Tag: microsoft

Truly Excellent People and Coding Inspiration…

.NET Fringe took place this last week. It’s been a rather long time since my last actual conference that I actually got to really attend, meet people, and talk to people about all the different projects, aspirations, goals, and ideas about what’s next for the future. This conference was perfect to jump into, first and foremost, I knew it was an effort in being inclusive of the existing community and newcomers. We’d reached out to many brave souls to come and attend this conference about pushing technology into the future.

I met some truly excellent people. Smart, focused, intent, and a whole lot of great conversations followed meeting these people. Here’s a few people you’ll want to keep an eye on based on the technology they’re working on. I got to sit down and talk to every one of these coders and they’re in top form, smart, inventive, witty and full of great humor to boot!

Maria Naggaga @Twitter

I met Maria and one of the first things I saw was her crafty and most excellent art sketches around lifestyles, heroes, and more. I love art like this, and was really impressed with what Maria had done with her’s.

Maria giving us the info.
Maria giving us the info.

I was able to hang out with Maria a bit more and had some good conversation time talking about evangelism, tech fun and nonsense all around. I also was able to attend her talk on “Legacy… What?” which was excellent. The question she posed in the description states a common question posed, “When students think about .Net they think: legacy , enterprise , retired, and what is that?” which I too find to be a valid thought. Is .NET purely legacy these days? For many getting into the field it generally isn’ the landscape of greenfield applications and is far more commonly associated with legacy applications. Hearing her vantage point on this as an evangelist was eye opening. I gained more ideas, thoughts, and was pushed to really get that question answered for students in a different way…  which I’ll add to sometime in the future in another blog entry.

Kathleen Dollard @Twitter && @Github

I spoke to Kathleen while we took a break across the street from the conference at Grendal’s Coffee Shop. We talked a lot about education and what is effective training, diving heavily into what works around video, samples, and related things. You see, we’re both authors at Pluralsight too and spend a lot of time thinking about these things. It was great to be able to sit down and really discuss these topics face to face.

We also dived into a discussion about city livability and how Portland’s transit system works, what is and isn’t working in the city and what it’s like to live here. I was, of course, more than happy to provide as much information as I could.

We also discussed her interest in taking legacy shops (i.e. pre-C# even, maybe Delphi or whatever might exist) and helping them modernize their shop. I found this interesting, as it could be a lot of fun figuring out large gaps in technology like that and helping a company to step forward into the future.

Kathleen gave two presentations at the conference – excellent presentations. One was the “Your Code, Your Brain” presentation, talking about exactly the topic of legacy shops moving forward without disruption.

If you’re interested in Kathleen’s courses, give a look here.

Amy Palamountain @Twitter && @Github

Amy had a wicked great slides and samples that were probably the most flawless I’ve seen in a while. Matter of fact, a short while after the conference Amy put together a blog entry about those great slides and samples “Super Smooth Technical Demoes“.

An intent and listening audience.
An intent and listening audience.

An intent and listening audience.Amy’s talked at the conference was titled “Space, Time, and State“. It almost sounds like we could just turn that into an acronym. The talk was great, touched on the aspects of reactiveness and the battle of state that we developers fight every day while building solutions.

We also got to talk a little after the presentation, the horror of times zones, and a slew of good conversation.

Tomasz Janczuk @Twitter && @Github

AAAAAaggghhhhhh! I missed half of Tomasz’s talk! It always happens at every conference right! You get to talking to people, excited about this topic or that topic and BOOM, you’ve missed half of a talk that you fully intended to attend. But hey, the good part is I still got to see half the talk!

If you’re not familiar with Tomasz’ work and you do anything with Node.js you should pay close attention. Tomasz has been largely responsible for the great work behind Edge.js and influencing the effort to get Node.js running (and running damn well might I add) on Windows. For more on Edge.js check out Act I and Act II and the Github repository.

The Big Hit for Me, Distributed Systems

First some context. About 4 years ago I left the .NET Community almost entirely. Even though I was still doing a little work with C# I primarily switched stacks to other things to push forward with Riak, distributed systems usage, devops deployment of client apps, and a whole host of other things. At the time I basically had gotten real burned out on where the .NET Community had ended up worldwide, while some pushed onward with the technologies I loved to work with, I was tired of waiting and dived into some esoteric stuff and learned strange programming techniques in JavaScript, Ruby, Erlang and dived deeper into distributed technologies for use in application construction.

