Al Nyveldt

 Central Penn .NET Code Camp 2009

-   Dec 06, 2009 -   Development -   code camp, community, spark, mvc

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

 CodeMash 2009

-   Jan 16, 2009 -   Personal -   community, codemash

I spend most of last week at CodeMash 2009. CodeMash is a great 3 day developer event held every winter in Ohio at Kalahari Resort. It not a .NET focused conference and I went with an idea to take in some of the non .NET world and learn a bit about Ruby, Groovy, and whatever else hit me as interesting. PreCompiler I arrived Tuesday evening in preparation for the PreCompiler on Wednesday. The PreCompiler was a extra day of full day or half day sessions which focused on a variety of things. I found these sessions to be among the best of the conference as there was so much time to get in to the topic and I was very torn as to which sessions to go to. My first choice was the iPhone Development session, and I decided to hit the Ruby session in the morning as it was a full day session and I figured I'd be better off being there for the start then the last half. The Ruby session was different than I expected but very good none the less. We ended up downloading a series of tests and code and spent the morning fixing tests and learning Ruby. It was a self paced thing with the instructors just helping people as they got stuck. Since I had already played around with Ruby a little, I was able to quickly move through the exercises and got a good way through before lunch. After lunch was the iPhone session. It was taught by Chris Adamson, who is co-authoring an iPhone book I've already been reading, iPhone SDK Development. While I had covered most of what Chris went though, it was really good to be able to pick up some shortcuts and to get a better handle on some of the concepts. Sessions Thursday and Friday were filled with some great sessions. I heard a number of people saying there were just so many good opinions for each time slot they had no idea which one to go to. There were also some interesting open spaces conversations going on at the same time which made the choices tougher. A few of the highlights here for me were Mary Poppendieck's session on Thrashing (and a lunch table chat as well) and Venkat Subramaniam's talks. Venkat is a great speaker and very enjoyable to listen to. People It is hard to go to a conference like CodeMash and not meet a bunch of great people. I had a number of interesting conversations with people from all over and really had a nice time. CodeMash was so large that a few of the people I had hoped to meet, I never did run into or find again. Having to leave early on Friday didn't help matters in this area I'm sure. Overall I had a fantastic time at CodeMash 2009 and hopefully, I'll be able to attend again next year. I also hope my family can come as well as the Kalahari was awesome and the kids would have had an excellent time. If it all works out, I'll try to make sure I can stay until Saturday and have a relaxing day with the kids at the water park.

 October Happenings

-   Oct 02, 2008 -   Personal -   community

Some exciting things going on in October for me and I wanted to share about them.  First, tomorrow, October 3rd, I’ll be making a trip to New York City to hang out with Mads Kristensen (founder of BlogEngine.NET).  It will be very cool to meet him in person finally.  He’s invited anyone interested in talking BlogEngine.NET to join us around noon tomorrow if you are interested.  It should be a good time. Also, on Monday, October 20th, I’ll be speaking at the Lehigh Valley .NET User Group.  I’ll be talking about the Provider Model, focusing on how to make your own custom providers while using BlogEngine.NET as the sample code.  (This will be very similar to the talk I gave earlier in the year at the Philly Code Camp.)  While the focus of the talk will be the provider model, we’ll be going through a lot of the BlogEngine core so you’ll learn a bit of how BlogEngine works through the evening.  I think it will be a fun evening.

 Philly Code Camp Wrap up

-   May 20, 2008 -   Personal -   code camp, community

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 -   blogengine.net, code camp, community, provider model

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.