DotNetDevDude

That Conference: I’ll be there, you should be too!

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:41:41 GMT

Once again I am plugging That Conference! Why? Because it is going to kick ass and you will not want to miss it!

In a previous post I highlighted some of the nationally recognized top-notch speakers that will be Counselors at the event. What I didn’t mention is that I have been given the honor of presenting not one but two sessions at That Conference. Below are the two sessions I will be doing.

Going Native with KendoUI Mobile
The number of people using their smartphones or tablets to access the web has grown to the point where having a presence on mobile devices has become a must for anyone with a website. But to be truly successful your mobile presence has to differentiate itself from the mobile web entirely and straddle that line between web and native application. In the past this meant having specific styles and often views for each specific mobile platform you wanted to target, but this is no longer necessary thanks to Kendo UI Mobile.

In this talk Keith will demonstrate how using HTML5 and Kendo UI Mobile you can write one application with a single set of styles and views that looks truly native on iOS, Android, and Blackberry. Keith will walk through creating a mobile application from start to finish including how to use PhoneGap to package and deploy your website to the major mobile application stores.

HTML5 – It’s Not Just for Hipsters
HTML5 is the current “Big Thing” in web technologies. HTML5 has already been crowned the “Write Once Run Everywhere” toolset, even running on the desktop. But we .NET guys seem to once again, be left behind. The lack of tooling in Visual Studio along with the fact that most .NET web developers do not consider themselves HTML developers is really causing .NET developers to already be behind the 8 ball when it comes to HTML5 development.

In this talk Keith will cover the features of HTML5 that all .NET developers should know about and be taking advantage of. He will also cover, how contrary to popular belief the tooling is there and you can start coding HTML5 in Visual Studio now. Keith will also demonstrate that HTML5 development does not require a completely new toolset, you can leverage your current skills including all your favorite .NET server technologies when doing HTML5 development.

I highly suggest you take a look at the awesome array of sessions that will be presented at That Conference in each of the 4 tracks:

On top of the Give Camp leading in to the event there are a number of other awesome events being planned. Unfortunately these events are still in the planning phase so I can’t go in to detail but I can stress Do Not Miss That Conference!

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

That Conference: Do Not Miss This Chance!

DotNetDevDude — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:47:42 GMT

That Conference announced the initial session line up earlier this week and in a word AWESOME!

The official speaker line up will be announced shortly and includes the following;

For a line up like that you would expect to have to travel to one of the coast’s and spend a fortune but that is not the case. That Conference was formed under the premise of bringing a top quality conference (speakers, content, etc.) to the upper Midwest that everyone can afford to attend. If you are in the Midwest this is an excellent opportunity that you should not miss! Registration opens May 16th at 8:13am CST. You will want to get in early as this is going to be one hot ticket.

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

Getting Started with KendoUI in ASP.NET MVC

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:01:26 GMT

I have recently started diving in to KendoUI and have decided to document that dive and blog about it. So this is the first post in a series dedicated to using KendoUI in ASP.NET MVC.

KendoUI is a JavaScript toolset developed by Telerik that leverages jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to provide rich UI widgets and an MVVM framework that is ‘scary fast’. The thing that really drew me to KendoUI in the first place is there native skinning on mobile devices. Unlike vanilla jQuery Mobile that renders the same iOS-esque view on all mobile devices KendoUI Mobile applies specific native-looking styles for iOS, Android, and Blackberry. Over the series of posts I have planned we will cover exactly what KendoUI brings to the table for both the ‘desktop’ web and the mobile web, but today I will cover getting KendoUI installed and configured in an ASP.NET MVC application.

Before we dive in to getting the bits I want to prepare you…KendoUI is not free. I know, I was surprised by this as well and it actually delayed my dive in to it for a bit. In all honesty I am still not 100% sure how I feel about it not being free. What I do know is that as a long time user of Telerik products they produce damn good tooling and there support system is second to none. If you want to just play around with KendoUI there is a 60-day free trial available.

Update: I received a comment from a member of the KendoUI team, thanks John, and my statement above needs some clarification. KendoUI is dual licensed (GPLv3 and commercial), so although it is not free for commercial use they do support open source development. You can can get the official terms here: http://www.kendoui.com/get-kendo-ui.aspx

Note: To prepare for experimenting with KendoUI I created an empty MVC 4 project, that of course is not empty, and removed all scirpt and css files (other than Site.css). I then removed all script and css registrations in _Layout.cshtml. I did this because I wanted to deal strictly with KendoUI without all the other *noise* of the other script references.

