Kevin Griffin

Open Letter To Whoever Designed the Turn-By-Turn Feature for Windows Phone

Kevin — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:54:01 +0000

Dear Whoever Designed the Turn-By-Turn Feature for Windows Phone, First of all, to the entire Windows Phone team: Good job with Mango. I’m highly impressed with several of the features. There is just one feature that really grinds my gears. The Maps application. You got that one wrong. Not wrong as in “oops, wrong turn. I’ll [...]

MVP For Another Year (now in ASP.NET)

Kevin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 19:01:01 +0000

Looks like Microsoft has granted me the title of MVP again for another year However, unlike last year when I was a Client Application Development MVP, this time around they’ve moved me into the ASP.NET/IIS product group. Really, I feel this is the group where I can really grow and reach out, as most of [...]

Review: OfficeWriter by SoftArtisans

Kevin — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: I was approached by SoftArtisans to evaluate their software product OfficeWriter, and I was given a free license for the product. OfficeWriter is a product that handles two common functions for software applications, reading and writing to Excel and Word documents. When I was approached to evaluate OfficeWriter, I had one particular purpose that [...]

Moving on to Greener Pastures

Kevin — Wed, 25 May 2011 15:00:00 +0000

After four years with my current company, Antech Systems, it is time for me to pack up and move on to greener pastures. I would like to publically thank Antech for providing me with a foundation to build my career off of. I came to Antech as a college newbie, recently laid off from Symantec, [...]

Why You Should Attend MADExpo 2011

Kevin — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:00:00 +0000

A couple weeks ago we announced that we’re going to be holding our first regional event here in the Mid Atlantic, and the name of that event is MADExpo (Mid Atlantic Developer Expo). Scheduled for June 30th – July 1st. It’ll be held at the Hampton Roads Convention Center in Hampton, VA. Last week, we [...]

Test Driven Development Firestarter

Kevin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Test Driven Development is one of those topics that is heavily preached throughout the community, but very few developers are taking advantage of. Two of our locals, Perry Neal and Jeff Muller, have decided to put together a one day workshop for folks that want a hands on “real world” approach to doing Test Driven [...]

Announcing MADExpo

Kevin — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Here in the Mid-Atlantic, we’re a productive group. We host code camps in most of our major areas, we have a dozen very successful user groups, and we’re dedicated to making developers like ourselves better at what they do. A couple months ago, we held a leadership summit for the Mid-Atlantic. Several of us discussed [...]

ASP.NET MVC 3 : RenderSection ‘Required’ Parameter is Misleading

Kevin — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000

The other night at a user group meeting, I was discussing ASP.NET MVC 3 with a group of people. During the discussion of Master Pages vs. Layout Pages, I talked about Sections and how to use RenderSection() to add content to your layout pages. RenderSection has two overloads: RenderSection(string sectionName) RenderSection(string sectionName, bool required) If [...]

A User Group Leaders Guide to the INETA Community Speakers Program

Kevin — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000

As an INETA mentor, I’ve received a lot of feedback from my community about different things that INETA has done. The Community Speakers program was started last year in an effort to help promote community speakers and assist user groups with bringing in fresh, exciting new faces. A Little History Before the Community Speakers programs, [...]

Building better ConnectionStrings with ConnectionStringBuilder

Kevin — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:00:02 +0000

Okay, I never admitted to being a .NET guru or anything, and that’s why I get so excited whenever I run across a gem in the framework that allows me to do something easier and with fewer issues. ConnectionStrings has always been one of those things I did the hard way. For example, I would [...]