Lime in the coconut - learning adventures

If I understand the story correctly, Karl started writing this book as a series of online articles for his website 'Code Wiki' and it turned out so well that it made more sense to put it in an eBook format. I've come across the info in this books more than a handful of times over the past year or so while googling around for coding best practices, architectures, and coding techniques like dependency injection.

Some of what stands out about this work is Karl's ability to

9/19/2008 2:35:02 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Modular Framework

I'm hoping to arrive at a Modular Framework.
The trip will likely be long, but quite interesting... and the destination useful, reusable, consistent, and ideally easy to implement the first time, and refactorable as technology needs change.
The framework will be:
- n-tiered, where n is at least 3.
- datasets or object datasource
- ado.net 2.0 and then LINQ
- add in a ws or wcf transport
- swap out ASP.NET and WinForms with Silverlight and WPF

Basic layers:

DB - Data Model - Controller - Domain Model - UI

6/10/2008 1:55:57 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, February 22, 2008

my first Silverlight thing

I was on an interview and saw a cool example of what i may be asked to produce. I think the app was done with flash... but i think it'd be easy enough to do with silverlight.

picture a 3 panel screen divided into equal sized left and right halves. On the left half there are 2 equal size panels and on the right half there is 1 taller panel. A video displays on the top left, below it a script with titles and text. On the right half, a slide presentation follows along matching the content.

The first step is to get silverlight and tools installed (remove old stuff first)
- Expression Blend2 - December
- remove May version, got rid of Designer too although may not have needed to.
- Expression Encoder
- ASP.NET Futures - don't know if i need this yet, but it sounds way cool!
- had to remove 3.5 beta and install the real 3.5

2/22/2008 4:22:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Plans for Glen

Glens' project will primarilly be a winform app with a small web component.

I'm thinking about creating the winform peice as a 2.0 smart client, then redoing it with CAB UI and SCSF.
Then take both of those and put a WPF front end on them.

For the web component, again just create it as a 2.0 app, add ajax, then slap a silverlight front end on it.
somewhere along the way i want to replace the traditional DAL with a web service, and maybe wcf for kicks.
if all goes well, maybe even redo this using the asp.net MVC framework.

2/19/2008 4:11:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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Saturday, February 02, 2008

CodeCamp FL '08

What an awesome day! (Feb 2, 2008)

The South Florida .NET Code Camp 2008 was held at DeVry University in Miramar FL - nice location.

Sessions:

1. Getting Started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
David Hayden

2. Creating Hyper-Text Videos for Silverlight
David Silverlight

3. The Future of Subsonic
Jim Zimmerman

4. Shine your Silver with AJAX
Anthony Lombardo

5. The Perfect Pattern Storm, where TDD meets UX and MVP
Ron Jacobs

6. Intro to LINQ to SQL in VS2008
Chris Rock

2/2/2008 7:56:58 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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Saturday, September 01, 2007

and so it begins...

For years I've been toying with the notion of earning a MS certification, now I've finally decided to take the plunge.

About 5 years ago we had a set of SIGs that went through the orange books for MCAD - WinForms, Web, and XML. I was still in hw infrastructure mode so I didn't bother taking the tests or even doing anything other than reading. Then in 2004 after I was zapped from that job and I decided to make the leap to programming, I picked up the blue books and started through them. I made it a few chapters in each, but got distracted by trying to get a job. Just to get by I had so much to learn along such a broad landscape that i decided not to commit to getting a cert. It didn't seem like it would guarantee a job, even though it may have opened some doors, so I bailed. Also I looked around at some of my friends who were awesome coders and not a one of them had a certificate...

But, here I sit, 2.5 years after making the jump to coding, after filling the pool with enough general knowlege about web, winform, vb6, access, sql, design patterns, pragmatic programming practices, ajax, xml, etc that i can now swim around some. I've also found myself going back to some basics [of C#] and really trying to get it and recently took a test which ended up proving to me that I could actually retain this stuff well enough to spew it back out - strangely motivating. I have also finished up 1.5 years of slowly going through a few design patterns books and it's finally starting to make some sense. I have a steady day job that keeps me supporting a complicated real world app in a small sw shop that I am thinking of as an intensive case study in terms of architecture, functionality, growth and maintanence over 6+ years and rafts of developers, blending old with new, and watching a next version begin from scratch. Anybody remember the architecture pattern 'the great ball of mud'? One must know dark to appreciate light.

enough. You get the picture, now I'm ready.

ok, back to the question 'why bother with earning a cert?' Well, it may pay off in terms of a next job someday, but the real driver for me is focus. I've successfully used the SIGs in the past decade to slowly build a foundation for learning how to code, so now I want to take it up a notch and accomplish some real tangible milestones. My add hoc approach up till now has done me well, let me absorb as much as I could at a comfortable pace and and deep dive as needed. I will still keep the misc topics alive in the form of WinForm and Web Apps and Web Services SW factories, patterns from the DoFactory Reference app, and taking apart the DinnerNow.net and StockTrader demos.

What's missing? a good, thorough, organized revisit of fundamentals... and that's what I hope to get out of earning my cert.

9/1/2007 5:14:50 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

a book, why?

