Ariel's Remote Data Center

I’ve been doing quite a few presentations lately, and I am currently following a method that has been working out for me quite well for the last year or so.

I don’t claim my method to be unique, and it’s definitely inspired by people I’ve seen presenting, worth mentioning are Scott Hanselman and Steve Sanderson. The reason for this post is only to share with you my approach and hope you will find it helpful. I won’t iterate over great presentations tips posts that you can find over the web but just describe the process I am using.

So with that long introduction beyond us let’s get to step number 1.

1. Organize your talks on disk– I’ve created a folder to contain sessions that I consider active. Once in a while I scan that folder and retire talks that are not likely to be used in the future and move it to another folder, so this folder won’t be cluttered and you can navigate and find your stuff quickly. (Make sure this folder is backed up regularly, anyway today it’s not an excuse anymore to backup everything you have for a few bucks a month).

2. Create a folder for new talk – this one is quite self explanatory. I use the format of starting with a date and talk subject but you should change it for whatever works out for you.

3. Brainstorm.txt – With a technique mainly learned from Scott Hanselman, I’m starting out every new talk by creating the Brainstorm.txt. I putting into the file ideas, bullets of topics I would like the talk to contain and I try to measure out the timing for each topic. Later on it will be my talk note which I can print out and place it near my machine while presenting, containing important stuff I want to remember and timing and make sure I’m on track.

Here is an example:

* Framework
* IoC
* Panorama/Pivot
* Unitest
* Store
* Background-Tasks
* Azure Mobile Serivces
* Phone API

Intro
--- 5 min

Motivation for this talk
  Decided we want to build a wp8 app. But what are the steps to follow?
 
--- 10 min

Idea: Show the final app.

---- 15 min
Design
Show Pivot vs Panorama
Show AppBar

---- 20min
Architecture
Show some frameworks: SuiteValue, MVVMLight
Talk about WAMS

---- 35 min   
Code
Demo

Part 0 - Setting up from new project. Adding packages: SuiteValue and Toolkit, Add Icons and splash.
       - Setting up StandardFiles and Folders
       - Adding App specific service code => Part 1
Part 1 - Adding Pivot + ViewModels composition => Part 2
Part 2 - Adding Invite UI + ViewModel => Part 3
Part 3 - Adding Invite Command + AppBar => Part 4
Part 4 - Adding Gifts UI + ViewModel => Part 5
Part 5 - Adding CustomMessageBox for editing Gifts => Part 6.

---- 60
  Testing
Part 6 - Adding Unitest project and showing Asynchronous tests => Part 7
-----65
Store

----- 70
Summary

----- 75

4. Creating slides for talk – nothing new here, by following the brainstorm.txt, I can structure my slides with more ease.

5. Writing Code – For most of my talks I try to create a sample application or applications and demonstrate the features of whatever I’m talking about. I avoid completely the use of snippets (I had more then one talk that is completely unusable now cause I’ve somehow (or more precisely Visual Studio) lost those snippets.

Instead of Snippets I use Git. (the inspiration for this came from Steve Sanderson that used in one of his talks a source control to jump straight to a working demo). Git will server us really well, it is fast, it is robust, it can be pushed to github (By the end of my talk I share a url for the github repository to people get immediate access to code and slides), it contains everything locally, it can be moved around without fear of breaking up and much more.

When I have git created,  I start working on my demos, I can use git and commit, but it’s completely optional and up to you. When you are done and everything is ready do make a commit, so you can always go back to the final state of the demo application.

Now, it is time to start removing code and features (YES). Delete and remove till you are back to what you consider square one, meaning, at the start of your talk this is how you want the sample application to be, it can be empty, it can be already doing stuff, all depend on your talk.

Commit.

Now tag this commit with “Step0”. This is the baseline. Every time you are going to present this talk, you can “checkout” and return to “Step0”.

From here you start adding code. granularity of the steps is up to you, I usually prefer to have a something that can be shown to the audience with every passing step, but it’s really your choice. Whatever you do be consistent and name them “Step1”, “Step2”, … , “StepN”. I like the steps to appear in the Brainstorm.txt, so I will have a cheat sheet during the talk to remind me what each step should do. (also good when you review the talk after a while) In some cases I also mention the main file which the step had altered so I can make sure to avoid having crowd fear to forget what did I change.

