Vinay Ahuja

Tallahassee Code Camp - Session Resources

vinay.ahuja — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:27:00 GMT

I enjoyed presenting in Tallahassee Code Camp last weekend on September 22nd, 2007. I presented 3 sessions on C# 3.0, Design Patterns, and Scrum. Here are the details on the sessions and the resources.

Overview of C# 3.0
This session will introduce you to the various new features of C# 3.0 – Automatically implemented properties, Object and type initializers, Lambda expressions, type inference, and LINQ queries.

Presentation
Source Code [for complete solution, last state]
Visual Studio Settings File for Code Snippets in Toolbox [Use Tools --> Import Export Settings to import this settings file in your environment, once import is successful you'll see the code snippets I was using in Toolbox]

I was using Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite VPC for my demos. You can download it from here.

Other Resources on C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008
Visual C# Developer Center
Visual Studio Developer Center
Overview of Visual Studio 2008 - A Whitepaper
Overview of C# 3.0
C# 3.0 Unified Language Specification

The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET
Have you worked on a design problem and thought if there was a standard solution to that? Have you thought of enhancing your design vocabulary to add factories, facades, proxies, decorators, visitors, mediators, and bridges etc? Come to this session to learn about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an elegant, tested, well documented, and reusable solution to standardized software design problem. This session will look at some of the standard Gang of Four (GoF) Patterns. GoF patterns are divided broadly into creational, structural, and behavioral categories. We'll discuss when, why, and how to use them with real world scenarios. The demos would be in C#.

Presentation
Head First Design Patterns - Book Home Page
C# Code Examples
C# Code Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005

You would need NUnit to run the unit tests from the project.

Agile Development using Scrum
Welcome to the world of pigs and chickens, scrum lords, stand up meetings, product backlog, burn down graphs, and much more. We’ll introduce you to Scrum, an agile software development process. I’ll be explaining my experience from a current project to discuss what it takes to scrumify an existing/new project. This would be an interactive session and audience participation would be highly encouraged. Come prepared to learn and share best practices in agile development.

Presentation

Resources on Scrum
http://www.controlchaos.com
http://www.implementingscrum.com
Scrum Podcast - HanselMinutes - Podcast #23

Please refer to the presentation slides for more resources. I prepared a 3 page sheet on various resources. If you need a copy, please send me an email.

The attendance in all my sessions was really good - from 20-35 people.Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions. I would love to hear your feedback. Please contact me with any comments/questions. I was very pleased with how the audience responded to all my talks. The turnout in this year's code camp was much better compared to last year. According to Steve Lane (Primary organizer along with Jose Fuentes), there were 160+ people who attended the code camp. It was good to see Shawn Weisfeld, Joe Healy, Jeff Barnes, Russ Fustino, Wes Dumey, Bayer White, Mike Mollenhour, Keith Rowe, Kelvin McDaniel, Jacob Sanford, and John Dunagan

As I was presenting a session on Scrum, I decided to listen to Rob Eisenberg's and Christopher Bennage's sessions on Agile Development. I must say those sessions were very insightful. I learnt a lot from those sessions. Those were only the sessions that I could attend, beyond presenting my own 3 sessions.

Another notable mention was Jacob Sanford's book celebration in the after party. Jacob has written an excellent book on ASP.NET Design. Congratulations to him.

Overall it was a very well organized event. Thanks and kudos to all the organizers.

Jacksonville Code Camp - Session Resources - The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET

vinay.ahuja — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:40:00 GMT

Jacksonville Code Camp this past weekend was a blast. I'll be writing a detailed entry on the event itself sometime later today. In addition to being one of the primary organizers for the event, I presented one session and coordinated a "Show your coolest code" contest (more details in separate post). I presented a session titled - The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET. Similar to Tampa Code Camp, I had more than 40 people in this session. Thanks to everyone who attended. I hope you enjoyed the talk. This time I played some humor clips in the beginning and end of the talk and they seemed to be received well. In essence, one of the objectives of a Code Camp is to have fun as well (people coming on Saturday to learn).

Here is the abstract for the session:

The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET - Have you worked on a design problem and thought if there was a standard solution to that? Have you thought of enhancing your design vocabulary to add factories, facades, proxies, decorators, and bridges etc? Come to this session to learn about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an elegant, tested, well documented, and reusable solution to standardized software design problem. This session will look at some of the standard Gang of Four (GoF) Patterns. GoF patterns are divided broadly into creational, structural, and behavioral categories. We'll discuss when, why, and how to use them with real world scenarios. The demos would be in C#.

Here are the presentation slides and demo source code:

Resources
Presentation Slides – The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET
Head First Design Patterns - Book Home Page
C# Code Examples
C# Code Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005

You would need NUnit to run the unit tests from the project.

Thanks once again for attending this session. Please feel free to contact me with any questions / comments.

Vinay

Running for President

vinay.ahuja — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:35:00 GMT

Well, I am not running for president of America, for which elections will happen early next year. I am not even runing for President of India, for which the elections concluded recently. I am running for President of Jacksonville Developers User Group. Yesterday, I had sent Dennis Bottjer, the current president of the group answer to three questions - Who am I?, What I will do as President? and Why I would like to be the President?

I wanted to share those responses with everyone here.

Who am I?

