The next Alabama Code Camp has been scheduled for Saturday, January 23, 2010 in Mobile, AL at the University of South Alabama campus. 

For those of you that aren’t familiar with code camp, it is essentially an all-day geekfest that provides a free training and networking opportunity.  It is facilitated by and for developers.  Typically, the covered technologies in the Microsoft .NET realm, but this certainly not a requirement.  There are usually six to seven 1-hour sessions that run concurrently throughout the day (9 to 5’ish).  Topics range from ASP.NET to SQL Server to C# and just about anything in between.  So, there should be something to interest just about everyone.

One of the primary goals of the code camp is to encourage first time speakers that would like to share knowledge about a topic they find interesting.  So, if you would be interested in speaking (or know someone that would be), the call for speakers is officially open.  Visit the website and you will find a document to download that covers the process of submitting a session for consideration.

This will be the 8^th code camp in Alabama and I’ve never been to one where I didn’t learn something new…if not from a session at least via conversing with other developers.  It really is a good time.  If you can’t make it to Mobile, the event will be back to Birmingham later in 2010.

Here is the website:  http://www.alabamacodecamp.com  It runs on Silverlight, so it may require a download if you don’t have it installed.

I hope to see you there.

I’ll be giving my “Why You Should Care About Dependency Injection” talk for the Huntsville New Technology Users Group on Tuesday, November 10th.  If you will be in the area or know someone that is interested, please pass the word along.

Here is the abstract:

Why You Should Care About Dependency Injection

Buzzwords such as Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, and containers have become increasingly popular in the world of .NET development. However, many developers are still wondering what’s the big deal? Are you curious what these terms actually mean? Would you like to know why the concepts are important as well as how and when to apply them? If so, please join me for this practical and interactive discussion about how you can greatly reduce the coupling of your application by leveraging these concepts.  The Unity IoC Container will be used as a reference for this presentation, but the concepts are applicable to your container of choice.

Although it took me a bit longer than I expected, I have finally posted the slides and source code from my recent presentation for the Birmingham .NET User Group.  I would like to thank all of you that attended.  If you have any questions about the material, feel free to ping me.

You can download the material here.

On Tuesday, September 8th, I will be presenting for the Birmingham .NET User Group.  The meeting will start at 6:30 PM and it will be held at the usual venue of New Horizons. 

Here is the abstract for the presentation:

Why You Should Care About Dependency Injection

Over the last year, buzzwords such as Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, and IoC containers have become increasingly popular in the world of .NET development. However, many developers are still wondering what’s the big deal? Are you curious what these terms actually mean? Would you like to know why the concepts are important as well as how and when to apply them? If so, please join me for this practical and interactive discussion about how you can greatly reduce the coupling of your code and increase the flexibility of your application by leveraging these concepts. The Unity IoC Container will be used as a reference for this presentation, but the concepts are applicable to your container of choice.

Here are the resource links from the “Write Code Like a Ninja: Introduction to Resharper” presentation:

• http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
• http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx
• http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/
• http://tinyurl.com/mlt3tq (TDD Macro)
• http://tinyurl.com/mamrf2 (Macro via Resharper)

Thanks to everyone who attended the user group meeting.  I was very pleased with the level of attendance as well as how engaging the audience was.  Interactive discussions are always much better than a 60 minute monologue.

On Tuesday, June 9th at 6:30 PM, I will be presenting for the Birmingham .NET User Group.  The meeting will be held at their usual venue over at New Horizons. 

Here are the details:

Write Code Like a Ninja: A Introduction to Resharper

Have you ever been frustrated with Visual Studio?  Do you ever find yourself thinking there must be a faster way to do this?  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some shortcut to automate a lot of your repetitive tasks?  Fortunately, there is an answer to a lot of these questions.  Resharper is a commercial add-in for Visual Studio that is developed by JetBrains.  Come and see how this inexpensive product can dramatically increase your productivity to help you write code like a .NET ninja.  We will go through a comprehensive overview of the major functionality that Resharper has to offer as well as several tidbits of hidden features within Visual Studio.

