Another AADND Success

We had another great night at AADND! On Wednesday night, Jennifer Marsman kicked off our meeting by introducing us to some of the basics of 3D graphics in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). She introduced us to XAML - the markup lanuague behind WPF - and introduced us to some of the considerations we are need to be aware of (camera angles, lighting, etc.) before introducing 3D graphics into your applications.

Drew Robbins finished the meeting by transforming a dull and unwieldy application into a visually appealing and very user-friendly application without touching any of the underlying functionality of the code! Drew guided us through some of the new user controls that will be available to us as well as more XAML. The most impressive portion of the demo was when he took a basic listbox with the file paths of individual photos and changed it into a series of thumbnails that responded intuitively to mouse movement and clicks. In short, if you develop user interfaces, you want to spend some time with WPF.

Drew Robbins Speaking at AADND

Drew Robbins, Developer Evangelist from Microsoft and the scary looking dude you see to the left, will be speaking at our next AADND meeting on February 14th. The topic is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and if you haven't seen it in action, now is the time. I've also heard a rumor that Jennifer Marsman, Drew's co-Evangelist, will be doing a tutorial session. I don't have a bio for Jennifer yet - I'm sure she will be sending it soon, but here's the bio for Drew.

Drew Robbins is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft in the Heartland District. Drew has over 12 years of experience using Microsoft products as both an IT Professional and Application Developer. Before joining Microsoft, Drew was already very active in the developer community on both a local and global level. He served in central Ohio as a Microsoft Regional Director (honorary Microsoft position), establishing a major user group and working in several enterprise accounts. Drew was also recognized as a Microsoft MVP for his role in community and expertise in Visual Studio and ASP.NET. Drew mobilized the global developer community through blogging websites that drove buzz and participation in conferences such as TechEd, PDC and DevDays. Drew is a regular presenter at local and regional events on Microsoft technology and development methodology.

AADND Success

Well, what can I say? AADND was a huge success. I haven't kept close track of the numbers in the past, but we were pretty close to a record turnout. Of course, when Matt Winkler is you speaker, there isn't much selling you have to do. And he certainly did deliver. Windows Workflow is really going to change the way you architect your applications and you need to know how. Doing so with Matt just makes the process a bit more clear and a lot more fun. If you were in attendance last night, you certainly know what I am talking about. Look for his slide deck at AADND later today.

Just a couple of "thank you"s before I end this post...

• Dave Redding - worked hard on promoting this and has proven to be a strong leader.


• Dave Baldwin - Keeps right on top of the website and has some fantastic - and very aggressive - ideas.


• Dave Pease - Created the flyers that we posted around U of M and WCC. Defintely a future Board member.


• Scott Zischerk - Yet another future board member. Great ideas.


• Bill Wagner - He's the president - and my boss - who was there the for much needed advice.

and our Microsoft folks...

• Josh Holmes - Thanks for booking Matt when you were still program chair for AADND and staying involved in the group


• Drew Robbins - Thanks for the pizza!


• Jennifer Marsman - Thanks for getting Matt to the meeting on time.


• Gautam Reddy - We've only just begun using his expertise

Matt Winkler Speaking at AADND on January 10

That's right. Matt Winkler, Technical Evangelist for Windows Workflow, will be speaking at AADND on January 10, 2007 in downtown Ann Arbor, MI. You've heard me prattle on and on about WCF, but WF is equally cool - maybe even more so. This is really going to change the way you architect your applications. Come and check it out.

A little about Matt...
Matt Winkler is the Technical Evangelist for Windows Workflow. He was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, home of Budweiser, the Cardinals and toasted ravioli. After college at Denison University, he returned to work for a consulting firm and a software development firm. For the last few years he has been focused on integration and workflow technologies, so he's very excited about Windows Workflow, and looking forward to finding many different cool uses for it.

WCF Webcast - Finally

Yes, my webcast is done. Hard to believe, I know. But in fairness, it was a bigger task than I originally thought. After a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to discuss, I had to try to cut the content down to my 5 minute limit - a task that apparently was too much for me. One of the things that pained me to cut was an overview of some common exceptions and what to do to fix them. These are the basic exceptions that somebody new to WCF may not figure out right away. Things like mismatching bindings or calling the wrong port. I also didn't talk about the code generated by the svcutil.exe utility. Something I did leave in was the evil practice of defining endpoints and behaviors in code. Why take out the good and leave in the bad you ask? There are two reasons. First, I think most developers are more comfortable working with traditional languages as opposed to XML. Secondly, I think there will be a real appreciation for the configuration file when I begin refactoring. Of course, this pretty much sets me up for promising episode 2 sometime in the near future!

So here it is: a twelve minute introduction to creating a simple webservice using WCF while ignoring best practices.

Also, a special thank you goes out to Scott Zischerk for calling me out on NOT having my webcast done a lot earlier. Thaaaaanks, Scott!

WCF Webcast Episode 1

WCF Webcasts, Java and CodeMash

First off, I thought I was going to be able to jump right into my WCF webcasts that I promised, but it appears that I am going to have to put a little more thought into this. First off, I want to design my webcasts to be as short and focused as possible - hopefully five minutes or less. Why the limitation? I was listening to Mark Miller on an old episode of dotnetrocks (do yourself a favor and listen) talk about the great features we develop that are only ignored by the customer. Why do they ignore, you ask? Because customers don't know it's there and/or they don't know how to use it. One of his ideas to combat the problem was to was to include brief training videos no more than 5 minutes long in the help "infrastructure". I heard this and said, "hmmmmmmmmmmm....I know! I'm going to steal Miller's idea and tell everyone I came up with it"! Inject the evil scientist laugh here. All kidding aside, I think he brings up a great point for a couple of reasons. One, if you are new to a particular application, you will hit the help files and the internet a lot looking for very easy answers. I do not often find easy answers in help files. I do, however, seem to get a lot out of watching someone explain what they are doing while they are coding. As proof of this, I just recently listened to Miguel Castro talk about web controls on dotnetrocks AND watch similar content on dnrTV. The difference was amazing. I got so much more out of the dnrTV episodes (btw, this is no knock against dotnetrocks. I condider myself a loyal fan). Unfortunately, I can't watch dnrTV for an hour everytime I have a problem. Therefore, I feel very short, well-defined segments are far more helpful than hundreds of lines in a help file. I could be wrong here (or I suppose Mark Miller could be wrong), but I doubt it. Therefore, I'm looking I'm looking at the entirety of what I'm trying to develop before I begin. I'll keep you posted.

Last post, I was talking about Java. If you're one of the two people who read my blog, you'll know that I'm reading Thining in Java. I'm getting ready for CodeMash and want to be able to intelligently discuss platform differences - something I consider a shortcoming of mine. Well, I've read a couple hundred pages and I can tell you there is little difference at the superficial leve between Java and .NET. Makes sense, since Java was a bit of a model for .NET. One interesting point is that I feel I'm learning a lot about .NET by doing the examples in the book. Who would have thunk?


Have you registerd for CodeMash yet? If not, WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!? Here is a conference that has Scott Guthrie, Neal Ford and Bruce Eckel lined up as keynote speakers, something few of us have thought could ever happen. Register now at www.codemash.org. You want to be part of this one.