You can download the KendoUI bits here: http://www.kendoui.com/get-kendo-ui.aspx

Once downloaded and unzipped copy the contents of the ‘js’ directory to the ‘Scripts’ directory of your ASP.NET MVC application and the contents of the ‘styles’ directory to the ‘Content’ directory.

Next you need to register the scripts and CSS files that KendoUI needs in the _Layout.cshtml.

_Layout.cshtml

DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<meta charset="utf-8" />

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

<title>@ViewBag.Titletitle>

<script src="~/Scripts/jquery.min.js">script>

<script src="~/Scripts/kendo.all.min.js">script>

<link href="~/Content/kendo.common.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

<link href="~/Content/kendo.default.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

head>

<body>

@RenderBody()

body>

html>

That’s it. KendoUI is now wired up. Pretty much the same process as wiring up jQuery. So now we can do a quick implementation to prove it.

If you followed my lead and created an empty project you you will need to create a controller and a view at this point.

The actual implementation of KendoUI is almost identical to that of jQuery which makes the ramp up time a lot less if you are familiar with jQuery.

Index.cshtml

@{

ViewBag.Title = "Getting
Started With KendoUI";

}

<script type="text/javascript">

$(document).ready(function(){

$("#datePicker").kendoDatePicker();

});

script>

<h2>@ViewBag.Titleh2>

<input id="datePicker" />

As you can see on line 13 I have an input tag with and id of datepicker and then starting on line 5 I have my document ready function that selects the control with id of datepicker and calls the ‘kendoDatePicker’ function it. The result is below.

In the next installment we will dig deeper into the different controls available in KendoUI.

If you want to follow along with the source code it is available on GitHub.

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

ASP.NET MVC: Putting Your Controllers In A Separate Assembly

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:02:14 GMT

Having been a part of many large enterprise ASP.NET MVC application implementations using test driven development I learned early on that separating your controller classes into a their own project significantly reduces the noise in your web project. It wasn’t until a recent talk I gave to user group in my region that I realized that this isn’t a widely adopted practice. For large applications with a lot of developers and a complex architecture I highly recommend it.

Putting your controllers in a separate assembly is very straight forward. First create a controllers project in your solution and then you just need to update your route registrations to tell them where to look for the controllers.

routes.MapRoute(name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", 

namespaces: new[]
{"[Namespace of the Project
that contains your controllers]"}, 

defaults: new {controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional});

In order to tell ASP.NET MVC where to look for your controllers when registering your routes you use the ‘namespaces’ parameter of the MapRoute method as illustrated above.

I know that the concept of putting controllers in a separate assembly is a bit controversial and everyone seems to have a strong opinion either for or against, so let me know what side of the fence you fall on.

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

Updated: Unit Test ReSharper Live Templates

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:09:59 GMT

Back in 2009 I published ReSharper Live Template For Creating Unit Test Stub. A lot of things have changed since 2009, including my templates. Since I am doing another series of presentations on Test Driven Development I thought I should get these out because people always ask for them.

As stated in my original post these templates are a way for you to create unit test names that help in describing the true intentions of the test and also to provide a common unit test format that will make reading and comprehending your unit tests easier on everyone. And of course as lazy developers any redundancies should be automated!

The first template is for a unit test that does not have specific input criteria.

Test
w/out Input Criteria

[TestMethod]

public void $MethodUnderTest$_Should_$ExpectedResult$()
{

//Arrange

$END$

//Act

//Assert

}

The second template is for a unit test that has specific input criteria.

Test
with Input Criteria

[TestMethod]

public void $MethodUnderTest$_Should_$ExpectedResult$_When_$Condition$()
{

//Arrange

$END$

//Act

//Assert

}

You can take the two templates and create new Live Templates and map to whatever key stroke combination you wish. I use ‘tt’ and ‘tw’.

Note: I have been using these Live Templates since ReSharper 3 and I am currently using them in the latest build of ReSharper 6 without any issues so you should be good to go.

As always if you feel these can be improved on or have other Live Templates you want to share let me know in the comments below.

