Wow, I can't believe I've added another 16D days to the stack...although at times it feels like 1DF1.  For you geeks out there, here's another representation of the day count:

• Octal - 23177
• Octal (byte) - 177
• Binary - 10011001111111
• Binary (byte) - 1111111

Well, now thinking about it...I'm actually only 267E days old since the day is not over yet.

Anyway, here's to good times (and hopefully more to come)!

Well, I was tagged by Jeff earlier to talk about how I got started in software.  So, here's my stab at answering these questions...

How old were you when you started programming?

I was either 11/12 years old.  I got into it a little late since, well, I never had access to a computer when I was living in Mexico.  I knew what they were and I was intrigued by them, but to ask my parents to get me one was completely a ludicrous idea since they were 10x more expensive in Mexico.

What was your first language?

Apple BASIC and QBASIC

What was the first real program you wrote?

This answer all depends on how you define "real" program.  I wrote a pretty wicked "lemonade stand" game in Apple BASIC that would render the stand, a glass filling up with lemonade and the face of a happy customer.  I spent close to a month working on the "graphics" since I had draw them on a piece of paper with a grid to lay out the blocks that made up the images.  Oh the joyfulness of 10 PRINT "DO YOU WANT TO BUY SOME LEMONADE?"

The first "paid gig" was working on VB4 code on Win95 for a company that wrote software for utility companies.  The money I got paid there beat what I made on my paper route BY FAR.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes, totally.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Make sure you do things with passion.  Even in your darkest day during the job, passion the thing that keeps you motivated and going forward.  Everything else (architecture, designs, practices, etc) is superficial.

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?

That's a though one 'cause there are so many different things that affect the "level of fun".  I would say that my most enjoyable times are either when a client or colleague has that "Eureka!" expression on their face when you work with them on a problem. That's always a sign that you've done your job correctly; specially when building business software.

Who am I calling out?

Nick Parker

Derik Whittaker

D'Arcy Lussier

Chris Sutton

Great job to the IronRuby team on getting this done!

This just freakin' rocks!

A couple of weeks back, I recorded a podcast with, our community MS Developer Evangelist, Jeff Brand for his Spaghetti Code series.  I was informed by Jeff, today that he finally posted it!  I had a heck of a time recording this podcast with Jeff, the hour just flew by!  If yo have the time, download the podcast and check it out!

Links:

• Direct Download - click here
• Subscribe - click here
• iTunes - click here

So, here's a little shameless self plug for a book that Bryan Sampica and I are writing...also, I'm using this blog post as a warm up for my writing this evening!

Yes, like I just mentioned, I'm co-authoring a book for Wrox with Bryan entitled, ASP.NET 3.5 Programmer's Reference.  The purpose of the book is to get you the novice/beginner introduced to the features of ASP.NET 3.5, and hopefully teach you a few tricks things along the way.  The book is due out in November, so that means that my summer (evenings) is pretty much booked up.  I must confess that Bryan is writing more than half (3-4 chapters more) of this 36 chapter venture.

So at this point, you might be wondering, why are you writing a book?  Well, I figured it might be fun and the mean time, I can help Bryan out with the title.  That's pretty much it!  I've always wanted to experience the writing of a book, so when Bryan presented this opportunity to me, I felt I was up to the challenge.

To help me manage the writing process, I've setup a project at unfuddle so I can keep track of milestones, tasks and, of course, source code.

I will keep blogging about the progress of the book and let you guys know what sort of things I run into!  Stay tuned!

During lunch on Tuesday of this past week, ScottHa raised an interesting discussion point by saying that he rarely sees MVPs that are enterprisie ... by that, MVPs that actually work for (day to day) for an enterprise).  Granted, he used to be one himself back when he worked for Corillian.  But as we looked around the group you could see that we were all trying to recollect if we knew of any other MVPs that are enterprisie.  Sadly, we didn't.

