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!
Later this month I’ll be speaking at Open Camp 2010 in Dallas. I’m really looking forward to attending, participating and speaking at this event! It might not seam like the normal event that would have a Microsoft/.NET track, but I think that is part of what makes it so exciting to me. Open Source and Free are not necessarily the first words that come to mind when people think about the Microsoft Platform, but the fact is that Microsoft and the Microsoft communities have fostered some of the most vibrant OSS communities and projects. I’m looking forward to highlighting some of the awesome resources and tools that are available.
Be sure to register soon! – try the discount code “ugdotnetOC10″
Also…
See you there!
On Friday I spoke at the 2010 Dallas Tech Fest. This is a great event and I look forward to it every year. This year, I spoke on the 10 Practices that every developer needs to start right now (slides). I also, found out later, that I had the most attended talk of the day – awesome! One of the things that I cover in that talk are the principals of SOLID – and that’s what I was heckled about.
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 frequently asked about new computers from our friends and family, and I’ve blogged about buying a new computer in the past, but this post is about the common things that you should download and install once you have that new computer, right after you do all of the Windows Updates and un-install all of the “trial” software that came with your computer. As with anything, you can take this advice or leave it, I’m really curious to know what sort of things you think I need to add to this this. Feel free to add anything that I’ve missed in the comments!
Microsoft Security Essentials. I won’t go through the discussion about whether or not Mac get viruses, they do; I will however say that you should have anti-virus software installed on your computer. This one is free, built by Microsoft, and works really well. This is the first thing I install on a new computer. (note: You’ll probably need to uninstall whatever “free 90 day trial” antivirus that your new computer came with probably Norton or McAfee)
This week I had the privilege of leading a custom workshop for a team of developers in Fort Worth, TX. One of the topics that we covered was Writing Testable Code; specifically, we looked at the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) patterns, dependency injection and using RhinoMocks to pull it all together. The one catch was… this group of developers used Visual Basic.
I’ve never shied away from VB. In fact, VB6 with classic ASP is where I cut my programming teeth, and VB.NET was my first move to a true OO language. That being said, I work day in and day out with C#… I’m much more fluent there, and I realized that there were a ton of new features in VB that I wanted to cover that I wasn’t up to par with, fortunately I was able to call on my network of super smart friends and recruit/hire a fellow MVP’er to help me out for the day (thanks Cory for doing that 2 days after your wedding!)
One of the things that tripped me up was using Lambdas in VB. Lambdas are especially important if you are going to use a Mocking framework like RhinoMocks (which I do). Doing Lambdas in VB – especially when I was trying to raise an event from a mock – sort of tripped me up…
First – if you are working with Rhino Mocks, you should go have a look at the excellent Wiki. http://ayende.com/Wiki/Rhino+Mocks+3.5.ashx I find that a lot of people (read: I had) skip the “documentation” since RhinoMocks is so fluent and straight forward, but it’s definitely worth the read!
Second, if you’ve never raised an event in mock from your test in C# here’s the code:
viewMock.Raise(x => x.CalcShippingRequest += null, this, EventArgs.Empty);
and in VB:
This Thursday I’ll be speaking at the New York City .NET Developers Group.
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!
Yesterday Microsoft released a new plug-in for WordPress that uses Bing Search to improve your 404 pages. It works by grabbing keywords from the missing URL string and then uses the Bing API to search your site for those keywords.
Update: The creator of this plug-in just added a quick start video… go check it out!
So, your 404 page can go from this… 
(boring WordPress Default 404)
To this…
I may not own an iPad… but thanks for Giovanni’s “help“, my wife now wants one, and I have to admit, after playing Plants vs Zombies on both an iPad and a PC.. the iPad touch is a much better PvZ experience. This video show some of the other things that you *could* to with an iPad… plus velcro. Enjoy!
iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.
It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog so I thought that I should catch everyone up to speed. I gave Six Flags my two week notice 3 weeks ago.. and started a new company last week. Someone asked me how long it took me to put together my new company, 20 years of hard work. 
Caleb Jenkins, is a recognized Silverlight expert, Software Mentor and Coach; he is the Founder and Principal Mentor for Proaction Mentors, he is also a National Speaker for INETA, a Technical Editor for Wrox Press and is a Microsoft MVP. You can follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his blog updates.
Caleb lives in the Dallas, TX area where he continues to date his beautiful wife and busy himself playing Candy Land and xBox 360 with their four incredible children. Eventually he’ll post some of the gazillion interviews that he's recorded on CommunityCast.tv or blog more... or stop speaking of himself in the third person. more...
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