important stuff is in the speaker notes;

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/presentations/Virt4Dev-NxtGenUG-Birmingham-Feb2009.zip

Also, thanks as well to Guy Smith-Ferrier for giving me a lift back to New Street station, and for joining forces to create a comprehensive Virtualisation evening. There is new stuff about Virtual Server 2005 already on my 'to research' list.

An interesting note from New Street station; a late platform change for the London Euston train had the first class carriages on platform 3a, and the standard class carriages on platform 1b. Unfortunately not true, would have been an interesting train to be on two different platforms at the same time - a Shroedinger's train.

UPDATE

And a video of an earlier version of this present, given at DDD7, is now live at, http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1591

Presentation – tips and tricks I used for DDD7

Liam Westley — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:25:16 GMT

Having chatted to Toby Henderson about a few quick keys and shortcuts I used for my DDD7 presentation, ‘Virtualisation for Developers’, I thought it may be useful to collect these tips into a single place.

Desktop

I created a desktop folder called DDD7 Cleanup and ALL desktop shortcuts were moved here.

I then created shortcuts for my PowerPoint presentation, and for the projects I would be loading into Visual Studio 2008 (much easier than finding the project on the Start Page of Visual Studio). In previous presentations I have also created shortcuts to text and XML files, and to folders I will need to open.

QuickKeys in Vista

Windows+D will minimise all windows, just like desktop on the Quick Launch taskbar. However, do it when PowerPoint is in presentation mode and it doesn’t quite work when you select a different program to view (see PowerPoint note below).

As well as desktop shortcuts, think about placing some shortcuts in the Quick Launch toolbar. To run a Quick Launch item you use Windows+<number>. The first item is Windows+1, the second Windows+2 etc. I configured VirtualPC as Windows+6, VMware Player as Windows+7 and VirtualBox as Windows+8. That way, I could launch them really quickly, without having to find the icon on the desktop with my mouse.

Windows+Pause will call up the system properties window. This was useful when displaying the o/s version, including 32-bit/64-bit details, within my virtual machines.

PowerPoint

When you hit F5 to start the presentation in PowerPoint, another full screen window opens to display the presentation. Although this can be minimised with Windows+D, if you then select a different application for a demo then the PowertPoint full screen window will also reopen and display behind the application being used for a demo.

To pause a presentation, press Escape to end the full screen window and return to the PowerPoint editor. Run the demo application, and when the demo is complete, return to PowerPoint and use Shfit+F5 to continue the presentation from where you stopped.

Also, even a standard wireless mouse is really useful within PowerPoint. To move onto the next item, either an animation within the current slide, or to move to the next slide, you just click the left mouse button. This allows you to walk and talk while still moving the presentation forward.

HP laptop

The HP presentation button on my HP 6910p is really, really useful. When you hit the presentation button a HP utility pops up with the option to go dual screen on the VGA output for presentation. It automatically switches your resolution to 1024 x 768 at the same time as going dual screen.

When you have finished presenting, hit the button again, switch of presentation mode and it automatically switches back to your original resolution. I’ve used this at four different venues now, and it has worked every time.

Update (thanks to Phil - see feedback)

Links I visited before DDD7 that contain many more great tips for presenting;

http://www.guysmithferrier.com/downloads/HowToGiveGreatPresentations.pdf

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/11TopTipsForASuccessfulTechnicalPresentation.aspx

Hyper-V remote management made much easier

Liam Westley — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 02:51:14 GMT

Just a simple link to John Howard's blog where he annouced HVRemote - an much quicker way of enabling Hyper-V remote management,

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/11/14/configure-hyper-v-remote-management-in-seconds.aspx

Thanks to Matt Barret for telling me about the appearance of the tool, and it's already helped him solve Hyper-V remote issues which he was finding impossible to solve. Released just too late to get into the talk at DDD7.

DDD7 - Virtualisation for Developers powerpoint available for download

Liam Westley — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:56:15 GMT

Thanks for everyone at DDD7 for giving me the chance to present Virtualisation for Developers. It all appeared to go well, and as the Microsoft Channel 9 guys were videoing it I can finally get to see what it looked like from the audience point of view.

You can download the presentation from www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/ddd7/virt4dev.ppt.

I’ll be writing a series of blog entries on how I managed to configure the various Virtual Machines that I demoed in the presentation. This is especially true of VirtualBox which is a bit of a learning curve compared to Virtual PC but which is well worth the effort required to understand how it works.

UPDATE

And a video of this event is now live at, http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1591

SysPrep usage with Vista when creating virtual machines

Liam Westley — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:07:39 GMT

At my presentation last night, one of the questions I received from some of the members of the .NET Developers Network user group was whether you could use the SysPrep tool under Windows Vista. This is essential if you want to create a single Vista virtual machine image, from which you create 'clones' to support multiple virtual machines running concurrently on the same network.

I googled the following post on the train back to London, http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=195, so this morning I tried out SysPrep on a Vista Business VHD running under Virtual PC 2007. It appears to work, and for those who want to see the results, here are the screenshots showing how SysPrep fully resets the system ready for reuse ...

Step 1 - run SysPrep

Step 2 - Select option to 'generalize'

Step 3 - SysPrep goes to work before rebooting

Step 4 - During reboot

Step 5 - More configuration ....

Step 6 - ... then we get the user options

Step 7 - Entering the product key (and turn off activation as I'm only testing!)

Step 8 - Reaccept the license agreement

Step 9 - Entering a new user (in addition to any already created previously)

Step 10 - This really is the out of box experience ...

Step 11 - Network selection

Step 12 - And we're done (phew!)

Step 13 - ... OK, nearly done ....

Step 14 - The login screen with original login prior to SysPrep and new login we created on reboot

DDD7 - agenda is now live - 22 November 2008

Liam Westley — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:35:51 GMT

The developer day agenda for 22 November 2008 has now been published so you can start planning and blogging about how the sessions you'd like to go to always clash ...

http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/agendaddd7lineup.asp

Obviously the highlight is at 10:40 where you can learn all about Virtualisation for Developers. Good news for me, is that Everest only holds 50 so no need to mic up and you get close to the audience. I remember a SubVersion talk I did for DDD2 which was great fun in that room.

DDD7 - Virtualisation for Developers - see Liam speak on 22 November 2008 (UK)

Liam Westley — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:39:25 GMT

Thanks to everyone who voted for my 'Virtualisation for Developers' session at DDD7. I'm really looking forward to giving the presentation and by the end of November I should have some Hyper-V experiences to include as well as covering Virtual PC, Virtual Server, VMWare and VirtualBox.

What	DDD7 (www.developerday.co.uk)
When	Saturday, November 22, 2008 - 9:00 to 17:00
Where	Microsoft Thames Valley Park Reading, Berkshire RG6 1WG England

I would advise anyone who is keen to attend DDD7 keeps an eye on the registration page as it tends to book out in two or three days.