Technical
I have more than 8 years of experience in designing, developing, and architecting enterprise scale applications using Microsoft Technologies. I am a passionate software developer / architect and love to venture into cutting edge technologies. I am a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Visual C#. I am a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer in .NET and working towards MCTS. I did my Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from a prestigious university in India. I graduated with M.S. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Dallas.

Community - Technical
Currently, I serve as Secretary and Special Interest Group (SIG) Coordinator for Jacksonville Developers User Group (http://www.jaxdug.com) (Since October 2005). I was instrumental in organizing last year’s Jacksonville Code Camp. I am a strong proponent of knowledge sharing and community development. I have spoken extensively in Code Camps in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Last year, for few months, I was also part of INETA’s Technology Committee.

Community – Non Technical
I love working with the community and helping them. Apart from my association with JaxDUG, I have been associated with Hindu Society of Jacksonville for the last 4 years and served as Chair of Youth Committee from 2004-2006. Since, 2005 I am also the Regional Coordinator for North South Foundation. This non-profit organization organizes spelling, math, essay, geography bee and other contests for kids of Indian origin. In 2005-2006, I was associated with a local toastmasters group as Treasurer and VP of Education as well.

What I would do as president?
We have done really well as a user group over the past years. There are some things I would like to see more structured and execute my ideas around. These items are in no particular order.

Speakers
-    Develop local speaker pool by giving them structured opportunities
-    Get UG Members feedback on which speakers they would like to see and present

Meetings
-    Explore different meeting styles – Discussion based, 2 speakers in one night, Bring your own presentation, Interactive debate on technology
-    Meeting reminders and communication
-    Feedback on meeting, future topics
-    Attendance

Events
-    Keep Code camp as an yearly event
-    Organize 1 day technology focused events on a weekend. These events can be based out of the need of the community / local businesses

Web Site
-    Shows meetings and events for the next 3 months preferably
-    Refinement

Collaboration with other User Groups
-    Other User groups in the area in different technologies
-    User groups in Florida
-    INETA

Collaboration with local businesses
-    Assess needs of organizations from a training perspective (brought up by Marshall Harrison)
-    Get speakers on those topics

Newsletter
-    Have a weekly newsletter with all events coming up locally and in Florida

Special Interest Groups
-    Encourage and support people who want to start focused groups
-    Try to get financial support
-    Raffle prizes

UG Meetings and Events Sponsorship Structure
-    Structure around how organizations can sponsor meetings
-    Associated benefits and costs matrix

UG Organizational Structure
-    Role based organization
-    Advertise opportunities to get involved
-    Recognize all people involved
-    Prepare for sustainability and growth of user group

Actually, these are the items that came to my mind while thinking about it. I would take every suggestion as an opportunity and evaluate it with an open mind along with the group. We have to do things that make our user group one of the strongest knit communities not only in Florida but all over the nation.

Why I want to be the president?

•    To serve the technical community
•    Bring ideas and refreshing changes for growth and betterment
•    Develop my own leadership skills

The president is only a facilitator that guides the leadership team and the community. I certainly look forward to the support of able volunteers and advisors. By being a president, I would be the torch bearer, however it is the community and the team that will strive for excellence.

Given the opportunity to serve, I'll do my best to implement the above mentioned ideas. If you would like to support me, or have any questions or comments, please reply to this post or come to the User Group meeting tonight - July 25th, 2007. More information on JaxDUG Web Site.

Actually, I just noticed that Dennis has posted a blog entry regarding elections.

Microsoft E-Learning - Free Courses

vinay.ahuja — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:53:00 GMT

There are several developer clinic courses available for free on Microsoft E-Learning Site on various technologies. You just need a passport account to login. Most of these clinics can be downloaded and viewed offline using Microsoft Offline Reader. I knew about this link and thought I would share it.

Here are the courses that are free:

Collection 5134: Developing Rich Experiences with Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio® 2005
Clinic 5135 : Introduction to Developing with Windows® Presentation Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005
Clinic 3402: ASP.NET for PHP Developers: Introduction to ASP.NET
Clinic 5230 : Developing Enhanced Web Experiences with Microsoft® ASP.NET AJAX Extensions
Clinic 5045: Inside Look at Developing with Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0
Clinic 5046: Inside Look at Building and Developing Solutions with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

Enjoy

Tampa Code Camp – Resources – Power Tips for Orcas IDE for C# - July 14th, 2007

vinay.ahuja — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 05:44:00 GMT

Here are the resources for my Power Tips for Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) IDE for C# session from Tampa Code Camp. I had some problems with the Orcas VPC and could not show my Linq examples. Ryan Morgan was very helpful and let me use his laptop that had Orcas installed. We did lose some time in this changeover. However, I am satisfied that I was able to show some very cool tips for Visual Studio IDE for C#.

Presentation Slides – Power Tips for Visual Studio Orcas IDE for C#

Currently, I am working on a reference sheet for all the tips and would be posting it in few days. I’ll also be posting a list of resources for C# IDE Tips and Tricks.

- Vinay

Tampa Code Camp – Resources – Design Patterns - July 14th, 2007

vinay.ahuja — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 05:26:00 GMT

Tampa Code Camp was a very well attended event. I presented couple of sessions. One of them was on Design Patterns. I talked about some of the Gang of Four patterns. It was in one of the first slots in the morning. There were about 50 people in the room, some of them standing too. Honestly, I did not expect so many people to show up. Thanks to everyone who came to this session. I hope you liked the session. I tried to get feedback from people who had used Design Patterns in their projects. Thanks to those who shared their experiences and scenarios. It’s always good to learn from others’ experiences.