Using this format it’s very clear for the eye during the talk:

Part 3 - Adding Invite Command + AppBar => Part 4

Part 3 is the start for this sample, and Part 4 has this demo implemented. Easy and clear.

Add code, Commit, Tag, update Brainstorm.txt, repeat and rinse.

By using this technique you can pretty much concentrate on the code itself. for example it is most likely you have added all the necessary references in Step0, cause you have only deleted code from the final version when you got to Step0.

Another critical benefit is that now you always have a working a demo. if you choose to live code part of the code and you get lost, you can always jump straight to the end of the step and viola, a working demo. No longer you need the mercy of the demo gods, you control the environment and it has zero chance for mistakes if you prepare carefully.

6. Preparing your tool for the talk – I usually use VIsual Studio in my talks, I’ve am using the Nuget console inside Visual Studio which is basically a PowerShell. You can configure PowerShell with Git by using this post. But you can use command line, I just like it inside the IDE, I don’t have to switch, and usually I can do it so quickly that the audience doesn’t really know how I’ve pulled that magic .

7. Executing the talk – now all you have to do is talk with confidence, smile, be responsive, enter git checkout –f “StepX” (-f is very important, cause you want to force and ignore any changes you might have made during the talk). After that I usually explain what were the code changes, so while I agree it is less visible then moving around snippets but with the right commentary it will be understood and appreciated by the audience that you don’t waste their time with fumbling around with code and snippets.

8. Wrapping up – usually I transfer my slides to PDF and push it to github as well, and share the link with the world.

Questions? No. Go and prepare for your presentations now you can concentrate on the content, and not on memorizing steps.

Good Luck, hope that helps someone.

Ariel

Packt book publisher has requested me to review their book on Kinect SDK. I’ve obliged.

This book is a guide that takes you end to end with Kinect development.

The first chapter provides you with an in-depth introduction into the Kinect sensor itself, for myself one who finds all hardware a mystery it was very educational to have someone pinpoint all the hardware pieces that Kinect consist of.

The 2nd chapter guides you with the preparation of your working environment. It describes in length how to setup the various SDKs and make sure you have zero questions mark before you get into the real thing. Coding.

From there we are skimming though the various properties of the SDK, from extracting information on kinect devices plugged in into setting their properties, for example their tilt angle.

With light and easy to read language, the book takes no prerequisites on the reader knowledge, but WPF knowledge will help concentrating on the main issue which is the SDK and not the user code that operates it.

Also very helpful are diagrams and side information meant for explaining what is going on the device itself and the physics involves with the commands operated.

Skeleton processing or speech processing are most likely what every Kinect driven application is likely to use, the book is full of practical code snippets and approaches that steer away from the academic approach and it’s very valuable for someone who doesn’t solely care about how it works but how to make it work in his app.

Kinect is here to stay, it’s the harbinger of NUI (Natural User Interface), reports indicate that Kinect and other similar devices are getting better and better and are extending the scenarios they can be applied into. You can grab this book and make sure this train doesn’t leave without you.

Hey all,

A week before Build// I’ve registered to the Build Hackaton.

Hackaton is a process which people are gathered in a room, divided into ad-hoc teams and are driven to create awesome and imaginative apps in a short term of time.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/LauraFoy/BUILD-2012-Hackathon-Kickoff

Hackaton has started on Monday, a day which was dedicated to attendee registration, but the hackaton room was already packed with action, a room filled with MS techies (from the relevant Windows8, Windows Azure and Windows Phone teams) were mentoring attendees teams day and night, and attendees who were already trying to split into teams and decide on ideas.

At first I thought about creating a game, but after talking with my colleague Alon, he convinced me intto creating a version for Countdowns to WP8 (everything was needed to be created from scratch, so reusing my Windows8 app and backend was not eligible for fair contest ).

Teaming up was out of the question for me, I didn’t want other people being part of my initiative (mostly because of post build consideration), so I’ve become a one man team.

Unfortunately I had a rough start, the machine I worked on was underpowered (Acer PDC09 machine, which I took for my 1 month trip and was primarily used to read emails and download photos to) and after trying to install the WP8 SDK 3 times during that day it turned that machine is unable to run the WP8 emulate as it has Hyper-V as a requirement(boo), the WP8 SDK installed didn’t warn me, and so this has become my first input back to the people of MS which were mentoring me, it will not be the last.

I’ve literally burned a day worth of work on this.

