Do you work for a company that truly, I mean truly, values technical leadership and skills?  Do they value your abilities to communicate with non-IT staff?  Do they encourage you to get involved in the community through a bonus compensation plan that includes things as simple as attending a local user group?  No?  Then perhaps its time to Improve your outlook…

Improving Enterprises, my employer since March of 2009, is just such and employer.  Improving has to be doing something right, after all we’ve just been named to the Inc. 500/5000 list, placing us at #210 in the nation, but number #10 fastest growing company in Dallas, and #18 in IT Services nationwide.  And this is our second year on that list.

Now why am I telling you all of this?  Is it just to brag about how great my life at Improving is?  To rub in your face that I get to work for a company with 4 Microsoft MVPs on staff?  No, none of that…

It’s because we’re hiring … and in a big way!

How big?  We’ve got over 20 positions open at the current time.  Are we just looking for rock stars?  Not at all … we’ve got positions available at Consultant, Senior Consultant, and Principal Consultant available.  Consultants are generally people just out of school, or with a year or two of experience, and it goes up from there.

Why should you work for us?

For me, it is just this simple : I like to be challenged at work, I want to feel that my co-workers are challenging me to expand my horizons.  I’ve felt that way every day since I started at Improving.

Other perks?  How about an annual company retreat to Vegas.  A bonus plan.  And an incredible work environment.

CALL TO ACTION – It’s time to work for the best, and pity the rest … if you’re interested in working for an incredible organization like Improving, then drop me an email with your resume to Tim@TimRayburn.net and we’ll get you started along the process.

So I’m always pushing Dallas TechFest, and that I believe it is the best value day you can spend away from work, but you don’t have to listen to me…

• “There are also some big names from other technologies at TechFest as well, such asScott Davis (Grails guru extraordinaire), Ted Neward (.NET developer and consultant), Mark Piller (Midnight Coders), and Craig Walls (SpringSource) to name but a few.  Sounds excellent, right? Well, today's your lucky day. If you haven't registered yet there's still time, and there's a big discount to boot! Register now and use the discount code coldfusion to get in for only $25. That's right, a mere $25 for all this geeky goodness.” from Matt Woodward
• “If you are unable to attend CFUnited and you are in or are able to travel to the Dallas, TX area you should really check out Dallas TechFest.  I'll be speaking there again this year on Getting Started with Mura CMS Development.” from Steve Good
• “This year’s schedule features well-known and local speakers from across 6 different communities including .NET, Java, PHP, Adobe, ColdFusion, Apple and IT Pro.  Registration is normally $50, but if you use the code “dotnet” you can get a $25 discount!  Make sure you sign up today as space is filling up quickly” from Chris Koenig

If you haven’t registered yet, then what are you waiting for?  Online registration is open for the another day or so, so head over to http://DallasTechFest.EventBrite.Com and use one of the discount codes above to register for only $25.  Or, register at the door, but that will cost $60.  Feel like registering ahead of time now?  I thought so.

It’s been far to long since I’ve talked here about what I’m working on, so it is time to correct that.  I’ve been working with a client who has some very unique business requirements, and one of them deals with a lot of flexibility of their data storage.  As such we were looking into different types of storage, because while SQL Server is in fact a wonderful product, it is not known for its flexibility of storage.

This quest led us to the door of a large number of databases in the “No SQL” arena, and eventually to MongoDB.  MongoDB is a document database, which stores what can best be described to the .NET Developer as a Dictionary<string,object>.  This structure allows for nesting of structures (where the object stored is another Dictionary) and is a very clever structure if you ask me.  But, document databases do not work like relational databases.  There are several important things you need to realize:

1. Documents databases do not generally support the concept of JOINS.  If you retrieve data, and it refers to other data, then you need to make another call to the database to retrieve that data.
• This leads to the core concept of preferring to embed (in the dictionary) data rather than refer to data.
2. Document databases do not generally support a defined structure, they do not have tables but rather “collections” which have no definition in the database.  It is perfectly valid for one entry in a collection to have a key “dateOfAccount” which is a string type, and another with that same key as a date.
3. Document databases do not include a validation structure, any validation of the data (including structural data as noted above) must be enforced by your application.

