istu :: The Innovativ Studios Blog

Innovativ Studios is rebranding

2009-02-02T00:29:08-05:00

We are currently going through a rebranding and renaming process right now. We do not like our current name as is it very easy to forget and not very memorable. We are going to fix that.

Our new name is Brilliant Fantastic, LLC. We like it a lot more and we are hearing that from people all over the place. Let us know how you feel by emailing comments to email AT brilliantfantastic DOT com.

You will still be able to use the old email addresses. In the near future we will turn on the redirection so that all email and web traffic get's routed to the correct address. If you would like to get our new email addresses now, feel free to email us at email AT brilliantfantastic DOT com.

Check out our new site at http://brilliantfantastic.com.

Made From Dolly is Live!

2008-09-30T00:55:36-04:00

We at Innovativ Studios have been working on a small side project and it is now live. The project is called Made from Dolly which is a small clothing company.

The first product is called "The Tweet Shirt". You can go to the site, enter your Twitter username, and get a personalized shirt with your Twitter username printed right on it in the mail within a few days. People are pasionate about the technologies they use so sport it on a t-shirt.

We are planning some more designs as well as additional lines so check it out at http://madefromdolly.com. We have a limited number of coupons for a 30% discount. If you enter the code TWITTERDEBUT when you checkout, you will get the discount if the coupons are not used up. They are going fast!

Western Ohio Day of .NET Registration Open

2008-03-03T16:25:09-05:00

I just registered for the Western Michigan Day of .NET on May 10th. The registration is open and I highly suggest that you do the same if you are in the area. I have gone to several Ann Arbor Day of .NET events and they have great content and speakers and best of all, it's free. There will be no spring Ann Arbor Day of .NET event this year, so this looks like one of the only local Day of .NET events. There is also the Central Ohio Day of .NET on April 19th event as well.

Step Into .NET Framework Code from VS 2005

2008-02-07T18:14:39-05:00

Microsoft has been nice enough to release the .NET source code as a reference to developers in order to allow them to step into .NET Framework methods. Up until a couple of days ago, this capability was only available to Visual Studio 2008 users. John Robbins and Kerem Kusmezer then stepped up and created the .NET Mass Downloader utility which grabs the pdb's from the Microsoft servers and places them on your desktop. This enables you, amoung many other things, to step into Microsoft .NET Framework source code from within Visual Studio 2005. Here is how you set it up:

Download the .NET Mass Downloader utility from CodePlex.
Extract the downloaded zip file somewhere.
Start a command prompt and run the extracted NetMassDownloader.exe with the following parameters: netmassdownloader -d C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 -output <any drive location where the pdb's will be downloaded to (e.g. C:\ReferenceSource)>
Add the pdb file directory as a location to look for in VS 2005 Options dialouge. Go to Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols and add the symbol file location that you specified in step 3.
Uncheck the "Require source files to exactly match the original version" option under Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> General tab.
For each solution you would like to view the .NET source, you need to go to that solution's properties -> Common Properties -> Debug Source Files and add the symbol file location that you specified in step 3.

There, you are now ready to start debugging into your VS 2005 projects within the solution you set up. Here is an example in action.

Set the break point:

Hit F11 to step into the System.Drawing.Color.FromName method!

That's it! How cool is that! VS 2008 users can't have all the fun.

Visual Studio 2008 Launch Event

2008-01-19T17:29:01-05:00

Microsoft is going to make the rounds again with the Visual Studio 2008 Launch event. They are going to lauch their Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 products. I went to the lauch event for Visual Studio 2005 and the presentations were pretty lame but the reason you should attend....free copies of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (last time they were "real" copies and not the express versions). Every attendee gets a copy!

I signed up for the Detroit event. See you there! You can register here.

CSLA.NET 3.5 Preview Release

2008-01-17T21:20:08-05:00

Rocky Lhotka is up to his old tricks again and has released a preview release of CSLA.NET 3.5. This release has several new highlights that will ultimately come down to the developer writing less plumbing code.

For those who don't know about CSLA.NET, it is a business object framework that takes care of the plumbing that almost all business objects need to worry about. Things such as serialization, n-level undo/redo, business rule processing, and authorization.

This framework is used extensively within Morale and it is a very well written piece of brilliance. You can download the 3.5 version of the framework here. Here is Rocky's blog post about the new release.

.NET Framework 3.5 Namespace Poster

2008-01-16T15:27:59-05:00

Brad Abrams has posted a poster that contains a layout of the .NET 3.5 framework namespaces. It is available in PDF and XPS formats and is a great handy reference guide.

