JohnPapa.net

Behind the Scenes at Microsoft

John Papa — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:43:00 GMT

I’m a little over a week into my new role as the Silverlight Evangelist at Microsoft and so far it has been a blast! I’ve had a lot of joking questions about how much the implants hurt when they put them in, so I thought I might share with you all a quick behind the scenes looks at the new recruits getting their implants. As you can see, they only had to remove my head for a little while.

Yes, I am kidding.

Seriously though … I’m really enjoying working here, the people are brilliant and great to work with, and the work is very fulfilling. Currently I am preparing a session for PDC titled “Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight”. So if you are heading to the PDC, be sure to check it out!

Silverlight, MVVM, Prism and More at VSLive Orlando

John Papa — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:46:00 GMT

Are you planning on attending VSLive Orlando this week? If so, please stop by the 3 sessions I will be presenting at VSLive Orlando and say hi. I really enjoy speaking at the conferences and getting the chance to have great conversations with all the people. Often it gives me a greater breadth of understanding of what people are trying to accomplish and the struggles they face. For me the conferences have always been about the conversations and the people.

If you are going to be at the conference ping me on Twitter.

So this week I will be presenting 3 interesting and timely topics:

Building Silverlight Applications with MVVM and Prism

Tuesday, October 6 @ 10:30 am

Building medium to large scale practical applications in Silverlight requires just as much planning as developing with WPF, ASP.NET or WinForms. It is important to account for testability, scalability and modularity. Using the Model-View-ViewModel pattern (MVVM) with Silverlight is ideal for breaking out separation of concerns. Prism 2 helps facilitate this development with MVVM in Silverlight, while including key aspects for modularity. The Unity library is excellent for including Dependency Injection in Silverlight applications and for increasing both testability and modularity. This session will explain how to plan for and build real world business applications with Silverlight using Prism, Unity, and MVVM to achieve these goals.

Silverlight Data Binding Foundations

Tuesday, October 6 @ 4:00 pm

This session will demonstrate how XAML based data binding works with Silverlight 3 including the exploration of dependency properties. Demonstrations will be given in both Expression Blend and Visual Studio to show how to manage contextual bindings through declarative and explicit coding techniques. We will walk through examples of binding modes, list based bindings, type converters, notifications, and ObservableCollection implementations.

Getting Started with the Entity Framework

Wednesday, October 7 @ 2:15 pm

The Entity Framework can be used to architect applications against a conceptual model that is mapped to the logic model. The Entity Framework has many components including EntityClient, Entity SQL, Object Services, the Entity Data Model and LINQ to Entities. This session will discuss the architecture of the Entity Framework and explain the roles of each of its different components. I will also demonstrate how to write queries using the different options as well as how to evaluate which options within Object Services to use or if to use the EntityClient provider directly.

Validation with Silverlight 3 and the DataForm

John Papa — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:42:00 GMT

My latest Data Points column is now online and in print in the October 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine. The column’s title is “Validation with Silverlight 3 and the DataForm” which focuses on the validation features in Silverlight 3. This includes the DataForm, the validation XAML binding attributes, and the DataAnnotations.

Code alert: I’ve been made aware that the code for the article linked to in the online version may not be valid at this time. So for now you can download the code form my site from this link. (The link will be corrected on the MSDN site in a few days.)

Getting Rid of Me Once and For All! - NerdDinner in Tampa

John Papa — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:14:00 GMT

On Wednesday October 7th at 6:30pm several of the Florida.NET crew and I are gathering at Champps sports bar at the Tampa International Plaza Mall. I will be moving out to Redmond the following week so this is a great chance for me personally to see a lot of people before I head out. I believe Nikita and Joe Healy reserved the second floor of Champps, so we will have plenty of room to spread out. If you are in Tampa that day, please stop by and have a bite or a drink with me.

I’ll be speaking at VSLive Orlando Tuesday and Wednesday on a few topics (of course including Silverlight). Then I will drive over to Tampa and meet everyone at 6:30pm.

