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• My ASP.NET news sources

  - by Jon Galloway

  I just posted about the ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight. I was going to list a bunch of my news sources at the end, but figured this deserves a separate post. I've been following a lot of development blogs for a long time - for a while I subscribed to over 1500 feeds and read them all. That doesn't scale very well, though, and it's really time consuming. Since the community spotlight requires an interesting ASP.NET post every day of the year, I've come up with a few sources of ASP.NET news. Top Link Blogs Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He covers the entire Microsoft development, but generally any of the top ASP.NET posts I see either have already been listed on The Morning Brew or will be there soon. Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets. While not 100% ASP.NET focused, I've been appreciating Joe Stagner's Weekly Links series, partly since he includes a lot of links that don't show up on my other lists. Twitter Over the past few years, I've been getting more and more of my information from my Twitter network (as opposed to RSS or other means). Twitter is as good as your network, so if getting good information off Twitter sounds crazy, you're probably not following the right people. I already mentioned Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor). I follow over a thousand people on Twitter, so I'm not going to try to pick and choose a list, but one good way to get started building out a Twitter network is to follow active Twitter users on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft: @scottgu (well, not on the ASP.NET team, but their great grand boss, and always a great source of ASP.NET info) @shanselman @haacked @bradwilson @davidfowl @InfinitiesLoop @davidebbo @marcind @DamianEdwards @stevensanderson @bleroy @humancompiler @osbornm @anurse I'm sure I'm missing a few, and I'll update the list. Building a Twitter network that follows topics you're interested in allows you to use other tools like Cadmus to automatically summarize top content by leveraging the collective input of many users. Twitter Search with Topsy You can search Twitter for hashtags (like #aspnet, #aspnetmvc, and #webmatrix) to get a raw view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Twitter's search is pretty poor; I prefer Topsy. Here's an example search for the #aspnetmvc hashtag: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc You can also do combined queries for several tags: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc+OR+%23aspnet+OR+%23webmatrix Paper.li Paper.li is a handy service that builds a custom daily newspaper based on your social network. They've turned a lot of people off by automatically tweeting "The SuperDevFoo Daily is out!!!" messages (which can be turned off), but if you're ignoring them because of those message, you're missing out on a handy, free service. My paper.li page includes content across a lot of interests, including ASP.NET: http://paper.li/jongalloway When I want to drill into a specific tag, though, I'll just look at the Paper.li post for that hashtag. For example, here's the #aspnetmvc paper.li page: http://paper.li/tag/aspnetmvc Delicious I mentioned previously that I use Delicious for managing site links. I also use their network and search features. The tag based search is pretty good: Even better, though, is that I can see who's bookmarked these links, and add them to my Delicious network. After having built out a network, I can optimize by doing less searching and more leaching leveraging of collective intelligence. Community Sites I scan DotNetKicks, the weblogs.asp.net combined feed, and the ASP.NET Community page, CodeBetter, Los Techies,  CodeProject,  and DotNetSlackers from time to time. They're hit and miss, but they do offer more of an opportunity for finding original content which others may have missed. Terms of Enrampagement When someone's on a tear, I just manually check their sites more often. I could use RSS for that, but it changes pretty often. I just keep a mental note of people who are cranking out a lot of good content and check their sites more often. What works for you?

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• Collation errors in business

  - by Rob Farley

  At the PASS Summit last month, I did a set (Lightning Talk) about collation, and in particular, the difference between the “English” spoken by people from the US, Australia and the UK. One of the examples I gave was that in the US drivers might stop for gas, whereas in Australia, they just open the window a little. This is what’s known as a paraprosdokian, where you suddenly realise you misunderstood the first part of the sentence, based on what was said in the second. My current favourite is Emo Phillip’s line “I like to play chess with old men in the park, but it can be hard to find thirty-two of them.” Essentially, this a collation error, one that good comedians can get mileage from. Unfortunately, collation is at its worst when we have a computer comparing two things in different collations. They might look the same, and sound the same, but if one of the things is in SQL English, and the other one is in Windows English, the poor database server (with no sense of humour) will get suspicious of developers (who all have senses of humour, obviously), and declare a collation error, worried that it might not realise some nuance of the language. One example is the common scenario of a case-sensitive collation and a case-insensitive one. One may think that “Rob” and “rob” are the same, but the other might not. Clearly one of them is my name, and the other is a verb which means to steal (people called “Nick” have the same problem, of course), but I have no idea whether “Rob” and “rob” should be considered the same or not – it depends on the collation. I told a lie before – collation isn’t at its worst in the computer world, because the computer has the sense to complain about the collation issue. People don’t. People will say something, with their own understanding of what they mean. Other people will listen, and apply their own collation to it. I remember when someone was asking me about a situation which had annoyed me. They asked if I was ‘pissed’, and I said yes. I meant that I was annoyed, but they were asking if I’d been drinking. It took a moment for us to realise the misunderstanding. In business, the problem is escalated. A business user may explain something in a particular way, using terminology that they understand, but using words that mean something else to a technical person. I remember a situation with a checkbox on a form (back in VB6 days from memory). It was used to indicate that something was approved, and indicated whether a particular database field should store True or False – nothing more. However, the client understood it to mean that an entire workflow system would be implemented, with different users have permission to approve items and more. The project manager I’d just taken over from clearly hadn’t appreciated that, and I faced a situation of explaining the misunderstanding to the client. Lots of fun... Collation errors aren’t just a database setting that you can ignore. You need to remember that Americans speak a different type of English to Aussies and Poms, and techies speak a different language to their clients.

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• Building a Mafia&hellip;TechFest Style