You can find it here.

CodeMash 2008 Review

2008-01-16T11:41:46-05:00

I attended the CodeMash event from Wednesday, January 9th - Friday, January 11th at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, OH. This event was intended to be a "mash-up" for developers of various languages like Java, .NET, Ruby, and Python. The schedule contained all sorts of sessions that convered all of these various languages and topics.

This was the second annual CodeMash event whose idea was started by several developers and leaders in the development community over lunch. It was a very different event because of the wide range of topics covered and the venue it was held at. It made for a very relaxed atmosphere. Here are some of my thoughts on the event. Sorry in advance for the long post, I just had a lot to say about it.

Event Organization

The event was very well organized even before I stepped foot on the venue. The web site for the event had various rss feeds so you could get up to the minute news about the event. News such as when the speakers and sessions were announced, when registration could take place, etc. That was a very good thing because it didn't require me to go out to the site every so often to look for any updated news.

Another great piece of organization that was present is that the CodeMash organizers developed a scheduling application that allowed you to schedule the sessions you wanted to attend before you got there. You could then email these schedules or print them off and be ready before you got the pamphlet the day of the event. The only downside to this was that it was written in Silverlight. I know the developer probably wanted to experiment with Silverlight and that is why it was used but it was total overkill for the application and it required me to go and download the new Silverlight plugin to use. This was a pain in the butt but the idea was great.

I arrived to the event on Wednesday evening at 5:30 and checked in to the hotel. When I checked in, the resort knew that I was there for the CodeMash event and gave me a flyer for the event which gave a brief overview of what was going on. This was a nice touch as well so I wouldn't be sitting there going "OK, what is going on now". The organizers have arranged with the resort a great price. I got my single room for Wednesday night for $88 and a suite for Thursday and Friday night for $159! I stayed at the resort before and the suite costs me $350 so these were great rates and another reason to attend this event.

After I checked in, I went down to the convention center which was just down the hall from my room to register for the event. I told them my last name and they gave me my pre-printed badge, a ticket for the raffle at the end of the event and a t-shirt ticket to claim my free t-shirt. The shirts were well designed and a nice touch to an already cheap event. I also recieved a printed program for the event that mapped out the session rooms, the schedule, and the information about each session. It was very well organized and had all the information I needed.

The sessions were well spread out and scheduled well. There were only a couple of sessions in which I had a conflict of interests. This was not a big issue as you could pop in and out of any the sessions you wanted. There were plenty of time in between each session to mingle, network, grab a quick drink, or grad some juice for your laptop. The event was scheduled very well and ran without a hitch.

Believe it or not, the organizers also organized breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the entire event! This was included for the cheap registration fee. They did a GREAT JOB on the sponsors. From what I understand, you will have to thank Jim Holmes for bringing all these sponsors together for this event. He did a great job on keeping the event cheap for the attendees.

Overall the event was organized near perfection! I was very pleased with how the event was organized. Great job to everyone who was involved. I only know a few so sorry for anyone I am missing. Great job to Brian Prince, Jim Holmes, Josh Holmes, John Hopkins, and Jason Follas.

Venue

Like I mentioned before, the event was held at the Kalahari resort in Sandusky, OH. It is a huge hotel with an indoor waterpark. It recently went under some new construction and it opened a new larger part of their park on Christmas so we were lucky that we were able to be there after the construction. They added a wave pool, a swim up bar, and some sweet new waterslides. My family came over from Toledo on Thursday night and I was at the park with them on Thursday and Friday night. It was a lot of fun. My favorite was a new water slide that is like a giant toliet bowl and spun you around this bowl and then dropped you out at the end. I must of went on that at least ten times. My 1 year old daughter also enjoyed the new kids section. She was in awe most of the time. Did I mention that the $150 rate for the suite also gave 8 people access to the waterpark for our entire stay. This was possible because of the organizers.

There were a couple of things that I didn't like about the resort. They seem to be understaffed at the checkin/checkout desk and they totally do not have enough luggage carts for all the rooms they have. These were just minor details but they definately improved on the service since the last time I was there.

