Excellence in Software

The October meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on October 21st, 2008 from 7-9PM.  Check the DC ALT.NET site and our mailing list for continuing updates and future meetings.  This month, Linda Cook will be presenting "A Look at Kanban Software Development".  I've been exploring a lot of Lean Software Development and Kanban, and this is an opportunity to explore the topic in depth with an established Lean/Agile coach.  My CodeBetter compatriot, Dave Laribee had introduced Kanban to... [read more]

The next couple of months are pretty busy for me.  There are several items worth noting whether I'm speaking or just plain attending.  This is a great season for community events and chances for continuous improvement. Richmond Code Camp - October 4, 2008 This weekend, I'm going to be attending the Richmond Code Camp in Richmond, Virginia.  I have the privilege of presenting "Approaching Functional Programming in C# or How I Lost the ForEach and Learned to Love LINQ" in which I di... [read more]

I'm not usually one to follow up replies from another's blog in my own, but some challenges need further analysis.  Ayende posted earlier about emulating the behavior of Java Enums in .NET.  Since the inception of C#, there has been a lot of back and forth between Java and C# in terms of features such as generics, attributes (annotations), foreach statements, and lastly enums.  There are significant differences between the two, but let's see if we can bridge that gap. Enter Java E... [read more]

In the past couple of posts, I covered extension everything in F#.  This allows me to extend .NET types with such things as extension static and instance methods, properties, properties with indexers, events and so on.  But, let's go back to the beginning and cover object oriented programming with F# from the ground up.  I like to stress that F# is not only a first class functional language, albeit a more impure one than say Haskell, but it also treats imperative and object orient... [read more]

I want to thank Troy Goode for his presentation tonight at DC ALT.NET.  He gave a great demo of how to build from scratch an ASP.NET MVC blog engine, which is a lot to ask given our two hour timeframe.  And yet, he pulled it off nicely.  As promised, Troy has posted his materials from the presentation here. I'm hoping in the near to set up some workshops in the Washington DC area on such subjects to take a single topic and go deep as we can on it.  I think this would be a pr... [read more]

Just a reminder that the September meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on September 24th, 2008 from 7PM-9PM.  Check out our site and our mailing list for more information as it becomes available.  This month, Troy Goode will present on building applications with ASP.NET MVC.  This will be a basic introduction, but also how to build practical applications, such as a blog engine using MVC.  Download the latest bits, ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and follow along as I will be. I'd like to ... [read more]

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of recording Episode 18 of Herding Code on Functional Programming and F#.  The topic on their minds was around functional programming, and more in particular with some of the things I've been doing around the .NET space both C# and F#.  Some of the things I talked about in this episode were around the following topics: What is Functional Programming and why should we care? C# and the evolution of the language with functional asp... [read more]

In the past, I've covered quite a bit of functional programming in C# 3.0 and how you can implement some of the basic constructs using the language.  In preparation for the Richmond Code Camp coming up on October 4th, for which I'm planning to present "Functional C# -or- How I lost the foreach and learned to love LINQ", I'm revisiting some of the topics I've talked about in the past.  One of those topics is pattern matching. Pattern Matching Earlier in my introduction to F# series, ... [read more]

Thursday, September 18th, 2008; 6p-8p Bank of America, Building 500, 9000 Southside Blvd; 2nd Fl; Sea Oats Rm Map: Meeting Logistics RSVP: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=130639 Enterprise Content Management - Document Retention Document retention is an important part of content management.  SharePoint provides out-of-the-box support for managing document retention using the built-in expiration policy feature of the information management policy framework.  The built-in expirat... [read more]

In a previous post, I covered a few ways we can do extensions methods, properties, events and so on with F#.  After a few chats, I realized I may have missed a couple of cases that I wanted to cover today.  These two cases are extension operators and extension properties with indexers. With these examples, I'll try best to show you my development style, using my FsTest library from CodePlex to set up my expectations of the extensions using F# syntax.  If you're not familiar wit... [read more]

One of my first posts at CodeBetter was in regards to side effects and how, when unmanaged, can be truly evil.  Today, I want to revisit that topic briefly in regards to functional programming and managing side effects.  When I was out in Redmond a couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Erik Meijer to discuss functional programming among other topics.  In there, we discussed a number of issues around managing side effects and state in your code, and how both ... [read more]

There is a new standards effort in the works that promises to unify the disparate ECM platforms currently available into a common set of interfaces.  The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification is the result of a collaboration between Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Alfresco, OpenText, SAP and Oracle.  Click here to download a preview copy of the spec. First impressions: The specification tries to define the "core" components of any ECM system.  On the on... [read more]