Details below … click the link to register

John Papa Goodbye Tampa, FL Dinner

Add event to your calendar (iCal)

When: Oct 07, 2009 @ 6:30 PM

Where: 2223 North West Shore, Tampa, FL 33607, USA Geolocation for hCalendar

Description: @John_Papa going away party - John's moving to Redmond. Come see the local developer celebrities, and chat with your fellow peers. Champps International Plaza, we have the second floor reserved. As always, on your own for food and drink. URL for hCalendar

Next Stop, Redmond WA!

John Papa — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:12:00 GMT

I have been a consultant for most of 14 year career working with dozens of customers large and small on business applications. I really enjoy working with customers and seeing the results of hard work. The interaction with everyone is one of the huge benefits for me personally. I’ve also been involved with the community for most of that time in varying technologies.

Late this summer I heard about the Silverlight Evangelist opening at Microsoft. It sounded perfect for me! At first I entertained the idea with the cautious understanding that my family would never go for the move to Redmond and leave sunny Florida. But I was pleasantly surprised by them when they were excited about the opportunity too. My family really has been very supportive and helped me make the big decision. So I went for it and a few weeks later I accepted an offer to join the Developer Evangelist Platform (DPE) at Microsoft to be the Silverlight Technical Evangelist.

I’ll be joining Tim Sneath’s team on October 19th and working alongside several great icons including Adam Kinney and Jaime Rodriguez. My role covers quite a wide range but in short I’ll be focusing on helping business partners and the developer community make an impact with Silverlight as well as providing feedback both ways to and from the product team. Honestly there is so much more to it, but that’s the 20,000 foot view. I am really stoked about this opportunity to make an impact at a global level!

I’ll still be very active on the community through different mediums including conferences, articles, blogs, and twitter. So please feel free to touch base with me as always. The next few weeks will be crazy hectic since we are moving across the country, selling our home, and settling into a new life on the west coast so I am sure it will fly by!

They Are More Like Guidelines, Not Rules - Some Insight on How I Use Twitter

John Papa — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:47:00 GMT

I’ve been asked how I use Twitter, what I try to avoid, what I try to emphasize, and just some basic guidelines for using it. Frankly, I just ride the wave and tweet my personality. I find it makes it easy, non intrusive into my work day, and I never regret something I tweeted because it’s “me”.

While these guidelines are no comprehensive, they do seem to cover the basics of how I operate. Here are some basic guidelines I follow, in no particular order, when using Twitter:

Tweet regularly, and on topic, but don’t be afraid to speak your mind on whatever. Stick to a core set of topics. For me its .NET development and (of course) Silverlight. I focus most of most tweets around these topics though I also use twitter for discussing various random thoughts. It gives a bit of a window into the person you are following outside of the .NET world. I will tweet about football, baseball, my family, or some random thing that happened to me during the day.
Don’t offend. If you want people to listen to you when you talk to them, it’s important not to offend them. Off color humor, targets at specific people, and heavy political views are sure ways to polarize your following.
Speak your mind, respectfully. I respect and will follow people who speak their minds. I enjoy a fresh perspective that is challenging and respectful in tone. Think about it, would you listen to someone who calls you an idiot for what you do or to the person who likes what you are doing but thinks you might want to consider some variations on how you do it. If you want to make an impact, know your audience.
Pay attention to others. If you want people to listen to you, show them you are listening to them first. Engage, interact, reply … and not just to people you know .. but to those you do not know personally. Twitter is a global community. Where else can you talk to people of many cultures and many experiences?
Ride the wave. These are guidelines that I follow. They may not be right for you. It’s important to comfortable with what you write because it’s there for the whole world to read, literally.

These are by no means comprehensive … honestly, I just go with it :-)

Do what feels right for you, that’s what I do!