  - by David Hoerster

  It’s been a few months since I last blogged (not that I blog much to begin with), but things have been busy.  We all have a lot going on in our lives, but I’ve had one item that has taken up a surprising amount of time – Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  After the event, I went through some minutes of the first meetings for TechFest, and I started to think about how it all came together.  I think what inspired me the most about TechFest was how people from various technical communities were able to come together and build and promote a common event.  As a result, I wanted to blog about this to show that people from different communities can work together to build something that benefits all communities.  (Hopefully I've got all my facts straight.)  TechFest started as an idea Eric Kepes and myself had when we were planning our next Pittsburgh Code Camp, probably in the summer of 2011.  Our Spring 2011 Code Camp was a little different because we had a great infusion of some folks from the Pittsburgh Agile group (especially with a few speakers from LeanDog).  The line-up was great, but we felt our audience wasn’t as broad as it should have been.  We thought it would be great to somehow attract other user groups around town and have a big, polyglot conference. We started contacting leaders from Pittsburgh’s various user groups.  Eric and I split up the ones that we knew about, and we just started making contacts.  Most of the people we started contacting never heard of us, nor we them.  But we all had one thing in common – we ran user groups who’s primary goal is educating our members to make them better at what they do. Amazingly, and I say this because I wasn’t sure what to expect, we started getting some interest from the various leaders.  One leader, Greg Akins, is, in my opinion, Pittsburgh’s poster boy for the polyglot programmer.  He’s helped us in the past with .NET Code Camps, is a Java developer (and leader in Pittsburgh’s Java User Group), works with Ruby and I’m sure a handful of other languages.  He helped make some e-introductions to other user group leaders, and the whole thing just started to snowball. Once we realized we had enough interest with the user group leaders, we decided to not have a Fall Code Camp and instead focus on this new entity. Flash-forward to October of 2011.  I set up a meeting, with the help of Jeremy Jarrell (Pittsburgh Agile leader) to hold a meeting with the leaders of many of Pittsburgh technical user groups.  We had representatives from 12 technical user groups (Python, JavaScript, Clojure, Ruby, PittAgile, jQuery, PHP, Perl, SQL, .NET, Java and PowerShell) – 14 people.  We likened it to a scene from a Godfather movie where the heads of all the families come together to make some deal.  As a result, the name “TechFest Mafia” was born and kind of stuck. Over the next 7 months or so, we had our starts and stops.  There were moments where I thought this event would not happen either because we wouldn’t have the right mix of topics (was I off there!), or enough people register (OK, I was wrong there, too!) or find an appropriate venue (hmm…wrong there, too) or find enough sponsors to help support the event (wow…not doing so well).  Overall, everything fell into place with a lot of hard work from Eric, Jen, Greg, Jeremy, Sean, Nicholas, Gina and probably a few others that I’m forgetting.  We also had a bit of luck, too.  But in the end, the passion that we had to put together an event that was really about making ourselves better at what we do really paid off. I’ve never been more excited about a project coming together than I have been with Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  From the moment the first person arrived at the event to the final minutes of my closing remarks (where I almost lost my voice – I ended up being diagnosed with bronchitis the next day!), it was an awesome event.  I’m glad to have been part of bringing something like this to Pittsburgh…and I’m looking forward to Pittsburgh TechFest 2013.  See you there!

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• SQLAuthority News – Ahmedabad Tech Ed On Road June 11, 2011 – An Event to Remember – A Grand Success of Community Tech Days

  - by pinaldave

  I am very excited to announce the huge success of the Microsoft Community TechDays at Ahmedabad, on 11 June 2011.  The turn-out for this seminar was huge, and there was a great response from the audience.  In fact, the AMA where the conference was held can seat 275 people – but there were over 50 people standing, the event coordinators had to find 150 more chairs, and we even had to turn away 30 people at the door because there was just no more room.  This means that there were over 500 attendees! The event started right on time, at 10 am, with my introduction and welcome to the audience.  My presentation on my favorite subject of “SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting Using Waits and Queues.”  Because of the number of speakers, I had to cut my presentation short by 10 minutes, so I only had 50 minutes to explain how to use swaits and queues to fine tune performance.  There was a good response to my talk from audience. I feel the best presentation, though, was “HTML5 – Future of the Web” by Harish Vaidyanathan.  He explained how HTML5 is going to change the internet, and taught everyone a lot about how to best use Internet Explorer 9, and discussed CSS3, SVG and DOM specifications.  Many people in the audience came specifically for this session – many had to take a half day leave off work just to travel there. At this point we all took a break for lunch, but there was no one taking a nap with a full stomach because we had a presentation of the new Windows Mango phone from Dhananjay Kumar.  New technology like this always wakes everyone up! After this came “TSQL Worst Practices” by Jacob Sebastian.  He too had to cut his talk short by 10 minutes in order to accommodate everyone, but his discussion of what SQL queries to avoid was still excellent. He is magnificent presenter and Ahmedabad loves him. The final presentation was “ASP.NET Tips and Tricks” by Tejas Shah.  This was a good overview of asp.net fundamentals, and how to use them to improve application performance.  However, the day was not over here!  We kept the audience entertained with prizes and give-aways.  Names were drawn for prizes and there was a quiz session with great gifts for the winners. Overall, the day was a huge success.  There was a good mix of SQL and non-SQL subjects, and many audiences members commented on how much they learned.  We had a much bigger turn-out than expected – all the chairs were filled 45 minutes before we even started!  For our next conference we need to find a space that will hold everyone, especially since we are hoping to have 600-800 people attending.  We definitely feel we can reach this goal.  We are already looking forward to the next Ahmedabad Microsoft Community TechDays. Download presentations: HTML5 Beauty of Web -By Harish Vaidyanathan TSQL Worst Practices- By Jacob Sebastian SQL SERVER Performance troubleshooting using Waits and Queues -By Pinal Dave ASP.NET Tips and Tracks -By Tejas Shah Other reports: Tech-Ed on Road 2011- Ahmedabad–A great event- By Jalpesh Tech-Ed 2011 on the Road in Ahmedabad – by Ritesh Shah Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Who Makes a Good Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product.  Note that I didn’t say about the product itself.  Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners.  Products only matter in relationship to their customers.  If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product. A good product owner is also a good negotiator.  They recognize that many different priorities exist inside of a corporation, but that there can be only one list that developers work from.  A good product owner recognizes that its their job to help others around them prioritize (perhaps with a Product Council), but also understand that they alone have the final say about priorities and are willing to make the tough decisions required.  Deciding the priority between two perfectly valid stories is very difficult, especially when the stories are from two different departments! A good product owner is deeply interested in helping the team be successful.  They don’t seek to control the team, but instead seek to understand what the team can do and then work with the team to get the best product possible for the Customer.  A good product owner is never denigrating to team members, ever.  They recognize that such behavior would damage the trust that needs to be present between team members and product owners and will avoid it at all costs. In general, technical people (i.e. former or current developers) make poor product owners.  In their minds, they can’t separate implementation details from user functionality, so their stories end up sounding like implementation details.  For example, “The user enters their username on the password screen” is something that a technical product owner would write.  The proper wording for that story is “A user supplies the system with their credentials.”  Because technical people think different from the rest of the population, they are generally not a good fit. A good product owner is also a good writer.  Writing good stories demands good writing.  The art of persuasion, descriptiveness and just general good grammar are all required.  A good Product Owner must also be well spoken, since most of what will be conveyed will be conveyed with the spoken word, not just written word. A good product owner is a “People Person.”  They like talking to people and are very patient.  They don’t mind having questions repeated or fielding many questions, because they want to make sure that the ideas they’re conveying are properly understood so the customer gets the best product possible.  They are happy to answer any questions a team member may have and invite feedback and criticism of designs and stories, since they want a good product.  They really have little ego that gets in the way of building a great product. All of these qualities can be hard to find, but if you look close enough, you’ll find the right person in your organization.  Product owners can be found anywhere, not just in upper management.  Some of the best product owners are those that are very close to the customer.  In fact, check your customer support staff.  I’d bet that several great product owners are lurking there. Final note about what makes a good product owner.  You’re probably NOT going to find a good product owner in a manager, especially if they consider themselves a “Manager.”  Product owners don’t manage anything but the backlog, so be especially careful if the person you’re selecting for Product Owner is a manager. Up Next, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• The Evolution of Television and Home Entertainment

