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.

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!

 

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.

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.

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.

Interesting Article on DevSource: “According to an Evans Data survey, a broad majority of developers say they expect the development of applications for wireless devices to grow or stay the same despite the economy. The survey also shows that 40 percent more developers plan to target Windows Mobile than Apple iPhone, and 46 percent more plan to target the NET Compact Framework than Google's Android platform.”

VMware is having a Conference in Madison coming up next month on March 10th.  Considering the success and focus that I’ve personally had with VMware Workstation, as well as our focus using their application in our .NET User Group meetings / SIGs – I’m definitely heading out for the couple hours to check out what they are discussing.  If anyone else is heading to this, add a comment to the news blog – and we’ll try to hook up.

Wanted to emphasize that those in our field (specifically in computer Development/Architecture) either continue our education nearly every day, or settle into “comfortable” obscurity.  The latter being a very dangerous place to be in these times – and not someplace I ever see myself.

And I was very pleased when I received an email from InnerWorkings – a company/software application that I started using when I taught .NET training courses at FirstData ( see my previous blog posting: Case Study: Many .NET teams are underperforming… is yours? ) – with a Certificate of Achievement for my 50th Task completion – which I received as I’ve been working through some of their new training modules, continuing my exposure and enhancing my understanding of new materials.  May be trivial to some, but kudos to InnerWorkings for recognizing and inspiring.

And on another note, kudos to all the members our our Madison .NET user group ( www.MADdotNET.com ), these are the people who especially in these uncertain times, show their dedication to sharing, learning and enhancing peer-to-peer knowledge related to .NET technologies ... proving themselves to be the leaders in our field -- today, tomorrow and beyond...

Downloaded and looking at the latest ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RC1 project from Microsoft. 

Microsoft’s ASP.NET Model View Controller design pattern for Test-Driven Development of enterprise scale Web applications, is really Microsoft’s answer to the Ruby on Rails framework used by Web developers for rapid prototyping of applications.

High hopes based on feedback that I’ve seen so far.

Look at Scott Guthrie’s (corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division) blog posting to get an overview of the release.

Detailed instructions on how to download and wire-up “Windows Live Writer 2009” to easily publish to your DotNetNuke blog engine – as I do on both www.LanceLarsen.com and www.MADdotNET.com.

1) You’ll want to download new Windows Live Writer 2009 from the following link: http://download.live.com/writer

2) Run the install. It will ask if you want to install other Microsoft “Live” products – but for this, all the matters is that you select the Windows Live Writer application.

3) Once installed – run the application. Click on “Blogs” – and select “Add blog account…”