Content

The content was probably my biggest disappointment of the event. I thought it was good but I thought it would be better. The content I didn't like was the stuff I didn't learn anything at. That was probably due to the fact that I should of attended something else and expanded my mind but I really was expecting something else in some of these sessions due to what I read on the session description. Here are my thoughts on the sessions that I attended:

Keynote : Software "Engineering" & Polyglot Programming by Neal Ford - This session made comparions between tradional engineering (example used was building a bridge) and software engineering and how they differ. This was a very, very good keynote and it set the expectations for me for the event. I liked the "theory" keynotes as apposed to the technical ones (the other two). Score: A+.
Coding in Silverlight by Jeff Blankenburg - OK, I am going to be honest, this was the worst of the ones I attended. To be fair though, Jeff did fill in for the original speaker at the last minute. The session demoed putting a spinning button in a web form using XAML and Silverlight. Seriously. After all the people saying "I don't want to do a spinning button", that is what was done. I left the session early to check out of my current room and into my suite so it would be ready for the family when they arrived. Score: F.
Crash, Smash, Kaboom Course in Python by Catherin Delvin - I have never looked at Python before so I was excited about this course. It was exactly as it says, it was an introduction to Python, it's development environments, and third party controls. I thought it was very informative and it got me excited about Python. Score: B+.
Keynote : Mashing it up with IIS7 by Scott Hanselman - This was perhaps the funiest session I have ever seen. The first part of Scott's keynote was him talking about himself in a sort of stand-up comedy routine with some slides and what it is like to work at Microsoft. He bashes himself and Microsoft several times. At one point in his slides, he talks about how he has met so many great people and he shows a Photoshoped picture of himself with his arm around the picture of the guys who are pictured during the Visual Studio install. Very funny. He had the whole room cracking up. The second part was him talking about the new features in IIS and implemented an HttpModule in C# for a PHP program running in IIS. It was good except I dodn't learn that much plus I do not like technical keynotes like I said. He gets a higher score for being so funny. Score: B-.
Applied Service-Oriented Architecture by Brian Prince - I love going to Brian's talks as he talks bout real world issues and doesn't talk about spinning buttons (see above). He talked about how to architecture your service oriented applications and how much work should be done in designing them. I did not learn much in this because I have read these sort of things before but it was a good talk and discussion. Score: C+.
Putting the Fun into Functional with F# by Dustin Campbell - Dustin lives in Toledo and so I see a lot of his talks at local user groups. He always blows my mind with his talks and he makes me feel really stupid. He did sort of an introductory talk about F# and functional programming. It was good because he taught me how to get functional programming and I had an "Ah-ha moment" as he talks about. Plus you can hear him on the recent Hanselminutes podcast talking about similar things. Score: A-.
Party and Jam Session - I didn't attend this because my family was at the resort and I wanted to spend time with them.
Keynote : Concurrency: Past and Present by Brian Goetz - This talked about the issues surounding concurrency and how it is a hard problem to solve. Brian demostrated how some of the issues can be solved and gave code snippets in Java. I think this talk was way too technical (and frankly boring) for a morning keynote session. I did not get anything out of it. Score: D+.
Real World C# by Bill Wagner - This was a good best practices for C# and the new features in the 3.5 .NET Framework. Since I live and breath C# day in and day out, I did not get much out of this presentation but I thought it was good. Score: B-.
Hands-on Agile Practices by Brian Prince - This is second time I have seen this presentation and there is a reason for that. Brian talks about how his company uses some concepts from Agile practices to implement software for his clients. I love the approach and I plan on implementing some of these concepts into Morale. Score: A+.
RESTful Web Services by Dave Donaldson - This talked about how to make web services RESTful and the theories around REST web services. The problem was that the first half of the talk implemented a WS-* based web service in .NET. I didn't care about that and that is not why I attended the session. I think most people felt that way as I looked around the room. The rest of the talk was informative for me though as I never really knew what made a good REST service. Score: B-.
Building Custom Workflow Activities in Workflow Foundation by Keith Elder - This talked about how to implement a custom workflow activity and implement designer features for the end user. It demostrated an activity that sent email and built the designer pieces around that. I just started in WF so I was excited about this but I did not learn a thing because it is something I already knew how to do. It was good but again, I did not learn anything. Score: C+.

Final Thoughts

Overall I thought that the conference was well worth the $125 registration fee and the hotel costs. I killed four birds with one stone. I learned some things, networked with several people, caught up with people I used to work with etc., and allowed my family to have a great time. They have already announced CodeMash 2009 and I will definately be attending that as well. I will go for the sessions that I do not know much about though such as Ruby and PHP. If you want to hear the sessions from CodeMash 2008, all of them were recorded and you can listen to the podcasts here. Hopefully I see many of you next year. It was fun and I plan on being a sponsor next year.