  - by Bill Evjen

  This is a group that is focused on entertainment in the aviation industry. I am attending their conference for the first time as it relates to my job at Swank Motion Pictures and what we do for our various markets. I will post my notes here. The Evolution of Television and Home Entertainment by Patrick Cosson, Veebeam TV has been the center of living rooms for sometime. Conversations and culture evolve around the TV. The way we consume this content has dramatically been changing. After TV, we had the MTV revolution of TV. It has created shorter attention spans, it made us more materialistic, narcissistic, and not easily impressed. Then we came to the Internet. The amount of content has expanded. It contains a ton of user-generated content, provides filtering, organization, distribution. We now have a problem. We are in the age of digital excess. We can access whatever we want. In conjunction with this – we are moving. The challenge we have now is curation. The trends  we see: rapid shift from scheduled to on demand consumption. A move to Internet protocols from cable Rapid fragmentation of media a transition from the TV set to a variety of screens Social connections bring mediators and amplifiers. TiVo – the shift to on demand It is because of a time-crunch Provides personal experiences Once old consumption habits are changed, there is no way back! Experiences are that people are loading up content and then bringing it with them on planes, to hotels, etc. Rapid fragmentation of media sources Many new professional content sources and channels, the rise of digital distribution, and the rise of user-generated content contribute to the wealth of content sources and abundant choice. Netflix, BBC iPlayer, hulu, Pandora, iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu, Voddler, Spotify (these companies didn’t exist 5 years ago). People now expect this kind of consumption. People are now thinking how to deliver all these tools. Transition from the TV set to multi-screens The TV screen has traditionally been the dominant consumption screen for TV and video. Now the PC, game consoles, and various mobile devices are rapidly becoming common video devices. Multi-screens are now the norm. Social connections becoming key mediators What increasingly funnels traffic on the web, social networking enablers, will become an integral part of the discovery, consumption and sharing model for Television. The revolution will be broadcasted on Facebook and Twitter. There is business disruption There are a lot of new entrants Rapid internationalization Increasing competition from existing media players A fragmenting audience base Web browser Freedom to access any site The fight over the walled garden Most devices are not powerful enough to support a full browser PC will always be present in the living room Wireless link between PC and TV Output 1080p, plays anything, secure Key players and their challenges Services Internet media is increasingly interconnected to social media and publicly shared UGC Content delivery moving to IPTV Rights management issues are creating silos and hindering a great user experience and growth Devices Devices are becoming people’s windows into all kinds of media from all kinds of sources There won’t be a consolidation of the device landscape, rather the opposite Finding the right niche makes the most sense. We are moving to an on demand world of streaming world. People want full access to anything.

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• Inspiring a co-worker to adopt better coding practices?

  - by Aaronaught

  In the Handling my antiquated coworker question, various people discussed strategies for dealing with coworkers who are unwilling to integrate their workflow with the team's. I'd like, if possible, to learn some strategies for "teaching" a coworker who is merely ignorant of modern techniques and tools, and possibly a little apathetic. I've started working with a programmer who until recently has been working in relative isolation, in a different part of the company. He has extensive domain knowledge and most importantly he has demonstrated good problem-solving skills, something which many candidates seem to lack. However, the actual (C#) code I've seen is a throwback to the VB6 days. Procedural structure, Hungarian notation, global variables (abuse of static), no interfaces, no tests, non-use of Generics, throwing System.Exception... you get the idea. This programmer is a fair bit older than I am and, by first impressions at least, doesn't actively seek positive change. I'm not going to say resistant to change, because I think that is largely an issue of how the topic gets broached, and I want to be prepared. Programmers tend to be stubborn people, and going in with guns blazing and instituting rip-it-to-shreds code reviews and strictly-enforced policies is very likely not going to produce the end result that I want. If this were a new hire, a junior programmer, I wouldn't think twice about taking a "mentor" stance, but I'm extremely wary of treating an experienced employee as a clueless newbie (which he's not - he just hasn't kept pace with certain advancements in the field). How might I go about raising this developer's code quality standard the Dale Carnegie way, through gentle persuasion and non-material incentives? What would be the best strategy for effecting subtle, gradual changes, without creating an adversarial situation? Have other people - especially lead developers - been in this type of situation before? Which strategies were successful at stimulating interest and creating a positive group dynamic? Which strategies weren't successful and would be better to avoid? Clarifications: I really feel that several people are answering based on personal feelings without actually reading all of the details of the question. Please note the following, which should have been implied but I am now making explicit: This coworker is only my "senior" by virtue of age. I never said that his title, sphere of influence, or years at the organization exceed mine, and in fact, none of those things are true. He's a LOB programmer who's been absorbed into the main development shop. That's it. I am not a new hire, junior programmer, or other naïve idiot with grand plans to transform the company overnight. I am basically in charge of the software process, but as many who've worked as "leads" will know, responsibilities don't always correlate precisely with the org chart. I'm not asking people how to get my way, come hell or high water. I could do that if I wanted to, with the net result being that this person would become resentful and/or quit. Please try to understand that I am looking for a social, cooperative method of driving change. The mention of "...global variables... no tests... throwing System.Exception" was intended to demonstrate that the problems are not just superficial or aesthetic. Practices that may work for relatively small CRUD apps do not necessarily work for large enterprise apps, and in fact, none of the code so far has actually passed the integration tests. Please, try to take the question at face value, accept that I actually know what I'm talking about, and either answer the question that I actually asked or move on. P.S. My sincerest gratitude to those who -did- offer constructive advice rather than arguing with the premise. I'm going to leave this open for a while longer as I'm hoping to hear more in the way of real-world experiences.

