In case you haven’t heard, EPS is hosting a 3-day WPF training next week here in Houston, given by myself and Markus Egger. It’ll go from fundamentals, through skinning apps, and composite applications. A lot of ground to cover.  :)

See more info here.

Just had a good time doing my “Beyond the Core Concepts of OOP” presentation at the New England VB users group. I’ve heard good questions and everybody seemed to be pretty engaged.

Preparing for it was kind of interesting since I’ve translated all my C# samples to VB. I’m just very rusty with the VB code editor and couldn’t figure out how to do some very simple things. :)

The material for the presentation can be downloaded here.

Sorry for the late post…

Last week’s Virtual BBM went pretty well. We’ve had 17 people attending, and we’ve had more people sharing tips. That’s great; the outcome of that is that we’ve covered all sorts of very different subjects.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to post the recording yet, but we’ll do it as soon as we can. Meanwhile, this is a quick recap of things we covered:

• Polyglot programmer
• Ted's article on MSDN mag
• Scripting Silverlight with IronRuby: Writing C#, but testing with IronRuby…
• MEF and dynamic languages
• Extension methods on IEnumerable, View objects, and a bunch more.
• F#
• BDD-style tests
• Context/Specification
• Windows 7 Release Candidate
• Dimecasts.net
• Podcasts on IronRuby and IronPython on CodeCast
• Visual Studio tips:
  • Ctrl+H and replacing text in “selection”
  • Ctrl+K+A: swaping current anchor/caret position on selected text
  • Guid Generator
• Some Executor tips
• FireFox: LoL extension, for keyboard-based navigation

It’s worth mentioning that our buddy J.B., from Houston, was the main “MC” for last week’s meeting, and he’ll do it again tomorrow, because I won’t be able to attend (will be out of town speaking at a user group). As time goes by, we’ll need two or three more people who’d be willing to be the MC for meetings, in case neither I or J.B. can make it; that way we make sure we always have our weekly meeting, no matter what.  :)

I’d like to thank INETA for hosting the event and everybody who attended to it. As promised, here’s a link where you can download the material (slides and samples). See you next time!  :)

We’ve had our second Virtual Brown Bag Meeting today. At some point, there were 15 attendees; I noticed some were at the first meeting, and some were new to it. Hopefully we’ll see this number increasing in the future.

Here are the things we’ve covered this week (I’m sorry, but I just don’t have time to put more details here. Check out the link to the recording at the bottom of this post to watch the meeting):

• Entity Framework with POCO
• VS tip
  • How to set keyboard shortcuts to increase/decrease the editor’s font site (look for the IncreaseTextEditorFontSize and DecreaseTextEditorFontSize macros).
• May/June 2009 CODE Magazine (the “open source” issue): good articles on Windsor Castle, NHibernate, Mocks and Stubs…
• Karl’s Seguin free book on “Foundations of Programming”
• Uncle Bob’s blog post: Code Inevitable? Rumblings from ACCU
• WPF: Dependency Properties, Attached Properties, Attached Behaviors, Model-View-ViewModel and DataTemplates
• Refactoring code to use a fluent interface
• Alternative to dynamic instantiation (DynamicMethod versus Activator.CreateInstance)

Here’s a link to the recording, in case you’ve missed it or want to go back and revisit some of the points.

Next week I will be out to a client and won’t be able to attend to the meeting. We’ll find somebody to start off the meeting and promote others to presenter as the meeting goes on.

I’m back from my quick trip to Lubbock, TX. I did a presentation on OOP over there. We’ve covered the core concepts, as well as the S, O, and I parts of SOLID. We’ve also squeezed some explanation on delegates, events, Action and Predicate, some brief functional programming with C#. Not bad, I don’t think. :)

The material from the presentation can be downloaded here.

Last week we’ve had our very first Virtual Brown Bag Meeting (click here to learn more). About 14 people showed up, which was beyond my expectations, since it was just the first meeting, and I had only announced it in a few places (my own blog, Twitter, and VAN’s Google Group). I’ve heard some great feedback about it, so we’ll keep this going.

Things We’ve Covered

Here are a few things we’ve covered in the first meeting:

• Books
  • Sara Ford’s book on Visual Studio Tips
• VS productivity tools
  • CodeRush/RefactorPro
  • SonicFileFinder
  • CoolCommands
  • Saving Windows Layout
• Application Launchers:
  • SlickRun
  • Launchy
  • Executor
• Utility for Windows
  • AutoHotKey

Things I’ve Adopted or Will be Adopting Soon

I’ve been using SlickRun for several years now. It’s the very first tool I install right after installing the O.S. And I use it a LOT! I’ve always heard of people using both SlickRun and Launchy, since they complement each other. When I saw Executor at this 1st Virtual BBM, I just knew I had to take a serious look into it. Executor is much like a mix of SlickRun+Launchy; it has pretty much the best of both, and more. I’ve adopted it as my main launcher tool, and I’ll probably have a separate post just about it. I’m still going to keep SlickRun around because I use it’s Jot feature quite often.

Another thing I’ve had at the back of my mind for quite some time now is AutoHotKey. After seeing a little demo of it at this last BBM, I’m convinced I also have to take a serious look into this tool, too. My immediate use is going to be for creating BDD-style test names, but I can see how I’m going to be using it for many other things. However, I’ll need to spend some time learning its scripting language.

Things We’ve Learned in General About How to Handle the Meeting

We’ve recorded the session, but I’ve made the mistake to not record it to the LiveMeeting servers, so I only have it on my computer. I’ve uploaded it so you can download it here, though.

One thing we’ve established at the meeting was that whoever has anything to share must change the “Feedback” flag on LiveMeeting to “yellow”:

That helps the facilitator (that is, whoever’s helping the group stay on track as the main presenter) to promote the person to a presenter. Once you’ve been promoted to a presenter, go to the LiveMeeting toolbar at the top of your screen, click Content, Share, and then either pick Share a Program or Share Your Desktop, depending on what it is exactly that you want to share:

Also, we’re using LiveMeeting’s voice-over-IP features for the audio part, so make sure you have a microphone and speakers plugged in (for better quality, trying using a headset).

What’s Next?

That’s it for now. Do not forget our next Virtual BBM is tomorrow (Thursday), at 12pm Central Time. Bring in your tips and let’s share!

If you have any suggestions or comments, please don’t hesitate in letting me know, so we can improve the experience for everybody.