Tell the Debugger to Ignore Silverlight Validation Exceptions

John Papa — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:29:00 GMT

I recently wrote an article that demonstrates how to use the DataForm and validate data entry in Silverlight using the DataAnnotations. One of the pet peeves I have with the validation is that it throws in exception in the setter of your public property. Putting my disagreements with that aside for a second, it causes a major inconvenience when debugging the application. For example, when running the application that uses the DataAnnotations and one of the conditions is violated, the debugger will catch the validation exception and break into the code. The desired behavior is that the debugger will not break into the code since I really just want to see the validation information on screen.

For example, the default behavior when not entering a value for the FirstName property will yield the result shown in the image below.

Yes, I can simply hit F5 and it will bypass the exception. But this gets ugly when you have more than one violation and you are testing the app. What I really want is to simply see the validation on screen, as shown below:

last night I was chatting with Jeff Handley (of DataAnnotations fame) and he mentioned a technique I was unaware of that will ignore the exception of this particular type. I was thrilled to see that it works and is quite simple to do. There is a feature in Visual Studio that allows you to do this (I love learning something new about Visual Studio). Here are the steps you need to go through to ignore the exception in Visual Studio:

1) Go to the Debug menu in Visual Studio, and select the Exceptions menu item

(If the images are hard to read, click on the images below for larger versions of them)

2) Expand the Common Language Runtime Exceptions item in the list

3) Click the Add button to add a new exception type

4) Select Common Language Runtime Exceptions from the drop down list

5) Enter System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationException in the Name textbox

6) Click OK

7) Uncheck the User-unhandled checkbox for the item

System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationException (the highlighting is mine)

8) Click OK

Now when you run your application using the debugger, the debugger will not stop no the exception. It instead will bypass those exceptions and simply display the validation information in your application. Basically skipping right to this:

Thanks to Jeff Handley for pointing this out to me!

Silverlight Featured in Sunday Night Football Extra

John Papa — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:53:00 GMT

Tonight is opening night for the NFL season! This year NBC will showing the Sunday Night Football games in HD via Silverlight. You can catch the games at http://snfextra.nbcsports.com/

It’s just a few minutes into the opening night game and I am watching it side by side with my HD TV to get a comparison. The HD broadcast in Silverlight is quote impressive! But the features built into the Silverlight app are even more impressive. There is a chat window for fans, stats, videos, and game information on the right hand side of the video. There is also a button at the bottom named “Key Plays”. When clicked it displays an area that is reserved for recapping key plays in the game. The video, of course, has DVR features too. I am not taking a screenshot for fear of copyright protection … but if you are interested in it, go ahead and check it out.

It really is quite cool!

Silverlight Firestarter Party in Portland

John Papa — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:52:00 GMT

Erik Mork of the Sparkling Client fame is hosting a gathering for those in Portland who want to see the Silverlight Firestarter in Redmond. Details are below …

Are you in Portland and want to get in on the Silverlight 3 FireStarter Simulast? We'll be hosting the event and watching live from the Microsoft Portland Office, so join us! We'll have local Silverlight experts on site, along with lunch and raffle prizes!

And the link:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032423154&Culture=en-US

Prism, MVVM, Behaviors, Blend – Lakeland, FL User Group

John Papa — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:48:00 GMT

I just confirmed that I will be presenting Silverlight 3 at the Lakeland, FL .NET User Group next Tuesday evening at 6:30pm. As everyone who knows me knows, I just love talking to people about Silverlight so this is just another excuse for me to do so with some great people:)

I’ll be bring some cool demos demonstrating how to build behaviors, using Blend effectively, and a walk through of MVVM and Prism. Of course, i will be giving away a few of my books at the event too .. so if you have not bought it yet here is your chance :)

Title: Building Business Applications with Silverlight 3

Silverlight 3 has some amazing new features that allow for developing richer business applications. This session will demonstrate how these features can be used to build applications using the various new features and tools at your disposal. The topics will include an overview on the new features in Silverlight 3, how to effectively design Silverlight applications in Blend, and how to take advantage of MVVM and Prism in Silverlight.

Location:
University of South Florida Polytechnic
3433 Winter Lake Road
Lakeland, FL 33803

Room: LTB 2117 (This is a large campus, so look at this image to locate building LTB)