Now, the point of that discussion was not say that people in the enterprise cannot be MVPs, it is more to find out the reasons why there isn't a community of enterprisie developers.  We started to talk about some reasons as why people wouldn't/couldn't be members of a community.  Here's an example of these reasons:

• Not having too much free time -- people do have lives outside work
• Shutting off when the bell rings -- again, people do have lives outside work and IT
• Not caring -- people go to work to just collect a paycheck
• No valid channels to provide support/feedback -- do the forces behind the enterprise care about talking with other enterprises?

We explored some of these (and others) in somewhat detail to see if we could get a sense of the problem.  Later that evening during our product dinner, I posed the same question to my members of our table to see if we could get a different perspective. 

So now, I ask you, my three readers, are there channels or ways to reach to people in the enterprise?  If so, is there a problem with providing greater reach?  And if not, how can we create such channels?

If you work in the enterprise, I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Well, I had a great time meeting old friends and making new ones at this year's summit.  There were so many things going on and so many people to see and talk to, that it's next to impossible to consume everything at once!  So, to keep things simple, here are of the highlights per day:

Sunday

Although, I was not there until late (way late), it was a lot fun hanging around the Westin's lobby and talk about how a chicken takes a dookie.  Yeah, that's right.  Keith Elder had the great intentions of recording a podcast that quickly degraded into different implementations of ICanLayEgg and ICanPoo.  Yeah, needless to say you had to be there.

Monday

By the far the impromptu IronRuby open space was the best!  Had a pretty small group (10+/-) of people talking about IronRuby.  You knew you were in for a treat when John asked, "Tell us where we suck."  From there the conversation turned into the number of specs needed to get IronRuby fully running and talking about getting RoR up and running by RailsConf.  Great stuff!  Also, I had the please of finally meeting Jimmy Schementi and talk about dynamic Silverlight!  Jimmy had some great insights on his side project called Silverlight on Rails. The concept made my mind explode!!

Tuesday

I had a great time at the product dinner!  I sat next to my new MVP Lead, Suzanna Moran, Jason Tillman, Bryan Sampica and Eilon Lipton.  We talked about how we define community, and how we can build community and of course, ASP.NET MVC!  The fun really begun when Phil Haack and I created the "Butch" an open source drink for the product dinner.  The drink for those of you wondering, is 1 part vodka, 1 part ice and 1 part citrus juices (lemon, limes, etc.) and 1 part grenadine.  The reason why its called the "Butch" is because it's both pink and manly at the same time since it's made with Beefeater Vodka.  Yeah...again, you had to be there!

From there, I had the pleasure of meeting ScottGu! I must say that it was pretty awesome moment  (yes, I sound like a little school girl). I thanked him for the work him and his team are doing to pushing out the best content and tools for .net developers.  I think the moment where I passed out during the our conversation was when he told me that he reads my blog and really likes the content.  The next thing I knew, I was at the Westin lobby standing next to Caleb Jenkins.  Totally surreal.

At this time, it's close to 11 PM and the night is just staring.  From the Westin lobby, I wonder off to bar/restaurant place called The Palace where I had a few beers with Rob Connery, Steve Harman, Jon Galloway, Dave Donaldson and Rick Strahl.  I sat next to Jon and had a great time talking to him about his adventures with Silverlight and developing Video.Show.

Wednesday

By far both of the dynamic language sessions, "Why I Py?"  with Harry Pierson and "IronRuby" with John were pretty awesome.  After listening to Harry's talk, I should realized that I should give python more of a chance.  The only thing that I do not like about python is the requirement to use space as a scope boundary...that's it.  I know, I should stop whining and give it a chance.  Also, talking with Scott Bellware and Phil Haack about thunking from IronRuby to CLR types was pretty cool.

The attendee party was pretty great too!  It was funny to see my wife get up and sing Brown Eyed Girl with Nick's wife.  Also, listening to D'Arcy Lussier sing I Touch Myself and Keith Friends in Low Places was pretty awesome too.

