TEERA 2.0: Technology blog

Cleaning up my hard drives and found this

The site is dated back to 2001, the first site I’ve ever worked on (and get paid for it) back when I was in high school grade 10. I guess I’ve come a long way since then :).

DevTeach 2009 is coming to Vancouver early next month. This is an event that you should not miss if you are around the area. I’ve been to a number of tech conferences and I must say DevTeach is my favorite. (and I don’t have any sponsor for the endorsement!) =].

The thing I like the most about this conference is the candid/no-marketing information and the quality of content. I’ve met a few of this year speaker earlier in March when I was down in ALT.NET Seattle and I must say that they know their stuffs. Their opinions can be quite controversial at times (to what you would hear from MS) but they’re thought provoking and sound. There’s also a deal going on where you bring 2 people in the price of one. So if you are going to attend a tech event this year, DevTeach is not the one to be missed.

Another note is that ALT.NET Canada is also coming to Vancouver and it’s right after DevTeach! If you are looking for good solid discussions, open space style, it’s definitely worth check it out. I must admit that I didn’t get to participate as much as I would like when I was at ALT.NET Seattle because I was half sick at the time. It’s a great experience and a lot of fun. See you there.

Next month I’ll be presenting at BC .NET user group on ASP.NET MVC framework. The talk will be focusing on how and why you should consider ASP.NET MVC for you next project.

Instead of the usual “presentation” I decide to kick it up a notch and make it more of a real-world case study walkthrough the process of moving a traditional ASP.NET project to MVC framework. And one thing I can promise you is that this talk will have no fluff, no marketing talk, only candid opinion from my side :).

Here’s the full description of my talk on the user group website.

“ASP.NET MVC is out but should I use it on my next project? What’s the development experience like? In this presentation, I’ll take you through the real world experience my team had converting traditional ASP.NET application to MVC. We’ll examine the good and the pain points we found and show you how to unleash the full capability of the MVC framework. I’ll also introduce you S#arp Architect framework and show how it can help you in your next MVC project.“

And here’s a rough agenda of topics and a few things I’m planning to include:

• ASP.NET MVC, what’s in it for me?
• I have an application developed in ASP.NET web form, is there any way I can migrate it to MVC framework?
• How to unleash and take full benefit of the MVC framework
• And of course, I’ll show a lot of code
• I’m planning to have a lot of time for Q&A and discussions at the end as well.

Date & Time: May 5th, 6.30pm

Location: Building SW3 room 1750, BCIT Burnaby campus, 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby BC

For more detail, check out the event detail page on the user group website.

So if you are around the area, I hope to see you there :).

Though it’s a bit late but let me congratulate ASP.NET MVC team on 1.0 release. The official announcement was made by Scott Guthrie at MIX 09 in Vegas. You can read the full blog post about this release on Phil’s blog. This is a great achievement for both Microsoft and the community. As we all know, MVC is one of the very first products from Microsoft with the source freely released and taking full feedback from the community.Â

If you have not done so, go get ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM here and have fun :).

Angad forwarded this to me a a few other. This pdf is an essential for anyone who’s starting out or already involved with FOSS.

Click here to download the PDF

note: Kudos for Shakthi Kannan, the creator.

ALT.NET Seattle 2009 is at the end of this week. This is going to be my first ALT.NET meeting so I’m pretty excited. I’m looking for a good discussions, specially in the following areas:

• ASP.NET MVC and MVC-based framework (e.g. Fubu MVC)
• Distributed Agile team and agile collaboration for overseas teams
• TDD and BDD
• Advanced IoC and MEF

I’ll be heading there on Friday, hopefully it’s not too late to catch the afternoon workshop. See you there

This same question was asked on ASP.NET MVC forum a few days back. The origin of concern came from a comment from Scott Hanselman’s blog. I think this concern is perfectly legitimate given that Microsoft had done it before. Then Gerry Lowry took the same question to asp.net forum. A few people chimed in their opinions and the conversation went so far that Phil Haacked (the MVC senior program manager) and ScottGu got involved in the discussion.

This is what Phil had to say:

“I have a very high confidence ASP.NET MVC will not get killed off any time soon. We have internal web properties planning to build sites using ASP.NET MVC. Several major external partners are committed to it as well. Not sure where that fear is originating from.”

And this is what ScottGu said:

“I’m not entirely sure where the concern came from, but just to clarify - there is absolutely no chance of Microsoft killing ASP.NET, nor the ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC feature areas within it.  The final release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 will ship very, very shortly and has had fantastic feedback and buzz with customers and within the community.  The first beta of ASP.NET 4.0 will also ship in a few months, and includes significant improvements and investments in ASP.NET Web Forms and other feature areas of ASP.NET.

Hope this helps provide a “definitive” answer to the concerns,”

IMHO…

Well, here’s my take on this. I’m not being a pro-MS here but I think words from a senior program manager and a VP do carry some weight. Aside, I like the way MS is doing MVC (actively listening to feedback from community, transparent development process, and releasing the source for public viewing). And as far as it is in beta, it’s one of the products that doesn’t suck.

So what would happen if MS really kills MVC? I think (and I hope) the community will pick it up, perhaps as an open source project. Already the project has inspired other open source projects (MvcContrib, FubuMvc, …).

A few items on my list new year resolution. Starting with “Definitely stop getting in shape in bed” (brought to you by Resolution Randomizer).

Seriously..my new year resolution is to be a better leader and an agile software developer (that includes coming closer to mastering Scrum, IoC, and TDD).

Reading is my most favorite hobby and there’re a few good books in my collections worth sharing.

I recently finished “C# In Depth” by Jon Skeet and it’s one of the best tech book I’ve ever read. Before introducing new C# features, Jon started out by addressing problems and evolution of features from C# 1.0 then 2.0. Then the book goes on to introducing the way these problems are addressed in C# 2.0 and further enhancement in the latest 3.0. Three key themes I found in this book are

• “Why“: what problems developers face and shortcoming of C# version 1.0
• “How“: the way these problems are addressed in later versions  and how new features resolve problem and enhance the language
• “What can I do with this“: the examples provided are practical and easy to follow. It also give a lot of insight on how you can apply the content to your development (after I finished the chapter on generic, I put it to work right away and it greatly improved the code I was working on ).

The only let-down is that I wish Jon has delved deeper into implementing custom LINQ provider. I find it fascinating and deserve more than only a section.

C# In Depth is not a reference book but rather an end-to-end read. The content is very valuable, it can help you understand the language under the hood and certainly help you become a better developer.

Yes, we do Scrum

…but we don’t have to stand up. We sit comfortably in our Aeron chairs 

.…but we don’t set specific time for the daily meeting. We usually do it when everyone arrive at the office and finish their emails

.…but we also take our time to brainstorm and discuss problems

.…but we don’t have to get product owners (clients) involved. They’re too busy

.…but we don’t have a ScrumMaster.

 “Scrum but…” is NOT Scrum. period.