RJ Dudley

A few behind-the-scenes photos from our Azure talk at Pittsburgh Code Camp:

Matt, Shaun and Nathan working like crazy in the speaker lounge.

Nate, putting the finishing touches on while Matt and Shaun are presenting just inside the door.

Shaun (facing) and Matt (back) presenting.

Nate presenting, Matt and Shaun in the wings.

I wish I wasn't going to be out of town this weekend!  Ugh--looks awesome!

Full details and registration at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032402422

Saturday, February 28, 2009 8:00 AM - Saturday, February 28, 2009 5:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 8:00 AM

Pittsburgh MPR

MPR
30 Isabella Street
2nd Floor Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 15212
United States

Full details and registration at https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032402405&flag=1

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 1:00 PM - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 5:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 12:30 PM

Theater - Loews Waterfront 22

300 Waterfront Drive W.
WEST HOMESTEAD Pennsylvania 15120
United States

Language(s):
English.

Product(s):
Microsoft Visual Studio, Mobility and Web Development.

Audience(s):
Academic/Student Developer, Developer, Developer Generalists, Hobbyist Dev and Professional Developer/Coder.

Event Overview

Enhance your coding capabilities with new tools, tips, and inside secrets from MSDN Events. We’ll start with an overview of the Azure Services Platform, which can help you build cloud-based applications and solutions that offer the best of online and on-premises functionality. Next, you’ll learn how to take full advantage of the Visual Studio debugger. We’ll offer some great tips and tricks to help you debug faster and more efficiently, while applying fresh techniques to ramp up your problem solving abilities. Finally, you’ll see how developing for a Windows Mobile phone leverages your current coding skills and can make it simple to build, deploy and debug cool new devices.

Session 1:  Demystifying Azure - An Overview of the Azure Services Platform for Developers

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an Internet-scale cloud services platform with an operating system and developer services set that can be used individually or together. Hosted in Microsoft data centers, Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can help you build new applications to run from the cloud or to enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. With open architecture, Azure gives developers the ability to build Web applications, and applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, and hybrid solutions that offer the best of online and on-premises functionality. Confused about the Azure hype? Come discover and demystify the Azure concepts, and see demos of Azure in action with a variety of services

Session 2: Deepen your Debugging - Tips and Tricks for the Visual Studio 2008 Debugger
The Visual Studio debugger is a highly underutilized tool for many developers. In this session, you’ll learn how to use it like a pro, while picking up new techniques to fast-forward your problem solving and debugging abilities. We’ll show you how to use advanced breakpoints, advanced watch window / Expression evaluator tricks, modifiers, assertions on the fly, remote debugging, and more. Whether you’re writing C#, VB, WPF, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, or services, we’ll provide tips and tricks that will have you debugging faster and much more efficiently. The debugger is your primary tool for finding bugs, so join us and learn how to make the most of it.

Session 3: Developing for Windows Mobile Devices
Mobile development is growing fast, and Windows Mobile is at the forefront with over 18 million phones shipped last year and many more cutting-edge devices on the way. Visual Studio developers have tremendous opportunities in this space. Why? Developing for a Windows Mobile phone leverages your existing coding experience and takes it to new heights. In this session, we’ll look at some of the coolest new devices, you’ll learn how to set up Visual Studio with the latest SDK and device emulators, and you’ll see how to build, deploy and debug Windows Mobile applications. We’ll also explore how Internet Explorer Mobile 6 provides new AJAX capabilities that offer the richness of the desktop with pan and zoom features tuned for mobile devices.
For more details, please visit www.msdnevents.com.

Registration Options

Event ID:
1032402405

Register by Phone
1-877-673-8638

I can't believe I've been back for a week, this week has been a blur.

I have to say thank you to the Montreal .NET Community, JS Tougas, Eric Moreau and Guy Barrette in particular.  JS was my personal tour guide all week, and Eric treated Julie Lerman and myself to lunch on Friday.  Overall, a great bunch of guys.  Thanks also to Jim Duffy for the chat on the plane to Philly.  Hope you got home after your delay.

Montreal .NET UG hosted a party one night, with some excellent beer and munchies.  JS and I loaded up on poutine before heading over.  There were giveaways, and I ended up winning an Aspose Total for .NET subscription because I dropped my business card in the pile.  Awesome!  That pretty much made the trip a wash for my company.  I'm looking forward to using that in the very near future.  JS had to catch his train home, and I had a little work to do, so we gave our door prize tickets to Julie (we're each claiming 1/3 of anything she won).  Plus, I wasn't going to try and navigate the underground by myself after a couple beers.

There was plenty of swag given away at DevTeach.  Dozens of thumb drives (I won a couple), as well as a big pile of books and I think 5 MSDN subscriptions.  Microsoft kicked in a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Expression Web and the Tech-Ed DVDs for all attendees.  Plus, the ever present messenger bag or backpack to take it all home in (from Leed's, a local company).

Speaking of the Tech-Ed DVDs, they were produced with a beta of Silverlight, and don't work with Silverlight 2.0 RTM.  Eric has more information about how to play the Tech-Ed DVDs.