However some in the community didn’t stop moving the ball forward, and at this conference I got a great view into some of that progress! I’m stoked to see this technology and where it is now, because there is a LOT of potential for a number of things. Here’s the two talks and two more great people I got to see speak. One I knew already (great to see you again and hang out Aaron!) and one I had the privilege & honor to meet (it was most excellent hanging out and seeing your presentation Lena).

Aaron Stonnard @Twitter && @Github

Aaron I’d met back when Troy & I put together the first Node PDX. Aaron had swung into Portland to present on “Building Node.js Applications on Windows Azure“. At .NET Fringe however Aaron was diving into a topic that was super exciting to me. The first line of the description from the topic really says it all “Distributed computing in .NET isn’t something you often hear about, but it’s becoming an increasingly important area for growing .NET businesses around the globe. And frankly it’s an area where .NET has lagged behind other runtimes and platforms for years – but this is changing!“. Yup, that’s my exact pain point, it’s awesome to know Aaron & Petabridge are kicking ass in this space now.

Aaron’s presentation was solid, as to be expected. We also had some good conversations after and before the presentation about the state of distributed compute and systems within the Microsoft and Windows ecosystem. To check out more about Akka .NET that Aaron & Andrew Skotzko …  follow @AkkaDotNet, @aaronontheweb, @petabridge, and @askotzko.

Akka .NET

Alena Dzenisenka @Twitter && @Github

...
…

…Lena traveled all the way from Kiev in the Ukraine to provide the .NET Fringe crowd with some serious F# distributed and parallel compute knowledge in “Embracing the Cloud“!  (Slides here)

Here’s a short dive into F# here if you’re unfamiliar, which you can install on OS-X, Windows or whatever. So don’t use the “well, I don’t use windows” excuse to not give it a try! Here’s info about MBrace that  Lena also used in her demo. Also dive into brisk from elastacloud…

In addition to the excellent talk that Lena gave I also got to hang out with her, Phil Haack, Ryan Riley, and others over food at Biwa on the last day of the conference. After speaking with Lena about the Ukraine, computing, coding and other topics around hacking and the OSS Community she really inspired me to take a dive into these tools for some of the work that I’m working on now and what I’ll be doing in the near future.

All The Things

Now of course, there were a ton of other people I got to meet, people I got to catch up with I haven’t seen in ages and others I didn’t get to write about. It was a really great conference with great content. I’m looking forward to round 2 and spending more time with everybody in the future!

The whole bunch of us at the end of the conference!
The whole bunch of us at the end of the conference!

Cheers everybody!   \m/

An Aside of Blog Entries on .NET Fringe

Here are some additional blog entries that others wrote about the event. In addition to these blog entries I’ll be updating this entry with any additional entries that I see pop up – so if you post one let me know, and I’ll also update these talks above that I’ve discussed with videos when they’re posted live.

RSVP for the Geek Train to .NET Fringe

Cascadian Flag
Cascadian Flag

The .NET Fringe Conference guests coming from northern Cascadia (north of Portland) will have the excellent benefit of taking the Geek Train to the conference. It’s also only $10 friggin’ bucks!

RSVP link here | RSVP link here | RSVP link here | RSVP link here | RSVP link here

Departure

We’ll depart Saturday, April 11th at 2pm, with an ETA into Portland at 5:50pm.

Itinerary

  • 1:40pm Arrive at train station in Seattle to join group for boarding. **
  • 2:00pm Departing Seattle King Street Station (i.e. you better be on the train)
  • 2:10pm We’ll be seated and get setup for…
  • 2:15pm We’ll break into teams of ~4 or so people (or however many of us there are we’ll break out to a reasonable size groups).
  • 2:17pm I’ll announce hacking goals and ideas for the teams and we’ll launch into coding. More information will be announced soon, but suffice it to say we’ll be planning a hack around geo and logistics based solutions! The solutions hacking begins!
  • – – – much hacking and enjoying of the trip occurs here! 🙂 – – –
  • 5:00pm We announce who’s completed what and we’ll demo and discuss the app awesomeness of what we’ve managed to come up with.
  • 5:50pm or before we arrive in Portland and the fringe fun shall begin.