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

Failing Gracefully: Life As a Tech Speaker

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:52:40 GMT

The week of March 25th – 31st was one of highs and lows for me.

The Good

Monday through Thursday I was in Las Vegas to speak at VSLive. The conference was a blast. Awesome speakers, interesting content, and fun events. Not to mentioning the networking with my peers. My talk on Thursday went very well and I received great reviews. Oh yeah, and I was upgraded to First Class on both legs. Life was good!

I left Las Vegas immediately after my talk and was back at work on Friday morning…uneventful day.

Saturday I got up bright and early and headed to Milwaukee for Deeper In .NET. I have attended Deeper In .NET many times and it is always a great event. This year was lucky enough to be chosen as one of five speakers for the day long event. The event went very well until 20 minutes into the last presentation of the day…mine.

The Bad and The Ugly

I was doing my Reach The Mobile Masses With ASP.NET MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile, the same presentation I did 2 days earlier in Las Vegas and using the same machine. The trouble started with VS11 Beta creating half of a solution when I went to create a new MVC 4 project with the mobile application template. I was able to skip over that issue with out too much trouble. Shortly there after the machine started acting wonky and I was starting to get that feeling in the pit of my stomach, you know the one, and it happened…BSOD! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

After the initial feeling of dread it was time to boot back up and quickly get back into it it…until I realized the machine was not powering back on. And my heart sank! Here I am in front of over 300 of my peers with a neon #FailWhale sign pointing directly at me.

In an attempt to salvage things I started taking questions of the audience and for about 10 minutes that was going well…until the microphone died. Seriously! it was just not meant to be. The event organizers finally threw in the towel on me and declared it a KO, and swag time.

The Lessons

As that was my first huge fail in public speaking I learned that I handle myself fairly well under pressure (I think)
- At first I had the urge to pack up after the BSOD, but then realized that these people came to learn and the least I could do is do my best to answer their questions.
People are nicer and more respectful than I give them credit for.
- Multiple people asked if I wanted to use their machine once mine puked.
- At least 10 people came up to me afterwards and offered their condolences.
- Not one negative tweet came across the events Twitter hash tag.
- No one threw tomatoes or empty bottles.
Always have presentation materials available on an external device of some sort in case of emergency machine swap.
Don’t trust beta software for coding heaving presentations. (I was using VS11 beta and MVC4 Beta)
My deodorant works as advertised.
In the end all you can do is “Smile and wave boys. Smile and wave.”

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

Next Midwest Give Camp

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:06:18 GMT

I am very honored and excited about leading up the efforts for the next Midwest Give Camp. For this installment we have been lucky enough to team up with the folks at That Conference and are hoping to ride the hype and excitement of this awesome event for another successful and rewarding Give Camp.

The Give Camp will be held at the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells, WI Saturday August 11th through Sunday August 12th, the weekend leading into That Conference.

We are working with an awesome charity that will no doubt be very familiar and close to a lot of your hearts and once we have all the details ironed out I will be going public with them.

For now block off the dates on your calendar and stay tuned for more details!

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

Skyline Give Camp

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:27:59 GMT

Last weekend I had the pleasure of being a part of the first Skyline Give Camp. If you are not familiar with the Give Camp concept you can found out more here. What it boils down to is a bunch of people, mostly developers but project managers and designers as well, get together for 2 to 3 days, typically Friday through Sunday, and do some sort of work for a charity. Typically this involves either creating a new website for the charity or enhancing the charity’s current website. I have been involved in Give Camps in the past and find them to be very rewarding. The Give Camps that I have been involved in in the past have been in the Chicago area and open to the public usually with only the die hardest of community geeks attending.

About a month back I was approached by my boss and two of my colleagues about helping with an internal Give Camp for a charity called Riverview Gardens. I thought this would be a great learning opportunity for everyone involved as well as an opportunity to give back to the local community so I got on board…but I was leery. By this time the people I was approached by had already been working with the charity and had mock ups of what they wanted. In my past Give Camp experiences the work had always been limited to a public facing website, but this charity already had a public facing site in the works. What Skyline would be providing for the charity was a full featured volunteer management system not only for the desktop web browser, but also for the mobile web as well as native iPhone and Android applications. Needless to say this was a huge undertaking.

