WorldOnWindows

Random Thoughts on Leadership

efosao — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:47:38 -1000

Excerpt from FrankFi's view of the world.

One of my audio books is all about leadership, another book I just read is on Design Thinking. So – as a reminder to myself – here are some random thoughts on leadership:

What do leaders do? They produce certainty in ambiguity.

This is for me the major thing. As soon as there is no more ambiguity there is no leader needed. But in today’s world we have more change than ever thus more ambiguity than ever. Producing certainty also means to make decisions and to rely on them. It does not mean to never change a decision but it does mean, not to change frequently. Also, a coach is not a leader. A coach might instrumentalize people (by “coaching in the ´right direction’) but in the end another person decides what the right thing is to do. So, who’s the leader?? Another direct implication is that leaders try to be predictable and therefor trustworthy…

Link to full story - http://blogs.msdn.com/frankfi/archive/2009/12/20/random-thoughts-on-leadership.aspx

Family Guy Ads for Windows 7 (Video)

efosao — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:42:19 -1000

Apparently these Gamily Guy videos never hit the airwaves due to questions about their brand ‘suitability’, but they made it to YouTube nonetheless, and I think they are very cool!

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

Spelling Bee – Family Guy and Windows

Windows Stewie – Family Guy and Windows

Computer – Family Guy and Windows

State of Windows 7 – Family Guy and Windows

The Story behind C#, .NET & Visual Studio

efosao — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:31:00 -1000

MSDN’s Channel 9 has published a cool series of documentary videos providing an introspective into the history and thinking that has gone into the development of Microsoft’s programming languages (BASIC, Visual Basic, C# …) and their primary development platform consisting of Visual Studio’s IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and the .Net Framework.

I found Anders Hejlsberg’s and Scott Guthrie’s videos most enlightening, but admittedly I’m still working my way through the rest of the list. The videos average 40mins each but are very worthwhile. Enjoy!

Links to videos of the Visual Studio Documentary:

Information Overload and Managing the Flow: Effectiveness and Efficiency by Scott Hanselman

efosao — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:46:59 -1000

Scott Hanselman keeps the hits coming with this great and insightful video on Information Overload and Managing the Flow: Effectiveness and Efficiency delivered as a Keynote address at Øredev in Malmo, Sweden.

Scott meshes together Covey and GTD principles with a crazy dose of common sense and simplicity. Simple tips and techniques for filtering your inbox are almost priceless. I will be archiving my entire inbox tonight, guilt-free!

Read the article and video on his blog or view the full HD version of the video on Vimeo.

10 tips for ASP.net developers

efosao — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:18:00 -1000

Becoming a good and proficient programmer is ofter about the little things. There are small good habits that make an ok programmer golden, and bad little habits that make a code genius a nightmare to work with. Here are some humble tips for the aspiring dotnet programmer on his way...

Simple redirect – Response.Redirect(“path-goes-here”) can be used to redirect a user to a new page. By extension, to reload or refresh the same page after posting back you can use Response.Redirect(Request.RawUrl);
Use relative and dynamic links. Try as much as you can setup all your links as relative/dynamic links, NOT just relative. This will make it a lot easier to move pages and resources within your app without breaking functionality. For server controls this simple involves using the “~/” notation when specifying paths e.g. Response.Redirect(“~/UserControls/FacultyBioPOD/Page1.aspx”) for JavaScript and CSS read ‘How to setup Relative links in ASP.NET’.
Make “Collapse to Definitions” a button in your toolbar or a shortcut. It is simply one of the best ways to read code-heavy pages by starting at the top level.
Foreach loops are a joy and can be used in a many circumstances to loop through all sorts of collections. I think they are much more preferable than For or While loops. When you need to loop through a data collection or object collection this is a very easy way to do it! Learn it, love it, use it!
Almost anything is better than writing your data access code in your page! Almost anything. It’s messy, makes your application/website hard to read and maintain, makes it almost impossible to re-use your code else where. Alternative? Put your data access logic in a class, use TableAdapters which allow you to store multiple queries in single class files and call them from anywhere in your code, LINQ-to-SQL, LINQ-to-Entities, or well written parametrized SQL encased in using statements. Which to the next tip…
Learn to organize your code, and keep it organized. The more organized your code is, the more excited you will be about returning to it time and again to add new features, fix bugs, enhance usability, borrow functionality, refactor, etc. The more disorganized a code base is, the higher the chances are that it will be left to gather dust and die a lonely death. There are many techniques for cleaner, maintainable code that anyone can learn. Here are a few
1. Group similar files in folders /CSS, /JS, /UserControls, /Images, /App_Code, /Admin etc.
2. Keep your methods(functions) short. <20 lines if possible. If your code gets longer than that you should ‘refactor it’.
3. Use classes to group similar methods together, and more importantly define your application objects.
4. Quick fixes have been know to cause more problems than they solve. Before you implement a solution, let it marinate in your mind for 5 mins.
Sometimes you may need to check if a String is null or otherwise blank/empty "". Instead of writing 2 blocks of code to check for this, simply use string.IsNullOrEmpty(crazy-string) to check for both conditions at once.
Read ‘other’ code written by other programmers. The .net community is huge and there are fantastic projects everywhere. Your knowledge and growth as a developer gets on the super-fast track the more you learn to learn from the work of others. Check out the tons of projects on Codeplex, or some of my favorite open-source projects dotnet BlogEngine and N-Layered Web Applications with ASP.NET 3.5 Part 1: General Introduction by Imar Spaanjaars.
Visual Studio’s Debugger. Love it, learn it, use it! When confronted with a bug in your code, set some break points and launch your debugger. Inspect your variables as you applications run. Become a master bug slayer! Some people fix their bugs in minutes, others will live with their bugs for weeks, years or forever? Which will you be?
Learn proper database design. It easy, but it’s not ‘optional’. No matter how much C# you can sling at the blackboard, not knowing what an identity column or foreign key is will close many-a-door in your face. And if you do get the job, you may lose it quickly enough. SQL is easy to learn. While a good programmer is not a substitute for a good DBA (Database Administrator), the force is strong with the one who knows his or her way around SQL queries, inserts, deletes etc.