Heading Home

Unfortunately, I left on Thursday morning so I was unable to make the rest of the festivities along with the ALT.NET Conference.  In all, I had a great time with everyone and look forward to the rest of the year and next year's summit!

I've been looking into getting a laptop skin for my Macbook Pro for some time now.  I've been searching on Google trying to find something I like and have tossed the idea of creating my own with the lozanotek logo (I still might do this one!).  The one to me that seemed the coolest (and the one that people might know more) is an art piece called The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai.  Here's what the art work looks like:

While returning a movie over at InMotion at Seatac, I bumped into the Gelaskins version of the skin and decided to get it.  Here's what it looks like (from their website):

Pretty cool, huh?

twitter is a funny thing.  Not only is it a web application but also a way interacting with people both on/off-line.  The thing that I find most interesting about it is how people tend to user it as a verb (have you twittered?) and a noun (my tweeps)...like another thing that's just part of their things to do.  Another interesting thing is how people here in Des Moines have managed to organize a monthly physical meeting where other fellow DSM tweeps can meet.  Definitely something I really need to check out next month.

Not sure how many of you have seen the Web 2.0 ... The Machine Is Us/ing Us video in which it shows how we are the Internet and that the Internet is us (kinda of a scary/overwhelming thought).  If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you check it out. It's only 4:31 minutes long.

Now, I'm not sure if twitter falls into that same realm or categorization as blogs, podcasts, etc. because of the way one interacts with twitter.  At it's core, twitter is nothing more than a simple publish/subscribe architecture.  If you care about to know it, just follow the loosely structure updates.  Just like sitting back and watching people go by in an airport...random things happen, it's totally up to you to pay attention to them.  There's nothing really formal about it...just you and the Internet.

Could it be that it's lack of structure that makes it so appealing to people?  If you think about it, although RSS has Simple in its name, it's not...when compared to the 160 char limit of twitter.

I guess, that I can't put my hands around it...twitter, what's your je ne sais quoi?

I haven't done this in a while, so I apologize.  Here's my current reading list for technical/non-technical books:

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Thus far is a pretty good book.  When I picked it up, it sounded like a great book since it tries to answer the "how" of the unexpected.  For some reason, I'm always a sucker for these type of books.

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

I love biographies because they provide a different insight on a person's life.  I've only managed to get through chapter 1, which is a little sad since I was really looking forward to getting through this book.  At 704 pages, it's going to be a great read...come on, it's Einstein!

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Now, technically, I'm not reading this this book since it is an audio book.  I really like the way the authors explain their SUCCESS process for making your ideas a bit more "sticky".  I must say that I listened to this book on the way up to the Twin Cities Code Camp and the time just flew by!  Really, I mean that.  I definitely can't wait to get a lot further on this audio book.

I Am America (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert

I listened to this audio book on the way to/from (and in) Hawaii.  All I can say is that I laughed hysterically!  If you like watching the Colbert Report, you need to get this book!

For those of you that attended my Silverlight presentation yesterday at the Twin Cities Code Camp, I just want to say, "Thanks for coming! I hope you enjoyed it!"

As promised, you can download the presentation slides and source code from Google code using TortoiseSVN.

Again, thanks for coming to my presentation and thanks to Jason Bock for allowing me to come up and be part of a great event!

That's right!  We're having another ASP.NET Expert Live Chat on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 6 PM PST.  Here's more info on the event:

Get your tough development questions answered by Microsoft MVPs, Regional Directors, and other industry experts. Community experts will be on hand to answer your .NET- and Visual Studio-related questions. No off topic questions please.

Please note that questions regarding upcoming products and future product specs might not be answered.

Would you like to participate as an expert? Contact Ryan Olshan at Ryan[dot]Olshan[at]strongtypes[dot]com.

MSDN Online Chats - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx
Chat Room - http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/chatrooms/msdn.aspx
ICS - http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/vcs/08_0501_msdn_DEV.ics

If you have some questions you want answered, come check it out!  It's going to be a great time!