Pizza and soft drinks will be provided.  We will probably have a license of Resharper to give away as well. 

I hope to see you at the event. 

On Tuesday, April 14th at 6:30 PM, I’ll be presenting for the Birmingham .NET User Group.  The meeting will be held at the usual venue of New Horizons.  I’ll be giving an overview of the SOLID principles since there has been a extensive attention to the subject over the last few months, and there are a lot of the developers in the area that have been asking for clarity on the principles. 

Here is the abstract:

SOLID is an acronym that represents five crucial principles of class design in object oriented development.  The terms were originally coined by Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob).  Although these concepts are certainly not new, they have received considerable press in the .NET community over the last several months, but there is still a lot of confusion among many developers regarding their meaning.  In this session, we will examine the significance of these principles and examples of how to apply them in your applications. 

Microsoft has released a new version of the Azure SDK and Azure Tools for Visual Studio.  This has been labeled as the March 2009 CTP.  To me, the most exciting update is the ability to now run full trust within the cloud rather than being restricted to medium trust.  Unfortunately, it appears as though the CTP still does not work completely on Windows 7.  From what I have been told, Windows 7 problem isn’t likely to get resolved until the next beta of Windows 7.  It is actually a bug in Windows 7 rather than a problem with the Azure CTP.

At any rate, here is the complete release:

Greetings from the Azure Services Platform Team,

We are excited to announce that we have released an update to the Windows® Azure™ SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio®. These latest releases are available here:

• Install both the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752
• Install the Windows Azure SDK alone: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130232

What’s new in Windows Azure SDK

• Support for developing Managed Full Trust applications. It also provides support for Native Code via PInvokes and spawning native processes.
• Support for developing FastCGI applications, including support for rewrite rules via URL Rewrite Module.
• Improved support for the integration of development storage with Visual Studio, including enhanced performance and support for SQL Server (only local instance).

What’s new in Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

• Combined installer includes the Windows Azure SDK
• Addressed top customer bugs
• Native Code Debugging
• Update Notification of future releases
• FastCGI template

We will continue to release updates to Windows Azure and its tools based on your feedback. Please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130231 to share your Windows Azure experiences.

Thank you for your continued interest.

Sincerely,
Azure Services Platform Team

I just received an email with the following information and wanted to pass it along for those that might be impacted:

Currently, the time zone within Windows Azure is Pacific Standard Time (PST). Soon, we will be migrating to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This is potentially a breaking change for applications which rely on local time.

When will we make the change?
We will start rolling out this change starting Sunday, March 8 at 10:00 AM GMT.

Why are we doing this?
Windows Azure is a global service. To ensure that applications behave the same way regardless of their physical location, it’s important that Windows Azure have a consistent time zone across all geographies. UTC is a natural choice given our global customer base, and UTC is not subject to potentially disruptive changes in Daylight Savings Time.

What’s the potential impact to you?
If your application running in Windows Azure relies on local time, you will be impacted by the migration to UTC. Here are a few examples of potential issues:

• Gaps may occur in event logs if local timestamps are used.
• User interfaces that depend on local timestamps may show different results.
• Local timestamps stored by your application may be interpreted differently after the changeover.

Many applications have already been designed to rely only on UTC time. These applications should be unaffected.

On Tuesday, February 10th at 6PM, I’ll be presenting at the Huntsville New Technology User Group.  The presentation will be an introduction to the Windows Azure platform.

Here is the abstract:

So, you have heard a lot of buzz about cloud computing and this new thing that is coming called “Windows Azure”, but you aren’t sure why it is a big deal or what it is all about.  Well, this session may be just what you were looking for.  Windows Azure is the new cloud operating system for Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative.  It is all about making it easier to build reliable and scalable services by alleviating a lot of the common headaches that service developers currently face today.  In this introductory overview, I will focus on the big picture of Windows Azure to help you establish an understanding of the essential concepts, particularly from the perspective of the service developer.  The goal is to try and provide you with a general understanding of the purpose of the platform and some of the ways it can be leveraged.

I hope to see you at the meeting.