The amount of work was not my only concern. Typically these events are held in major hubs, like Chicago, and they draw developers from all over the Midwest. For this Give Camp the pool was Skyline employees, currently about 100 people, so I was worried about the turn out. Would there be enough interest in the event to even get it off the ground? We put out a survey to all employees and I was amazed by the great response. Out of a pool of 100 people, where actually only 80 or so are developers/designers/project managers, we had 30 people signed up. That is outstanding, and truly a testament to the type of people I have the pleasure to work with at Skyline Technologies.

Another concern I had was that in order to make the event a learning experience and to get in some free training for the attendees we chose to go with ASP.NET MVC 4, Entity Framework Code First, jQuery and jQuery Mobile for the desktop web and mobile web applications and Web API for our RESTful service layer. These are all new technologies that the majority of the people signed up to participate had very little working experience with.

So we did some planning, broke everyone into teams and prepared for the big event.

The event went off without a hitch. The eagerness to learn and to teach by everyone involved was outstanding. I was amazed at not only the amount of work that was accomplished but by the quality of work. At the wrap of day 2 we estimated that in total we where ~85% complete with the work. Unfortunately since the sites and apps we created are not public you will have to just take my word for it

This event was truly a testament to the type of organization that Skyline Technologies is and to the people that make up the Skyline family. I look forward to being a part of it for a very long time and hopefully we can make the Skyline Give Camp a yearly event, or maybe every other year…I am not as young as I used to be.

Oh yeah…did I mention we are hiring!

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

Visual Studio 11 Beta–Install Hung Up on ‘ultimate_finalizer’

DotNetDevDude — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:23:05 GMT

In case you haven’t heard the beta version of Visual Studio 11 was released on February 29th. You can get the bits here. I ran into an issue when I was installing VS 11 Beta on 3 of my 4 machines and according to Microsoft.Connect others are encountering the same issue.

The issue is that the install runs just fine to about 98% complete and then hangs on Applying ultimate_finalizer. I let this step chug away for a good hour during the my first 2 installs and then eventually canceled it. After cancelling it you receive a message stating something along the lines of “97 of 99 components installed successfully”. My first try I was happy with that result, those last 2 components probably weren’t all that important anyway . At first everything worked fine but then when it was time to do some actual coding and pull source down from TFS Preview I kept encountering all kinds of cryptic errors. My first thought was to uninstall, but then I thought I would try the ‘repair’ functionality included on the VS11 Beta install. The repair chugged for awhile and required 2 restarts. The original install only required 1 restart. Come to find out that 2nd restart is important because it wraps the entire process up. So after running the repair everything is working fine.

So if you encounter this issue, this is currently the only workaround. Check out Microsoft.Connect for details on the issue and to see if an actual bug has been found related to this issue.

This weblog is sponsored by newtelligence AG. Happy fan of

Certifications–What are your thoughts?

DotNetDevDude — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:27:00 GMT

I am currently in the process of getting my Microsoft Certification mainly because I was told I should. I have started the process 3 times previously in my career but quickly “fell of the wagon” due to priorities I deemed more important such as bringing you this awesome blog content . I guess I have never really placed a lot of importance in certifications and figured that my past work/reputation are enough. Anyone can pass a test with enough memorization of content, but not everyone can deliver quality software applications.

My thoughts on certification

I have never lost an opportunity as a consultant because I was not certified.
Certification is beneficial to new grads/ new entries in the software development work force.
Experience and proven track record should far out way a certification.
The content, at least in Microsoft exams, does not reflect the world.
You should be reimbursed for your time and fees should be covered by your employer and /or a comparable bonus should be awarded.

So, the point of this post, other than to get something out quick so I can get back to studying for said certification exam 1, is to ask a few questions to you my loyal audience.

Are you certified in any technology/methodology/software practice?
If you are certified:

What are you certified in?
Why did you get certified?
Did the content you study reflect the real world?
Did you ever lose an opportunity prior to certification because you where not certified?
Since becoming certified have you gotten an opportunity because you are certified?
Did your employer provide compensation/bonus for becoming certified?
What have you gained by becoming certified?
Was it worth it?

If you are not certified:
1. Why aren’t you?

I would love to hear what everyone has to say on this. Thanks for your time.

newtelligence AG

Happy fan of