Both my sessions had logistical challenges too. I was standing in the back of the room, near the control panel and laptop. The projector was in the front. I was not able to look at the participants for more than half the time. For this talk, Shawn Weisfeld helped me with progressing my slides. Thanks Shawn. I feel the presentation went really well. This time I did not know whether there will be session evaluations, so I had printed my own session feedback forms. The dozen forms that I receieved had encouraging feedback. Many people pointed out that there was too much content. I knew that was going to happen, however it is a hard problem to deal with when you're assuming that the attendees know the basics and have just 1 hour to get through. My main objective was to create an awareness around patterns, and I think I achieved that. I did emphasize that one should not over-engineer using patterns, considering today's agile world and other reasons.

Here are the presentation slides and demo source code:

Resources
Presentation Slides – The Art of Design using Design Patterns in C#
Head First Design Patterns - Book Home Page
C# Code Examples
C# Code Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005

You would need NUnit to run the unit tests from the project.
There were couple of questions that came up during the talk. I’ll be posting the answers in a separate blog entry.

- Using Composition over Inheritance
- Singleton Design Pattern in Distributed Scenarios

Thanks once again for attending this session. Please feel free to contact me for any questions.

Vinay

Follow up to Jacksonville Developers User Group Meeting - July 11th, 2007

vinay.ahuja — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 05:22:00 GMT

It was nice to present at JAXDUG meeting on Wednesday It was a small group that attended this meeting. We had some interesting discussion. I talked on Design Patterns and demonstrated some of the Gang of Four Patterns from the classic design patterns book - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series).

My talk was based on the code examples from the book - Head First Design Patterns (Head First). This book takes a look at various design patterns in a very lively manner with fun examples. I would strongly recommend this book. Although the book is in Java, the fundamental principles of OOAD are the same and explained very nicely.

Resources
Presentation Slides – The Art of Design using Design Patterns in C#
Head First Design Patterns Book Home Page
C# Code Examples

The above C# code examples are written using Visual Studio 2003 version. In my demo, I showed several class diagrams from this code for various patterns. You can download the updated package from the link below.
C# Code Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005

The code examples solution contains a project that has unit tests written using Nunit. You’ll need to download NUnit for .NET 2.0.
Thanks to everyone who attended the session. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Jacksonville Developers User Group - July Meeting

vinay.ahuja — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 17:15:00 GMT

This month's meeting is on July 11th. Joe was supposed to speak on Silverlight, however he won't be able to make it. Instead, I'll be speaking on Design Patterns in .NET. Here are the session details:

The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET

Have you worked on a design problem and thought if there was a standard solution to that? Have you thought of enhancing your design vocabulary to add factories, facades, proxies, decorators, visitors, mediators, and bridges etc? Come to this session to learn about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an elegant, tested, well documented, and reusable solution to standardized software design problem. This session will look at some of the standard Gang of Four (GoF) Patterns. GoF patterns are divided broadly into creational, structural, and behavioral categories. We'll discuss when, why, and how to use them with real world scenarios. The demos would be in C#.

I have missed last few user group meetings due to travel. I am looking forward to this one. It should be fun. See you all.

Jacksonville Developers User Group

Speaking in Tampa Code Camp - July 14th, 2007

vinay.ahuja — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 21:30:00 GMT

Tampa Code Camp is on Saturday, July 14th, 2007. I am presenting two sessions. Here are the abstracts.

Session 1: The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET

Session 2: Power Tips for Visual Studio Orcas IDE for C#

Visual Studio 2008 (code named Orcas) IDE for C# introduces many new developer productivity features. This session will introduce you to those new IDE features and some of the advanced existing features (from Visual Studio 2005). We’ll create an end-to-end application using new features of C# 3.0 and LINQ to demonstrate various developer tips and tricks. This would be a demo based presentation. Although, code examples would be in C#, most of the IDE features are applicable for VB.NET development as well. Developers of all levels will learn something new from this session. You’ll be able to use the tips and tricks and be more productive in your development right away. Come prepared for an interactive session and enjoy the double sundae (C# and Visual Studio).

Tampa Code Camp - Main Site

Tampa Code Camp - Agenda

I hope to see you all there.

Vinay

Microsoft MVP Award - Visual Developer C#

vinay.ahuja — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:40:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that I have received Microsoft MVP Award for 2007 in Visual Developer - Visual C# category. It was a pleasant surprise to see the award email today morning. I could not have asked for a better start to the new year. Here is an excerpt from the email:

Dear Vinay Ahuja,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!

The Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying thank you and to honor and support the significant contributions you make to communities worldwide. As a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award, you join an elite group of technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing your real world expertise with users and Microsoft. Microsoft salutes all MVPs for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success everyday. To learn more about the MVP Program, visit: www.microsoft.com/mvp.

Your extraordinary efforts in Visual Developer - Visual C# technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated.

Though the award is addressed to me, there are several individuals who have made it possible. After all, it's team work.

I would like to thank Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joe Healy, Andrew Connell, and Marshall Harrison for nominating me for this award. Joe, one of the greatest developer evangelists, has been a tremendous source of inspiration to developers all across Florida - transforming them into .NET Rock Stars. Andrew has been very supportive and encouraging. His passion for technology is extremely motivating. Marshall is an ardent supporter of developer community activities. I would also like to thank other members of South East Region Microsoft Evangelism team - David McNamee, Jeff Barnes, Russ Fustino, and Kim Matlock for their support.

