Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp 2007

I just had a great time down in Cincinnati yesterday. Mike Wood, Jim Holmes and a lot of other people I'm not even aware of put on the second Annual Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp and what a great time! My talk, Balancing WCF Security and Performance, went really well. It was a small, yet very engaged group. I believe everyone in the room had some sort of service programming experience, whether it was Web Services, Remoting or WCF. They were an impressive group. The talk had an "Open-Spaces" feel to it.

I only sat in on a couple of talks, Nino Benvenuti's SQL CE discussion and Dustin Campbell's Back to Basics, and learned a lot in both. If you have any interest in SQL and are a bit confused by the different products out there (i.e., SQL CE, SQL Mobile, SQL Everywhere, etc) catch Nino's talk. Dustin's talk was applicable to everyone. Interestingly, this was all about writing quality code yet we never really typed any. Dustin was thrilled when a young lady that had been sitting in on this session approached and told him how wonderful his talk was. I think he was blushing.

I've got more I want to talk about, but I have to get back home. I'm writing this from my hotel room in Cinci and need to get on the road. I still haven't talked about the after-party where Dustin has finally convinced me to watch this series of videos from MIT. He is extremely enthusiastic about them and it's about time I find out why. NOW, I'm leaving.

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 WebcastProgress

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how I am going to approach these WCF webcast. I had to make a decision between demonstrating the simplest possible examples and demonstrating the best practices. After much consideration, I've decided on a combination approach. The initial screencast will simply get a server app and client app speaking to one another - the simplest possible approach. Subsequent episodes will focus on transforming this very simple application into a more complex, but better designed application. I have enough of my demo application done to do three or four of my mini-webcasts so hopefully I can start working this weekend.

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.