I had a great time opening up the .NET track at Open Camp this year. This was sort of a State of the OSS on .NET Talk – if you we’re, thanks for joining us and I hope this was fun and informative!

Be sure to register soon! – try the discount code “ugdotnetOC10″

Also…

• Go read Shawn Weisfeld’s post
• the MVP Blog mention

See you there!

The goal of the SOLID principals is to write better, healthier OO code that is easier to test, maintain and develop with. Essentially, SOLID embodies object oriented development done right.

It’s important to note that SOLID is a set of principals that embody the what and the why of certain OO practices. SOLID is really light on the specifics of how. The distinction is important, in that this is part of what allows the SOLID principals to be embraced across various languages and environments including Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc… So, for example, the Open Close Principal can be achieved through poly-morphism, strategy pattern, IoC, virtual methods, dynamic mix-ins (ruby); the same can be said for the Dependency Inversion Principal – these are two how’s & why’s that tackle the same problem from two different directions. The application of these principals is often very similar.

You can imagine that in that context, it would be difficult to fully embody the full breadth and depth of all of the SOLID principals in a talk where the entire set of SOLID principals were one sub point (two slides) of a 10 point talk.

My goal was to pull out a couple of practical nuggets to help people embrace the SOLID principals – namely, to code against Interfaces and to adopt a Dependency Injection approach to development. In my opinion, if a developer will take on those two practices – that alone will take them close to embodying about 90% of the SOLID principals.

Imagine getting the why wrong, but being right on the how. Let that soak in for a minute.

It’s like telling your kids to wash their hands or their pants will fall off. It’s a non-sequitur, they are un-related – and yet, people should still wash their hands. That’s what happened on Friday – and what I was heckled for.

I explained the how (what you should do with your code) correctly, but miss-matched the why. I was giving the why of Open Close Principal and Dependency Inversion Principal and attributing it to Liskov Substitution Principal – my mistake.

Should I have been heckled for that? Probably not. Not many people do as much public presenting as I do, and most would find it difficult to handle a heckler – it can throw off your whole talk (especially when you’re only on the 2nd point!) Fortunately, I’ve been doing this for a while, and I don’t think that it threw me off much, as one attendee observed on twitter

Why am I blogging about this?

First, for transparency. I was wrong in my explanation of LSP (it was a minor sub-point to my talk, and not the overall goal of my talk – but still). Second, I reached out to the person that heckled me via email the following day, and we’re back on good terms. He’s apologized for being inappropriate and we’re having lunch in the next couple of weeks. I honestly didn’t know who it was that heckled me at first,  I found out later and then realized that we had exchanged (positive) emails in the past, and so I reached out to him. Since he is active in the community, and at least a couple of other people recognized him in my session – I felt that it was important to let you all know that we’re all good – and that there were no hurt feelings.

The community is strong, no one is ever right all of the time (gasp!) and it’s important that we continue to move forward as an industry together.

Incidentally, what caused me to go back and re-look at LSP, was not from being heckled, but from a very nice email that someone else sent me after my talk – I really did appreciate that email, so to the person that sent it, thank you.

If you were at the talk that day – I’d love to get your feedback on the Joind.in site that DallasTechFest is using.

Also, if anyone is interested in looking at my slides (the last 3 slides are all of the image credits) they are – and have been for some time – posted on slideshare; if you’re interested in some of the broader blog posts on this subject, they are posted on my blog including my more complete write up on SOLID (awaiting a Liskov update!)

Thanks – Happy coding!

Photo credit used in heading – on flickr by idrewuk

This Friday I’ll be speaking at the Dallas Tech Fest, and today is the last day to pre-register! Tech Fest’s are unique from other .NET Code Camp style event in that they pull some of the best speakers from a cross section of technologies. This is a great place to come mix it up and see what’s happening on the “other side of the wall”. This year the Dallas Tech Fest will have featured tracks for .NET, JAVA, PHP, Adobe Flex, ColdFusion, IT Pro and other Mixed Sessions.

This year, my friend and organizer Tim Rayburn has pulled together some elite speakers from across the country like Craig Walls (Spring in Action), Ted Neward (as in – The Ted Neward), Mark Piller (famous for his cross platform Adobe/.NET/Java applications), Matt Woodward (IT Specialist for the US Senate) and many many more.

Register today at http://DallasTechFest.EventBrite.com Use promo code LASTYEAR to save $25.00 – go register now! It’s gonna be awesome.

