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albiopic I'm Al Nyveldt. I'm a software developer from central Pennsylvania. I make web apps, mobile apps, and various other things. [More]

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 Talking MonoTouch at Philly Code Camp

-   Nov 01, 2012 -   Development -   ,

I’ll be back at Philly Code Camp on November 17th to do a session on MonoTouch.  The session is called, “Building iOS apps with C# and MonoTouch”.  We’ll be building out a simple Code Camp app with the schedule.  This is a fast paced hour going from File/New to working app, but it will show you how you can leverage your .NET skills to make amazing apps for the iPhone, iPad, and other iOS devices. The app we will be building is available in the App Store.  It currently defaults to the sessions from the last code camp, but just hit update to get what we know about the current set of sessions.  I have a new version waiting for review with Apple so expect a nice update with the new iOS 6 features, some interface cleanup and new sessions.  You can get it in the App Store now or take a look at what to expect on my company site. I’m looking forward to the event in a few weeks.  It is “sold out” but there is a waiting list and a few booster (paid) tickets left for the event.  Sign up here if you haven’t already.

 Central Penn .NET Code Camp 2009

-   Dec 06, 2009 -   Development -   , , ,

I had a nice time at the Central Penn .NET Code Camp this past Saturday.  It was my first code camp in Harrisburg, PA and while not as large as the Philly Code Camp I’ve been to a few times, it was a good code camp just the same.  There was a nice mix of sessions and I had a enjoyed getting to chat with fellow developers from the area (and a few from a bit further away.)  I was also shocked to see the swag that was available at this code camp.  It was incredible.  Everyone who stayed the whole day left with at least a t-shirt and a technical book.  My friend Mark scored a ReSharper license and some lucky fella went home with an XBox 360 (whatever that is.) I gave a talk in the first time slot of the day on the Spark View Engine.  I had not done a talk on Spark before and was very curious to see how it go over.  I didn’t have a huge crowd for the talk but they were a great audience and had lots of good questions and insight.  It was a pleasure to present to them. In the presentation, I decided to go the route of showing Spark instead of teaching Spark.  I showed a lot of different syntax, discussed spooling, partial files, and ended with an example of using iTextSharp and Spark to produce PDFs.  Hopefully everyone there got a good taste of Spark and will take a moment to download it and give it a try soon. I promised to put the demo code out on my blog so I’ll include it at the bottom of the post.  It is far from perfect, but it will give you something to play around with. Anyway, I hope to make it to future Code Camps in Harrisburg.  It was a good time and something local developers should really try to make time for. Download: CPCC2009-SparkDemo.zip

 BlogEngine.NET and VistaDB

-   May 21, 2008 -   BlogEngine.NET, Development -   , ,

For my presentation at Philly Code Camp this past weekend, I talked about the provider model and we used BlogEngine.NET as the source code for the talk.  As part of the presentation, I created 3 new providers for BlogEngine.NET to store data in a VistaDB Express database.  These 3 providers allow you to keep most all your blog data in a single database file for easy backup of your site. In thinking about my presentation, I decided early on I wanted to write new membership, role, and blog providers for the presentation.  I figured it would be helpful to go through the steps in the session and even though no one would want to watch me implement each of the required methods, we would gain a lot by writing a little of the code, putting in the pre-written versions, and then discussing a bit more of it.  A light weight database seemed to be an ideal fit for what I wanted to do.  You might ask why I chose VistaDB and it is a good question.  I actually was encouraged to go the Sqlite route, but I decided to give VistaDB a try.  I have heard good things about Sqlite, but the fact that I've heard very little about VistaDB other than the fact that Graffiti CMS uses it out of the box, made me curious.  Once I found that they have an Express edition available for open source projects and non-commercial use, I decided to give it a try.  I'll write more about VistaDB soon, but I can say it has a lot going for it and I am really happy with my experience with it so far. I promised to make my code available so here it is.  The source includes BlogEngine 1.3.1 with the additional files I created.  If you are interested in using the VistaDB implementation with BlogEngine for yourself, check back tomorrow.  I've made a separate project with the necessary files and will make the needed dll, the database, and the web.config changes and I'll give the details on it all tomorrow.  If you just can't wait, you are more than welcome to dig into this code.  It is all here. Update: I made some updates to the VistaDB providers (security and the like), moved them out of the Core project, and made them into a separate dll for easy installation with the BlogEngine project.  The details and the download can be found here. 