The day after turned out the be much better, I’ve attended sessions most of the day which were tremendous help to my cause, I’ve used the Azure Mobile Services which were really easy to integrate with the client and provided me amazing Server side experience including OAuth authentications (I’ve used only Twitter, hoped to add Facebook as well but didn’t have the time), We have tried so hard to overcome those challenges using plain vanilla Azure services in the past, and this makes those so easy to use.

I’ve stayed very late that day and before turning in I’ve managed to get the basic UI done.

Thursday I’ve focused on getting the app to be in better shape, I’ve created an Intro page that explained users what is going on.

Also completed the Create new Countdowns/Edit scenario and by the last minute managed to implement an NFC interaction and put my designer friend’s (Amazing Erez Pedro) paintbrush change to the default background.

Alon has helped me to create some content (countdowns) and by 17:30 I have submitted the binaries and locked to the Azure database from future changes.

I took a long breath and went along with my fellow Codevaluers to the Build// party

During this development phase I’ve made great connection with Ariel Schapiro(@aschapiro), Microsfotie from Argentina focusing on WP8, Sam Jarawan, a member of the WP8 development team (which is code snippets for NFC were invaluable to me and helped me implement it on the last seconds, literally) and Paul Batum, a PM on the Windows Azure Mobile Services, which I enjoyed so much showing him some AMS bugs (serializing datetime for example was a nice one), so it was nice hacking past those bugs by pairing with him as well.

After coming back from the party I was happy to see an email telling me I’ve been successful on reaching the finals after they (Awesome Dan Fernandez and his team) have spent 4 hours going through all the apps being submitted.

Come Friday morning, I sat down with Alon to conceive my 3 minutes demo talk, I’ve prepared the text during a session on Unitests Windows Store apps, but when I got the Hackaton room, I’ve find out that I was going to present first, without much practice, I went along and tried to do my best.

Turned out it wasn’t that bad, and I finished 3^rd . I must admit I felt a bit disappointment though the 1^st place app was well deserved, but I thought that with more design and a little more features such as live Tiles I would at least be finishing 2^nd. But I guess 3^rd place is still great.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/LauraFoy/Hackathon-Finals-BUILD-2012

As a summary Hackaton provided alternative learning process and the interaction with the people there was lots of fun, showing the app to Scott Hanselman and the rest of the judges was both fun and exciting experience.

I hope that’s next conference an Hackaton will also take place.

Hope you find this piece interesting, Keep on hacking and reaching out!

Cheers!

This week we are helding our annual monthly session. It’s a bit odd, but Erez Pedro and myself are going to be the speakers .

The session name is “Developers Are from Mars, Designers Are from Venus” it has 2 parts, one by Erez an amazing designer and UX expert targeted to designers and myself targeting developers. Our goal is the same, narrow the gap between the two group especially when doing XAML work.

If you are a developer, I’m going to talk about the MVVM pattern, and it this session focus, why is it good for designers. I’m going to show common challenges such as ViewModel Data, Visual State Manager, etc.

After that we are going to talk about the tool, Blend, and talk about what to expect as a developer with blend output.

in our final part we are going to discuss tips and performance issues worth to remember.

Does that sound good to you? Interesting? boring? it’s not too late change my agenda, so let me know .

Here is the full description:

Developers Are from Mars, Designers Are from Venus

Today every application big or small needs to compete on a highly demanding field of the User experience. Touch based devices; crisp beautiful displays all effects the complexity of those User Interfaces. Furthermore it is now common to witness how UX/UI people are participating on every aspect of the development phase.

In this session we will try to mitigate the challenges of developers and designers working side by side, by showing methods and best practices especially when using XAML based technologies.

On Wednesday 18st  April 2012

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly
18:00 - 19:15   Designers: How to work with developers
Erez Pedro

19:15 - 19:30   Break
19:30 – 20:30 Developers: How to work with designers
Ariel Ben Horesh

About the speakers:

Erez is a senior UX architect with a unique perspective of user experience that combines knowledge and expertise covering all aspects of the user experience design. He utilizes a variety of user centric analysis & design methodologies to design experiences that optimize users’ situation awareness and usability. This expertise is the outcome of 15 years of UX design experience including work in North America and many years in Israel. Erez is an expert in: Human factors, interaction and information design, as well as in implementation and development of rich client technology. He is experienced in WPF & Silverlight client technologies.