That's right, we're having another IADNUG meeting this evening with Chris Sutton from the CR Ineta user group talking about ASP.NE MVC!  If you're free this evening, come check us out!

Intro to the ASP.NET MVC Framework
Chris Sutton, CRIneta.org
The ASP.Net MVC Framework is a new project that the ASP.Net team is working on to give developers an alternate and potentially better way to do web development in the ASP.Net environment. Model View Controller(MVC) is a well known presentation pattern that has been used in many environments with a variety of different languages. It enables the developer to achieve better separation between data, program flow and the actual presentation(html). By getting the optimal separation between data, flow and presentation your projects can be more maintainable as well as more testable.

In this talk we will dig into Models, Views and Controllers to learn how we can use this pattern to make our development lives easier. Chris will show you where to download the latest bits, how to install them and then how to use get starte developing with this project. 
Presenter Bio:

Chris Sutton is a consultant and technical trainer in Eastern Iowa and has been working with ASP.Net since the November beta in 2002. He helped start SouthColorado.net, the Ineta group in Colorado Springs, CO, and has been involved running CRineta.org, the Ineta group in Cedar Rapids, IA, over the last three years. Chris has the MCPD:Enterprise certification and is working toward his MCITP: Business Intelligence certification.

Getting to spend time with his wife and kids makes his tech work worthwhile. He also enjoys hiking and biking in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter.

Long blog title, I know.  Yesterday, I ran into a issue/bug that I've never encountered during my years of being an ASP.NET developer.  The error message is below:

The interesting thing about this error, is that it's occurred so often that there's a KB article (KB896181) for it that tells you how to fix it.  Fortunately for me, I didn't have to apply the fix in the KB.  I just had to change some of my security settings to give the account hosting the website the right permissions.

Here's how the errors occurs:

So you have an ASP.NET page that calls a web service.  This can be done within its code-behind or within a control that the page is hosting.  The big thing here is that you have a web page calling a web service.

Although you've created a proxy for the web service you plan to call, its base class SoapHttpClientProtocol still needs to create a temporary serialization assembly and cache its contents within the constructor. So, when you new-up that proxy, you run into this error.

Why you might not run into this issue:

By default, every ASP.NET web application runs as the ASPNET account, along with the IWAM_ComputerName account that runs any of the out-of-process applications for IIS.  If you haven't changed any of these default settings, more than likely you haven't encountered this bug.  However, if you're running your ASP.NET application as a different Windows user to tighten down security, you have a greater chance of getting the error. 

That's the reason why I encountered it!  We're hosting our application in IIS 6.0 and I've created a new AppPool to run the application as a user with minimal rights.  Doing so, we can use Windows integrated security for connecting to remote resources like file shares, SQL Servers, etc.

For those running into the similar issue, I hope this post helps you!

This is just too funny:

We all know we've been there!

For the past two weeks our team here at work have been heads down working on getting a project out the door.  I will omit the answers to the why did the project get there? and how did you let it get there? questions since, although they're important, they would deter from the core reason for this post.

All I have to say that last week was just awesome because of the team synergy (yes, buzzword) that was built around this project.  Essentially, last week was treated as week-long Sprint.  We met on Monday morning for an hour and a half to layout the tasks (list and prioritize) for the week.  Within that meeting, we assigned the work for the day that was needed to be completed before our next daily stand up at 9 AM the following morning.  If for some reason, you couldn't get it done in that time, it got put on the list for the next day and so on.  To make matters more fun, the team was split geographically.  Have of them where here in Des Moines, while the other half was in Boise, ID.

The thing that made the week even better was the fact that everyone had trust each other and on their abilities to complete their tasks before the next day.  There was no, Gee, person x is not going to deliver attitude from anybody in the team; everybody had the same level of commitment regardless of their work load.  If you got done early with your tasks, then we would help each other out until all tasks for the day were completed or brought near completion. To put it in simple terms, this was a team made up of pigs.