I am thankful to my employer Idea Integration for supporting my community activities. I can vouch for the transparent, encouraging, challenging, and fun environment that Idea provides to its employees.

I want to thank Dennis Bottjer (President, JaxDug - for being an excellent leader and a close friend), David Strommer (Founder JaxDug, for "breaking the ice" and encouraging me to speak in Jacksonville Code Camp 2005 - it has been a fruitful and long journey since then). Apart from this, I would like to thank all the people I have met in several code camps. I am a better person today by sharing my knowledge with all of you. Thank you.

Every title and award brings with it a sense of responsibility. I hope to continue sharing my insights and experience with the community. During the last one year, most of my contribution has been through my speaking and organizational ventures. One of my resolutions this year is to focus on my technical writing skills. I hope to bring you more content through my blog and web site.

Thank you and have a happy new year filled with - Wisdom (Common sense that we need), Knowledge (someone said its Power), Passion (Have you found your passion yet?), and Innovation (Creation - to explore our hidden/unknown potential).

Ciao

Follow up to Orlando .NET Users Group Meeting on .NET 3.0

vinay.ahuja — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 04:36:00 GMT

I went to Orlando yesterday to present in their Orlando .NET User Group's meeting. I gave an overview of .NET 3.0 features - WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, and System.Speech. Dennis drove along with me to Orlando. The meeting was in Orlando City Hall. It was a nice facility in the middle of downtown. Shawn Weisfeld does a great job organizing Onetug meetings. Other notable people who were present in the meeting were Ken Tucker (President, Space Coast Dot Net User Group) and J. T. Taylor (Secretary, Onetug).

Shawn started the meeting with some announcements. He handed it over to me around 7:15 pm. I spoke for around 90 minutes. The turnout for meeting was good. The attendees were excited and there was good discussion and questions. Then there was raffle for the give aways. After the meeting was over - Shawn, Ken, Dennis and I went to IHOP for dinner. Most of the time we talked about the idea of unifying all the user groups of Florida through a single web site. All of us agreed on the features and benefits that such a portal will bring. We discussed several options to develop such a web portal. Some action to watch out for. It was around 11 pm, when Dennis and I headed back to Jacksonville. A long day came to a satisfying end couple of hours after midnight.

Anyways, the session resources can be downloaded from here. I have also included the demos in the zip file. The demos for WPF data binding and WF - State diagram based workflow are standard samples (included in the download package). You can download the complete set of samples for .NET 3.0 Framework from here.

The WCF StockService demo had a problem with security configuration. The problem was that app.config for WCF Client (StockServiceClient) had an identity element pointing to my domain user name. As there was no domain available when I demo'd it gave a security negotiation exception. Right after the presentation, I removed the identity element from the client's app.config and it worked like a charm.

I have included the list of resources in the presentation slides. In the next couple of days, I'll post that list and some other resources in a separate blog entry.

I hope you enjoyed the talk. Thanks to Shawn and Onetug for giving me this opportunity to present. It was a pleasure to speak. Please feel free to contact me, if you have any questions or comments.

Download Links
Presentation Slides and Demos - .NET 3.0 - Overview
.NET 3.0 Framework RC 1
Windows SDK for .NET Framework RC 1
Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation RC 5
Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" CTP - Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0

Follow Up to ASP.NET SIG Meeting - Introduction to Microsoft Expression Web

vinay.ahuja — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:21:00 GMT

Yesterday, I talked about Microsoft Expression Web (EW) in JAXDUG ASP.NET SIG Meeting. Thanks to all who attended this meeting. Most of the presentation focused on demonstrations with the tool's capabilities. Expression Web helps in creating standards based web sites. It has extensive CSS formatting options. There is style redundancy checking and renaming built in. EW comes with ASP.NET 2.0 integration. The tool can generate several reports to check accessibility, compatibility, and CSS Usage. Finally, it is a full fledged development tool with deployment capabilities. As a bonus, you can optimize your deployed source with several options.

Comparing Microsoft Expression Suite with Dreamweaver
There were several questions and comments that came up in the session. One of the comments was that this tool definitely appears to be a strong competitor to Dreamweaver. I searched and found couple of comparison articles:
Microsoft's Expression Web Designer vs. Adobe's Dreamweaver - First Look: Let the rumble begin
Can Microsoft Expression Web Designer Touch Dreamweaver?

There were other questions also that were interesting:
- Is EW integrated with Source Controls tools like VSS? I don't see anything in Beta 1, however I will have to check if EW team has plans to do the integration later.
- EW combines the best of FrontPage and Visual Studio and targets the professional designers. Is there a possibility that EW designer capabilities will become part of the next version of Visual Studio (code named Orcas)? I am not sure, if the EW / Visual Studio team is thinking on these lines.

Resources on Expression Web
Microsoft Expression Home
Microsoft Expression Web Home
Microsoft Expression Web - Tours and Demos
Microsoft Expression Web Beta 1 FAQ
Microsoft Expression Web Download
Expression Team Blog
Web cast - Introduction to Microsoft Expression
First Look at Microsoft Expression Web by Clint Steed
Microsoft Expression Web Designer Newsgroups

Download
Introduction to Microsoft Expression Web

Hope you enjoyed the presentation. Please feel free to contact me with your comments.