I'm trying to learn Macromedia Studio 8 so I pulled out an old Macromedia MX book I had... and found it too wordy to follow and not very full of examples that were aestetically pleasing once completed [demotivating]

Next I found a book that covered the Dreamweaver and Fireworks and [thankfully] de-emphasized Flash. There's plenty of good Flash books out there, but I'm currently not too interested in going down those paths.

I had been browsing the internet looking for tutorials and kept ending up at Lynda.com so I gave their demo video courses a try - very nice. So, next time I was at B&N I picked up the Dreamweaver 8 book by Daniel Short and Garo Green.

Halfway through this, today I went to lunch with my friend and mentioned the book. He asked a simple, but suprisingly thought provoking question: why buy a book to learn this stuff? It's a tool, right? Just start using it and figure it out. What are you getting out of it?

He likened Dreamweaver to Word - you know how to write, so all you need to do is go through the menus, and start formatting.

Hmm... good point.

But I knew I was getting something more out of it!

I'm learning the tool, which is very robust and has lots of ways of getting at formatting, inserting items, selecting sections of code, viewing code and the design in synch and at the same time, etc..
integrating Dreamweaver with Flash, Flash text, and Fireworks
I'm getting the wisdom of workflow from some web designers who really seem to know their stuff. Tons of tips and pointers along the way for shortcuts of using Dreamweaver, and good web design habits. Even suggestions for organizing website file structure.
CSS and XHTML info, as well as refreshing my understanding of basic html tags/formatting things like tables, lists, navigation, divs, spans, etc which I've not spent many cycles on thinking about since I learned their basic syntax and usage.
some good 508 accessibility kinds of concerns.
the subtle value of a good color scheme and layout - and how to get things to sit on the page as you envision them.

I doubt I expected much more than items 1 & 2 when I started, but I must say I'm pleasantly surprised and will definately finish this book up quickly.

8/8/2006 4:42:19 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Friday, June 30, 2006

ASP.NET authors online

Scott Mitchell:
Scott's blog
An Extensive Examination of the DataGrid Web Control: Part 1-18
Another way to see Scott's stuff
Scott's books

Stephen Walther:
Stephen's blog
Stephen's books
on MSDN

6/30/2006 8:40:55 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Getting started with ASP.NET v2.0

Here's a list of books, websites, articles that I recommend for getting started with ASP.NET v2.0:

	.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook By Wei-Meng Lee 348 pages ISBN: 0-596-00812-0 http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/aspnetadn/
-quick to go through -single topic/control focused -just enough discussion of how things work, not too many details
	Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide - VB Edition by Anne Boehm and Joel Murach 16 chapters, 526 pages, 244 illustrations ISBN 1-890774-36-7 http://www.murach.com/books/ugvb/index.htm
-thorough coverage of fundamental concepts/controls -follows a single application -after 1st complete pass through, it makes a good reference (hint: start on chp1 and go straight through)
	-or- Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Web Programming with C# 2005 by Joel Murach and Anne Boehm 26 chapters, 841 pages, 391 illustrations ISBN 1-890774-31-6 http://www.murach.com/books/a2cs/index.htm
- I don’t have this one yet, but it looks equally thorough. - possibly a better place to start.
	ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution by Marco Bellinaso 576 pages ISBN: 0-7645-8464-2 http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0764584642.html
-follows a single application, starting with basic framework and then walks through 5 modules -not just syntax, a lot of real-life design decisions/best practices -for really getting to understand ASP.NET apps, this may be my favorite book ever!

6/30/2006 6:35:45 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Monday, June 19, 2006

MapPoint

Here's the toc page for MapPoint resources:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnanchor/html/anch_mappointmain.asp

I'd like to use this for a web services demo. (WinForms SIG)

6/19/2006 7:58:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Design Patterns

This is cool!

http://www.dofactory.com/Framework/Framework.aspx

Lots of code, well organized, ties in with 2 of the Design Patterns books that are my favorites, and not too expensive. Wow.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture Heads First Design Patterns

Heads First Design Patterns Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

6/17/2006 9:16:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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game stuff

https://www.upgradeyourgame.com

http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/gamedevelopment/

6/17/2006 8:36:16 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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Follow the "Made in Express" contest

Looks like the 12 finalists were choose ~early June. Check out their plans and blogs...

http://www.madeinexpresscontest.com/

It's kinda cool to see what project ideas folks came up with and why. (I'd love to see a list of the ones that didn't make it too!) There's quite a variety of projects, peoples' background, and approaches.
Now I hope to follow their different approaches to research, design, planning, coding, etc... and maybe see if I can gleen any good habits from these guys.

6/17/2006 8:33:16 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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back to basi[cs]

After a year of focusing on vb apps I'm revisiting some basic c# syntax.

As a guide, I'm using MSDN

MSDN Library > Development Tools and Languages > Visual Studio > Visual C# > C# Programming Guide >

It's a bit boring, but helpful... typing everything as I go [rather than cut&paste] helps stick it to my brain a bit better. Only up to Arrays so lots of commandline stuff at the moment.

For Winform stuff I found some videos at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcsharp/learning/default.aspx
-a 16 lesson series for beginners
-10 control focused lessons

also, found http://www.windowsforms.net/Default.aspx which is the Windows App equivalent to http://asp.net . Funny how I never came across this before.

In order to inject a bit of fun, i checked out the game stuff at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/gamedevelopment/
I will be trying these out as a small reward for getting through the dry stuff.

6/17/2006 8:21:25 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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