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• Dark Sun Dispatch 001

  - by Chris Williams

  If you aren't into tabletop (aka pen & paper) RPGs, you might as well click to the next post now... Still here? Awesome. I've recently started running a new D&D 4.0 Dark Sun campaign. If you don't know anything about Dark Sun, here's a quick intro: The campaign take place on the world of Athas, formerly a lush green world that is now a desert wasteland. Forests are rare in the extreme, as is water and metal. Coins are made of ceramic and weapons are often made of hardened wood, bone or obsidian. The green age of Athas was centuries ago and the current state was brought about through the reckless use of sorcerous magic. (In this world, you can augment spells by drawing on the life force of the world & people around you. This is called defiling. Preserving magic draws upon the casters life force and does not damage the surrounding world, but it isn't as powerful.) Humans are pretty much unchanged, but the traditional fantasy races have changed quite a bit. Elves don't live in the forest, they are shifty and untrustworthy desert traders known for their ability to run long distances through the wastes. Halflings are not short, fat, pleasant little riverside people. Instead they are bloodthirsty feral cannibals that roam the few remaining forests and ride reptilians beasts akin to raptors. Gnomes are extinct, as are orcs. Dwarves are mostly farmers and gladiators, and live out in the sun instead of staying under the mountains. Goliaths are half-giants, not known for their intellect. Muls are a Dwarf & Human crossbreed that displays the best traits of both races (human height and dwarven stoutness.) Thri-Kreen are sentient mantis people that are extremely fast. Most of the same character classes are available, with a few new twists. There are no divine characters (such as Priests, Paladins, etc) because the gods are gone. Nobody alive today can remember a time when they were still around. Instead, some folks worship the elemental forces (although they don't give out spells.) The cities are all ruled by Sorcerer King tyrants (except one city: Tyr) who are hundreds of years old and still practice defiling magic whenever they please. Serving the Sorcerer Kings are the Templars, who are also defilers and psionicists. Crossing them is as bad, in many cases, as crossing the Kings themselves. Between the cities you have small towns and trading outposts, and mostly barren desert with sometimes 4-5 days on foot between towns and the nearest oasis. Being caught out in the desert without adequate supplies and protection from the elements is pretty much a death sentence for even the toughest heroes. When you add in the natural (and unnatural) predators that roam the wastes, often in packs, most people don't last long alone. In this campaign, the adventure begins in the (small) trading fortress of Altaruk, a couple weeks walking distance from the newly freed city of Tyr. A caravan carrying trade goods from Altaruk has not made it to Tyr and the local merchant house has dispatched the heroes to find out what happened and to retrieve the goods (and drivers) if possible. The unlikely heroes consist of a human shaman, a thri-kreen monk, a human wizard, a kenku assassin and a (void aspect) genasi swordmage. Gathering up supplies and a little liquid courage, they set out into the desert and manage to find the northbound tracks of the wagon. Shortly after finding the tracks, they are ambushed by a pack of silt-runners (small lizard people with very large teeth and poisoned pointy spears.) The party makes short work of the creatures, taking a few minor wounds in the process. Proceeding onward without resting, they find the remains of the wagon and manage to sneak up on a pack of Kruthiks picking through the rubble and spilled goods. Unfortunately, they failed to take advantage of the opportunity and had a hard fight ahead of them. The party defeated the kruthiks, but took heavy damage (and almost lost a couple of their own) in the process. Once the kruthiks were dispatched, they followed a set of tracks further north to a ruined tower...

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• SQLAuthority News – Stay Connected and Social Media

  - by pinaldave

  I think I have finally gotten back my faith in social media. If you are following my blog I am sure you are aware of my views on social media – SQLAuthority News – Social Media Confusion – Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Me. I was not happy about how social media was evolving. Whenever I go to Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, I noticed the same updates everywhere. I just thought I was wasting my time doing the same thing everywhere. I strongly believe that there is no dictator on internet. Nobody has authority over others, everybody can express their ideas as long as it is not violating others privacy and it is not morally wrong. I have decided that instead of trying to improve the world, I should change myself and adjust my needs. Here are few things I have done to relieve my social media confusion. Twitter I un-followed people who were taking up my time with too many updates. I un-followed people who hardly updated at all. I did not follow anybody else’s list, as I have no control over who other people follow. I follow not only serious SQL people but some fun stuff as well. I removed all my friends who were on Facebook and repeating the same updates on Twitter. I engage with them on Facebook. I followed people who are very conversational on Twitter. I let anybody follow me. I update all my blog posts through at least five tweets online. I decided to re-tweet at least five of my favorite tweets of the day, this way I force myself to remain active in the community. Follow me on Twitter! LinkedIn I updated my career and professional info on LinkedIn. I keep my LinkedIn profile updated with my latest jobs and career news. I let anybody connect with me on LinkedIn. I specify my email address in my profile, keeping it easy for those who want to add me. I read all the profile related updates of my connections – it is very valuable to know who is where and what changes are happening. I do not add my personal tweets or comments in LinkedIn profile. I just keep it professional. Link with me at LinkedIn Facebook I use Facebook only for personal friends. I visit all of my friends at regular intervals and make sure that they are really my friends. I often remove my friends from my Twitter list who are sending duplicate updates. I upload my family photos as well as family updates on Facebook, making sure that only my approved friends are able to read my updates. I keep my Facebook very personal and I often chat with my friends on Facebook chat. I am no longer confused about social media and I think I am using it appropriately. As I said, one cannot decide for others how to use social media, you can only decide for yourself. I have finally found my peace with social media. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• If not now, then when?

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/10/25/if-not-now-then-when.aspx The time has been flying by this year. It seems like only yesterday that I mentioned the gorillagator, a simple construct of confusion to try to draw attention to my message. In reality, that message was sent over a month ago. During that time, the hours slipped to days and days to weeks. Many exciting things have happened to myself; I'm sure many exciting things have happened to you. I'm also sure that many terrifying things have happened to children and their families. 62 children enter treatment at a Children's Miracle Network Hospital every minute. That's nearly 60,000 children since I sent the last email. To put that number in perspective, that is more than the population of Greenland. If we expand that to the past year, they have been nearly 550,000 children treated. That is almost the population of Huntsville, Decatur, and all their suburbs combined. Over the past 4 years, I have raised a little more than $3,000 for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As a result, I received a call from the organizers of Extra Life thanking me for my dedicated work and informing me that I was the top supporters for Children's Hospital of Alabama ... with my measly three grand. We can do much better than that. It may sound like I'm trying to have fun by playing games for 24 hours. It is more than that. It is me using my time and body as a catalyst. It is me putting my passion to work for a cause. It is me turning my love into something tangible. I have been campaigning and fighting to give these children a chance for years. I have been asking you to help me support these children and families. I've been putting in countless hours of talking to people, impassioned emails, and carefully constructed tweets. I have been fighting with cutting edge, and sometimes expensive, technology to try to provide live streams of my marathons. I yearly put my body through 24 (and, this year, 25) hours of no sleep. I do this to represent the countless hours these families sit awake at their children's side. All I ask is a few minutes on a website and a few dollars. These few minutes and few dollars go a long way help people that are experiencing circumstances that only occur in our nightmares. I also ask that you take one extra step. Forward this plea to those that you know. I can only reach a small fraction of a percentage of the people that may be able to help. Together, we can reach the world. I raise money for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As this message branches out, people may wish to support a hospital closer to their area. I have included a link to the list of people that have dedicated their time and have received no donations. Find someone on the list supporting your local hospital and give them a donation. Let them know that their time and effort are appreciated. Together, we can do something great. Together, we can make a difference. Together, we all stand tall. Thank you. You can get more information at http://www.extra-life.org and http://childrensmiraclenetworkhospitals.org/" My donation page is http://www.extra-life.org/participant/cgardner The list of participants without donations is http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.eventParticipantList&page=629&eventID=512