A post by Jeremy Miller caught my eye this morning in regards to extension methods in Javascript.  While I think that's pretty interesting, I don't think it's a real fair comparison.  Instead, I want to revisit C# and even F# with regards to extension methods, because there are a few things I wanted to point out.  This is the start of a series covering object oriented programming techniques and how they are used in F#.  Note that F# is not only a functional language, but it i... [read more]

The September meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on September 24th, 2008 from 7PM-9PM.  Check out our site and our mailing list for more information as it becomes available.  This month, Troy Goode will present on building applications with ASP.NET MVC.  This will be a basic introduction, but also how to build practical applications, such as a blog engine using MVC.  Download the latest bits, ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and follow along as I will be. I'd like to thank Cynergy System... [read more]

When it comes to content management in SharePoint, half the battle is figuring out the best angle of attack.  Why?  Well, because there are so many options and combinations of options that come into play when designing a solution. Take the SharePoint permissions architecture, for example.  There are 33 different permission masks divided into 3 categories: personal, list and site permissions.  These are combined into role definitions (permission levels) which may be assigned t... [read more]

Back in June, I announced the creation of FsTest, a testing Domain Specific Language for F#.  Since that time, the F# team has released the September 2008 CTP, which finally gives F# full citizenship within Visual Studio with real project files.  I felt it was time to update FsTest, and more in particular, FsxUnit, which uses xUnit.net as the back end for doing assertions.  Go ahead and pick up the latest bits here from the CodePlex site. What's Changed? Other than migrating th... [read more]

Lately, there has been a lot of momentum around functional programming.  While I was away on vacation for the past couple of weeks, I came across quite a few items that caught my eye.  This isn't meant to be a link blog by any means, but to show that there is a bit of new information coming out around functional programming and what it means to you. F# There has been a bit of excitement around F# since the release of the September 2008 CTP.  If you haven't already downloaded... [read more]

Don Syme just announced today the F# Community Technical Preview (CTP) Release September 2008 which is now available for download as well  the launch of the MSDN F#  Developer Center.  I've been playing with these builds lately and they are great improvements in usability as well as better integration into Visual Studio and MSBuild.  Be sure to check out Don's post on the matter on how the language has evolved and the changes that have been made.  Some of the big items I... [read more]

The August meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on August 28th, 2008 from 7-9PM.  Check our site and our mailing list for continuing updates and future meetings.  This month, Jeff Schoolcraft, ASP.NET MVP, will host a conversation on Ruby.  This will include some Ruby demos, a little bit of Ruby on Rails, as well as approaching it from the ASP.NET mindset.  This talk will go very nicely with our talk on ASP.NET MVC next month. Approaching Ruby One of the main intentions for the... [read more]

Let's face it, SharePoint is a huge development platform no matter what angle you approach it from.   As most of you know, I've spent the past year or so traveling and teaching SharePoint developer courses for the Ted Pattison Group, and my focus has been pretty broad, covering topics ranging from features to content types to workflow and everything in between.  Now, as the platform continues to mature and as developers become more and more familiar with the basics of Shar... [read more]

For the next part of my coverage of Asynchronous Computation Expressions, I'm going to talk about the things you get for free when you use them.  I was reminded of this during a recent chat with Greg Young about how hard it was during asynchronous operations to notify the controlling thread of an exception.  These asynchronous operations are meant to handle such things.  Let's get caught up to where we are today with regards to Async Computation Expressions: Task Parall... [read more]

Last month, I posted my Functional C# presentation for the Rockville .NET User Group (RockNUG).  Yesterday, I was able to finally present the material, although I was feeling under the weather and there was a lot of information in just that brief amount of time.  So, I'm going to repost the materials just in case someone missed them.  I'm adding a few things as well which may be of interest.  I'm hoping to expand this for upcoming code camps. Here are some resources that ... [read more]

In this continuing series of my back to basics, I've been talking about recursion, and various strategies around using it effectively.  This includes covering the basic types of recursion, whether it be linear, binary, and tail.  Then I took it a step further with topics on list recursion and memoization techniques.  This is an ongoing part of my back to basics series in which I hope is a refresher for many who don't use these things on a daily basis. Let's catch up to where we... [read more]

Mozilla Labs in partnership with Adaptive Path has released two concept videos of what the web browsing experience may look and feel like in the future.  It shows some pretty interesting concepts.  I particularly like the 3D interface where content continually recedes as time progresses – kind of like a push-down stack from front to back with the most recent items in the front. The little hand-held device looks remarkably similar to the iPhone, and the design team appears to have ma... [read more]

Ok, so first I need to give a shout out to John Miller, who read my last post and promptly encouraged me to check out the VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta, which adds a nifty feature called “AutoProtect”.  The idea is to have Fusion automatically save snapshots of your virtual machines as backups for easy rollbacks in exactly the same situation I find myself in now.  Unfortunately, I didn’t upgrade sooner, because it looks like this is one of those “must have” feat... [read more]