Microsoft Expression Web - Beta 1 Released

vinay.ahuja — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:54:00 GMT

Beta 1 of Expression Web Designer (now renamed to Expression Web) has released today. It can be downloaded from here. Somasegar's initial announcement post summarizes about the Expression Suite here.

Last Friday, I was looking at the Expression tools and I was quite impressed. Microsoft Expression is a set of three tools - i) Graphic Designer ii) Interactive Designer, and iii) Web Designer. Expression Web is a professional design tool that helps to produce dynamic and standards based web sites. It comes with sophisticated CSS layouts and rich data presentation. There are several tours and demos available on Microsoft Expression Web Site.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta 1 Download

Microsoft Expression Tools - Tours and Demos

I'll be talking on Microsoft Expression Web in the upcoming JAXDUG ASP.NET SIG meeting on Thursday, September 14th. I'll introduce the suite of Microsoft Expression products and then focus on the power of Expression Web. Expression Web helps in creating superior user experiences (UX). Note that with the advent of WPF and .NET 3.0, the term UI (User Interfaces) has transformed to UX (User Experiences).

On another note - September CTP for Microsoft Expression is available now. It can be downloaded from here. This CTP targets .NET 3.0 RC1.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer September 2006 CTP Download

Podcasts on Jacksonville Code Camp

vinay.ahuja — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 04:45:00 GMT

Jacksonville Code Camp saw several fresh and innovative ideas surface. According to Joe Healy, the Code Camp Manifesto at Boston Wiki will see some changes soon. During the code camp, Wally McClure did a podcast with the code camp organization team.

A summary of the ideas that we discussed are below:

Highlights of Jacksonville Code Camp
- Code Countdown - Xtreme Coders: We tried to setup similar drama and excitement as CodeRoom.Com. Watch out for the video to come out soon.
- Innovative tracks - Developing the developer, Bootcamp, Black Belt track
- Keynote speaker - John Spence
- Ask the expert sessions
- Highlight Session - Show your coolest Code - 7 minutes to code fame
- Donating used computers to a charity
- MSDN Raffle - Charity for Red Cross
- Media Publicity - Florida Times Union, GotDotNet

- Book signing by authors
- Speaker and Volunteer Badges
- Recognition for volunteers, sponsors, top speakers etc.
- Ice cream - Ben and Jerry

You can listen to the podcast here:

ASP.NET Podcast Show #70 - Memphis and Jacksonville Code Camps

Wally did another podcast with David Silverlight on Code Countdown. You can listen to that podcast here:

ASP.NET Podcast Show #71 - Code Countdown with David Silverlight

Wally is coming to Jacksonville

vinay.ahuja — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:31:00 GMT

Wally is coming to Jacksonville to speak on Atlas on September 6th, 2006. Wally is a very interesting and entertaining speaker. His book Beginning AJAX with ASP.NET has come out recently. He is also working on another "Beginning Atlas" book. Apart from being an INETA speaker, he runs the ASP.NET Podcast Show. I met Wally last year in October in Birmingham Code Camp. After that, he sent me one of his Wally T-shirts, but I am still too scared to wear it and lose my own identity :) Wally is making up for not coming to our Code Camp on August 26th. Memphis had their code camp the same day. Wally, being a homer, had no choice but to be there. But he did miss the ice cream! However, he was with us virtually and did a podcast in the morning. The podcast will come out pretty soon.

Here is the abstract of Wally's talk for Jacksonville Developers User Group:

AJAX and client side technologies are all the rage with programmers. Microsoft is working on a set of technologies for building client side web based applications. These applications can rival the capabilities of Windows GUI applications. We'll look at going beyond what’s available in AJAX and see what other features the MS Atlas Framework will deliver.

Wally has couple of videos on Wrox web site as well. One of the videos was done during Atlanta Code Camp (held in May 2006). Here are the links:

Atlas Update Panel

Building Real World Apps with Atlas

Wrox has several other videos here. The complete feedburner feed of videos from wrox is here.

Plan to attend!

Followup to Jacksonville Code Camp

vinay.ahuja — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 23:32:00 GMT

Jacksonville Code Camp went really well. I was one of the primary organizers along with Dennis and Jaremie. I am very pleased with the results and feedback we have received. Last few days, I have been busy doing post processing activities. We'll be posting some interesting statistics on the code camp web site very soon. For the record, this was my 8th code camp in one year. It was homecoming for me as I first spoke in last year's Jacksonville Code Camp. Since then, I have presented in code camps in several cities across Florida. I have also been to Atlanta and Birmingham Code Camps. It has been a really great experience. I have grown and learnt a lot just by speaking. By doing this marathon run, I think I have lost the fear of speaking now, which I used to have long time back. The feedback from attendees of my sessions has been very encouraging. The constructive criticism that I have received has helped me improve my speaking skills. I still have to work on my writing skills though - one of my resolutions for this year.

I presented a session on Visual Studio Power Tips and also moderated a contest session - Show your Coolest Code - 7 minutes to code fame

Abstract of my More Power Tips for Visual Studio 2005 Session:

Many of us know how to use refactoring, short cuts, comment blocks, regions, and class designer. However, do you know how to write your own code snippets? How to create project and item templates to standardize processes among team members? How to share visual studio settings and profiles? How to speed up Visual Studio? How to customize list of recent projects? How to add an assembly to standard list of assemblies? This session will cover some known and many not so well-known features to make you more productive with Visual Studio. At least half of this session will have different or enhanced tips and tricks from the previous talks done in Tallahassee and Tampa Code Camps. Come prepared for this session to supercharge your Visual Studio IDE experience!

