Microsoft Local Impact Map

yet another cool silverlight app., time well spent. It has nice stories though.

NH Code Camp 09

last weekend I had the opportunity to attend the New Hampshire Code Camp ‘09, organized by the New Hampshire’s .net user group. Within the next few lines I’ll try to give a brief for the sessions I caught and my comments about them.

Keynote, How to survive as a techie in a lean economy by Patrick Hynds

this one has no references so I’ll give a quick brief of what he was trying to say, as the keynote speaker he started with a session about the market’s hot  topic of how to survive in this economy, he was trying to give a quick advise on how to keep your business and your job, starting with how should you conservatively acting with your boss/customers even they were idiots, where you should watch your steps and adjust your actions to meet their goals only even if they were not the perfect thing and you refuse to release something not prefect, then he talked about the value of communication and status reporting, we all know the value of the status reporting but who can always stick to sending out on a regular bases, he told a story about a manager with a number of employees where they should be reporting a status every week, it was literarily optional and there was only one employee who was doing the normal and sending it out on time, the manager didn’t follow exactly what his employees were doing but he just noticed that there was only one person who has the self-discipline to send his status report every week, and when the layoff time came over and he had to pick one team member to keep, he kept that one. Avoid being dogmatic, there are better ways to express your tech, don’t destroy your job by being the naysayer, make your pitch, but if you are overruled, accept it and try to pitch again or find someplace else. Don’t deal with the technologies as a religion you have to accept the others if their technology has dominated the market and you have no where else to go, for instance if you are a java developer and laid off your job you can’t stay at home because you can’t find a similar job, you will have to dig into the other world and get yourself a job to survive. Picking a niche, experts are always needed, so you will have to pick a one and dive into, he gave examples like usability – silverlight and WPF, technical problem solver – you are in if you can always solve the problems, scalability – a growth industry, security – hard to send offshore, most of these things can’t be exported, he was very aggressive explaining this point however he was talking reality when it comes on saving your income and your job. Business timeline importance, your product would be useless if you have missed your business timeline, don’t over engineer, for instance if an army asked you to produce a radar system and you have delivered it a day after the war started, at this moment your great radar became useless. This is a tough time for all industries and you must be a profit center, you must do everything right and distinguish yourself.

MSBuild Session by Steven St Jean

the session was fairly good, the MS build is a general purpose build automation engine that’s shipped with .net 2.0, 3.5, vistas, and windows server 2008, it uses xml-based language with a syntax similar to ant but with more power – he claimed, capable of using parallel processing and some other good stuff, here are some good references:

• MSBuild Overview – a good place to start if you are brand new to MSBuild.
• MSBuild Task Reference – a list of the built-in tasks, or “actions”, that can be performed by an MSBuild script.
• MSBuild Community Tasks – an open source project that collects a number of tasks to perform common actions that are not included. If you are doing anything non-trivial with your build, especially if you are creating deployment scripts, this will be indispensable. Download the nightly build (many new tasks/features since the last release).
• MSBuild Reserved Properties – a list of the built-in properties (variables) available to your script. Also keep in mind that all environment variables are automatically available to your script using the property syntax (so you get things like $(USERNAME), $(COMPUTERNAME), and $(SystemRoot) for free).
• MSBuild Well-known Item Metadata – a list of the metadata properties available on all items (variables with properties).

and as a MSBuild engine expert over the last three years he recommended “MSBuild and team foundation build” book as the no.1 reference.

JQuery Session by Chris Bowen

the session I liked the most, Chris is a very bright guy, knows what he is talking about, he started his session with the JQuery/MS story you all know from Scott Gu’s blog and the others who spread the word, then made some nice demos that show how cool and powerful the JQuery library is, and how its selectors,  animations, plugins, events have converted the JavaScript nightmare into an easy thing to do.

he has recommend the JQuery in Action as the no.1 reference for the JQuery, actually that book had two public recommendations during the event, that puts it up high on my reading list.

Team Foundation Server 2010 by Phil Denoncourt

I’ve been trapped into this one, I just wanted to know what’s new on the team foundation server and it turned out to be almost nothing, I wished I’ve attended anything else, here is a reference link for what’s new on the team foundation server 2010 if you are a fan.

Automating SharePoint with web services by Tony Sukiennik

yet another great session on the event, he featured JQuery and put it up as the greatest break that has been done lately on development! the session was a life cycle for the development of a client side service call for a SharePoint information on a SharePoint page, by the end of that session I’ve admitted that JQuery is a real break. more on the topic.

one of the interesting things I noticed during the event is the user group age range, with an easy look you can put them all between 35 and 75 and more than 70% of them are 50+, on the other hand when you look at the Cairo .net user group you will find almost 99% are below 25, this might raise up some interesting questions about who’s leading the industry, and who wants to know.

stop and listen, a little ad at Daniel Webster College where we had the code camp, enjoy.

Designing the perfect form

I came across this interesting post on form design and development, and thought it’s worth sharing, it shows by example what to consider when designing the prefect form and how it would have direct impact on how much or how little people use them..

Understanding the new American culture

This is not a break away from the technical aspect of the blog this is already a part of what you expect to know and what would influence you and your world in all terms, we’ve got to start understanding how a change in the center of the world would affect everything around us, pushing up the hope in our soles and minds, giving us the reason to wake up every morning with the ability to change this world. Yes, it’s Obama, it’s not actually about Obama it’s about the new era we are getting into, and how this guy has united a whole nation, spreading tons of promises for a better world. We must watch and act then.

