By Lance Larsen on 6/23/2009 1:44 PM

Have you ever found yourself getting latest from a team project, and someone else “accidentally” checked in code that doesn’t compile?  Well – none of us are perfect – but – sure we all find this quite annoying. 

So my first instinct is to right click on the file in “Solution Explorer” and back out the file to a previous version – but the file is buried deep in the file hierarchy.

So, instead of hovering over the file name tab in the main window, then following that path in Solution Explorer – found the following option in Visual Studio.

Go to Tools –> Options –> Projects and Solutions and click the “Track Active Item in Solution Explorer”.

Nice…  Try it out.

By Lance Larsen on 6/13/2009 3:30 PM

I’ve seen several presentations on XAML before, and my take away perception from the brief overviews was that XAML was an excellent markup language for visual layouts to be used in both WPF and Silverlight applications. 

True or False? 

Well, it’s Both – while it IS a great way to layout controls – but it’s really a whole lot more.

What I truly didn’t realize was that XAML is essentially a Serialization of the code – thus you can do almost everything you can do in code – directly in XAML.  And that’s a powerful and non-obvious revelation.

Karl Shifflett and Jamie Rodriguez had a fantastic 2-Day training session… Highly encourage others to take any opportunity to see these guys.

In fact my brain hurts from information overload…! :)

Here are some useful WPF Links brought up during training:

Demo Code & Slide Deck – lots and lots of fantastic code and information – will need to dive deeper.

XAML Power Toys – VERY COOL! Tools to quickly put XAML code together.

WPF Example: Cipher Text – Not only a good example of WPF, but a useful application for securing information – thinking of switching to using it.

WPF Example: Southridge Realty – Wow, really amazing MVVM application for demo Realty company.

WPF Example: Collapsible ListBox – Great example showing the power or XAML with no additional code behind.

WPF Binding Cheat Sheet – There’s no intellisense for bindings – so this helps.

By Lance Larsen on 6/12/2009 2:19 PM

Very pleased so far with with Day 1 at the Chicago WPF training Event by Microsoft.

It’s all about the XAML!

Karl Shifflett’s Blog – Blog: Karl on WPF

Jamie Rodriguez – Blog: On .NET Client

WPF Line of Business – Demo Application Source

By Lance Larsen on 6/10/2009 6:10 PM

If you’re not getting enough geek-to-geek face time at our MADdotNET meetings – there’s another software dev group in Madison – not specifically .NET – check out: http://softwaredev.meetup.com/113/

By Lance Larsen on 6/10/2009 5:56 PM

Our next Madison .NET User Group ( www.MADdotNET.com ) ALL.NET meeting will be on Wednesday June 17th. 

• Looking forward to Steve Evans continuing micro-presentation series on Architecture Patterns.
  
• We will also be spending a significant amount of time going through our Azure user group project – BetaMash.
  
  “Have you ever wanted to beta test the latest software?  Are you a designer looking to show off your designs on the newest websites and applications?  Are you a developer looking for serious testers and designers to solidify your creations?

  BetaMash gives Developers, Designers & Testers a social network in which they can gain a reputation for excellence, translating that work into marketable skills and experience - and working on the newest applications around.”

• New members are always welcome to the ALL.NET meetings!
  
• Certainly encourage everyone to come with questions about topics they are working on or wanting to work on, as you have an extremely talented group of developers / architects to which to ask your questions.
  
• Bring your Laptops! ( if you have one ) :)

By Lance Larsen on 4/17/2009 9:49 AM

Attending a full day training on ASP.NET MVC by Jeffery Palermo ( Twitter @jeffreypalermo )

“With the new version of ASP.NET developers can easily leverage the Model-View-Controller pattern in ASP.NET applications. Pulling logic away from the UI and the views has been difficult for a long time. The Model-View-Presenter pattern helps a little bit, but the fact that the view has to delegate to the presenter makes the UI pattern difficult to work with.”

Wrote the opensource http://codecampserver.com/ in MVC

Really good speaker – great energy and engaged the audience.

By Lance Larsen on 2/28/2009 5:46 PM

Having an MSDN event here in Madison, WI – I’m definitely going, and I know I’ll be seeing a lot of familiar faces.

Sign up for the Event!

By Lance Larsen on 2/28/2009 4:23 PM

 

Now, when architecting this solution, have to take many factors into consideration:

1) First and foremost, time is of the essence ( literally ) – as many of the organs have as small as a 6 HOUR window of opportunity from surgical “procurement” to transplantation.

2) The UWHealth ITS ( Info Technology Systems ) team generally consists of non-.NET developers who are tasked to maintain and customize purchased products developed from a wide variety of other companies.

This project is a new type of endeavor for the department as a whole – ie. in house ASP.NET development.

So while the development staff and project management team are top notch and extremely knowledgeable about the what the application will need to do – they are relatively new to developing critical ASP.NET core applications.

And most importantly in my decisions, they will need to be able to maintain the developed ASP.NET application once the application is past the development stages.

So…

1) For now, choose to go with an n-tiered implementation (obviously ) -- and based on the experience level of the folks that are going to support it after I depart, going with classic WebForms, not MVC.  

As to MVC, I'm not necessarily sold on the benefits of MVC over WebForms myself yet either – spent time playing with the MVC RC1 from Microsoft that allows for easy setup of MVC – and that works great!, but aside from making TDD a little easier - not sure moving away from WebForms will happen any time soon for most projects.

2) Right now looking at how I want to implement my DAL, looking at Linq to Entity as I haven't used that before and it appears to be the direction Microsoft is going, as opposed to Linq to SQL, etc.

By Lance Larsen on 2/28/2009 3:23 PM

Just started a new gig Monday before last – hired on as an independent contractor for a Senior .NET Architect position at UWHealth here in Madison, WI for a 6 to 12 month project. 

Tasked to build an OPO ( Organ Procurement Organization ) application that we’ve named DonorLink. 

DonorLink will be used anytime someone who is an “Organ Donor” ( ie. someone who has the “red dot” on their driver’s license ) passes away in the hospital.  Then DonorLink becomes a pivotal asset in the coordination of managing the process of getting the “procured” organs – everything from a heart, lungs, eyes, kidney, tissues of all sorts, etc – from the donor to a recipient who is waiting on an organ transplant to prolong their life.  Can’t get much more important than that.

Very pleased that they reached out to bring my experience and expertise to Architect their ASP.NET application as well as potentially mobile and other application in the future.

Will keep blogging on the Architecture process – and looking for feedback from my .NET peers.

By Lance Larsen on 2/12/2009 4:30 PM

Added a live Twitter Feed to my DotNetNuke site. 

Getting the CSS formatted to look the way I wanted was a little tricky, but after looking around at a couple other blog postings on the topic – settled on the following code.

Use it and if you have suggestion / further refinements – let me know.

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