The presentation slides and source code can be downloaded from here. If you attended my sessions, please fill your evaluations at CodeCampEvals.com. I would love to hear your feedback.

I'll be posting another entry on Show your coolest code - 7 minutes to code fame. We had several interesting entries. You can check the winners here.

Enjoy!

Jacksonville Code Camp hits Florida Times Union and GotDotnet

vinay.ahuja — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 03:41:00 GMT

I have been silent on this blog for a while. However I have been very active (read hyperactive but with care) with the organization of Jacksonville Code Camp. We have been really working hard to plan this event. We have thoroughly analyzed and planned for each and every aspect in this Code Camp. Our primary goal has been to make the attendee experience superior. The results are beginning to show and I am very happy with them. Margaret Thomas, a reporter for Florida Times Union, interviewed the organizational team yesterday. The result has been awesome - a story in the online edition of Florida Times Union. Thanks Margaret. Margaret will be covering the event on Saturday, August 26th as well. It is quite possible that the follow up story will make it to the print edition.

Earlier today I had a surprise in store. One of my colleagues was venturing on Gotdotnet forums and noticed that our code camp web site has been mentioned as the featured site (Thanks Robert!). This is certainly an honor for us. Particularly Dennis, Brady and I, who have worked on this web site for too many long hours.

Today has been an eventful day in the history of Jacksonville Code Camp 2006. We hit 300 registrants, had a florida times union story, and also featured on gotdotnet. Thats a hat-trick for me in cricket terms.

Last year Brady had posted The Top 10 reasons NOT to attend Code Camp. I hope those don't hold for you. In a recent newsletter to JaxDug mailing list Dennis says - "I can’t think of many reasons why any self respecting Geek would want to miss this event." My view is well, if you are a geek come to this code camp, if you're not then come to be ONE.

Come and see the unfolding of "The Code Camp" on Saturday, August 26, 2006.

Vinay

Tampa Code Camp - Session Resources

vinay.ahuja — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 06:30:00 GMT

Here are the session resources (Slides and source code) from Tampa Code Camp.

I presented 3 sessions on two topics. One was a power tips session on Visual Studio. Another session was on Generics. I am extremely pleased the way sessions went. Thanks to all the people who attended. I would appreciate your comments and suggestions. Please fill the evaluations at CodeCampEvals.com

The session materials can be downloaded from the respective links

Power Tips for Visual Studio 2005 (Both for Part I and Part II)

Real World Generics<.NET>

There were several questions and lot of discussion in both the talks. I would be posting follow up posts for each of the sessions in couple of days.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email at vinay_a at [hotmail dot com].

Vinay Ahuja

Speaking in Tampa Code Camp 2006

vinay.ahuja — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 18:30:00 GMT

I'll be speaking in Tampa Code Camp on Saturday, July 16th 2006. I am presenting two sessions. One of them is on generics and the other one on power tips for visual studio. In the generics session, I am going to focus on practical applicability of generics.

The abstracts for the talks are below:

Power Tips for Visual Studio: Many of us know how to use refactoring, short cuts, comment blocks, regions, and class designer. However, do you know how to write your own code snippets? How to create project and item templates to standardize processes among team members? How to share visual studio settings and profiles? This session will cover some known and many not so well-known features to make you more productive with Visual Studio. Come prepared for this session to supercharge your Visual Studio IDE experience!

Real World Generics<.NET>: Generics is probably the most talked and hyped feature of .NET 2.0. It is the ability to define classes and methods without committing to actual data types. The specification of actual types is deferred until instantiation. We will see how we can use generics every day and write extensible pieces of code. This session will answer questions like - How to use generic collections to improve performance and type safety? How to leverage generic types, methods, delegates, and constraints? What is the correct way to dispose generic types? We will also look at some of the tips and tricks of the trade, and best practices. Demos would be in C#. This is one session you cannot afford to miss!

Please plan to attend, if you are coming to Tampa. These sessions are currently scheduled for the first (8:30 AM - 9:40PM) and third (11:10 AM - 12:20 PM) time slots respectively.

Tallahassee .NET User Group Meeting

vinay.ahuja — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 01:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, I spoke in Tallahassee .NET User Group's meeting. The topic was Generics in .NET 2.0. I divided my talk into 3 parts. I did feel that there was too much information to cover. I had to skip some of the content despite the fact that I still talked for 1 hr 45 minutes.

Here is the outline for the presentation:

Part I - Basic Concepts
- What is Generics?
- Need and Benefits
- Constraints
- Generic Collections
- Demo and Examples

Part II - Advanced Concepts
- Building a Custom Generic Class
- Applying Generics
- Practical Applications
- Generics Internals
- Generics and Reflection
- Generics and Serialization
- Generics and Remoting
- Comparison with C++ Templates and Java

Part III - Best Practices

In this part I covered some of the best practices from Professional .NET 2.0 Generics by Tod Golding.

Thanks to every one who came to the meeting. All of you filled my bucket with your presence. Also thanks to Jaya and Jose for inviting me to present. It was a pleasure.

The presentation slides and demo source code can be downloaded from here.