In the world of .NET there are several drivers, but the one my team, David O’Hara and Craig Neuwirt and I, decided on was MongoDB-CSharp.  They have just released version 0.9 beta 1, which moves the driver a lot closer to a familiarity level for most .NET developers.  Now we had to address on our project all of the above problems, and key to us doing so has been a component called DictionaryAdapater from the Castle Project.  But that is a topic for another blog post.

So on Thursday afternoon, I picked up a beautiful new iPad 16gb WiFi.  As an avid iPhone user, I find the device to be everything I expected, and used it all day Friday happily.

On Saturday night, technically Sunday morning, I was leaving the home of my brother after a night of playing poker, and drove out of his driveway with the iPad on the roof of my Suburban.  My drive was 5 minutes of city streets, and somewhere along the way, on a road I was going about 30 miles per hour on, my phone took the plunge.  Now, of course, I didn’t notice this at the time.  So it fell into the roadway and I drove on.  When I finally realized it was missing when I got home, I called my brother who went out from his place, we met in the middle and he found it in the road for me.  The iPad had been in a black Belkin neoprene case I had purchased for my Kindle DX while I waited for Amazon to deliver my Speck CandyShell case, and the zipper was now ruined, so my brother left the tearing open of the case to me.  What did I find inside, after a 5 foot fall going 30 mph and then (as I would soon discover) having been run over by another car?  Here are the photos…

 

As you can see, clearly the device was run over, likely while laying glass-down in the case on the road, by a vehicle.  The device though continues to work PERFECTLY.  The screen has two areas showing some extra brightness where I suspect it is being pressed on from the rear, but despite this incredible event that I would have expected most devices to have been destroyed by, the iPad came through a little worse for wear but otherwise unscathed.  The sides of the aluminum case are puckering away from the screen slightly, and the corners are roughed up a bit, but overall it came through amazingly well.

Thank you Apple for a quality product, and saving me from being killed by my wife when she heard about this event.

I’m thrilled to announce that registration is open for Dallas TechFest 2010 at http://dallastechfest.eventbrite.com

Who is speaking you ask?  Well our incredible team of web volunteers are hard at work on a refresh of our website, but in the meantime, here are some names and topics from the .NET Track:

• ASP.NET MVC 2 and Azure Table Storage - Chander Dhall
• Particle Physics Engine in Silverlight and ASP-mvc?! - Amir Rajan
• The Rich Standard: Getting Familiar with HTML 5 - Todd Anglin
• Hard Lessons Learned From Being Stupid About TDD - Matt Hinze
• Intro To Generics 0 to 60 - Devlin Liles
• M-V-V-M in Silverlight 4 - Caleb Jenkins
• Unit Testing SharePoint using TypeMock - Kyle Kelin
• 10 Practices every developer should start right now - Caleb Jenkins
• Monotouch for the iPhone - Casey Watson
• Dropping ACID: Building Scalable Systems That Work - Chris Patterson

 

Silverlight, SharePoint, iPhone, HTML5, as you can see we’ve got a packed schedule of .NET goodness … and that’s not to mention the Flex, ColdFusion, PHP, and Java tracks!

Every year Microsoft hosts an event they refer to as the MVP Global Summit in the Seattle area.  This event is invitation only event where those who have been recognized as Microsoft MVPs get to meet with their product groups, discuss strategy, impart real-world scenarios, and learn what is coming down the pipe.  The event is simply wonderful, where else can you get a chance to interact with the people directly responsible for parts of the Microsoft eco-system you care about most deeply.  Of course, such openness does not come without restriction.  The MVPs are all under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) which means that for 90%+ of what we are told, we cannot discuss it with other people.

You can’t discuss it?  Why go then?!

A fair question, with at least four answers. So let’s go through them.

First – I can’t discuss things, but I still know them.