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• JFall 2012

  - by Geertjan

  JFall 2012 was over far too soon! Seven tracks going on simultaneously in a great location, with many artifacts reminding me of JavaOne, and nice snacks and drinks afterwards. The day started, as such things always do, with a keynote. Thanks to @royvanrijn for the photo below, I didn't take any myself and without a picture this report might have been too dry: What you see above is Steve Chin riding into the keynote hall on his NightHacking bike. The keynote was interesting, I can't be too complimentary about it, since I was part of it myself. Bert Ertman introduced the day and then Steve Chin took over, together with Sharat Chander, Tom Eugelink, Timon Veenstra, and myself. We had a strict choreography for the keynote, one that would ensure a lot of variation and some unexpected surprises, such as Steve being thrown off the stage a few times by Bert because of mentioning JavaOne too many times, rather than the clearly much cooler JFall. Steve talked about JavaOne and the direction Java is headed in, Sharat talked about JavaME and embedded devices, Steve and Tom did a demo involving JavaFX, I did a Project Easel demo, and Timon from Ordina talked about his Duke's Choice Award winning AgroSense project. I think the Project Easel demo (which I repeated later in a screencast for Parleys arranged by Eugene Boogaart) came across well and several people I spoke to especially like the roundtrip/bi-directional work that can be done, from browser to IDE and back again, very simply and intuitively. (In a long conversation on the drive back home afterwards, the scenario of a designer laying out the UI in HTML and then handing the HTML to a developer for back-end work, a developer who would then find it convenient to open the HTML in a browser and quickly navigate from the browser to the resources within the IDE, was discussed and considered to be extremely interesting and worth considering adopting NetBeans for, for no other reason than that.) Later I attended a session by David Delabassee on Java EE 7, Hans Dockter on Gradle, and Sander Mak on cross-build injection attacks. I was sorry to have missed Martijn Verburg's session, which sounded like it was really fantastic, among others, such as Gerrit Grunwald. I did a session too, entitled "Unlocking the Java EE 6 Platform", which was very well attended, pretty much a full room, and the demo went very smoothly. I talked to many people, e.g., a long time with Hans Dockter about how cool Gradle is and how great the Gradle/NetBeans plugin is turning out to be. I also had a long conversation (and did a demo) with Chris Chedgey, from Structure101, after his session, which was incredibly well attended; very interesting how popular modularity is. I met several people for the first time, as well as some colleagues from past places I've worked at. All in all, it was a great conference, unfortunately too short, which was very well attended (clearly over 1000) people, with several international speakers, as well as international attendees such as Mattias Karlsson, Sweden JUG leader. And, unsurprisingly, I came across NetBeans Platform applications again, none of which I had ever heard of before. In each case, "our fat client application" was mentioned in passing, never as a main application, and never in a context where there are plans for the application to be migrated to the web or mobile, simply because doing so makes no business sense at all. Great times at JFall, looking forward to meeting with some of the people I met again soon.

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• What is the best practice, point of view of well experienced developers

  - by Damien MIRAS

  My manager pushes me to use his self defined best practices. All of these practices are based on is own assumptions. I disagree with them and I would like to have some feedback of well experienced people about these practices. I would prefer answers from people involved in the maintenance of huge products and people whom have maintained the product for years. Developers with 15+ years of experience are preferred because my manager has that much experience himself. I have 7 years of experience. Here are the practices he wants me to use: never extends classes, use composition and interface instead because extending classes are unmaintainable and difficult to debug. What I think about that Extend when needed, respect "Liskov's Substitution Principle" and you'll never be stuck with a problem, but prefer composition and decoration. I don't know any serious project which has banned inheriting, sometimes it's impossible to not use that, i.e. in a UI framework. Design patterns are just unusable. In PHP, for simple use cases (for example a user needs a web interface to view a database table), his "best practice" is: copy some random php code wich we own, paste and modify it, put html and php code in same file, never use classes in PHP, it doesn't work well for small jobs, and in fact it doesn't work well at all, there is no good tool to work with. Copy & paste PHP code is good practice for maintenance because scripts are independent, if you have a bug somewhere you can fix it without side effects. What I think about that: NEVER EVER COPY code or do it because you have five minutes to deliver something, you will do some refactoring after that. Copy & paste code is a beginners error, if you have errors you'll have the error everywhere any time you have pasted it's a nightmare to maintain. If you repsect the "Open Close Principle" you'll rarely get edge effects, use unit test if you are afraid of that. For small jobs in PHP use at least something you get or write the HTML separately from the PHP code and reuse it any time you need it. Classes in PHP are mature, not as mature as other languages like python or java, but they are usable. There is tools to work with classes in PHP like Zend Studio that work very well. The use of classes or not depends not on the language you use but the programming paradigm you have choosen. I'm a OOP developer, I use PHP5, why do I have to shoot myself in the foot? When you find a simple bug in the code, and you can fix it simply, if you are not working on the code where you have found it, never fix it, even if it takes 5 seconds. He says to me his "best practices" are driven by the fact that he has a lot of experience in maintaining software in production (14 years) and he now knows what works and what doesn't work, what the community says is a fad, and the people advocating such principles as never copy & paste code, are not evolved in maintaining applications. What I think about that: If you find a bug fix it if you can do it quickly inform the people who've touched that code before, check if you have not introduced a new bug, ideally add a unit test for it. I currently work on a web commerce project, which serves 15k unique users per day. The code base has to be maintained and has been maintained this way since 2005. Ideally you include a short description of your position and experience in terms of years effectively maintaining an application which has been in production for real.

