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Part 2 of 2 on SubSonic

Kent Sharkey — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:05:39 GMT

I see that my second (and for now at least final) article on SubSonic is up on DotNetSlackers. Hopefully someone will find it useful and informative. This one is intended to be more practical than the overview I did last time. It builds out some of the functions of a blog engine using SubSonic queries and controls.

Thanks again to Sonu, Karl and the rest of the DNS team.

Victoria Code Camp retrospective

Kent Sharkey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:20:41 GMT

[modified] Almost forgot. Here are the slides if you want to see them.

We're back from Victoria, where I did another version of my "A quick look at SubSonic" talk (it was a shorter version of the talk I gave in Winnipeg). What did I learn?

People don't stay all day at a Code Camp. During the kickoff, there looked to be around 100 people in attendance. There were all of 8 or so people in my talk (and a big 'Thank you!' to all of you), and the other two speakers (I would have gladly been in either of their talks) during the last session claimed 25 each.
I really need to force myself to get out and speak (and write) more
While I feel generally apprehensive around the whole "LINQ thing", the syntactic sugar they added to VB to help on the XML work is excellent. You can now declare and use an XML element (or document) on the fly:

        Dim custs = <customers>
                        <customer id="ALFKI">
                            <company>Alfreds Futterkiste</company>
                            <address>
                                <street>Obere Str. 57</street>
                                <city>Berlin</city>
                                <zip>12209</zip>
                                <country>Germany</country>
                            </address>
                            <contact>
                                <name>Maria Anders</name>
                                <title>Sales Representative</title>
                                <phone>030-0074321</phone>
                                <fax>030-0076545</fax>
                            </contact>
                        </customer>
			'...more here, but removed
                    </customers>

        Dim contacts = From cust In custs...<contact> _
                       Select cust.<name>, cust.<phone>

        For Each contact In contacts
            Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0}: {1}", _
                                            contact.name.Value, _
                                            contact.phone.Value))
        Next

Victoria Code Camp coming

Kent Sharkey — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:05:08 GMT

Nolan (et al) has created a blog for information on the upcoming Victoria CodeCamp. Head on over there to read the writing on the wall, and hopefully I'll see you there (I'm taking the train down to the big city for the event)

SubSonic article on DotNetSlackers

Kent Sharkey — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:42:58 GMT

Thanks to Sonu (and Karl, and the rest of the DNS team), my (first) article on SubSonic is now up on DotNetSlackers. This one is intended to be an introduction, and I'll hope to continue professing my platonic admiration for said framework in the new year.

That's two

Kent Sharkey — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:46:32 GMT

I was busy through the week, so I couldn't commemorate my "second anniversary". Last Thursday (the 8th) marked the second year since, "My second biggest mistake" - aka my leaving Microsoft. So, what have we/I learned in those 24 months?

Work/Life balance. I feel that for the most part (i.e. excluding crunch time on projects), I have it. My commute is about 15s. The coffee in the office is fine (although not as frequent as I'd like). I am fairly strict about stopping work at the end of the day (excluding email and the newsletter of course). This one is a happy-happy.
Health. Sort of related to the above, but I wanted to pull it out for special consideration. Better. M and I go for a walk before I get started on work, as well as frequently at other times, and I exercise 5 days a week.
Many developers shouldn't be. This mostly from a few of the recipients of the newsletter[1]. I get a lot of unsubscribe requests, coding help and whatnot. The saddest part is that most of the time the solution is either RTFM or "type just what you asked me into Google." I imagine it's the same on most if not all discussion forums. However, I still think developers should be beyond these trivial user issues. Perhaps we aren't the "top guns" I keep thinking and hoping we are.

Envy. The recent spate of Microsoft hirings has really brought out the envy in me. I'm not sure why as the three gentlemen in particular truly deserve to work there, and I am not anywhere near as qualified, skilled (or good looking) as they. I guess it's because they are getting an opportunity to create that I felt I never had at that place. See: envy.

More lessons to come, I'd imagine...

[1] The CodeProject Insider. Even though I struggle some days to create it, I really do like it. If you need a dose of IT/Dev news that doesn't take itself too seriously, I think it's one of the best emails you can get. There. My marketing exercise for the year. (Yes, perhaps it should just be an RSS feed, but that's not my decision)

Wha? Sexy pages on MSDN?