When thinking about the trip to the Summit you must remember that you’re learning things far before the public will, but that does not mean that the public will never learn these things.  Much of what is discussed will eventually become public information, and once it is those who have been to the Summit will have had the most time to internalize and strategize on the information, often meaning they will be able to act on that information more quickly.  Also just because I can’t share my knowledge does not mean I can’t share my judgment.  I can use the information I have received to inform the choices I make for my own personal work and what I do for my clients.

Second – Meet the Team

Every Summit is a chance to meet new people within Microsoft who are working on your area of expertise and interest, to put a face with a name, and to collect business cards or email aliases.  This can be wonderful later on if you want to provide feedback or ask a short question during the 99% of the year that isn’t the MVP Summit.

Third – Bond with your Local MVPs

When you travel to the MVP Summit you get a chance to spend time strengthening your relationships with the MVPs in your area.  Your local MVPs are the backbone of your community, and getting to know them better will help you help your community better.  You’ve got time during the Summit to discuss plans for future events, eat, drink and be merry.

Fourth – Meet MVPs from around the world…

This may seem like a repeat of the entry above, but meeting MVPs from outside your local area has a different purpose.  Your making connections that open up an exchange of ideas.  You’re putting names with faces from Twitter, Facebook, StackOverflow and other sites.  You never know when a passing conversation about your interest with some technology might not result in you being able to help a company half way around the world make a wiser technical decision.  Absolutely key.  Again, eat, drink and be merry.

Conclusion

Rather obviously a lot of what the MVP Summit is about is networking, but you’re and MVP right?  You network, help people, organize meetings, answer questions, in general you are a community leader, and influencer.  And so are ALL of those other MVPs.  Even if every MVP touched merely as many people as a small user group, say 50/month people, then the 1400 MVPs who just left the Summit in 2010 represent 840,000 developer touches.  And those numbers are low.  From blog posts, to conferences, and more an MVP has huge reach … which is why we were invited to begin with.

Thank you to Microsoft, the Product Groups, the Developer Evangelists, and the incredible MVP Leads for making this Summit a smashing success!

I’m thrilled to announce that Dallas TechFest 2010 has set a date of July 30th, 2010 and is currently engaged in a Call For Speakers looking for those in all sorts of technology areas who wish to speak.  If you’ve got expertise in .NET, Java, Ruby, PHP, ColdFusion, Python, Flex or anything else then send in an abstract and see if you can secure a speaking slot at Dallas TechFest 2010.

Sometime in March we will be opening registration, but in the meantime mark the date on your calendar, and get ready for our registration drive.  Like in previous years, if you recommend people to register you will be entered to win a great prize.  What prize? Hmmm….  Well it’s got a touch screen, a 3G modem, and a huge app store.

I’m working on a side-project right now that is using Gravatars and found the wonderful article by Ryan Lanciaux on creating an HtmlHelper extension.  His extension was good, but did not use integrate with the FluentHtml model of MvcContrib, so I refactored his original into the following class, which does the same thing, but allows for fluent building of all the options.  Someone will undoubtedly point out that this could have used a couple of Enumerations, and their right, but I decided the API was static enough that I’d just create the methods. Anyway, I hope someone else gets some use out of this.

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;
using MvcContrib.FluentHtml.Elements;
using System;
using System.Web;

public class Gravatar : Element
{
    private string _email;
    private string _default;
    private string _rating;
    private int _size;
    private string _alt;

    public Gravatar(string email) : base("img")
    {
        _email = email;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToUrl(string url)
    {
        _default = url;
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToIdenticon()
    {
        _default = "identicon";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToMonsterId()
    {
        _default = "monsterid";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToWavatar()
    {
        _default = "wavatar";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultTo404()
    {
        _default = "404";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar Size(int size)
    {
        if (size < 1 || size > 512) throw new ArgumentException("Gravatars can only be between 1 and 512 in size.", "size");
        _size = size;
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar GRated()
    {
        _rating = "g";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar PGRated()
    {
        _rating = "pg";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar RRated()
    {
        _rating = "r";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar XRated()
    {
        _rating = "x";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar AlternateText(string alt)
    {
        _alt = alt;
        return this;
    }

    protected override TagRenderMode TagRenderMode
    {
        get
        {
            return TagRenderMode.SelfClosing;
        }
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        var src = string.Format("http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{0}?", EncryptMD5(_email));