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• The Three-Legged Milk Stool - Why Oracle Fusion Incentive Compensation makes the difference!

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  During the London Olympics, we were exposed to dozens of athletes who worked with sports psychologists to maximize their performance. Executives often hire business psychologists to coach their teams to excellence. In the same vein, Fusion Incentive Compensation can be used to get people to change their sales behavior so we can make our numbers. But what about using incentive compensation solutions in a non-sales scenario to drive change? Recently, I was working an opportunity where a company was having a low user adoption rate for Salesforce.com, which was causing problems for them. I suggested they use Fusion Incentive Comp to change the reps' behavior. We tossed around the idea of tracking user adoption by creating a variable bonus for reps based on how well they forecasted revenues in the new system. Another thought was to reward the reps for how often they logged into the system or for the percentage of leads that became opportunities and turned into revenue. A new twist on a great product. Fusion CRM's Sweet Spot I'm excited about the sales performance management (SPM) tools in Fusion CRM. This trio of Incentive Compensation, Territory Management, and Quota Management sets us apart from the competition because Oracle is the only vendor that provides all three of these capabilities on a single tech stack, in a single application, and with a single look and feel. The niche vendors offer standalone territory or incentive compensation solutions, but then the customer has to custom build the other tools and can end up with a Frankenstein-type environment. On average, companies overpay sales commissions by three to eight percent. You calculate that number for a company the size of Oracle for one quarter and it makes a pretty air-tight financial case for using SPM tools to figure accurate commissions. Plus when sales reps get the right compensation, they can be out selling rather than spending precious time figuring out what they didn't get paid or looking for another job. And one more thing ... Oracle knows incentive comp. We have been a Gartner Market Scope leader in this space for the last five years. Our solution gets high marks because of its scalability and because of its interoperability with other technologies. And now that we're leading with Fusion, our incentive compensation offering includes the innovations that the Fusion team built, plus enhancements from the E-Business Suite Incentive Comp team. It's a case of making a good thing even better. (See product video.) The "Wedge" Apps In a number of accounts that I'm working on, there is a non-Oracle CRM system of record. That gives me the perfect opportunity to introduce the benefits of our SPM tools and to get the customer using Fusion. Then the door is wide open for the company to uptake more of Fusion CRM, especially since all the integrations they need are out of the box. I really believe that implementing this wedge of SPM tools is the ticket to taking market share away from other vendors. It allows us to insert ourselves in an environment where no other CRM solution in the market has the extending capabilities of Fusion. Not Just Your Usual Suspects Usually the stakeholders that I talk to for Territory Management are tightly aligned with the sales management team. When I sell the quota planning tool, I'm talking to finance people on the ERP side of the house who are measuring quotas and forecasting revenue. And then Incentive Comp is of most interest to the sales operations people, and generally these people roll up to either HR or the payroll department. I think of our Fusion SPM tools as a three-legged stool straddling an organization's Sales, Finance, and HR departments. So when you're prospecting for opportunities -- yes, people with a CRM perspective will be very interested -- but don't limit yourselves to that constituency. You might find stakeholders in accounting, revenue planning, or HR compensation teams. You just might discover, as I did at United Airlines, that the HR organization is spearheading the CRM project because incentive compensation is what they need ... and they're the ones with the budget. Jason Loh Global Solutions Manager, Fusion CRM Sales Planning Oracle Corporation

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• Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community

  There we go! I finally managed to push myself forward and pick up an old, actually too old, idea since I ever arrived here in Mauritius more than six years ago. I'm talking about a community for all kind of ICT connected people. In the past (back in Germany), I used to be involved in various community activities. For example, I was part of the Microsoft Community Leader/Influencer Program (CLIP) in Germany due to an FAQ on Visual FoxPro, actually Active FoxPro Pages (AFP) to be more precise. Then in 2003/2004 I addressed the responsible person of the dFPUG user group in Speyer in order to assist him in organising monthly user group meetings. Well, he handed over management completely, and attended our meetings regularly. Why did it take you so long? Well, I don't want to bother you with the details but short version is that I was too busy on either job (building up new companies) or private life (got married and we have two lovely children, eh 'monsters') or even both. But now is the time where I was starting to look for new fields given the fact that I gained some spare time. My businesses are up and running, the kids are in school, and I am finally in a position where I can commit myself again to community activities. And I love to do that! Why a new user group? Good question... And 'easy' to answer. Since back in 2007 I did my usual research, eh Google searches, to see whether there existing user groups in Mauritius and in which field of interest. And yes, there are! If I recall this correctly, then there are communities for PHP, Drupal, Python (just recently), Oracle, and Linux (which used to be even two). But... either they do not exist anymore, they are dormant, or there is only a low heart-beat, frankly speaking. And yes, I went to meetings of the Linux User Group Meta (Mauritius) back in 2010/2011 and just recently. I really like the setup and the way the LUGM is organised. It's just that I have a slightly different point of view on how a user group or community should organise itself and how to approach future members. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing others doing a very good job, I'm only saying that I'd like to do it differently. The last meeting of the LUGM was awesome; read my feedback about it. Ok, so what's up with 'Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community' or short: MSCC? As I've already written in my article on 'Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion' I think it is essential in a world of IT to stay 'connected' with a good number of other people in the same field. There is so much dynamic and every day's news that it is almost impossible to keep on track with all of them. The MSCC is going to provide a common platform to exchange experience and share knowledge between each other. You might be a newbie and want to know what to expect working as a software developer, or as a database administrator, or maybe as an IT systems administrator, or you're an experienced geek that loves to share your ideas or solutions that you implemented to solve a specific problem, or you're the business (or HR) guy that is looking for 'fresh' blood to enforce your existing team. Or... you're just interested and you'd like to communicate with like-minded people. Meetup of 26.06.2013 @ L'arabica: Of course there are laptops around. Free WiFi, power outlet, coffee, code and Linux in one go. The MSCC is technology-agnostic and spans an umbrella over any kind of technology. Simply because you can't ignore other technologies anymore in a connected IT world as we have. A front-end developer for iOS applications should have the chance to connect with a Python back-end coder and eventually with a DBA for MySQL or PostgreSQL and exchange their experience. Furthermore, I'm a huge fan of cross-platform development, and it is very pleasant to have pure Web developers - with all that HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and JS libraries stuff - and passionate C# or Java coders at the same table. This diversity of knowledge can assist and boost your personal situation. And last but not least, there are projects and open positions 'flying' around... People might like to hear others opinion about an employer or get new impulses on how to tackle down an issue at their workspace, etc. This is about community. And that's how I see the MSCC in general - free of any limitations be it by programming language or technology. Having the chance to exchange experience and to discuss certain aspects of technology saves you time and money, and it's a pleasure to enjoy. Compared to dusty books and remote online resources. It's human! Organising meetups (meetings, get-together, gatherings - you name it!) As of writing this article, the MSCC is currently meeting every Wednesday for the weekly 'Code & Coffee' session at various locations (suggestions are welcome!) in Mauritius. This might change in the future eventually but especially at the beginning I think it is very important to create awareness in the Mauritian IT world. Yes, we are here! Come and join us! ;-) The MSCC's main online presence is located at Meetup.com because it allows me to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments very easily, and any member can have a look who else is involved so that an exchange of contacts is given at any time. In combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there is a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Trello is also available as free smartphone app. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians! Recent updates The MSCC is now officially participating in the O'Reilly UK User Group programm and we are allowed to request review or recension copies of recent titles. Additionally, we have a discount code for any books or ebooks that you might like to order on shop.oreilly.com. More applications for user group sponsorship programms are pending and I'm looking forward to a couple of announcement very soon. And... we need some kind of 'corporate identity' - Over at the MSCC website there is a call for action (or better said a contest with prizes) to create a unique design for the MSCC. This would include a decent colour palette, a logo, graphical banners for Meetup, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and of course badges for our craftsmen to add to their personal blogs and websites. Please spread the word and contribute. Thanks!