- Efosa Oyegun

.Net Developer Cheat Sheets

efosao — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:46:00 -1000

A .net developer should never be left without a helpful arsenal of cheat Sheets at his/her disposal, so here's a helpful collection to help you along, adorn the walls of your power-cubicles, and get you started on the way to world domination!

Visual Studio Cheat Sheets

Other Cheat Sheet Repositories

ADO.NET Data Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework (Channel 9)

efosao — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:23:00 -1000

Jonathan Carter of Microsoft provides a great overview of the enhancements to Data features provided by ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. He covers enhancements to technologies such as the Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, and Velocity quite excellently.

There's lots of great new capabilities in the ADO.NET technologies in .NET Framework 4, including paging capabilities in ADO.NET Data Services and support for different development methods (model-first, code-only, etc.) in ADO.NET Entity Framework. In this video, Jonathan Carter highlights these exciting new features.

Link to source: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/VS2010/DataPlatform/DataPlatform/

Windows 7 and your Xbox 360 (Channel 9)

efosao — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:39:00 -1000

For those of us who own an Xbox 360 and Windows 7, the question is what exactly can Windows 7 and your Xbox 360 do together? Ben Reed shows off some of the new features of Windows 7 Extender for Windows Media Center.

Get Started with the Entity Framework

efosao — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -1000

In this introductory video, Alex James will show you how to build a simple Entity Data Model in a short amount of time.

Presented by Alex James
Duration: 9 minutes, 31 seconds
Date: 22 May 2008

Enabling in-line editing in Dynamic Data

efosao — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:58:00 -1000

Now that you have created a site with Edit and Details views, how do you enable inline editing in a GridView control? This video shows you how, and also touches on routing.

Presented by Scott Hanselman
Duration: 6 minutes, 23 seconds
Date: 08 May 2008

So are you a multitasker? StandfordU thinks you probably suck at it!

efosao — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:55:00 -1000

With the prevalence of social media and the openness to distractions that our fully-mobile always-connected world has now stepped into, multitasking is no longer the rare occurrence it used to be many years ago.

Does your multitasking day begin in the office? If only. How many of you have considered how much of your early morning you could ‘optimize’ by combining activities? Shower and brush your teeth, have breakfast, catch up on traffic news while reading the paper and drinking coffee, briefly stopping to check your calendar on your BlackBerry while responding to an email that just came to your attention because your phone chimed in with that custom ringtone you paid $1.50 for. It’s a wonder we are all not insane.

And the question is why? Why do we do it?? Why do I do it and why do YOU do it? Easy answer you say. “It make me more productive”. “I get more done”. Do you? Do you really? Honestly?

Stanford University asked this question, and the answers do not bode well us dear multitasker, not well at all.

3 key findings stood out

Multitaskers were poor at ignoring irrelevant information. They did significantly worse at tests that required them to pay attention to one thing, and were more likely to be distracted by trivial and useless information than others who multitasked less.
They were worse at task switching. Now this was a revelation of almost Biblical proportions. I thought multitaskers got GOOD at this! You know? Slick! Flirting like Mohammed Ali's gloved fists from one task to another, knocking each one out... no? News flash, it’s the opposite! People more given to working of few tasks at a time move between tasks more easily than their dual-core multiprocessing brethren.
Lastly and I think most importantly is the issue of ‘performance’. Multitaskers were shown to attain a sub-par level of competency with whatever it was that they were passionately involved in. The more social-services they used, the less adept they were at the usage of them on an individual basis. In fact, totally proving the old adage true, they were jacks of all-trades and masters of none.

So the next time you think you could be doing more with your time? Packing more into your already-insane schedule? Take a breather an maybe consider yourself fortunate that you aren’t… You've probably made a mess of enough things already.

Further reading

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32541721/ns/health-mental_health/

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Google Chrome Experiments

efosao — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:11:00 -1000

While Microsoft has rallied the troops to build the ‘Ultimate Windows 7’ application, I find it quite ironic that Google Chrome in my humble opinion is simply that - ‘The most awesome Windows Application’. In further demonstration of it’s prowess, Google has release 50+ Chrome Experiments, showing the future of the web and what is and will be possible with HTML 5 (Canvas) and JavaScript.

My jaw is still on the floor where it collapsed onto after viewing just a couple of these demos. I mean, heavens! Ray tracing and real-time physics in a browser? Goodness!

You will need Google Chrome or Firefox 3.5+ to view these. Do enjoy!

Some video showing samples of the demos running on Chrome

Getting LogMeIn to work in Windows 7

efosao — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:30:00 -1000

Have you had problems using LogMeIn to access your Windows 7 computer remotely? If you have, this post might help.

LogMeIn installs just fine on Windows 7, but when I tired to login using my regular username and password I got this error:

Error (login): Logon faliure: unknown user or bad password. (1326)

The solution is a simple one. For the time being, LogMeIn on Windows 7 simply requires that you add the domain name to your User Name just like this:

domain/tim, instead of just tim

This should have you logged into your Windows 7 PC in not time!

If this helps please let me know. Thanks and happy computing!

Great resources for learning ASP.NET

efosao — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:06:00 -1000

Are you having a hard time trying to find good resources for learning Microsoft's ASP.NET?
No problem! Here are a few to get you headed in the right direction.