On Friday, the day of the demo, the list was 90% complete (the remaining 10% were items that we needed customer feedback in order to proceed) and the product was fully functioning beginning to end.  It was all due fact that you had a team of committed smart people with the same vision helping each other out.  In all, this is what last week taught me:

• Don't underestimate the power of trust. 
• Remember that trust is something that is earned, not given.  Also, you must work twice at hard to keep it alive.
• You're wiser at the end of the day than you are at the beginning of it.
• As you go along the day, you must be very comfortable with change otherwise anything from the norm will drive you bonkers.
• There's no "I" in team.
• Yeah, we've all heard it before but do we really understand it?  If you get "done" first, then it's your job to give back by helping out a team member.
• It's the people that make projects succeed or fail.
• Smart, goal-oriented people are an unstoppable force; the same goes for smart, ill-oriented.

Have you had experiences like this before?  If so, I would love to know about them!

As you recall, we cancelled last month's UG meeting due to weather.  For this month, we're having Bryan Sampica, an ASP.NET MVP from Cedar Falls, come talk to us about WPF!  The info for the meeting is below.

Hope to see you there!

Utilizing WPF as a Business Application Platform
Bryan Sampica, ASI Computer Systems
With the emergence of WPF and XAML as a UI framework, we've seen lots of demo's and examples on animating birds, and playing video clips.
In this session we'll examine the business uses in a real world application setting.  Looking at XAML creation options, the connection between designers and coders, and briefly talk about how to overcome some of the common difficulties in implementing the technology.
Presenter Bio:

Bryan has turned .NET development into his passion. Being introduced into the .NET world in
the .net 1.0 generation he quickly got his start designing and implementing web applications for 3rd party integrations.

Working today with Visual Studio 2008, LINQ, AJAX, WPF and Silverlight and the full power of .NET 3.5 he couldn't be more excited about where the technology is headed. By day he works at ASI Computer Systems located in Cedar Falls Iowa as a Software Architect and by night he authors for Wiley Publishing on his upcoming book, ASP.NET 3.5 - A programmers reference.

That's right, there will be a HEROES happen {here} event in Des Moines on 4/24!    Here's some info on the event:

The Des Moines event will celebrate the launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The event will bring together IT Pros and Developers to get an in-depth, up-close look at the new products and will give attendees an opportunity to meet with our Partners as well as members of the development teams who created the cutting-edge technologies. And all attendees will get a promotional pack containing all three new products.

The event will be held at the Iowa Events Center to accommodate the size of the event.  So if you have some free time on 4/24, come check out the event!

I'm not sure how many of you out there have heard of Video.Show, a ready to run solution for hosting video on the web. It's a great video sharing web site blue print built by the guys at Vertigo.  I've been looking at this app since it's RC (or beta) release and it's pretty sweet.  The display and interaction of HD video is pretty awesome!

Jon Galloway, one (if not the) developers, of the application has a great write up of the features of this application out on his blog.  If you want more detail info on the features of the application, it's worth reading it.

One of the cool things about this application is how it leverages the Silverlight Streaming and Expression Media Encoder to do all the video processing for you on the fly.  It's interesting how they were able to enable these to components and run them on a server environment.  They also leveraged the Ajax Toolkit Controls and LINQ to SQL (Express) to do the data access for them.  This is a great example on how to leverage these technologies within a single application.  If you would like to see a live example, check out Films for Learning Theater.

The awesome thing about this application is that you can download the source code from CodePlex and run it on your machine.  So check it out if you have time!

Last Thursday, I purchased a Samsung i760 Windows Mobile phone under my VZW contract.  I had previously tried other phones like the MotoQ but did not like the battery life it had.  I also looked into getting a BlackBerry, but unfortunately our company is moving toward Windows Mobile devices to make the integration between our laptops and our Exchange Server easier.  Another nice thing about having such phone is that I can write software for it using the .NET Compact Framework.

