Bender's Blog

I’m Following Rod Paddock at Codestock?!

James Bender — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:46:07 GMT

Codestock is this weekend in Knoxville. You can check out the agenda page here and see that there are some great, very smart people speaking there. With seven tracks over two days, plus open spaces, there’s something for everyone at this great event. I was honored to speak at the first Codestock event last year, and I’m thrilled to be back!

I’ll be presenting “How to make your application awesome with JSON, REST and WCF” in which I’ll explain why REST is the “new” hotness (turns out it’s not that new) and how to take advantage of it with WCF. You’ll also get to see some cool JQuery and ASP.NET MVC stuff as part of the talk. It’s the first time I’ve given this talk, so I’m very excited!

Turns out I’m following Rod Paddock. Yeah, that Rod Paddock. Editor in Chief of CoDe Magazine, author of many books, international speaker and Microsoft MVP. By contrast, I was all excited this morning because I found a $5.00 bill in my pocket that I forgot I had.

Ron Paddock followed by James Bender. Kinda like…

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In all seriousness, I’m really looking forward and VERY happy to be speaking at Codestock. It’s a must-attend event and if you’re not going, well, you should go!

Camping without the insects!

James Bender — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:31:23 GMT

Notice I didn’t say “bugs” though….

The Columbus Give Camp is July 17-19 and will be held at the Quick Solutions office

.What is a “Give Camp?”

The goal of the Give Camp is to pair charities that have technology based needs with people from the development community who are willing to donate their time and help those charities out. We will start on Friday the 17th, and work STRAIGHT THROUGH (OK, you don’t have to stay overnight if you can’t) until Sunday to do our best to provide the charity with what they need.

We are looking for both volunteers and charities. If you are interested, or know someone (volunteer or charity) that might be interested, please visit the Give Camp website and register.

Indy Code Camp Recap

James Bender — Sun, 17 May 2009 02:57:59 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk on custom WCF behaviors at the Indy Code Camp. I hope you all found the topic interesting and the content useful.

You can get the slides and code samples here:

For those who might be interested, I’ll be presenting an Intro to WCF talk at Cincinnati .NET Users Group in the future. More information will be posted here in the future.

If I Do A Good Job, Can We Go To Dietsch Brothers for Ice Cream After The Meeting?

James Bender — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:28:20 GMT

This Tuesday, April 28th, I’ll be speaking at the Findlay Area .NET User Group.

I’ll be presenting “How I Learned To Love Dependency Injection,” which if my .NET Kicks stats are to be believed, is turning out to be quite the popular talk. The meeting is at the Marathon Oil building in downtown Findlay.

I spoke at this group a couple of years ago and had a GREAT time. I’m excited to be going back!

Kalamazoo X Conference re-cap and Slides

James Bender — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:25:48 GMT

I had a GREAT time yesterday speaking at and attending the Kalamazoo X Conference!

Thanks and congratulations to Mike Eaton and the all the organizers and staff for creating, organizing and hosting this one-of-a-kind event. All the talks were great, but I want to especially single-out two that I thought we absolutely incredible:

Leon Gersing gave an awesome talk on “Change.” I've always thought Leon was a great, natural speaking and finding out that he actually studied musical theater in college explains where a lot of that comes from. He had some great insight and great advice for everyone there on dealing with change.

Jim Holmes gave two talks that were both great. But his talk on “Leadership” was just incredible. This talk should be “required reading” for anyone who is or wants to get into management.

If you are at an event in the future and you see either of these sessions on the schedule, go. I don’t care what else is on the schedule for that time, blow it off and go to these.

I enjoyed speaking to the group on Organization Dynamics. Unfortunately I had to use the “abridged” deck, but I think I got all the important points out. The full deck can downloaded here:

See you next year in Kalamazoo!

How I Learned to Love Dependency Injection: The Code Samples

James Bender — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:13:47 GMT

As promised, here are the code samples from my talk at Central Ohio Day of .NET.

The “Oven” demo can be downloaded here:

As mentioned I borrowed the MVC demo. The source, and a great blog post on using Ninject with ASP.NET MVC can be found here.

Code on!

How I Learned to Love Dependency Injection: The Slides

James Bender — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:46:27 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended the Central Ohio Day of .NET yesterday and made it such a success. A special thanks to all the organizers as well.

I had a great time seeing some old friends a making some new ones. I hope to see you all at events down the road.

I hope those who attended my session on DI enjoyed it and found it useful. As promised, I'm posting my slides.

Right now I'm using a borrowed laptop, so I don't have access to the sample code, but I'll be putting that up as soon as possible.

See you all at the next event!

Win some cool stuff from NPlus1!

James Bender — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NPlus1 now:

NPlus1 of the future:

NPlus1 is having a design contest!

The rules and prizes can be found here. We have some very cool stuff to give away, so if you’re good with design send a submission, you could walk away (figuratively) with a $250 Best Buy gift card and a copy of Vista Ultimate!

Kalamazoo!

James Bender — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:57:37 GMT

Ready for a different type of conference?

Then the Kalamazoo X Conference is for you!

Unlike your normal Code Camps and Days of .NET, this conference will focus on:

Human interaction, including social, personal, and career development
Interface and graphic design
Development process and best practices
Requirements analysis, architecture, design and modeling.

In addition to a lot of smart people, I’ll be there speaking on “Organizational Dynamics.”

See you all there!

What’s At the Center of A Tootsie Pop – Why Developers Need to Know WCF

James Bender — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:04:39 GMT

This past Saturday I took part in the West Michigan .NET University. In addition to the .NET Bootcamp I did with Len, I presented on Web Service concepts and WCF. At the end of the WCF session I was asked if Microsoft was really committed to WCF or if something else will be replacing it in a few years.

I believe the answer is that Microsoft is committed to WCF.

If you look at all of the recent cloud-based offerings by Microsoft you can see it’s commitment to WCF in the API’s. These new platforms and services all communicate via services. An Azure application uses WCF services to communicate between it’s various worker and web roles. The SDK for .NET services is largely made up of extensions to WCF in the form of new bindings. Live Mesh allows you to access your content via service REST endpoints. All built on WCF.

So it’s clear to me that Microsoft is committed to WCF as the “center” of it’s on-going cloud strategy. It’s also clear to me that while deep knowledge of things such as custom behaviors and bindings can still be a “niche” skill, developers MUST have a solid working knowledge of WCF that goes beyond the standard “Hello World” sample.