        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(_rating)) src += string.Format("r={0}&", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(_rating));
        if (_size != 0) src += string.Format("s={0}&", _size);
        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(_default)) src += string.Format("d={0}&", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(_default));

        base.builder.MergeAttribute("src", src);
        base.Attr("alt", _alt ?? "Gravatar");

        return base.ToString();
    }

    private static string EncryptMD5(string Value)
    {
        using(var md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider())
        {
            byte[] valueArray = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Value);
            valueArray = md5.ComputeHash(valueArray);
            string encrypted = "";
            for (int i = 0; i < valueArray.Length; i++)
                encrypted += valueArray.ToString("x2").ToLower();
            return encrypted;
        }
    }
}

public static class GravatarHtmlHelper
{
    public static Gravatar Gravatar(this HtmlHelper html, string email)
    {
        return new Gravatar(email);
    }
}

A couple of days late, but I’m thrilled to announce that Microsoft has recognized me as a Most Valuable Professional again for 2009.  I’m always immensely honored to be counted among this incredible group of technologists.  MVPs are known around the world as passionate experts in their field, and I can only hope to live up to that ongoing recognition.

For those of you who follow my blog for technical reasons, you’ll be pleased to know I continue to be recognized as a Connected Systems Development MVP, and that you should see a lot of interesting content regarding Code Contracts, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Workflow Foundation all in .NET 4 in the coming weeks.

Starting Monday morning I will be starting a new project for a client of my employer Improving Enterprises.  I’ve spent a good deal of time talking with my new teammates about what technologies we will be using for the project, and I thought that work might be of interest to others, so here are some of the highlights.

Technology Stack : VS2010, .NET 4, C#

The first thing that was decided, during the initial scoping phase of the project, was that this project was a nearly ideal candidate for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0.  How did we come to that decision?  The desired architecture for the project is such that certain features of WCF 4.0 and Entity Framework 4.0 would help with the implementation, and the timeline of the project is such that we have a no concerns over the current lack of the a “Go Live” license.  For language it was decided we will primarily be working in C#. With that decided, we get to the far more interesting pieces.

Inversion of Control : StructureMap

Obviously we are going to need an IoC container for the project, and we have settled on StructureMap for that.  The competition in this regard was Castle Windsor as Improving has the benefit of employing Craig Neuwirt, we knew we had an expert.  The final decision to go with StructureMap instead hinged on two related things, complexity and learning curve.  While we were quite certain we could pick up Castle quickly enough (2 of the 3 did not know it already), we were not as certain how easy it would be for those who follow us.  StructureMap had a single well defined scope (IoC), versus the larger bite that the Castle Project would be for those who follow.  We recognize we could have just done Windsor, but we found no compelling reasons to do that versus StructureMap.

As noted, we will be doing a good bit of WCF 4.0 on this project, so it naturally followed we would need to integrated StructureMap into the channel stack to let it handle the creation of our service instances.  Jimmy Bogard has an excellent post on this subject, and we followed that guidance closely, though we updated the StructureMapServiceHostFactory to use ObjectFactory.Initialize as was recommended by the excellent ObsoleteAttribute usage in the latest StructureMap.

Source Control : GIT

Even within a group of people as passionate about creating great technology as we have at Improving, there are certain debates that deeply divide us.  Source Control is definitely one of them.  We have a certain segment of the company that are passionate advocates for Team System, obviously including Chris Tullier our resident Team System MVP.  But there are others who are passionate believers in Subversion.  Still others are not happy with either of those options, and still seek the “better mouse trap” for Source Control.  We discussed the pros and cons of various solutions and decided in the end to try GIT, because of its distributed model, and see how we liked it in comparison to the others.  It is an experiment, and we shall see.

Logging : log4net

Really, is there another option?  The definitive logging library for .NET, it does what it needs to and does not bring along any additional baggage.  As we are also using StructureMap, we found this blog post by John Rudolf Lewis helpful in discussing how to inject log4net using StructureMap (or Ninject) without losing fidelity in the logs.

