Derik Whittaker : Announcement

Taking a Lap around MEF

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:22:01 GMT

Last night I was able to give my ‘Lap around MEF’ talk to the Charlotte Enterprise Developer’s Guid. I think the session went well, the demo’s worked (which is great since there was a large bit of code creation during the talk) and the audience asked some great questions.

I thought I would post the slide deck and example code here in case anyone wants it (some slides in the my deck were barrowed from my buddy Andriy).

Thanks a ton to everyone in that group I had a great time.

Till next time,

PS I will be doing this same talk next month at the TriNug (RDU .Net Group) in case you want to come out and give me a hard time.

Quick Lap Around MEF at the Raleigh VS 2010 Road Show

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:02:53 GMT

Today at the Raleigh VS Southern Road Show which was put on by Brian Hitney and Glenn Gordon I had a chance to do a 20 minute lightning talk on MEF. Because I only had 20 minutes, my talk focused on explaining the ‘what and the why’ along with providing 2 (had 3 but only got through 2 of them) straight forward examples on how to use MEF.

I thought it would be good to attach my slide deck (all 6 slides) along w/ my sample code here

Thanks again Brain and Glenn, great show.

Till next time,

Hangin the with guys from Thirsty Developer

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:22:00 GMT

A few weeks back I sat down with Larry Clarkin to record an episode of the Thirsty Developer (a podcast that he and Dave Bost put out) prior to my doing my SOLID session with the WI-Ineta group. Larry and I sat down at a local starbucks to chat about the session as well as just talk shop (Dave was off on assignment some place, but was there in spirit).

Well, Larry went off and actually released the episode (hey, when you chat with me the quality mileage may vary :) ) back a week or so ago while I was on a 2 week hiatus from the net (1 week vacation and 1 week of client visits for work) so I am a little behind in making the announcement about this.

Anyway, if you want to listen to our conversation you can check out here. I hope you like it and I am looking forward to sitting down with them in the future to chat again.

Till next time,

Also, if you do not currently subscribe to their RSS feed I would strongly suggest you give them a listen, they are great guys and a ton of fun

Chicago Code Camp Session List (99% final)

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:32:00 GMT

We have finalized the session list for the Chicago Code Camp (may changes if speakers have to bow out).

Below is the sessions that will make an appearance at the camp

Speaker	Session Title
Aaron Erickson	Code that Writes Code
Aaron Erickson	Introduction to F#
Chris McAvoy	Python
Cory Miller	Introduction to Silverlight 3, what’s new, a developer perspective"
Curtis Mitchel	Rails-like development using ASP.NET
Dan Nawara	Haml/Sass/Tenplate
Dean Wampler	Better Ruby through Functional Programming
Dean Wampler	The Seductions of Scala
Derik Whittaker	Guarding your code with Code Contracts
Derik Whittaker	Take your test to the next level with an Isolation Framework (RhinoMocks)
Dru Sellers	MassTransit
Eric Smith	TDD for the iPhone
Jim Suchy	TDD and JavaScript
Jim Suchy	iPhone on Rails
Keith Dahlby	Introduction to PowerShell
Kevin Gisi	Adding REST, AJAX and Microfromats to any website
Larry Clarkin	Spark View Engine
Len Smith	Get rolling with NHibernate
Len Smith	jQuery Magic
Marc Temkin	Data Visualization with WPF
Micah Martin	Develop your Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) faster than ever, with a thorough suite of unit tests to boot."
Micah Martin	Ruby Kata and Sparring
Michael Eaton	An Introduction to Castle ActiveRecord, or How to stop writing CRUD"
Michael Eaton	Developing Solid WPF Applications
Michael Hall	Introduction to AOP with PostSharp
Narayanan Kulasekar	Tools to build an effective Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process"
Perry Hertler	TDD in the Real World
Rob Lambert	Building and Deploying a Ruby on Rails Application on Amazon EC2
Scott Seely	Introduction to Google App Engine (GAE)
Sean Blanton	Trends in Continuous Integration and Software Delivery
Tim Barcz	Beginner's Guide to Unit Tests
Tim Barcz	Regular Expressions for the .NET Developer

If you would like to attend the camp please signup here:

Till next time,

My upcoming speaking/teaching schedule

Derik Whittaker — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:26:00 GMT

I know it may be kinda lame to self promote like this, but I thought I would put out a list of the upcoming speaking sessions I have over the next few months, plus it is my blog so there…:)

Groking the MVC Framework
– Rockford .Net UG – April 28th
The MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern has been around for quite some time, and is widely considered the best way to develop a web application. With the release of ASP.Net MVC framework this pattern has moved to the head of class in the ASP world. We will take a look at how the MVC pattern is used within Asp.Net MVC and learn how this framework makes developing web applications easier, more maintainable and more extendable
Learning how to utilize Dependency Inversion to loosely couple your code
-- Triangle .Net UG (Raleigh NC) – May 13th
– Lake County .Net UG – May 28th
It is no secret that highly coupled code causes developers pain and suffering every day. Highly coupled code is hard to maintain, painful to read and darn near impossible to test with any degree of confidence. Yet knowing these facts developers still insist on writing highly couple code.