Guy uploaded his photos to Sky Drive.  He's the guy in the antlers.

So now that work is settling down a little, it's time to do a little knowledge transfer with my team.  We have some good challenges ahead of us, and some great new knowledge to help us along.

Umm, yeah.  That could turn into a conference unto itself.  After you run through the little wizard, you have something pretty easy to use, but under the covers, it's amazing how much functionality and control they've baked in to a version 1 product.

Since EF originated with the ADO.NET team, it's actually pretty performant.  In some tests Julie ran for a recent CoDE Magazine article, she shows the EF to be about 10x faster than Linq to SQL (which originated with the C# team, but has been transferred to the ADO.NET Team), and faster than even ADO.NET Data Adapters.

I'm pencilled in to present the EF at Pittsburgh .NET in February, and Nate and I are going to begin to incorporate it into Scrumr.  That mean's there's going to be some serious rearchitecting of the app, but it'll be worth it in the long run.  As we go through the process, Nate and I will be blogging about our experiences.

Today I got to meet Nitin, publisher of the awesome and free cheat sheets at http://www.refcardz.com/.  All free PDF downloads, covering a range of topics.  They're introducing 12 new .NET cards next year, but already have Silverlight 2, Core .NET, C# and PowerShell.  Nitin brought some nicely printed ones for deign patterns and Silverlight 2.  This was a sweet bit of swag.

A lot of people stayed late at the UG party last night, judging by the low attendance at breakfast and bleary eyes in the early sessions.

My first session was protecting web apps against injection attacks.  In a way, I'm happy that we already do almost all of the recommended best practices.  There are a few things I need to touch up when I get back.

The Silverlight toolkit is very cool, I can't wait to get more into Silverlight and what it can do.  The follow-up databinding session didn't go so well, so not much there.

I did win a couple of USB keys today, and Rally Software gave me a handful of Matchbox-size Mini Coopers with their logo for looking at their software.  Their community edition may find its way into a project in the future as a test drive.

The afternoon is being spent with Rod Paddock and Jim Duffy.  Rod went through Ajaxing applications and a brief tour of the Ajax Control Toolkit.

The always hilarious Jim Duffy did a great talk on refactoring in VB.NET using the free Refactor! from DevExpress.  My team can expect to download and install this tool next week.

Last regular session is using Virtual Earth in ASP.NET apps.  Very excited about this.  My team at work can expect to see some of this next year.

I'm in Markus Egger's (Pubisher of CoDE Magazine) "Intro to Silverlight" talk, and he just dropped the bombshell that the next version of Silverlight will support out-of-browser experiences!  In 2.0, the browser is required to host the controls, but the next version can stand alone.

"Identifying Performance Benchmarks".  Awesome.  This session alone will pay for the trip.  Cool tip:

select * from orders
GO

will execute the statement once

select * from orders
go 500

will execute the statement 500 times.  Perfmon + profiler = cool, especially when you overlay perfom stats on top of traces.

DB Maintenance Optimization.  Don't use Database Maintenance Plans, create your own.  They're not a great tool.  If you have to, research all their options, and choose as few as you need to--you can do some really dumb things.  Windows 2008 Server has scheduled job to defrag filesystem enabled by default.  Using SQL on a SAN, check out http://www.sqlcat.com/ for best practices.  Physical file fragmentation does exist on a SAN, but can be hidden by caching and buffering.  Diskeeper has some guidance.

Expression Blend is cool.  We got Expression Web as part of the conference swag, but we have Blend as part of MSDN.  Blend 2.0 is built in WPF, and parts of VS10 will also be built on WPF.  Blend 2.5 with the Silverlight tools was changed to be an SP.  WPF Spy tools can be used to poke around inside of blend.  Tips: if you don't know a namespace, hover over the class and hit Ctrl+. to find all namespaces with that class.  I see some great potential for WPF enabled display of information.

Dynamic Data is awesome in theory.  It's immediately most useful in master data admin pages, but special steps are necessary to secure dynamic data.  This is partly because of issues in securing ASP.NET routing.  Also, since it can rely on Linq to SQL, dynamic SQL is used, and the login user needs access to all tables we want to access, including the master data tables.  There is an example on securing dynamic data on Codeplex (access via http://asp.net/dynamicdata/ and go to samples).

Last session of the day is Query Execution Plans, with Brad McGehee again.  A lot of this I know from Kim Tripp's webcasts in the past, but SQL 2005 has some differences over SQL 2000.  I'm amazed he can create such bad databases and queries on purpose for the demonstrations.  That takes effort when you've spent a lot of time figuring out how to do things correctly.

Tonight DotNetRocks recorded a session, and the Montreal .NET UG hosted a party at a nearby bar.  I ate poutine, which are fries covered with gravy and what translates into "cheese crap", but what we call curds.  BTDT, and I don't think I need another helping this week.

Keynote was a thoughtful talk by Ted Neward of Thoughworks.  Ted say's we're in a perfect storm of development due to the emergence of tools, virtualization, processors and something else I couldn't note because he flipped the slide so fast.  Sounded reasonable, though.

