Jeff Atwood wrote a post called Please Don't Learn to Code and Zed Shaw wrote a post called Please Don't Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer. My wife lost her wedding ring down the drain. She freaked out and came running declaring that it was lost. Should we call a plumber? I am not a plumber and I have no interest in being a plumber. While I advocate that folks try to be handy around the house, I choose to put a limit on how much I know about plumbing. While my wife has an advanced ... [read more]

Note: For more information around the CacheAdapter, see my previous posts here, here, here and here You may have noticed a number of updates to the CacheAdapter package on nuget as of late. These are all related to performance and stability improvements for the memcached component of the library. However it became apparent that I needed more performance for the memcached support to make the library truly useful and perform as best as can be expected. I started playing with optimising serialis... [read more]

I'll be doing an eLearning event on HTML5 for Mobile with jQuery Mobile. There will also be a few items sprinkled in on ASP.NET Razor. Mobile development is a hot item. Customers are buying iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and many other mobile computing devices at an ever increasing record pace. Devices based on iOS and Android are nearly 80 percent of the marketplace. RIM continues to be dominant in the business area across the world. Nokia's growth with Windows Phone will grow on a wo... [read more]

Save this URL, memorize it, write it on a sticky note, tweet it, tell your colleagues about it!  localtest.me (http://localtest.me) and *.localtest.me (http://something.localtest.me) If you do any testing on your local system you’ve probably created hosts file entries (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) for different testing domains and had them point back to 127.0.0.1.  This works great but it requires just a bit of extra effort. This localtest.me trick is so obvious, so si... [read more]

Multimedia is expected in today's mobile applications, and the fun isn't only for smartphone and tablet users. Mono for Android, based on the Mono project's open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework, can help you take advantage of Android Camera APIs in Visual Studio. In this article, we'll look at taking pictures, loading pictures, video playback and recording video. Link: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2012/05/01/plug-in-to-mono.aspx I don't know about you, but ... [read more]

So I have been a smartphone user for a few years now, and it continues to astound me how much I rely on my device on a daily basis. People who know me well will tell you I am generally not an early adopter of technology, so it took me longer than most of my technophile contemporaries before I jumped on the bandwagon. And the real tipping point for me was when I realized that I could replace a number of single-purpose devices with an “all-in-one” solution. In a practical way I could get rid o... [read more]

Last week Website Magazine published their June issue which contained a list of the Top 50 Content Management Solutions available in the market. The list included both open source as well as proprietary content management systems and the ranking was based on a custom formula of website popularity based on average daily unique visitors and page views. Aside from the list itself, Website Magazine also tried to explain in layman’s terms the definition of a content management system and how they ... [read more]

Earlier today, I received an email chain from a family member. I usually read these, but very rarely forward them off. However, this one brings up very interesting points. The tone of the email was against the current Obama administration. I’m going to try to do my best to remove the President’s office from this discussion. My reason for it is that whether or not I agree with the current Administration, I think this uncovers a larger problem with government spending. Setting the Tone Remember ba... [read more]

The Floppy Disk Icon means "save" for a whole generation of people who have never seen one. — Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 9, 2012 What happens when all the things we based our icons on don't exist anymore? Do they just become, ahem, iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery? Floppy Disk - Save Save? Save where? You know, down there. Adding the Arrow to the 3.5" floppy makes me smile. Is it pointing to under my desk? What's a floppy? Why not a USB key? Maybe a cloud icon? T... [read more]

Almost exactly one year ago I posted a blog which highlighted the three most pervasive technological trends in the software industry and predicted that the Content Management market was in for a significant disruption in the coming years as it attempts to get comfortable with these new technologies. This same blog was republished with Bryan Ruby’s permission on the CMS Report website. This morning I kicked off Day 2 at CMS Expo in Chicago, IL with a mini-keynote on this same topic. But rather ... [read more]

The Visual Studio is constantly reviewing items that have been posted to their User Voice site. One of the items that I’ve been asking for, installation customization in Visual Studio, has been voted up to number 4 on the list. Keep the votes coming. Another item that I have voted for is adding color back to Visual Studio. Yesterday morning, the Visual Studio team announced that changes have been made and will be reflected in the Visual Studio Release Candidate. While I still feel there ca... [read more]

I figured you may ask. Since my last post, I have been working hard to prepare and organize Northeastern PA’s only true technology conference, TECHbash 2012. The event was great! Everything was a huge success and the attendees seem to be pumped up for TECHbash 2013. Although we’re still 11 months away from our next event, we are already planning for the next one. If you think you may be interested in speaking, sponsoring, or volunteering, please let me know. We’ll have our firs... [read more]