In this session we will take a look examples of highly coupled code and lean how we can utilize the Dependency Inversion principle (part of the SOLID principles) to help free your code from these dependencies. We will do this by evolving an existing codebase which is highly coupled to one which is very loosely coupled. By the end of this session you will be armed with the ability to spot tightly couple code from a mile away along with the knowledge on how to start breaking free from the shackles of coupled code.

Taking your tests to the next level by using an Isolation Framework (RhinoMocks)
-- Chicago Code Camp – May 30th
-- Enterprise Developers Guild (Charlotte) – June 23rd
This session will walk through the progression of testing with an Isolation framework. In the session we will learn how testing in isolation will help remove dependencies which are out of our scope so we are able to create cleaner, simpler and more manageable tests.

During this session we will starts off our journey with a review of testing using NUnit. We will then continue on by creating tests which do not isolate their dependencies in order to understand how highly coupled test can cause random failures during test runs. Finally we will end our journey by learning how to use an isolation framework (RhinoMocks) to decrease the coupling in our tests and increase test reliability.

Guarding your code with Code Contracts
-- Chicago Code Camp – May 30th
It is a common practice to put checks into our code to help ensure quality. Historically these checks have come in the form of if/then statements where you were attempting to guard against data out of range data. Although the if/then method works reasonably well, it only solves half our problem. These checks guard against only data coming into a method, not the data coming out of a method. Fortunately for us, there is a project coming out of Microsoft, named Code Contracts, which will help to solve this problem. Code Contracts provides a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. In this session we will take a look at how you can utilize Code Contracts within your codebase to take your code quality to the next level.

If you are in the area for any of the following and you want to waste perfectly good produce swing buy and give it a hurl.

Till next time,

Congrats to Tim for being voted in as an ASPInsider

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:10:53 GMT

Hey all, I just wanted to say congrats to Tim for being voted in as a ASPInsider. Tim is a very knowledgeable ASP.Net guy who has recently converted over to the MVC side. I look forward to the input that time has to offer to the ASP team.

If you do not know what an ASPInsider is, well here you go:

The Insiders are a select group of international (about 150ish) professionals who have demonstrated expertise in ASP.Net technologies and provide valuable, early feedback on related developing technologies to their peers, the MS ASP.Net team and others.

Congrats again Tim.

Till next time,

Dimecasts.net releases its 100th episode today….W00t

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:37:00 GMT

Wow, it has been a long, fun and exciting time. Today we release our 100th episode on Dimecasts.net, I was not even sure I would stick it out to release the 50th let alone the 100th.

In honor of this milestone I thought I would put out some stats on the site along with various nuggets of information.

Site went live on 5/27/2008
First episode was 'An overview on how to use NUnit’
We have had 7 ‘guest’ authors submit content, with at least a few more in the pipeline
We have about 18000 file downloads a month
We have about 10000 views (watching online) a month
We have about 300gig of monthly transfer
We currently have 4.5 gigs of files we store
We have episodes in 38 different categories, with our most popular being
- MVC
- IoC
- NHibernate
- SOLID
- Testing

I have had a great time with the site, and am really excited with the stuff we have coming down the pipeline in the coming months

Till next time,

Asp.Net MVC 1.0 went live…!

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:39:50 GMT

So, the long awaited release of Asp.Net MVC has gone gold, it is in the books and out the door. This is a great achievement for Phil Haack and the MVC team. I am really glad to see this thing finally get out the door as I personally feel this is a great new product and will go a long way to allowing developers to create a better, more maintainable web site.

Get the bits here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b&displaylang=en

Great job team

Till next time,

Chicago Code Camp coming May 30th

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:15:29 GMT

The ChicagoAlt.Net group and Lake County .Net UG would like to officially announce the Chicago Code Camp which is slated to come to College of Lake County on May 30th. We are hoping to get more than just the .net community involved, we would love to get sessions from the Java, Ruby or anyone else. We will be announcing more information in the coming weeks, but if you would like to submit a talk please send an email to derikATgraudo.com

More info will be out soon.

Seattle here I come

Derik Whittaker — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:01:11 GMT

Like so many other people out there I will be packing up and making the trip out west to Seattle for both the Alt.Net conf (Saturday and Sunday only) and the MVP Summit.

I am looking forward to this trip for many reasons:

Never been to the Emerald City
Love meeting all the great people at the alt.net conferences, and there is always so much to learn
This is my first MVP summit (and who knows may be the last)

Anyway, if you are heading out there and we have never meet, drop me a tweet at @derikwhittaker and say hi and introduce yourself. If we have meet, and there is no restraining on you (and you know who you are :) ) lets have another beer and shoot-the-shit.