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• iPad: Merge concept of SplitViewController and NavigationController in RootView?

  - by MikeN

  I'm having trouble merging the two concepts of using a SplitViewController in my main view and having the "RootView" controller that controls the left panes popup/sidebar table view. I want to have the left "RootView" act as a navigation menu, but how do I do this when the RootView is tied through MainWindow.xib into the left pane of the SplitView? Basically, I want the left navigation to work just like the built-in email applications folder drilldown navigation. Is there an example iPad project out there that uses both SplitView and a NavigationView for the left/Root pane?

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• VS 11 Beta Cannot start process because a file name has not been provided

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  This is what I'm getting when I build my Test project: With this I'm unable to run my tests since they're not being discovered by VS. See the message "Unexpected error detected. Check the Tests Output Pane for details." at the window bottom. Now if you look at the Tests OUTPUT pane you'll have no clue about what's the problem. This is extremely helpful... :) I know VS 11 is in beta but it used to work... I've already restarted VS but it didn't work after that too. Any ideas about what's going on? Would it be a bug somewhere? Note: the only thing I can think is related with VS 2010 uninstall I did sometime ago. Maybe it uninstalled some necessary bits. Beats me...

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• Looking Back at MIX10

  - by WeigeltRo

  It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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• Using Ribbon as tab control

  - by zendar

  I would like to create application with ribbon interface that looks and behaves like this: application have one main form with ribbon ribbon has multiple tabs when user switches tab on ribbon, panel below ribbon changes and displays content related to ribbon panel. That way, ribbon tab acts as if it is tab over whole window. For example, ribbon have two tabs: people and tasks. When current ribbon panel is "people", below ribbon is displayed grid with people data. Ribbon contains command for manipulating people data. When user switches to "tasks" tab on ribbon, application should display form with tasks below ribbon. Question is can ribbon be used in this scenario? I read "OFFICE FLUENT™ USER INTERFACE DESIGN GUIDELINES" that describe what you can and cannot do with ribbon, but I could not find anything about this.

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• Special thanks to everyone that helped me in 2010.