I’m looking forward to this talk.. I’ll be covering the 10 Practices that All Developers Should Start Right Now! (based on this 10 Practices for Developers blog series)

I recently took on a new client in the travel industry, even though they are based in Dallas – I am working with their .NET development team in New York. As a part of that I am making my first trek to the big apple. I’m really looking forward to this trip to get to know the dev team that I’ve been working with remotely up until now. I’m also taking advantage of this trip visit the NYC .NET Meetup group and to speak at the local INETA .NET Developers Group.

If you’re going to be in the New York City area this week, be sure to ping me – I’d love to meet up with you at one of these events!

Be sure to RSVP!

• NYC .NET Meetup Group
• NYC .NET Developer’s Group
• Stephen Fort’s Blog announcing Thursday.

Introducing Proaction Mentors… although it really could be written with an optional plural form:

Proaction Mentor(s)

Obviously this is something that I’m extremely excited about! I’m also super busy with billable client work and speaking engagements (all good problems to have!) I’ll be blogging about Proaction more in the weeks to come, especially as the website launches, the business plan solidifies, and new announcements develop! (Stay up to date by Like’ing Proaction on Facebook and following us on twitter.

In the mean time – I hope to see you at some of these upcoming events!

Improving’s Agile .NET Conf – Improving Enterprises (my good friends and former employer) hosted the Agile .NET Conference at Microsoft again this year. I was honored to be the only non-Improving person invited to speak! – April 30th

Dallas .NET User Group’s Visual Studio 2010 Community Launch! – to celebrate the RTM (release to market) of Visual Studio 2010, the Dallas .NET UG is having an all out bash… 8 speakers in 1 night! Come see my talk:
Silverlight 4 – World Domination! – May 13

Big (D)esign Conference is happening again! This time it’s over twice as BIG as last year! Seriously, my hat goes off to the organizers and the local DFW UPA! That put together an amazing conference last year that I was excited to be a part of (Silverlight 3: Bringing Back the Sexy) and this year, they’ve more that doubled the size and scope. Amazing! Hope you can make my strategic talk on “The 10 Practices that every developer should start right now”.  – May 28th & 29th

Dallas Tech Fest – What could be better than last year’s inaugural Tech Fest in Dallas? Why, the second year of Tech Fest of course! Tech Fests are unique in the way that they specifically work to pull in technologies from various stacks… not just .NET – expect to see .NET, Ruby, Java, Silverlight, Flex, iPhone development as well as a healthy open conference style area. I was a little crazy and submitted 5 different talks to this event, I’m certain I won’t do all of them… but I’m looking forward to seeing what Tim picks!- July 30th

Update: This just in.. there is a “rumor” that I might present at a two day work shop style event in Dallas some time in June. Stay tuned!

Bring your A game, do your best, leave it all on the field. That’s how I roll… until last night. Last night I presented on MVVM in Silverlight at the North Dallas .NET Users Group. It was a great turn out with a lot of interaction and excellent questions. Huge thanks to the organizers for having me, and to every one that turned out for it!

OK, I learned two big lessons last night. First, don’t prep your demo’s with a source control system that you are not 100% comfortable with yet.. second, don’t keep your speaking engagements when you’ve been taking care of sick people all week.

Don’t get sick

This week, my family got hit bad with Rotavirus. I’m not going to sugar coat it, this was a bad week in the Jenkins home. We had to deal with this bug once before when our oldest son was a baby… it was bad then, now times that by five. My wife, son, and 3 daughters have had a rough week to put it mildly. Fortunately, I work for a great company that let me work from home this week so that I could help take care of them. I’m also fortunate that I’ve been fine this whole week… until last night.

Right in the middle of my talk it hit me, whoa.. light headed… oh no, I might need that trash can… ugh. I’ve never gotten sick in the middle of a talk before – not fun.

Fortunately I was able to take a 5 minute break, get some fresh air, and then finish my talk. I came home with a fever and have been laying in bed since. I’m grateful for the awesome vitamins that we take (especially the pro-biotics) because here I am – just over 12 hours later – feeling much better.

The last time that I was scheduled to speak at the NDDNUG I got a chest cold leading up to it, fortunately my friend Aaron Erickson was in town and filled in with a great talk on Dynamic Languages and the DLR. Note to self: If you could be sick (it’s hard because I really don’t get sick that often) find a replacement presenter.