American or non-American,  all will agree that a new day has dawned upon the world as of January 20th, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn as the president of the united states, and you don’t have to be a political scientist to understand why electing a black president with the middle name “Hussein” is a significant event for the united states and the world.

Americans love to identify the united states  as a “melting pot” of ethnicities, nationalities, customs and religions – which is completely true -  except no one really talks about who floats on top, and who toils at the bottom. mostly the “melting pot” analogy just makes everyone here feel better, Obama and the people who voted for him have reclaimed the”we” and even added a “yes” and a “can”! whatever your perspectives are there is no denying that Obama has created a “Culture of We”. according to what I heard, there is no other US political campaign has ever rivaled the spirit and tenacity that Obama’s campaign instilled in its supporters. Washington D.C was filled with 1.5 million people who came to watch and celebrate Obama’s inauguration, what does this exceptionally mean!

Some may point to “timing” as an explanation for his victory, other to technology, but perhaps the overwhelming support has something to do with Obama’s promise of change, his message of hope, his message of multiculturalism. one only has to listen to his inaugural speech to grasp that spirit and the appreciation that Obama has for diversity, here is a part: 

“…For us, they packed us their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the west; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth…For we know that out patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers, We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth…”

Obama’s multiculturalism and message of change might make the average American re-examine what exactly an “American” looks like and how to treat people who are different than themselves.  

Chrome’s benefits for a developer

In the last few days I had a closer look on chrome and how it would benefit our development work, I like to use Firefox since it offers so many development tool plug-ins, but I still have to make sure my applications perform properly in IE. From a developer viewpoint, Chrome provides a few tools for working with web pages. The list includes the following:

Gears, a standard component, provides a platform for creating web applications that can run offline, you can install it from here

Web Inspector, allows you to take a closer look at any element on the currently open page. It is available by right-clicking on an element. It allows you to browse page elements and view object properties and style. This is a feature from the WebKit base.

 

JavaScript console, allows you to enter command-line JavaScript code that can access page elements. It opens within the Web Inspector window — located in the bottom portion.

JavaScript debugger, a command line JavaScript debugger. here is an online tutorial.

 

Task Manager, allows you to view the current processes running within Chrome. It shows the system resources by a process. This includes memory, network, and CPU usage. A button is provided to end a process along with link to a report that breaks down memory usage for individual processes.

Of course, this doesn’t beat Firefox’s development tool plug-ins, so I’ll stick to Firefox while keeping an eye on Chrome.

Google entered the browsers battle

Google just released a beta version of its new web browser Chrome for windows, they claim its much faster, safer, and easier. it has been released with many languages support, it works fine with me so far, the pages looks a bit different because of its flatness, the only trouble I had is a failure while downloading a flash plug-in for the browser and after a couple of workarounds it has been installed successfully, check it out..

A Java or a .Net Developer, which one is better? (developer look)

“It’s all luck, when you get kicked out of your college, your first job destination becomes your track” a friend of mine said, yes this is true in the reactive people’s world, however the great people who could proactively shape their future and destinations, who could sense what’s best for them, their abilities and their market best opportunities, would have some other opinions.

This still doesn’t put any of the two tracks in the lower block, on all levels java is paying better everywhere in the world, and it’s expected to be like that for a while, Microsoft wins in the developer communities’ domination, it’s like when a country wins a war and their people get into a deep poverty and their soldiers get killed, the country still wins but all what their people have is the pride. Microsoft won but their developers didn’t.

Are you a java developer or a .net developer? This question applies on more than eighty percent of the world’s current software developers, I think you already asked yourself at least once which one is the best for you, and if it’s really a first time choice or you can convert whenever you want or when the market wants, and how would this affect your career.

It’s becoming a culture that you can’t convert – or work on both – and the developers started to believe it because they have separate departments in their companies, without giving it a deep thought why and what makes it a first time choice, and when you work on this you can’t do that.

it’s all about knowledge, you can get your hands on .net for years and then convert to work on a java enterprise or vice versa as long as it puts you on the same development level and you have the potential and attitude to get yourself on this level, and on the other hand you do have your own wide and thoughtful reasons, you would see some resistance claming that this is considered as horizontal knowledge scalability or you can’t become a great developer that way, let’s step back and thoughtfully look into it, you work only on couple projects, don’t you? And you already an expert with everything you practiced on these java or .net projects, so there is no other way to do more, unless you do one of two. first, take your career to the next level (most probably would be an architect if you are desiring a technical step, or managing development projects or operations if you are desiring a business step). second, you develop your skills by self studying the corners of the technology you use, and this doesn’t count on your career path unless you apply it on an enterprise project. don’t you think so? so you are who you decide, being a great developer or not, your attitude and self-awareness are what makes your step on a solid stair.

I don’t think there is a big difference in both technologies, both do the same job with almost the same cost in the enterprise, check out this article, it has some good information about Java vs. .Net from the technology perspective.

let’s conclude this in the following, you make your choice, you can be powerful on anything, as long as you believe you are powerful inside.

 

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how could you find a good developer

Want to impress us? Answer one of the challenges and show us your stuff!

okay I am going to apply to this, if only anyone can tell me what’s the Y2hhbGxlbmdlQGRvdHNwb3RzLmNvbQo=  email is?!

Do your part and set HIGH Expectations

Yet another impressive speech on father’s day by Obama, watch it all it would really inspire you!

New AJAX Control Toolkit tutorials on asp.net

asp.net has published some new AJAX control toolkit tutorials, check them out, the AJAX control toolkit would certainly speed up your AJAX development.

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