I’ll have more information posted here along with some other ideas about what the hackfest will include, so stay tuned and also be sure to follow @dotnetfringe, and check out all the speakers to start figuring out your plans!

Breaking Up Again, OneNote and I Must Go Separate Ways

Ok, psychologically one is supposed to tell the good news last and the bad news first. Well, I’m doing that backwards with this article. First things first, all the awesome about Microsoft’s OneNote App.

Microsoft OneNote

The cool thing is, after more than a few years, OneNote runs on most mobile and desktop systems. When I say most, what that equates to is: Windows, iOS and OS-X. Now, I wouldn’t doubt if it works on some other things that I’ve missed, but those are the places I know it works because that is where I’ve used the application the most.

OneNote does a number of things that are pretty cool. The first is simply look pleasant and make it easy to add notes, images, sound or other objects into any notebook in the app. This makes note taking extremely easy. There are also a lot of features around note history to move back and forward, play things back and more. This interaction with the notes across all of the devices is pretty seem-less, when the features are similar across all of the devices.

I actually really like the interfaces built specifically for the device that OneNote is running on. If I’m running the iOS iPhone App it is oriented to small screen touch and interactions of that sort. The iOS version is focused on creating notes, not on managing or organizing the actual notebooks and related structures.

On the iPad iOS App it’s oriented toward a larger workspace and more navigation between each notebook and and a little to the management of these notebooks and the respective notes. The iPad version is a happy middle ground between the note creating focus of the iPhone App and the full blown OS-X and Windows Desktop versions.

Speaking of that, it’s been about 3+ years since I’ve used OneNote on Windows and about 2 years since I actually used Windows for anything relevant. So when One Note was released on OS-X I was all over that. I’d always been a fan of the product, but it was limited since it only ran on Windows for the longest time. So when I switched off of Windows as my core operating system years ago, it went away. I had a list of top apps I lost when leaving Windows.

  1. LiveWriter for blogging because it hooked up to all the blogs I wrote to at the time; WordPress, DotNetBlogEngine and Blogger. So it was hugely useful.
  2. ReSharper for Visual Studio. Note I did NOT say Visual Studio, but just ReSharper. I’ve got a lot of this power back via WebStorm and IntelliJ, but I still miss the robustness of refactoring options with ReSharper.
  3. OneNote with Office. Note, again the specifics of just missing OneNote and not Office. The Office Suite, especially when I moved to non-MS Operating Systems was already useless to me. It was stuck in the 90s world of files and file systems. I’d already moved on to web options where the files were always where I needed them and versioned appropriately.

When I got down to this list, I assumed I could go ahead and switch. I did, haven’t regretted it for a moment and will still tell anybody that’s good at adopting to tools and finding the best for the job, the grass is indeed greener being not on Windows.

But I sure was happy to get OneNote back, but as I used it I realized…

…and now OneNote dies to me again.

…that I’d moved on form the paradigm that OneNote has to offer. I use more than just merely the iOS or OS-X or Windows Version. I need an option to see and retrieve my information beyond that medium. I needed to be able to use these tools sometimes disconnected and this also created a huge problem, as they’re all tightly coupled to the skydrive style service. In addition to this, if one uses any of the other iOS Office Suite Apps from Microsoft those are also tied to skydrive, but one has to get a monthly account to use those.

Overall the OneNote app was elegant, nice and worked well, but the connectivity issues and the tightly coupled service to skydrive left it removed from the other tools that I use to get work done. I suppose, if one is a full on fanbois and using all the Microsoft tooling running on Windows it likely has some integration to those tools. However I use a wide variety of tools across more than one operating system. In the end it seemed like Microsoft was endeavoring to lock me into their online presence with their offer of free OneNote as a gateway to their Office Product.