Ariel Ben-Horesh is a software architect and expert in Microsoft technologies. Ariel is a Co-Founder of CodeValue. Ariel is an expert in modern UI software design, using WPF or Silverlight with Prism.  Ariel serves as a Senior Consultant and trainer at CodeValue. He is currently consulting in various enterprises in Israel and worldwide, architecting and developing RIA and Smart Client-based solutions.

Register Here: http://idndug-apr-2012.eventbrite.com/

Finally big kudos to our sponsors Telerik

And JetBrains.

and our new addition Pluralsight

Thank you for you support!

Last Friday we had held CodeValue 1st CodeRetreat, for the unaware, CodeRetreat was created by Corey Haines (which had become a frequent visitor in this blog ).

It is safe to assume that most of you have never heard of CodeRetreat, it is a day which you concentrate on skills that usually you are neglecting or putting aside because it slows you down when you just want o get things done. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m the first to tell you that usually that exactly what you need to do. That why the whole purpose of this day is to sharpen skills that when you code you real stuff it will be less an hinder, it will be much more on the flow of your development, and by that I mean testing, design, etc.

In that day you focus on paring with other people, focus on perfect design and code. During the day the facilitators might throw in some challenges so you can thing out of the box for a few moments. More information on CodeRetreat on this site http://coderetreat.com/.

Sounds good you may wonder, but where do I participate in such an event. Here you can checkout CodeRetreats near you.  Sadly in Israel while there were a few CodeRetreats done (also participated on the global day of CodeRetreat, where CodeRetreats where held around 1oo countries around the world) there are no much of facilitators in Israel. Corey had facilitated a few in his last visit to Israel, but that it. Shay Friedman and myself decided not to wait to no one and went over the format and facilitated our first event to CodeValue employees. I hope we would be able to held a public event soon enough, if you are interested please contact me.

The Day was a blast, honestly it is always fun to gather a bunch of super smart people and just pair with them, Shay and myself were a bit surprised by the level and threw at the participants every challenge we knew . Another word of advice if you want to facilitate such an event to your company like we do, feel free to contact us and we will help you from out really vast experience – It is really simple and don’t worry about making a mess, you need to do a lot of damage to make this day unenjoyably. So you can do it too.

If you are still not convinced hear me out, I believe that such events are defining your organization culture (organization can be your team, your department and your company), if you would like a culture where people actually work together and trust each other, actually know of the other team mates abilities and how they think, if you would like a culture where people aspire to learn and learn from each other with no shame, if you would like a culture where people hone their skills all the time and are just happy to improve as professionals developers. When I set out into a new way and started up CodeValue with my friends, this is exactly the culture I wanted in this place, while each of my colleagues is a really gifted developer, there is a huge difference between a group of individuals and a team of people all trusting and helping each other.

And while I could do that on a very limited way at the previous places I worked before, CodeValue is a different story, no comparison at all, and this is why I’m so happy I went through that path.

Tomorrow you will get the chance of hearing everything you wanted to know about AOP, Aspect Oriented Programming.

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) helps us deal with application-wide concerns by adding a high level of reuse to the traditional OOP framework.

In the meeting Dror will explain what AOP is all about and how it can be implemented in .NET using simple methods and industrial grade frameworks to improve the developer's everyday work by using aspects.

- What is AOP and how it improve (instead of replace) the existing code

- Using high order functions to implement AOP

- .NET AOP solutions – from simple hacks to full-fledged frameworks

- Real world use cases where AOP really shines

Thank you Dror for taking the time and investing back to the community.

Register Here: http://idndug-mar-2012.eventbrite.com/

Now, I want to say big special thank you for Telerik

And JetBrains.

That for the first time will be supporting our group with various licenses worth thousands of dollars.

Don’t forget to register, and see you there.

Ariel

People often asks me which customizations do I use in my Visual Studio.

I think it’s fit that on the day Visual Studio 11 Beta is out I will be sharing my experience with VS2010.

For long time I was captured in a misconception, you shouldn’t customize your IDE, otherwise how do other people are going to be comfortable when you need them to to sit on your chair.

In some ways that habit is hard to quell, proof of that is that I still pretty much use the default VS color scheme (and Yes I’m aware there are better out there), but it’s not that I love white so much, when I used Delphi I stuck to the classic Yellow on Blue color scheme (image below for the young people here )

But nothing is more important than your own productivity. That exactly what I tried to do, reduce friction and enhance my productivity as much as possible.