First session this morning was a conflict for me--I attended an interesting talk on SQL Server CLR Objects, but there was also a good talk on WPF with Expression Blend at the same time.  Bill's talk was as much a warning as to how you can screw up your database as much as the power of SQL Server CLR Objects.  It was good to know that SQL 2005 can host CLR 3.5 apps.  The demos came from Bill's book Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server, which is going to find its way to my bookshelf soon.

Currently, we're in a Moulin Rouge type of theater, complete with heavy red velvet curtains and a disco ball.  I don't know whether to expect Lean Software Development or a Can-Can dance.  Some attendees are sitting in the box seats, it's kind of funny.

VSTO with WPF is mind boggling.  Tim Huckaby is even more wound up than I am when presenting.  Definitely will need some supplemental reading.  You can do a lot of really cool stuff with this technology, and this will probably find its way into out enterprise in the future.

Project Estimation Madness--outstanding.  Joel is a great speaker, and the session materials will be incredibly useful.

Preconferences started today, but today was my travel day.  Just the usual--circling Philadelphia for over 30 minutes, then a mad sprint to the flight to Montreal.  I barely made the plane, but my luggage didn't.  Fortunately, US Air got my bag on a later flight, so I have fresh clothes for tomorrow.

It looks to be a very busy four days, with three solid days of sessions and an all day post-conference with Julie Lerman on the Entity Framework.

I've promised Craig I'd do a presentation at Pittsburgh .NET User Group on the EF, so I'll be bringing back what I learn.

A huge thank you to everyone who voted for Scrumr in the Community Coding Contest-- were #2 by two votes.  The #1 project was CCConfig, and given the growing interest in agile development methodologies, we're humbled but not terribly surprised to see two agile projects at the top.

Two other projects which deserve mentioning are the Active Directory Roles Provider and aspNETserve, both of which may play a role in future development of Scrumr.  The AD Roles Provider hooks ASP.NET membership into AD groups, making roles administration part of the AD environment--definitely a plus in some corporate environments.  aspNETserve would allow Scrumr to be run locally on a machine without IIS installed.  Potentially, with SQL Server Express as the datastore, this could be used to make Scrumr as portable thumbdrive app, too (just like ScrewTurn Wiki).

And a very, very huge thank you to Chris Pietschmann, the MS MVP who had the cool idea of a contest to give away the MSDN subscriptions.  Thanks, Chris, hope you decide to do it again next year!

Coming soon to Pittsburgh:

When it comes to design patterns, the MVC is the granddaddy of them all.  First described in the late 70s, the MVC pattern remains very popular in the world of web applications today. ASP.NET MVC provides a framework that enables you to easily implement the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for Web applications. This pattern lets you separate applications into loosely coupled, pluggable components for application design, processing logic, and display.

Throughout the day we will be demonstrating the ASP.NET MVC Framework in a cookbook-style approach with recipes on how to solve common challenges when developing MVC web applications. No previous knowledge or experience is necessary. We will walk you through the basics on creating views and controllers and by the end of the day show you how to develop end-to-end MVC applications complete with ajax, authentication, authorization, caching, databinding, logging, persistence, validation, and other common challenges we experience in day-to-day development.

Sample code will leverage and integrate popular frameworks and libraries like ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, Enterprise Library, Entity Framework, and LINQ To SQL to show you how to write less code and be more productive during your development.

Polish it all off with examples showing the extensibility of the MVC Framework using custom controller factories, alternative view engines, and custom action filter attributes just to name a few.

Topics covered will include “How Do I...”

- Create Views Easily? ( HTML and Url Helpers )
- Handle Get and Post Requests? ( simple databinding of action method arguments, ActionResults, etc.. )
- Pass Data Between Views and Controllers? ( ViewData and TempData )
- Bind Views and Forms to complex data types? ( ModelBinders )
- Handle Errors Gracefully? ( ActionFilter Attributes )
- Provide Input Error Validation? ( ValidationMessage, ValidationSummary, ViewData.ModelState )
- Handle Authentication and Authorization? ( ActionFilter Attributes and Membership Provider )
- Persist to a database ( LINQ To SQL, Entity Framework )
- Log Messages to Database, File, EventLog ( ActionFilter Attributes, etc. )
- Leverage AJAX and JSON? ( ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery )

Some of the more complex and non-beginner topics can be discussed if time is allowed and/or maybe discussed afterwards in a social environs…

- Alternate View Engines
- IoC and Custom Controller Factories
- Unit Testing

Bring your USB Flash Drive to grab the sample code and begin developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications today!

Register online at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032392363&culture=en-US.

In my spare time, I've been working on an open source project management tool called Scrumr.  Scrumr is a lightweight app for managing sprints per Scrum methodology.  You can find out more about the project at http://codeplex.com/scrumr/. 

In the meantime, we need your help.  Please go to http://communitycodingcontest.org/ and vote for Scrumr.  We need the tools to make better software.

Thanks!