Conclusion

So there are a few of our technology decisions, things I’ll be learning on in the coming months more and more.

Dallas TechFest is behind me, and now it is time to look forward.  Forward to Visual Studio 2010, Forward to .NET 4.0.

Tomorrow (Friday, June 26th) I will be presenting at the Dallas DevCares event on Parallelism in .NET 4.0.  This talk is one I’ve given before, but two things will be different this time.  First, I will be presenting with the use of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, so you will see how this actually works on actual .NET 4.0 bits.  Second, I will be presenting for a somewhat longer time than my usual User Group talk, we will be have time to take lots of questions, and to cover some fundamentals that I might not normally cover at this talk.

I’d love to see any of my readers and followers there, so cruise over to their website and register.

No, you read that correctly.  If you follow the link below and register for Dallas TechFest 2009 between now and June 14th, 2009 you will be entered into a drawing to win a Mac Mini.  We've got lots of space around, so spread around the code to all your friends. Oh, and you'll also be getting $20 off the full ticket price on top of that.

Why tell your friends?  Because if your friends tell us on their registration that you referred them, then you get an entry into the drawing as well.  So spread the word on Twitter, your blog, your company's internal list, or anywhere else you think there are folks who would want to go to Dallas TechFest.

http://tinyurl.com/WinAMacMini

But wait ... you're telling me I'm losing out because I registered early?  Not at all!

Nope, we're giving away another Mac Mini as well, as a special thank you to all those who registered early.

 

At 3:30 today I’ll be speaking at the Northwest Arkansas Code Camp 2009 about Concurrency in .NET 4.0.  Not in NWA?  No worries.  These guys have all the rooms setup with LiveMeeting, and are going to be making the content available during the day. If you’d like to join, just enter the LiveMeeting associated with each room at the Code Camp, you can find the links to them here.

Come, join in the fun, ask questions, and learn something today!

A quick update to Solution Clone was posted today to handle some new file types created in the BizTalk Deployment Framework v5.0.  You can find it here.

Some time ago I made a post about using external file dependencies with NUnit. That post was about using a class called TestFile, which implemented IDisposable, to temporarily store files to disk, and then clean them up afterwards. While learning my way around the BizTalk unit testing capabilities in BizTalk 2009, I realized that this class could use some minor initial modifications to make life easier. To that end, I present to you that updated class. The most important new feature is the ability to support having it generate the file name as a temp file, and the ability to load resources from any Assembly in the AppDomain.

public class TestFile : IDisposable
{
    private bool _disposedValue = false;
    private string _resourceName;
    private string _fileName;

    public TestFile(string resourceName) : this(null, resourceName) { }

    public TestFile(string fileName, string resourceName)
    {
        if (fileName == null)
        {
            this.FileName = Path.GetTempFileName();
            File.Delete(this.FileName);
        }
        else 
            this.FileName = fileName;

        using (Stream s = LoadResourceFromAppDomain(resourceName))
        using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s))
        using (StreamWriter sw = File.CreateText(this.FileName))
        {
            sw.Write(sr.ReadToEnd());
            sw.Flush();
        }
    }

    private Stream LoadResourceFromAppDomain(string resourceName)
    {
        Assembly[] appDomainAssemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies();
        Stream outStream = null;

        foreach (var lAssem in appDomainAssemblies)
        {
            outStream = lAssem.GetManifestResourceStream(resourceName);
            if (outStream != null) return outStream;
        }

        throw new Exception(string.Format("Unable to find resource stream {0}",resourceName));
    }

    public string FileName
    {
        get { return _fileName; }
        set
        {
            _fileName = value;
        }
    }
    

    protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        if (!this._disposedValue)
        {
            if (disposing)
            {
                if (File.Exists(_fileName))
                {
                    File.Delete(_fileName);
                }
            }
        }
        this._disposedValue = true;
    }

    #region IDisposable Members

    public void Dispose()
    {
        // Do not change this code.Put cleanup code in Dispose(bool disposing) above.
        Dispose(true);
        GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
    }

    #endregion
}