Creating a Marketing Portfolio : Part 3

2007-11-04T22:27:10-05:00

I wanted to create a marketing portfolio in order to send out to clients and help fill my pipeline. I plan on taking the readers along this process. You can read the previous parts in these posts:

One of the things I want to include in my portfolio is business cards. I need new business cards anyway since I moved and my cards had my mailing address on it. I wanted the cards to be flashy and rememberable since I plan on placing them on the front cover of the portfolio. I want to splurge a little and get metal engraved business cards. I know that they will be a little pricey but I think that they will get people talking and that is not a bad thing. It is probably going to be a good investment.

I did a search on the internet as well as a local search on who could provide metal business cards. On the web, I found a couple of good canidates and I asked for some samples. I now have some quotes back from one online company and one local company. The company I found online is McLoone Csutom Graphics. They sent some very good samples including some sample aluminum cards that looked very nice. They only do screen printing on the cards and no etching or engraving. The local company that I am also considering is the local PR store. I like the idea of having a local store do the job because it will be an expensive job and it feels more comfortable.

I am providing the artwork for the business cards since I already have the logo artwork. I looked at a couple of sample business cards as well which game me several ideas. I want the card to be simple with not a lot of information. I definately decided that I am no longer going to place my mailing address on the card since not most of my clients do not need that information. If they do, they can go to my website to get more information on how to contact me. I toyed with the idea of just placing my website address on the card and that is it but I decided against it. I figured that would cause an extra step that potential customers would have to do in order to get my name and phone number and that may trouble them too much to call me. I placed the current working version of my business card mockup below. It needs a lot of touch up but it conveys the idea of what I am looking for.

The quotes that I got back were pretty high but I think the investment is well worth it. The cards will probably cost me around $2.25 each for about 500 cards. I plan on sending about 300 portfolios out so that will leave me with 200 left over.

Doing the crazy math, it seems that the cards alone will cost me over $1000 but I think it will be well worth it like I said. That is the only thing I plan on going over the top with.

I have a meeting with my local Chamber of Commerce to get some ideas and helpful advice on the portfolios. I will report on how that goes next time.

Creating a Marketing Portfolio : Part 2

2007-10-02T21:13:25-04:00

I wanted to create a marketing portfolio in order to send out to clients and help fill my pipeline. I plan on taking the readers along this process. You can read the previous parts in these posts:

Part 1

One of the items I wanted for my portfolio is a page of quotes from previous engagements and customers. The first thing I did was I made a list of people that I wanted to quote recommendations from. These included project managers, product managers, developers, testers, and business partners from previous engagements. I wanted to get an array of different quotes from different aspects of my previous work.

The first place I started was Linked In because I knew that I had recommendations from some of the people I had on my list. I emailed the people I had on my list whom also gave me recommendations previously in order to make sure that I could use their recommendation on a public marketing portfolio. This is the email that I had sent them:

XXXX,

I am putting together a marketing portfolio together for Innovativ Studios. I currently have a recommendation from you on my LinkedIn profile. I would like to use a portion of that within my marketing portfolio. Here is your recommendation below:

“Blah Blah Blah, etc....” Some Date, 2007

Some Person, Some title, Some company
managed Jamie indirectly at Innovativ Studios

I wanted to get your permission to use it. I will show you the finished product to get your final approval before I send them out.

Please let me know.

Thanks,

Jamie

email | blog | phone: XXX.XXX.XXXX

The next step I took after that was to see if I could find the rest of the people on my list within Linked In. I figured that by connecting with them through Linked In would give me a better chance they would write me a recommendation. I was only able to find three of the people but we are now all linked.

The final step I took was to send out an email to the rest of the people on my list to ask for a recommendation. For these people, I sent out the following email:

XXXXX,

I am putting together a marketing portfolio together for Innovativ Studios. I was wondering if I could bother you to write a two to three sentence recommendation on either the quality of work or how you found the experience in working with myself and/or my company. I would like to use a portion of that within my marketing portfolio.

If you do not feel comfortable writing a recommendation, please let me know and I will not be offended. I am looking for honest feedback.

Here is an example of a recommendation from my LinkedIn profile below:

“Blah Blah Blah, etc....” Some Date, 2007

Some Person, Some title, Some company
managed Jamie indirectly at Innovativ Studios

I will show you the finished marketing profile and where I used your recommendation to get your final approval before I send them out.

Please let me know and thank you in advance for your time and effort.

Thanks,

Jamie

email | blog | phone: XXX.XXX.XXXX

I am now sitting and playing the waiting game. I have already recieved some responses and they all contain great feedback. It should be a great list of recommendations when all said and done.

I am now starting to figure out the rest of my content and how I want the portfolio to be designed. I will of course blog about my findings. Until next time...