Let me start by saying I'm not a big Star Wars guy. I enjoyed the films when I was growing up (I think I saw the original  (Ep. 4 ANH) in 1980 along with Empire Strikes Back in 1980) but I haven't thought much about them since. That said, I appreciate the films and I like movies in general. Watching movies with my kids (usually Pixar movies) have brought us a lot of shared joy as a family. However, Star Wars are fun and classics and we wanted to share them with our kids in a way that worked... [read more]

The last beta for DotNetNuke 6.2 is now available.  That’s correct, this is the last beta.  That means we are feeling really good about where we are with the product.  The team is working hard to stabilize the release, but we still need your feedback!  We still have some issues to work through, but we are getting close to the public release of DotNetNuke 6.2.  Learn more about how to get started with DotNetNuke 6.2 today!

One of the new features in DotNetNuke 6.2 is the Member Directory.  During the implementation of this new feature, we ran into some stumbling blocks trying to retrieve user info and user profile information.  The issue wasn’t retrieving the necessary information, it was the speed at which the queries were performing at.

This year’s DotNetNuke World conference is just around the corner and we are once again looking for speakers. DotNetNuke World will be October 10th through the 12th in lovely Orlando, Florida. Registration will be opening soon, and like last year we will be offering great early bird pricing. This year’s event is shaping up to be twice as large as last year. More speakers, more sessions, and more attendees. Much like past years, we are accepting session submissions that focus on Development, De... [read more]

The portal "contentmanager.de" published a new german e-book

Over the last many months the Engineering Organization at DotNetNuke Corp. has been making many process changes to deliver high-quality Software. As Scrum Master and Lead Developer, I’d like to dedicate a blog series on what we did, how it helped and the lessons we learned. In this blog, I’d like to talk specifically about Peer Code Review that we implemented over 10 months ago.Category: DotNetNuke CorporationCategory: Development

Just wrapped up presenting at a Windows Phone Camp in Denver and I wanted to post a few follow up links that we talked about during the session. Location Programming Best Practices for Windows Phone http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431814(v=VS.92).aspx Bing Maps API Licensing Details http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/licensing.aspx Bing Maps REST API docs http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff701722.aspx Using the Bing Map Task http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh... [read more]

A while back my buddy Sam Saffron (from Stack Overflow and Mini Profiler) complained to me on Skype that he was finding it very irritating that every time he updated his project outside of Visual Studio he would be prompted to "Reload Project" and would lose all his open files because Visual Studio would close them. This apparently is becoming kind of an issue at Stack Overflow. Since they use distributed source control and often have a dozen or more folks all coding inside the same ... [read more]

Interested in learning more about game programming with XNA or building applications for Windows Phone 7? Two free all-day events are coming to Phoenix in May that you can attend to learn more. These events are always a ton of fun with some talks on the different technologies, labs, and hands-on time to actually build a custom game/application. Did I mention that there will be prizes given out and free food as well? Register at the links below and I’ll look forward to seeing you there! XNA... [read more]

On Friday, May 4th I am excited to travel to sunny Florida and present to the Sarasota .NET Developers Group ( SarasotaDev ). The presentation will take place at the Sarasota Community Foundation located at 2635 Fruitville Rd in the afternoon from 2:00-4:00 PM. I plan on covering a couple of topics related to DotNetNuke which I think the audience will find highly engaging. The first topic being a presentation and demo of the highly anticipated DotNetNuke 6.2 release which fully integrates the ... [read more]

This article resumes where we left off in "Working with Images and Animation on the iPhone and iPad with .NET and C#: Part 1," which looked at multimedia app development on the iPhone and iPad, including how to display simple images, take pictures with the device's camera, and perform some simple animation with the images. In this article, part 2, we'll look at how to perform more complicated animation using the NSTimer and UIView classes, how to display and record video, and how to edit th... [read more]

Let's be honest: When debugging with Android -- and Mono for Android (MfA) on Windows by extension -- using the emulator requires patience. This isn't a condemnation of Mono for Android; merely recognition of the reality of having to live within the Android ecosystem. I've noticed that most developers who develop on Android tend to be using a Mac. I think this is due to the development experience on the Mac being better overall for Android. Let's look at how this debugging has impr... [read more]

I visit a lot of customers and look at a lot of code. I also worked with a number of large production code bases in my previous jobs and I see a lot of ifs, fors and switches. I see loops inside of loops with ifs inside them, all doing various transformations of data from one form to another. I see strings getting parsed to pull bits of data out in ways that are easy to say in English but take 100 lines to say in code. Should they? When we are just getting started programming we learn about if... [read more]