Note about Resharper, I use this tool a lot, if you care about productivity, you should use it, if your company doesn’t have a license, convince them, it pays back it’s value after a week.

1,2,3 there’s no mouse.

How one becomes more productive, he leaves the mouse alone. Every time your hand leaves the keyboard and go to the mouse is a moment lost, aggregating those moments pile up to be a huge time waster.

First, Remove all toolbars, yes, you heard me, remove all of them. You don’t really need them. I admit that beside the buttons there are some advantages to them when displaying current state, but all in all it’s just not worth it, think of it, how many of the buttons showing up on your visual studio toolbars you really use all the time, 20%? While you are at it counting, take a mental note, do they have a shortcut mapped (most likely they do) open up an excel spreadsheet and write it down for you, it is going to be you friend for next 2-3 weeks, a cheat sheet, every time you forget a keyboard shortcut, look and next time use the mapping. Repeat.

Another mental note, every time you use the mouse to do something, ask yourself, can I do it better? if yes add it to the excel and next time try to use the keyboard to do so.

After a while you begin noticing that there are operations you use all the time, for example for me it was creating a folder in a project, or opening Windows Explorer from a selected item in the solution explorer, that when it’s starting to get fun as there is no keyboard shortcut mapped to it. But this is not what is going to stop us? Open up Visual Studio Tools –> Options and there Keyboard you can pretty much map any command available to Visual Studio.

Here are my custom mappings, feel free to change them to whatever feels comfortable to you.

• Build current selected Project – CTRL + SHIFT + X (I wanted something near to CTRL + SHIFT + B, but CTRL + SHIFT + C is already being used (it iterate through the clipboard ring, you should know that!)).
• Add Reference – CTRL N + CTRL + R.
• Open in Windows Explorer – CTRL + P, CTRL + P
• Create new Folder – CTRL + N, CTLR + N
• Increase Line Indent - CTRL+ K ,CTRL + ]
• Decrease Line indent - CTRL+ K , CTRL + [
• Resharper Find Usage – CTRL + R, CTLR + F

Those are few examples to get you running.

Immediate window is your friend as well (CTRL + D,CTRL + I), opens it up or focus it, type “>” and than you can call every command of VS. I use it a lot to close all windows. I just type “>CloseAll” I will get intellisense as I start typing and bam, didn’t use the mouse .

Real Estate, that’s the secret

Do you know that most users have the Toolbox pane open all the time? why because it’s the default, do you use really use it? do you really use it so it should be open all the time?

Start by removing every pane that you don’t use frequently, Class Viewer, Toolbox, Server Explorer, etc.

Do you see how my VS looks like, notice something interesting it mostly an editor, that what we need to do, crank up code, align things symmetrically, remove distractions.

More VS tweaks

It’s no secret that VS is an hungry resources beast, I managed to improve performance by making some small tweaks.

• Disable the Navigation Bar – It’s a nice feature, but it require the mouse to browse through, I prefer using resharper ALT + \ and type the member I’m looking for. It’s saves you both time and real estate.
• Disable TrackChanges – it’s a feature that shows you a color near every line you have changed. It’s nice, but I want speed, it is considered a feature that damages performance.
• If you are a WPF/SL developer, heed my word, disable the Visual Editor, open in full XAML View option is not enough. right click on a xaml file “Open With…” choose an Source Code (Text) Editor, make it the default, don’t you worry you still have intellisense, in the rare cases I need to actually see the xaml I write, I just open it up in Blend. Editor in the background is responsible for many of VS crashes and slowness.
• If you ever found yourself waiting for “Loading toolbox content from package. It’s a known bug. just remove that Guid from the registry. Do not be passive, hunt everything that goes in your way to be more productive.

Last note about Visual Studio 11

I admit my first reactions to the images coming out from the VS blog were negative, but I am willing to give it a fair chance before I draw a verdict, one thing for certain, the principles described in this post will remain relevant to the next version as well, perhaps even increasing in importance.

I will be fun to revisit this post after a while with VS11.

Do you have a killer feature you believe should be added to this list? Share it on the comments.

Hey all,

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to meet Corey Haines, an amazing man, full of vision and the abilites to fulfill them, when asked how one becomes a better programmer, he said to me, go to every User group you can find, in any language, in any field.