See you there

Till next time,

Teamcity.Codebetter.com is alive and kicking

Derik Whittaker — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:47:38 GMT

For the past few months a group of us at Codebetter.com, Devlicio.us, IdeaVine (with special thanks to JetBrains) have been working to create a build system for the .Net open source community. I am happy to announce (here at devlicio.us at least) that as of now it http://teamcity.codebetter.com is officially alive and kicking.

I am not going to give a full rundown on the details, as James Kovacs has done a great job of that here. Check out the post and the site and let us know your thoughts.

Also, if you would like to get your project hosted check out this information.

Register a user account here.
Email teamcity@codebetter.com with the following information:
- Your user account name, which you created above.
- Project name & URL.
- Link to your OSI-approved OSS license.
- URL and type (SVN, CVS, …) of your source control system.
- Build runner (NAnt, MSBuild, Rake, etc.) and default target.
- Any additional requirements you might have.

CodeBetter, JetBrains, IdeaVine, and Devlicio.us are looking forward to providing free continuous integration hosting for the open source community. Please email us at teamcity@codebetter.com if you have any questions or comments.

Till next time,

Talking about NHibernate and Fluent NHibernate on DotNetRocks

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:50:25 GMT

Recently I was asked to join the crew (Richard and Carl) on DotNetRocks. We had a great conversation about my learning NHiberante and using FluentNhibernate. We chatted about how learning new tools can be painful, but the pain comes with a good result in the end.

If you are interested in listening to the episode check it out here.

Hope you enjoy

Till, next time,

[ANN] Programming Asp.Net MVC by O'Reilly

Derik Whittaker — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:20:00 GMT

Well, it is about time we (Tim, Chris and myself) actually made this announcement. We will be doing a MVC book with O'Reilly titled 'Programming MVC'. We are super excited and super pumped to get this out the door. All three of us are huge fans of the MVC framework and know that this is framework going to be smashing success.

The goal of this book is to provide a clear, concise vision on how to build web applications using the MVC framework. Our goal is to walk you though the various parts of the MVC framework and MVC Pattern to all you to have a solid understanding of what the framework can do for you. Once you have mastered the framework, we will then take you on a little journey on how to use the framework to build out your application. By the end of the book our hope is that you will have a solid enough understanding of the framework be able to build a application, but also to know why it does what it does.

Collectively we will all be posting thoughts/content on the book over the coming months, so please stay tuned for more information.

Wish us luck (and send along some caffeine) we will see you on the flip side.

Till next time,

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Derik Whittaker — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:53:07 GMT

Just wanted to send a message out there to anyone that is going to be in the Raleigh/Durham area this week. I will be giving 2 talks this week. One at TriNug and another at the Raleigh Code Camp. If you are in the area and want to stop by to heckle me, please do.

Info on the 2 sessions

TriNug - Taking your Tests to the next level with Mocks

This session will walk through the progression of testing with mocks. We will learn how using mocks, and mocking out dependencies will increase the reliability of your tests. We will also learn why it is important to remove any dependencies that are out of your immediate scope. We will do a quick overview of TDD using NUnit, but the crux of the session will be focused on mocking with RhinoMocks along with the StructureMap AutoMocking Container

Code Camp - Bending the Asp.Net MVC to do Your Bidding, the Virtues of Extensibility

Most frameworks only meet about 80% of our actual needs. This could be due to our unique business needs, because the framework has made some wrong assumptions, or because the framework has a different scope. Therefore, it is the wise framework that recognizes this and builds in extensibility points.
In this session we will learn how to bend the ASP.Net MVC framework to your will. The ASP.Net MVC framework was built with extensibility in mind. Almost every part of it is extensible, from the view engine to the controller factory to the routing engine. We will learn how to make use of the various extension points in the framework and make it do our bidding.

Hope to see everyone out there, both sessions should be great. Even if you have no interest in hearing my MVC talk I encourage you to still attend the Code Camp as there will be great content.

Till next time,

Chicago Alt.Net this Wednesday - Nov 12th

Derik Whittaker — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:49:25 GMT

It is time for this months installment of Chicago Alt.Net meeting. You can register here and get more information from our new site (thanks Sergio) at www.chicagoalt.net.

Meeting Information

The Different Views of ASP.NET MVC

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
The default ASPX view engine in ASP.NET MVC is fine and comfortable but as with just about anything in ASP.NET MVC, you can replace it with alternative engines — and there are a few of those available.

We will be giving an overview of some of the alternative view engines, showing how to install and use them, what brought them about, and why would you use them.

Adam Tybor will be presenting Spark,
Mike Hall will show NHaml,
and TBD (not defined, wanna talk?) will talk about Brail.

7:45 pm
You may want to stick around after the presentation portion of the meeting and take part in our monthly open discussion. The topic is never arranged in advance but it's common that it reflects the content of the presentation.

Please register with your real first and last names because you'll need to identify yourself at the Sears Tower front desk. The front desk will have the list of attendees. If you can't register in time, show up anyway and call Sergio (224-627-8352) when you get to the front desk and we will let you in.

I hope everyone has a good time, I am not going to be able to make it this month as I will be out of town on business.

Till next time,