  - by mbcrump

  2010 has been a very good year for me and I wanted to create a list and thank everyone for what they have done for me.  I also wanted to thank everyone for reading and subscribing to my blog. It is hard to believe that people actually want to read what I write. I feel like I owe a huge thanks to everyone listed below. Looking back upon 2010, I feel that I’ve grown as a developer and you are part of that reason. Sometimes we get caught up in day to day work and forget to give thanks to those that helped us along the way. The list below is mine, it includes people and companies. This list is obviously not going to include everyone that has helped, just those that have stood out in my mind. When I think back upon 2010, their names keep popping up in my head. So here goes, in no particular order.  People Dave Campbell – For everything he has done for the Silverlight Community with his Silverlight Cream blog. I can’t think of a better person to get recognition at the Silverlight FireStarter event. I also wanted to thank him for spending several hours of his time helping me track down a bug in my feedburner account. Victor Gaudioso – For his large collection of video tutorials on his blog and the passion and enthusiasm he has for Silverlight. We have talked on the phone and I’ve never met anyone so fired up for Silverlight. Kunal Chowdhury – Kunal has always been available for me to bounce ideas off of. Kunal has also answered a lot of questions that stumped me. His blog and CodeProject article have green a great help to me and the Silverlight Community. Glen Gordon – I was looking frantically for a Windows Phone 7 several months before release and Glen found one for me. This allowed me to start a blog series on the Windows Phone 7 hardware and developing an application from start to finish that Scott Guthrie retweeted.  Jeff Blankenburg – For listening to my complaints in the early stages of Windows Phone 7. Jeff was always very polite and gave me his cell phone number to talk it over. He also walked me through several problems that I was having early on. Pete Brown – For writing Silverlight 4 in Action. This book is definitely a labor of love. I followed Pete on Twitter as he was writing it and he spent a lot of late nights and weekends working on it. I felt a lot smarter after reading it the first time. The second time was even better. John Papa – For all of his work on the Silverlight Firestarter and the Silverlight community in general. He has also helped me on a personal level with several things. Daniel Heisler – For putting up with me the past year while we worked on many .NET projects together in 2010. Alvin Ashcraft – For publishing a daily blog post on the best of .NET links. He has linked to my site many times and I really appreciate what he does for the community. Chris Alcock – For publishing the Morning Brew every weekday. I remember when I first appeared on his site, I started getting hundreds of hits on my site and wondered if I was getting a DOS attack or something. It was great to find out that Chris had linked to one of my articles. Joel Cochran – For spending a week teaching “Blend-O-Rama”. This was my one of my favorite sessions of this year. I learned a lot about Expression Blend from it and the best part was that it was free and during lunchtime. Jeremy Likness – Jeremy is smart – very smart. I have learned a lot from Jeremy over the past year. He is also involved in the Silverlight community in every way possible, from forums to blog post to screencast to open source. It goes on and on. The people that I met at VSLive Orlando 2010. I had a great time chatting with Walt Ritscher, Wallace McClure, Tim Huckabee and David Platt. Also a special thanks to all of my friends on Twitter like @wilhil, @DBVaughan, @DataArtist, @wbm, @DirkStrauss and @rsringeri and many many more. Software Companies / Events / May of gave me FREE stuff. =) Microsoft (3) – I was sent a free coupon code by Microsoft to take the Silverlight 4 Beta Exam. I jumped on the offer and took the exam. It was great being selected to try out the exam before it goes public even though Microsoft eventually published a universal coupon code for everyone. I am still waiting to find out if I passed the exam. My fingers are crossed. Microsoft reaching out to me with some questions regarding the .NET Community. I’ve never had a company contact me with such interest in the community. Having a contest where 75 people could win a $100 gift certificate and a T-Shirt for submitting a Windows Phone 7 app. I submitted my app and won. All of the free launch events this year (Windows Phone 7, Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC). Wintellect – For providing an awesome day of free technical training called T.E.N. Where else can you get free training from some of the best programmers in the world? I also won a contest from them that included a NETAdvantage Ultimate License from Infragistics. VSLive – I attended the Orlando 2010 Conference and it was the best developer’s conference that I have ever attended. I got to know a lot of people at this conference and hang out with many wonderful speakers. I live tweeted the event and while it may have annoyed some, the organizers of VSLive loved it. I won the contest on Twitter and they invited me back to the 2011 session of my choice. This is a very nice gift and I really appreciate the generosity. BarcodeLib.com – For providing free barcode generating tools for a Non-Profit ASP.NET project that I was working on. Their third party controls really made this a breeze compared to my existing solution. NDepend – It is absolutely the best tool to improve code quality. The product is extremely large and I would recommend heading over to their site to check it out. Silverlight Spy – I was writing a blog post on Silverlight Spy and Koen Zwikstra provided a FREE license to me. If you ever wanted to peek inside of a Silverlight Application then this is the tool for you. He is also working on a version that will support OOB and Windows Phone 7. I would recommend checking out his site. Birmingham .NET Users Group / Silverlight Nights User Group – It takes a lot of time to put together a user group meeting every month yet it always seems to happen. I don’t want to name names for fear of leaving someone out but both of these User Groups are excellent if you live in the Birmingham, Alabama area. Publishing Companies Manning Publishing – For giving me early access to Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown. It was really nice to be able to read this awesome book while Pete was writing it. I was also one of the first people to publish a review of the book. Sams Publishing and DZone – For providing a copy of Silverlight 4 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion for me to review for their site. The review is coming in January 2011. Special Shoutout to the following 3rd Party Silverlight Controls It has been a great pleasure to work with the following companies on 3rd Party Control Giveaways every month. It always amazes me how every 3rd Party Control company is so eager to help out the community. I’ve never been turned down by any of these companies! These giveaways have sparked a lot of interest in Silverlight and hopefully I can continue giving away a new set every month. If you are a 3rd Party Control company and are interested in participating in these giveaways then please email me at mbcrump29[at]gmail[d0t].com. The companies below have already participated in my giveaways: Infragistics (December 2010) - Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!  Mindscape (November 2010) - Mindscape Silverlight Controls + Free Mega Pack Contest Telerik (October 2010) - Win Telerik RadControls for Silverlight! ($799 Value) Again, I just wanted to say Thanks to everyone for helping me grow as a developer.  Subscribe to my feed

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• eclipse debugger: attaching source-code of maven managed libraries

  - by meriton

  I'd like to use the source code of maven-managed dependencies when debugging our webapp in eclipse. I have managed to attach the sources to the libraries in the "Maven Managed Depedencies" classpath container, i.e. when I open a class file from a depedency (e.g. using Ctrl-Shift-T), I see the source code. However, when I launch the tomcat within eclipse, and execution halts on a breakpoint in that same class, the editor pane only displays the text "source not found", and a button to edit the "source lookup path". I have attempted to manually add the "Maven Managed Dependencies" classpath container, only to be told "Use maven project settings to configure depedency resolution". However, I see no useful setting in that property pane ... How can I attach those sources?

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• Using XSD to validate node count

  - by heath

  I don't think this is possible but I thought I'd throw it out there. Given this XML: <people count="3"> <person>Bill</person> <person>Joe</person> <person>Susan</person> </people> Is it possible in an XSD to force the @count attribute value to be the correct count of defined elements (in this case, the person element)? The above example would obviously be correct and the below example would not validate: <people count="5"> <person>Bill</person> <person>Joe</person> <person>Susan</person> </people>

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• Linq Distinct on list

  - by BahaiResearch.com

  I have a list like this: List people age name 1 bob 1 sam 7 fred 7 tom 8 sally I need to do a linq query on people and get an int of the number distinct ages (3) int distinctAges = people.SomeLinq(); how? how?

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• Get audience members using web services in SharePoint

  - by Robert MacLean

  Using the SharePoint API (the one with the assemblies you add, but requires you to run on the server) it is easy to get audience members: using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://localhost")) { ServerContext svrContext = ServerContext.GetContext(site); AudienceManager audManager = new AudienceManager(svrContext); foreach (Audience audience in audManager.Audiences) { ArrayList people = audience.GetMembership(); if (people != null) { foreach (UserInfo user in people) { Console.WriteLine("send email to " + user.Email); } } } However I can not find a web service to do the same thing?

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• Build XML document using Linq To XML

  - by JasonDR

  Given the following code: string xml = ""; //alternativley: string xml = "<people />"; XDocument xDoc = null; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(xml)) { xDoc = XDocument.Parse(xml); xDoc.Element("people").Add( new XElement("person", "p 1") ); } else { xDoc = new XDocument(); xDoc.Add(new XElement("people", new XElement("person", "p 1") )); } As you can see, if the xml variable is blank, I need to create the rood node manually, and append the person the root node, whereas if it is not, I simple add to the people element My question is, is there any way to generically create the document, where it will add all referenced node automatically if they do not already exists?

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• Code reviews for larger MVC.NET team using TFS

  - by Parrots

  I'm trying to find a good code review workflow for my team. Most questions similar to this on SO revolve around using shelved changes for the review, however I'm curious about how this works for people with larger teams. We usually have 2-3 people working a story (UI person, Domain/Repository person, sometimes DB person). I've recommended the shelf idea but we're all concerned about how to manage that with multiple people working the same feature. How could you share a shelf between multiple programmers at that point? We worry it would be clunky and we might easily have unintended consequences moving to this workflow. Of course moving to shelfs for each feature avoids having 10 or so checkins per feature (as developers need to share code) making seeing the diffs at code review time painful. Has anyone else been able to successfully deal with this? Are there any tools out there people have found useful aside from shelfs in TFS (preferably open-source)?

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