Listen to Corey, don’t miss this opportunity to gather with your fellow programmers and enjoy their company, you might learn a few things and meet new friends. It might going to be what it takes to move you forward.

Now, enough chit chat, this month meeting will be held in two days, and this time we are going to have two exciting sessions:

Windows 8 - Understanding Metro UX

The Metro UI is a new User Interface designed for Windows 8. But there's more than beautiful fonts and sleek graphics to the Metro UX. Aimed for both PCs and tablets, Windows is undergoing the biggest user experience overhaul since Windows 95. It will change the way users interact with it, and it will change the way we developers think about it. In this session we'll explore the Metro UX and its implications, and take a glimpse at the underlying technological concepts.

Visual Studio Debugging Tricks - in BugAid and Beyond

While most Visual Studio .NET developers use various tools to improve their productivity when writing and refactoring code, there is a noticeable lack of useful tools in the realm of debugging. In this session, we'll explore a new tool called "BugAid for Visual Studio" that enhances the debugging experience by letting you visualize, search and compare live objects data when debugging a C# application. We'll also look at some of the more advanced features of the Visual Studio debugger itself.
On Wednesday 22^nd February 2012

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly
18:00 - 19:15   Windows 8 - Understanding Metro UX
Elad Katz

19:15 - 19:30   Break
19:30 – 20:30  Visual Studio Debugging Tricks - in BugAid and Beyond
Omer Raviv

About the speakers: 
Elad Katz is a senior .NET architect at the Sela Group. He specializes in ASP.NET MVC, HTML5 and WPF/SL, with more than 10 years of experience in the industry in various .NET technologies.

Omer Raviv is a co-founder of BugAid Software, an entrepreneur, and a passionate C# software developer.

Thank you Omer and Elad for taking the time and investing back to the community.

Register Here: http://idndug-feb-2012.eventbrite.com/

Now, I want to say big special thank you for Telerik

And JetBrains.

That for the first time will be supporting our group with various licenses worth thousands of dollars.

Don’t forget to register, and see you there.

Ariel

A question about intercommunication between Silverlight and the HTML host has been asked in the Israeli MSDN forum.

Since I’ve already implemented it once in a project, I believe I can extract the great info already exist in the MSDN documentation to a more direct how-to.

Let’s begin.

1. Create a class called JavaScriptBridge
2. Each method that you would like to be exposed to the HTML host, thus be possible to get called by JavaScript you adorn with [ScriptableMember] attribute.

[ScriptableMember()]
public void DoSomething(int a, int b)
{

}



3. Inside the App.xaml.cs, on the Application_startup event handler, register the an instance of the bridge

        private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
        {
            this.RootVisual = new MainPage();
            JavaScriptBridge javaScriptBridge = new JavaScriptBridge();

            HtmlPage.RegisterScriptableObject("bridge", javaScriptBridge);


        }



4. We are done with Silverlight side, now we move on to the HTML host, locate the aspx file (usually) that contains the Silverlight object. In this page you will notice that it is represented as an <object> tag. Insert an event handler for the onLoad event of the object.

   <param name="onLoad" value="pluginLoaded" />

5. Also add an input button for testing the interface.

     <input id="Button1" type="button" value="Test" 
     onclick="test()" />

6. Implement both event handlers:

        var silverlight = null;
           function pluginLoaded(sender, args) {
               silverlight = sender.getHost();
           }
   
           function test() {
               if (silverlight != null) {
                  silverlight.Content.bridge.DoSomething(10, 10);
               }
           }

7. Hopefully, now we look back and appreciate how easy it is to mix those two worlds

Ariel

I’m happy to announce that I am to join forces with Shai Bar-Lev and help manage the INDNUG – Israel Dot Net Developers User Group.

Today is my debut appearance at the group meeting, for those of you who don’t know this group roots are from a long time groups such as VB .NET user group. This group covers quite a wide range of areas, so it can appeal to any .NET developer out there.

For exmple today, is a talk about SQL Server 2012 for .NET developers by Shy Engelberg

Now dear followers, I encourage your to contact me in any way possible, via this blog, twitter (@arielbh) and tell me, what do you want to see in this group, or whether who do you want to hear talking about juicy subject.

Ariel

If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you should know I’m an avid prism fan. Most of my projects I am making use of Prism or Composite Application Guidance. This is not a post for learning Prism, but to provide a solution, not so straight-forward for a rather straight-forward problem.