Albeit I’ve used it now for 2 weeks, I’ve made tons of notes in it, I’m just going to go back to Evernote. The access is better, the apps are clunkier and not as pretty (I realize that’s subjective), and overall I’d rather use OneNote as an interface to files I put in Dropbox or Google Drive or Evernote or something, but alas, it hasn’t worked out. So if you’re looking for a note taking app, OneNote might still be fore you, but otherwise if you want full across the board support across many platforms, Evernote is still a more capable option.

Sorry OneNote, but even though it was nice to have a second fling, we have to go our separate ways again. I guess it’s time to fire Evernote back up.

Riak in a .NET World

Jeremiah's Demo Works, IT WORKS IT WORKS!
Jeremiah’s Demo Works, IT WORKS IT WORKS!

A few days ago Troy Howard, Jeremiah Peschka and I all traveled via Amtrak Cascades up to Seattle. The mission was simple, Jeremiah was presenting “Riak in a .NET World”, I was handling logistics and Troy was handling video.

So I took the video that Troy shot, I edited it, put together some soundtrack to it and let Jeremiah’s big data magic shine. He covers the basics around RDBMSes, SQL Server in this case but easily it applies to any RDBMS in large part. These basics bring us up to where and why an architecture needs to shift from an RDBMS solution to a distributed solution like Riak. After stepping through some of the key reasons to move to Riak, Jeremiah walks through a live demo of using CorrugatedIron, the .NET Client for Riak (Github repo). During the walk through he covers the specific characteristics of how CorrugatedIron interacts with Riak through indexs, buckets and during puts and pulls of data.

Toward the end of the video Joseph Blomstedt @jtuple, Troy Howard @thoward37, Jeremiah Peschka @peschkaj, Clive Boulton @iC and Richard Turner @bitcrazed. Also note, I’ve enabled download for this specific video since it is actually a large video (1.08GB total). So you may want to download and watch it if you don’t have a super reliable high speed internet connection.

Also for more on Jeremiah’s work check out http://www.brentozar.com/articles/riak/  and contact him at http://www.brentozar.com/contact/

New Relic, The King Makers, MS Open Tech, Riak VMs and Life Gets Easier Today

Today Microsoft released, with partnerships with a number of companies including Basho, Hupstream and Bitnami, the VM Depot. I’ve always followed Bitnami, so it’s really cool to see their VM releases for Jenkins (CI Build Server), WordPress, Ruby 1.9.3 stack, Node.js and about everything you can imagine out their along side our Basho Riak CentOS image. If you want a great way to get kick started with Riak and you’re setup with Windows Azure, now there is an even easier way to get rolling.

Over on the Basho blog we’ve announced the MS Open Tech and Basho Collabortation. I won’t repeat what was stated there, but want to point out two important things:

  1. Once you get a Riak image going, remember there’s the whole community and the Basho team itself that is there to help you get things rolling via the mail list. If you’re looking for answers, you’ll be able to get them there. Even if you get everything running smoothly, join in anyway and at least just lurk. 🙂
  2. The RTFM value factor is absolutely huge for Riak. Basho has a superb documentation site here. So definitely, when jumping into or researching Riak as software you may want to build on, use for your distributed systems or the Riak Key Value Databases, check out the documentation. Super easy to find things, super easy to read, and really easy to get going with.

So give Riak a try on Windows Azure via the VM Depot. It gets easier by the day, and gives you even more data storage options, distribution capabilities and high availability that is hard to imagine.

New Relic & The Rise of the New Kingmakers

In other news, my good friends at New Relic have released a new book in partnership with Redmonk Analyst Stephen O’Grady @, have released a book he’s written titled The New Kingmakers, How Developers Conquered the World. You may know New Relic as the huge developer advocates that they are with the great analytics tools they provide. Either way, give a look see and read the book. It’s not a giant thousand page tomb, so it just takes a nice lunch break and you’ll get the pleasure of flipping the pages of the book Stephen has put together. You might have read the blog entry that started the whole “Kingmakers” statement, if you haven’t, give that a read first.

I personally love the statement, and have used it a few times myself. In relation to the saying and the book, I’ll have a short review and more to say in the very near future. Until then…

Cheers, enjoy the read, the virtual images and happy hacking.