Detailed account of Tallahassee Code Camp

vinay.ahuja — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 01:18:00 GMT

As I promised before, here is the detailed account for Tallahassee Code Camp. This time I drove in the morning to Tallahassee for Code Camp. Obviously, I missed out on the Speaker meetup on Friday. I reached in Tallahassee around 9:30 AM. My first session was at 11:10 AM. Bayer White had a session on Windows Workflow Foundation(WF) before mine in the same room. I decided to attend that. Bayer had some technical issues with his VPC image and the projector. Shawn Weisfeld helped Bayer to get his presentation going. Overall it was a nice talk, Bayer walked through the concepts behind WF and also showed some examples. I remembered times when I was working on a Workflow product myself in my first company. WF concepts seemed familiar. It was 11:10 AM. Time for my session. I had good number of people in my Visual Studio Tips Session. It was nice to have a familiar face in J.T. Taylor. I think the session was quite interactive. I received great comments via email/blog from Tom Kelley and Scott Davis about the session. Thank you both for that. I have posted the slides in another post of mine here.

During lunch I came across Jose Fuentes, one of the main organizers of Tallahassee Code Camp. The first thing I asked him was Where is Jay? Jay Karnik and Jose had travelled to Atlanta Code Camp last month. Atlanta Code Camp did not have a post event social. To compensate for that, the gang of four - Jose, Jay, Tom Fuller, and I went for dinner and partying. We had a lot of fun together in downtown Decatur. When I was in Atlanta, Jay had asked me to come to his home for dinner. He lived in Tallahassee. Jay told me he will cook Veggies for me. While in Jay's company in Atlanta, I was very impressed with his master skill of story telling. Tom and I would listen to him with complete attention as if glued to TV for an NBA Final match. Back to the question. Where is Jay? Jose asked me - "Did you get my email from last night?". I said, I have not checked my email since last night. He said Jay passed away. I was shocked to hear that. I could not believe what Jose said. Jose told the sad story of Jay's untimely demise. Whatever time I spent with Jay, I enjoyed thoroughly. He was a very lively person. I am sure Tom will agree with me. I'll never forget him in my life. He was a master story teller. May god bless his soul.

There was Pizza for lunch. Joe Healy pointed me in the direction of the Veggie pizza and I ended up avoiding the line (it was not very long anyways, you have to come and see Jacksonville Code Camp's line this year on August 26th). During lunch I got chance to talk briefly to my colleagues Kevin Ayers and John Holliday. I had my second talk right after lunch. This one was on Visual Studio Extensibility. I was expecting a niche group of people to be present. When I did this talk in Atlanta, there were only couple of people who had played with Macros and AddIns; None with Packages. I put the same question to the 10-12 people that showed up for the talk. I was surprised that half of them had played with AddIns. Awesome! I thought this would be a fun session. William Rawls asked me several questions during this session.

When I was done with my sessions around 2:30PM, I just sat in the lobby and had a little chat with Joe Healy. I wanted his feedback on my talks of Tampa Bay TechEd Outcasts. He gave me some tips on how I can improve my presentation skills. I will be blogging about that in another post of mine later. After relaxing for around an hour and trying to take my thoughts away from the happenings, I went to attend Ken Tucker's session on DLinq. DLinq, a component of the LINQ Project, provides a run-time infrastructure for managing relational data as objects without giving up the ability to query. I would not bore you here with DLinq, as it is not even going to be part of .NET Framework 3.0 (new name for WinFx). You might get to see it by the middle/end of next year. Moreover, it may not be even called DLinq by then. Jim Wooley alluded that the name might be different.

All the sessions finished by 5:00 PM. It was time for giveaways and closing. There were huge stacks of swag. Most visible being lots of Microsoft press books. Steve Lane administered the closing. Every one of the attendees got at least two books. I think there were around 200 give aways and 85 attendees in the code camp. The code camp was very well executed. The only thing I did not like was the projectors. The projectors were of poor quality and messed up many good sessions. My eyes still hurt, don't know about the attendees who had to sit through 6 sessions.

After FSU, I went to the Pub Club. The location was Paradise Grill and Bar. This turned out to be a great location. I simply loved it for the live music and ambience. It was so relaxing after a tiring day. I had a chance to talk to several people here - Tom Fuller, Raenell Garner, and Kulbinder. Tom Fuller had interesting multi-threaded stories to tell from his DevMentor training. I got threadache for a while. I also shared the table with Stacy Draper and Wes Dumey. I talked with Noah Subrin and Jim Wooley for a while. Both of them came from Atlanta. I talked to William on social computing and Web 2.0 for a long time. Both of us together asked few questions to several people there - Ron Larson, Chuck David, Jim, and finally Joe "DevFish" Healy. I would keep the questions secret for now. They are the source and inspiration for something big. Keith Rowe was entertaining as ever with his beach shirts. We had group pictures in the official attire for pub club - beach shirts. I hope Keith will post them somewhere. I am also looking forward to the late nighters picture. It was way after mid-night when we left from there.

This was one day that I'll remember for a long long time. Thanks to Tallahassee Code Camp organizers - Jose Fuentes, Jaya Kastury (the background grunt worker), Keith Rowe, Steve Lane, and our favorite developer evangelist - DevFish.

See you in the next code camp.

Tallahassee .NET Code Camp Follow up

vinay.ahuja — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:09:00 GMT

Well, I am back from the second annual Tallahassee .NET Code Camp. It was a lot of fun.