Kent Sharkey — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 18:12:15 GMT

I see that there are a few new interesting pages on MSDN this morning. I can tell they're sexy, because they have a black background. And there are reflections! (Reflections are the new black). While their overall "Web 2.0"-osity is hampered by the MSDN chrome, it is interesting to see MSDN at least taking a chance at creating interesting pages.

Wonder who built those pages?

Which leads me to think a recurring thought while I was at said fish shoppe: Do visually interesting pages work for information? One of the requests we got a lot was for "sexier" pages on MSDN, particularly where new products like Express were concerned. People would say, "Make them look as good as Apple's pages." (usually pointing at the Trailers page, or some other showcase site. Heavily graphical sites are certainly something that people can look at and think, "Wow, that's interesting", but when it comes to providing information, they tend to collapse into unpleasant, text-heavy, link dump pages fairly rapidly. I really don't think that there is anyway around it -- organizing large chunks of technical content is not a pretty job. You can create a few high-level buckets and load them up with content, you can create intricate nested hierarchies that are mostly meaningless to most people other than the hierarchy creator, you can try to organize the content for a specific audience (but mostly forget that it's a perpetual exercise), or you can forget organization and give them cake. All answers are satisfying in one sense and for some people, unsatisfying for others.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it. (Samuel Johnson)

It's easy to point out the flaws in one organization or another, another to make the mistake of trying to suggest another. Personally, I tend to use "The Google" to find almost everything, including on MSDN. I continue to think that a "Personal Guide" is still the best way to find content - I think that this is why About.com, W3Schools and TechEdBloggers continue to be useful (and I guess why Wikipedia is as well). Automating any system leads to false positives and negatives (who hasn't waded through pages of entries on WinCE to get to the 'real' APIs?) However, I think we need some sort of common way of tagging and identifying content. Is something like DotNetKicks or DotNetSlackers the answer? I'm not entirely convinced (sorry Sonu).

Well, I guess another "no conclusion" post. I guess I need to think on organization some more. There must be something I'm not finding.

What has been occupying my time

Kent Sharkey — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:03:50 GMT

It's been about a nice round 17 months (give or take) since I left Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft shipped some software, people have argued, and the world continues its revolution, rotation and other movements.

I know all of you were wondering, "What's Kent up to?", so here is some of what I've been up to since I left.

I do a daily newsletter for Code Project, the Insider. It's a daily email of news on the industry, developer stuff and more. Oh, and sorry, no RSS feed.

I helped Bill Evjen (aka Writing Monster II) create a couple more books.
I did four chapters in Wrox's new Professional VB 2005 with .NET 3.0. (Proving once again that Microsoft doesn't have a lock on overly long product names.) No prizes if you guess which chapters I did, but I hope you like them. It also continued my almost perfect series. I realized as we were working on it that I have written on every version of VB since 5 with the sole exception of 2003. That I would have included, but I chickened out, and D had to finish it.

I did far too many (in my opinion) chapters in Wrox's Professional XML. It was a good experience, I think; it just took too long for everyone involved. Bill and I had originally planned for it to be out last year, but schedules, our new jobs and assorted other events contributed to it not. Again, no prizes if you can pick out my chapters. One of the things I liked about the book is that Bill wanted it framework-agnostic. That means it isn't a .NET book per se, but there are .NET samples, Java samples, Ruby samples and many others. It may not end up being a must-have book for everyone, but I think there is a lot of useful information in it.

I've been helping out with the whole TechEd Bloggers family of sites. Mostly poking at the back end of it, but I did also help out with the new look. More on that later, along with assorted complaints about CSS. While I am discussing TechEdBloggers, though. Don't forget to add your blog to their system. You don't have to be going to TechEd to participate. Oh, and if you like (or hate) the new look, feel free to let me know.

Finally (at least that I'll admit to right now), I've worked on a couple of Web sites for Microsoft. The Coding4Fun Web site was an experiment -- an attempt to host information both on MSDN and MSDN Blogs. Finally, Dan came to his senses, and he's moving it over to being a blog-only site. Check out the new look.

The Beginner Developer Learning Center is more of a standard site as far as MSDN is concerned, but is still an important site for me. The one group we miss in all of our discussions of best practices, language wars and datagrids is the complete beginner. This site really strives to help them out, and I know it will continue to get even better.

What's next? Dunno. Maybe another Alphabet project - at least it kept me posting. Maybe some of the items that don't make the newsletter, or comments about some of the items that do. Maybe something about the article series I'm doing for MSDN, assuming I do the next one and if any of them ever get published.