Here's what I've discovered/really like after a week of having this phone:

• Battery life is OK

Earlier on my battery life didn't last very long, but then I realized that I had immediate synch for my emails from our Exchange Server.  After I switched it to sync every 5 minutes, the issue went away.

• QWERTY Keyboard is NICE

I must say that having a decently sized keyboard is pretty nice.  My typing is not great on it yet, but it allows my hands to grip it nicely so I can move with it rather quickly.

• Camera Software

The software for the camera is pretty cool.  I just love how easy it is to interact with the menu items for both still and movie settings.  The quality of the video is descent enough for a mobile phone.

I must say that having a data plan does make the experience with the phone tons better.  The download speed is pretty descent so I don't have to wait too much to get my content.  However, the only thing that I find a little annoying is that I can't do multiple browser instances going at the same time.  It's not awful, but it would be a nice to have.

Do you have a Windows Mobile phone?  If so, how do you like it?

Earlier today, Scott provided us with, what I think is, a pinnacle post on getting people to understand the Zen of the new ASP.NET MVC framework.

Scott says,

This is a not just a different tune, but a whole different band playing all new music. Not everyone will like the music, and that's why the world has more than one band. This is a Good Thing.

I like to think of ASP.NET MVC as the raw, acoustic version of the more heavily produced and multi-layered ASP.NET WebForms we use today.

To me, these words are pure awesomeness!  We as ASP.NET developers can now play a different song if we want to! (By the way, I'm also including MonoRail in this ASP.NET playlist.)

I don't know how many times I've heard people asking questions like, why should I move to an MVC framework? why I do need to write all my HTML by hand?  why do I have to learn something new?  Honestly, you don't have to do anything.  If you have a solid grasp on the page life cycle and see the MVC framework as "meh" or "old school ASP", that's totally fine.  Nobody is forcing you to use it.  To relate to Scott's music analogy, is like having the option of changing or staying on the radio station when you hear that annoying song playing; it's totally up to you, you're in complete control.  

There are tons of great products out there that were built using this model; it totally works and gets the job done.  Now, if you believe that with great power comes great responsibility, and more importantly are comfortable with it, then it's worth checking out either MonoRail or ASP.NET. 

What are your thoughts on the matter?

I just finished reading the article Computer Science Education: Where Are The Real Software Engineers of Tomorrow? and I must that I'm pretty impressed with its very compelling argument:

Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods.

As some of you know, I attended ISU for my CS degree.  During the latter part of my tenure (junior/senior years) there, I started to realize that the "boring" stuff that professors were pushing down our throats, actually had a meaning!  In particular, my OS theory, algorithms, advanced databases, programming languages and of course, theory of computation.  If you take a look at the ISU CS curriculum, you can see that as the class number (CSXXX) gets bigger the concept becomes more concrete.  The lower level classes provide the foundation (the what's and why's) for these more specific concepts (the how's and who's).

Now, by no means am I saying that just by taking these classes it makes you a better application/system/db developer.  What I am trying to say is that these classes provide you with a solid foundation that could aide your application/system/db development skills.  The reason I stress the word could is due to the fact on how you as a computer scientist are willing to learn that a new domain (application development, system development, db development), etc.  If you go into these domains with a closed mindset, there's  a very good chance you won't succeed/advance in them as quickly as your peers that embrace it.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

That's right, remember a while back when I blogged about FlickrNSurface?  Well, since then, I've been showing people the demo code and some of them have been wanting to know how they can get their hands on it for their own website/projects.  At that point, I thought to myself, what is the best way to share the code and any changes that I make to it?  That's when I realized I should make this into an open-source project!  What better way to share ideas and implementations with community than by allowing them to contribute directly to it!

Again, I've decided to host the project details out on CodePlex and the source on Google Code.  Right now, I've created a production release v1.0.0.0 for you to use/play with.

Let me know what you guys think out on the CodePlex discussion board!