I presented two sessions. One was a power tips session on Visual Studio. Another session was on extending Visual Studio 2005 using Macros, AddIns, and Packages. I had good number of people in both the sessions given that only around 80 people attended this codecamp. I am pleased the way sessions went. I want to thank all the people who attended my sessions. I hope all of you enjoyed it.

The session materials can be downloaded from the respective links

Power Tips for Visual Studio 2005

Extending Visual Studio 2005

If you have any questions, please feel free to email at vinay_a at [hotmail dot com].

PS - I'll be writing a detailed account of my trip in another post. I won't do justice if I don't. So watch out.

Tallahassee .NET Code Camp - June 17th

vinay.ahuja — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 22:45:00 GMT

The second annual Tallahassee .NET Code Camp is on June 17th.

Check Joe Healy's blog entry for statistical details.

Sessions :: The ABC’s of ADO :: GeekGurl’s Goodies: Using Data Source Controls in ASP.NET 2.0 :: GeekGurl’s Goodies: Creating a Consistent Layout using Master Pages in ASP.NET 2.0 :: Confessions of an ASP.NET newbie :: ATLAS from Scratch (AJAX) :: Advanced windows forms Datagridview :: Configuring and Securing IIS 5.0 and 6.0 in a Production Environment :: Overview of the LINQ project :: Language enhancements in VB 9 and C# 3, The Search for the missing LINQ :: Lunch :: .NET 2.0 New Features in Action :: Are you down with ODP? Using the Oracle Data Provider with .NET :: C#.NET Oracle Stored Procedures & Oracle Tools for Visual Studio 2005 :: ClickOnce 411 :: Building SOA Composite Applications :: Best Practices For Reusable Service Design :: Creating Extensible Site Definitions :: Portal Adoption (chalk talk) :: SharePoint 2007: Business Data Catalog :: Sharepoint 2007: Branding :: Sharepoint 2007: The Feature feature :: Sharepoint 2007: Migrating CMS and SPS :: Data Warehouse Essentials with SQL Server 2005 :: Introduction to SQL Server Integration Packages (SQL 2005) :: Getting to Know Windows Workflow Foundation :: Extending Visual Studio 2005 :: Power Tips for Visual Studio 2005 :: Customize Team Foundation Server for your needs :: Web and Load Testing with Visual Studio Team Systems :: People vs. Machine Workflows using Windows Workflow :: Assembling the WinFX Puzzle – Putting WCF, WPF and WF together. :: Asynchronous vs. Synchronous. Using .Net 2.0. Web Services. :: Advanced serialization and deserialization of .NET classes to and from XML

Here are the abstracts of the two sessions I am presenting:

Power Tips for Visual Studio 2005: Many of us know how to use refactoring, short cuts, comment blocks, regions, and class designer. However, do you know how to write your own code snippets? How to create project and item templates to standardize processes among team members? How to share visual studio settings and profiles? This session will cover some known and many not so well-known features to make you more productive with Visual Studio.

Extending Visual Studio 2005: Have you ever thought of customizing visual studio components or extending them with your own components? This session will introduce you to the world of visual studio extensibility. The functionality of Macros, Add-ins, and Packages would be discussed. We will briefly cover the extensibility architecture and Managed Package Framework.

Follow up to Tampa Bay Tech Ed Outcasts

vinay.ahuja — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 06:00:00 GMT

Finally I am back from Tampa. It has been a long, tiring, and certainly satisfying day. Today, I spoke on Visual Studio Extensibility in Tampa Bay Tech Ed Outcasts. I want to thank all the attendees. I enjoyed presenting and I hope the sessions were useful. The presentation slides for all the three sessions can be downloaded from here.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me at vinay_a at [hotmail dot com].

Tampa Bay Teched Outcasts - June 12-16

vinay.ahuja — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 03:34:00 GMT

I am really excited to be speaking on Visual Studio Extensibility during Tampa Bay TechEd Outcasts on Wednesday, June 14th, 1:30pm - 4:30pm. Apart from my entry, the other speakers are Tim Walton (WCF), Tom Fuller and Shawn Morgan (SOA in .NET ), Joe Healy and Jim Zimmerman (ATLAS/AJAX) and David McNamee (Office 12 / MOSS). All these talks are 3-4 hours and are in-depth.You need to register separately for each one of them.

The abstracts for the sessions I am presenting are as follows:

Session 1: Visual Studio Customization (Level 200) : Visual Studio Overview. Productivity Tips and Tricks. Code Snippets – Create and register your own code snippets. Project templates, Item templates - Create and use project and item templates for common project guidance.

Session 2: Visual Studio Extensibility Macros and AddIns (Level 200): Macros – Definition, Concepts, Recording and writing macros, Development Tools Extensibility Model (DTE), Writing a simple AddIn. Debugging, testing, and deploying AddIns. Wrapping a User Control as an AddIn. AddIn architecture. Best practices for AddIns.

Session 3: Extending Visual Studio with VSPackages (Level 300): VSIP Program, Visual Studio 2005 SDK Overview, Visual Studio Architecture Overview. VSPackages, Pros and Cons of Macros/AddIns/Packages, Managed Package Framework, Language Services, Project System. IronPython integration demo.
If you are planning to attend and would like me to cover anything specific, please let me know.

I'll be posting a followup after the event with the session materials.