Reflecting on 2010 and Looking into 2011

Sam Abraham — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:25:59 GMT

In early 2010, I had blogged and shared my excitement as I was about to embark on a new journey relocating to South Florida.

As I settled down and adjusted to my new life, I was presented with an opportunity to get actively involved and volunteer in the local Florida .Net and Project Management communities. I have since devoted a significant portion of my time to community initiatives, coordinating the West Palm Beach .Net User Group, volunteering as a member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau and traveling to attend/speak at .Net code camps and user groups throughout the states of Florida and New York. I have also taken on various volunteer roles at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute starting as core team member on the chapter’s mentoring initiative and ending the year as Project Manager of the chapter’s mentoring program and as Director of Electronic Communications on the chapter’s IT team. I am also serving a one year term (2010-2011) as secretary and founding board member of Florida’s first official chapter of the International Association for Software Architects (IASA).

A big thank you is due for those who afforded me the opportunity and privilege to take part of these initiatives and those who provided guidance and encouragement when I needed them the most.

Looking ahead into 2011, I hope to continue my community involvement and volunteer activities. I will start by dedicating the first 5 weekends in the New Year to teach a free comprehensive Microsoft PowerPoint class at church. My goal will be to start from scratch and slowly cover the various available PowerPoint features that can be leveraged to create captivating presentations. Starting February, I will be resuming my user group/code camp speaking engagements at our South Florida .Net Code Camp and the West Palm Beach .Net User Group.

I look forward to continuing to meet, chat and share with our technical community members and to another active year in community service.

All the best,

--Sam Abraham

Reflections on SoFla Local PDC10

Sam Abraham — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 20:23:15 GMT

On Thursday October 28^th, 2010, I had the privilege of attending and speaking at the SoFla Local PDC10 hosted by the Gold Coast and Miami .Net User Groups. While most local PDCs focused on viewing the Redmond event, South Florida kicked it up a notch by availing some of the community’s local speakers to comment and address any questions the audience might have. I greatly enjoyed covering and answering audience questions on WebMatrix, Razor Syntax, ASP.Net Web Pages Helpers, IIS Express, ASP.Net MVC 3 and NuPack. A thank you is in order to Joe and Maureen Homnick and others whose tireless work and support made this event a success.

Throughout the day-long event, I had the opportunity to chat with many professional developers from both small and large organizations in both public and private sectors. Tools, frameworks and architectural patterns we discussed varied based on the nature of the business, company size, budget as well as specific product requirements. I am by no means an expert, but I found myself repeating the following in most conversations:

Planning is priority one. In order to put the correct technology to service, one first needs to fully analyze short as well as long term project goals.
The triple constraints: scope/quality, time and budget need to be delicately balanced. Looking at cost alone will probably sacrifice either or both product quality and feature set. Focusing on quality alone however is bound to jeopardize the project as it increases the likelihood of running over budget.
Need to balance all Stakeholders’ needs. A good strategy to balance all stakeholders’ needs is to work with all parties to break a project into smaller manageable pieces/functional areas (phases). Furthermore, it would be ideal if each phase creates a complete feature even if simple. This strategy would ease the following:

-Reusability. Should the plug be pulled off a project, already-completed features can always be documented for future re-use thereby resurrecting part of the time and money already spent.

-Measuring Progress. Periodic evaluation of completed features enables non-technical stakeholders to get a feel for project progress without the need for a translator to decipher geek jargon.

-Stage Gating. Despite the hard work, tools and measures applied to analyze the feasibility of a project before execution, a project might no longer be a good fit for the company at a later time. Regrouping to evaluate an implemented feature can also act as a gate to evaluate project continuity.

Putting my geek hat back on, I would like to share the following ressources I brought up at the event:

1-A great resource page for WebMatrix development can be found at:

http://msjoe.com/blog/posts/a-list-of-resources-to-help-jumpstart-your-asp-net-webmatirx-development/

2-You can run ASP.Net MVC 3 side-by-side with ASP.NET WebForms in the same Visual Studio solution. Scott Guthrie wrote a nice chapter on this and made it available freely to all, so feel free to lookup. Other articles and webcasts have also addressed this situation. For instance, the following article provides a nice sample and coverage of the topic:

http://weblogs.asp.net/rajbk/archive/2010/05/11/running-asp-net-webforms-and-asp-net-mvc-side-by-side.aspx

--Sam Abraham

PMI

Reflecting on 2010 and Looking into 2011

Reflections on SoFla Local PDC10