Using GIT

It’s all David’s fault. Well, Dave and TekPub.
My friend Dave (@davidmohara) is constantly pulling out and showing off the cool shiny toys. He’s the one that got me to start using CodeRush (no seriously, he’s a CodeRush ninja), he’s the one that got me to look at ASP.NET MVC completely differently, and then recently he’s become the unofficial GIT guide to several of us at the MVP Summit. So, Dave, combined with a 1 month subscription to TekPub that I won at the last Community for MVC.NET group got me interested in using GIT.

By the way… TekPub is awesome, I’ll talk more about them for another time, for now, go check out the preview to using GIT.

The nice thing about GIT is that you can quickly and easily create local branches and commits without standing up a server anywhere. It sounded like a great way to fork out my demos so that I could work in a single directly and just take snapshots (branches) along the way while I was prepping the talk. I still think I’ll end up using GIT for that, but last night in the middle of my talk I couldn’t remember how to roll back changes to one branch in order to switch to a different branch. You can’t leave a branch that has uncommitted changes, you either have to commit them or roll out of them. For anyone interested – the command that I was looking for was “git reset –hard [name of branch]” – would have come in handy last night.

So my own stumbling over git combined with a mid-talk fever made for an interesting night! Again, a big thanks to the organizers and attendees, and my  apologies for giving you my C game.

Hopefully, Lesson learned.

North Dallas .NET Users Group – March 3rd

First, Wednesday March 3rd, I’ll be at the North Dallas .NET Users Group talking about Model View View-Models (MVVM) for your Silverlight Applications. If you’ve ever seen my Dependency Injection for Silverlight talk, this is pretty much the follow up to that. (above is a snapshot from the last time that I spoke there.)

Technically Speaking DFW – March 27

Have you ever wanted to be a technical presenter, but you weren’t sure how to get started? Or do you want to take your technical presentation skills to the “next level”? This this is the event for you! I love the idea of events like this, and I was honored to be invited to participate. Maybe this will spark more interest in groups like Presenter Mentor?

Teresa Burger, awesome community member and talented developer over at Woot! is organizing this event. It’s $50 to attend, includes lunch, and is a full day of Dave Gunby, Microsoft’s Chris Koenig, MVP extraordinaire Tim Rayburn and also yours truly.

Register for both!

• Register for the North Dallas DNUG – Wednesday March 3rd (Free)
• Register for Technically Speaking DFW – Saturday March 27 ($50)

Yep, this is going to be a fun month! Hope to see you there!

Last week I had the privilege of attending Microsoft’s Global MVP Summit in Bellevue Washington. While I can’t talk about most of what was covered (NDA) I wanted to mention two projects that I learned about while there and mention some of my thoughts from the event.

First, check out these two Silverlight projects on Codeplex.

• The Silverlight Hyper Video Player
  On Thursday, Jessie Liberty presented on this project that he’s been leading. I actually got to see a preview of this project last year with one of the developers, but they weren’t sure back then if they were going to be able to release this project as OSS or not. Glad to see that it was! Go check out the project, it’s a great Silverlight project demonstrating TDD in Silverlight as well as using the new features of MEF for composition that are built in Silverlight 4.

• The Silverlight User Group Website Starter Kit
  A friend of mine, David Silverlight, brought this project to my attention. I love this idea! He and a talented group of developers and designers are working on this project to give user groups a great starting point and some excellent features to leverage. I’ve actually been added to the team and hope that I’ll be able to provide add to the final result!

Final thoughts

There are multiple reasons that Microsoft organizes and hosts the MVP Summit. Part of it is developer satisfaction and to show appreciation for the work that MVP’s do around the world. MVP’s attend to gain insights in to Microsoft’s direction, network with product teams and gain a deeper understanding of the products that they work with day in and day out.

The last reason that I want to mention is to give the MVP’s a chance to provide input back in to the products that Microsoft is building, to be able to tell the product teams what they are doing right, what they are doing wrong, and help prioritize the features that the product teams should be working on.

This was my fourth Summit to attend, and the first time that I really saw this last point taken to heart across the board from multiple teams. I was really excited by the feedback that the product teams were actively soliciting from the MVP’s. I consistently saw and participated in agile techniques like dot voting and buy a feature around broad functionality, specific features and general direction for the product teams. It was very refreshing and opened up a ton of conversations that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Thanks Microsoft!

Microsoft Campus Photo Credit: Denis Gobo

1. Go to Microsoft’s “The New Efficiency” website http://thenewefficiency.com *

* Site requires Microsoft Silverlight

2. Click on the “Watch The US Event” link

3. Check out all of the “For Developers” videos…

4. Sit back, and enjoy.