 Philly Code Camp Wrap up

-   May 20, 2008 -   Personal -   ,

The second Philly Code Camp of the year was this past Saturday and it was a good one.  (I guess my experience tells me they are always "good ones", but it is worth stating that it was in fact good up front.)  Hats off to the Philly.NET crew.  They really do a fantastic job of putting a code camp together.  It was very well organized and really ran through without a hitch. This was my first time speaking at a code camp and it was a very interesting experience.  While I thought I was ready to present when I arrived, my Macbook Pro, Vista, and the projector had other ideas.  Since I was first up, I was able to get into the room early and get setup.  If it were not for this extra time, my session would have been a disaster.  I wasted about 15 to 20 minutes trying to get the projector to work off my Boot Camp partition (booting directly into Vista) but it wasn't to be.  (And here I thought it would be my best bet.)  Anyway, I finally booted to the Mac OS, and run my presentation through Fusion.  It worked like a champ, but I had wasted the initial 10 minutes of the presentation. It was a rough start and not exactly what I had planned, but after things settled down, all seemed to go well.  (Ok, I had no further technical difficulties and no one threw rotten vegetables at me.)  In reflection, there are lots of things I'd have changed, but it was all a great learning experience.  I'm sure I had too many uhs and umms, in the talk and I knew I rushed it a bit as I had planned a full agenda and was now working with a compressed time frame.  So it goes. Beyond my session, I enjoyed a number of interesting sessions and had some nice conversations.  The sessions I attended were all very good and really showed the passion of the presenters.  These people made you want to dig further into the topic after you left the session which is the mark of success in my book.  I never seem to get to talk to all the people I had planned to, but I will admit that by the end of the day, I was exhausted and just ready to go home.  I think I'll make sure I'm better rested for next time. If you came by looking for my code samples from the presentation.  I will make them available in the next day or so.  Sorry for the delay.

 Speaking at Philly Code Camp on May 18th

-   May 08, 2008 -   BlogEngine.NET, Development -   , , ,

A week from this Saturday, I'll be at the Philly.NET Code Camp 2008.2.  I was at the January Code Camp and had a great time.  There were lots of great people to talk with and interesting sessions that got me thinking about things. I had met Bill Wolfe, the head of Philly.NET, at MIX08 in March and had offered to be a speaker in the spring Code Camp.  He said to get in touch closer to the camp.  So when the call for speakers went out in early April, I responded.  I was accepted and told a talk on BlogEngine.NET would be great.  I wasn't initially thinking of a BlogEngine.NET talk, but since it is a comfort zone for me I figured it would work out.  There are lots of things I could talk about in relation to BlogEngine.NET so I sent in 3 session summaries and one was chosen. My topic will be "Learning the ASP.NET Provider model with BlogEngine.NET".  It is a talk that goes into one of the things I really appreciate about BlogEngine.NET.  BlogEngine.NET is an easy to follow, simple project that is great to learn from.  It is a great project to just poke around in the code and see how things work.  Being a relatively small solution with just a web site and a class library project, there isn't much room to get lost.  Also, since there are no 3rd party libraries, you can see how everything works. My session will get in to the provider model and how BlogEngine.NET uses it.  We'll look at implementing the built in providers like membership and go over making your own implementations of built in providers  Then, we'll spend some time talking about custom providers like the BlogProvider in BlogEngine.NET.  We'll make our own implementation of the BlogProvider as well.  It should be a fun time. While the talk is very focused on the Provider model, it should be interesting to people curious about BlogEngine.NET as we'll really get into some of the inner workings of how the software works.  Of course, if you are interested in talking BlogEngine.NET or have specific questions, look me up at the Code Camp.  I'd be happy to talk BlogEngine or most any other topic after the session.