I must add that that rarely I had had been pushed to extreme solutions such as I show you here. For most scenarios you are pretty much good with the default behaviors.

In my scenario I’ve been using a control as a region. This control requires that when adding views to it, it must be done with RegisterViewWithRegion extension method. The concept is simple in contrast to the “regular” AddToRegion method. RegisterViewWithRegion doesn’t requires the region to be initialized, yet. When the region becomes available than those views who had been registered will be called via delegates and added to the now ready region.

A regular usage of RegisterViewWithRegion is as follows:

public void AddView(object view)
{
    RegionManager.RegisterViewWithRegion(RegionNames.MainRegion, () => view);
}

A common scenario is to allow clients to "readd” a view, but instead of duplicating it, just put into focus, or in Prism concepts, activate the view. This is were things get messy. For an example let’s simplify it a bit and for the following wrong code snippet let’s just do nothing when the view already exist.

public void AddView(object view)
{
    if (!RegionManager.Regions[RegionNames.MainRegion].Views.Contains(view))
    {
        RegionManager.RegisterViewWithRegion(RegionNames.MainRegion, () => view);
    }
}

Why is this code bad? if have a reason to use RegisterViewWithRegion, most likely it fail to check if the view exist if the region is not ready yet. So we need to move this check into the action delegate, to be called only when the region is ready.

public void AddView(object view)
   {

       RegionManager.RegisterViewWithRegion(RegionNames.MainRegion, 
           () =>
           {
             if (!RegionManager.Regions[RegionNames.MainRegion].Views.Contains(view))
             {
                 return view;
             }
             return null;
           });
   }

Last code looks formidable but there is a catch, when we returning null, it is actually adding a null view to the region. In my scenario it’s really an undesired side effect of the whole situation. It is worth mentioning that a RegionAdapter doesn’t solve this issue completely, when you react to a view being added you can decide to not do  anything but than the underlying control is out of sync with the views collection as the views collection will keep those nulls as views. While it might serve for some purposes, I haven’t thought it is clean enough. Also it kept me checking for nulls every time I iterate over the region views.

So luckily, the prism source code is open for grab, though I wanted to avoid altering the source code by all means, I’ve followed the key players involved when you register a view with RegisterViewWithRegion.

To make a long story short one need to dwell into Region Behaviors, in specific responsible for the scenario above is the AutoPopulateRegionBehavior. Soon enough I could identify the culprit:

public virtual void OnViewRegistered(object sender, ViewRegisteredEventArgs e)
       {
           if (e == null) throw new System.ArgumentNullException("e");

           if (e.RegionName == this.Region.Name)
           {
               AddViewIntoRegion(e.GetView());
           }
       }

When we call e.GetView() it will call our delegate, if GetView returns null than it will add a null, no brainer. Fortunately the Prism team did a good job, and provided us a mean to change those behaviors on many levels, by making this virtual I could’ve created my own version of AutoPopulateRegionBehavior that avoided adding nulls. I inherited from it and overridden this method.

Last piece of the puzzle is the making the configuration  of the behavior factory to use my version instead of the one coming from the box. This is done actually rather easily by overriding the bootstrapper ConfigureDefaultRegionBehaviors method.

What I ended up doing but didn’t like so much is copy pasting the original implementation of ConfigureDefaultRegionBehaviors  and changing it to use my own AutoPopulateRegionBehavior because the Factory didn’t give me a way to replace an existing behavior. Perhaps the Prism team can make this available in the next version.

Ariel

In Part 1, I’ve placed down the background for this post series, I’ve written down my feelings towards the session at MIX, but what about the Keynotes?

Keynotes

In this MIX we had 2 keynotes, one was concentrated around IE10 and HTML5, the other was about Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and Kinect.

It’s very easy to compare them, the first one was non-imaginative, bothersome and at times offending, while the other one was direct, happy and fun.

Before really trashing the first keynote, I want to say that it did have some very interesting news, showing a windows version running on ARM processor, why is that important I think I will get into this at our third part of this series. The sad thing about it, when I was watching it I was not impressed, Steven Sinofsky just showed me the My Computer properties of a computer, it just didn’t had any WOW effect, and while I was engulfed in negativity I had almost missed it’s true meaning.

I also liked Orchard, from the stuff I’ve seen in the keynote it looks promising but in order for it to become a WordPress competitor as it is technically aspires too, Microsoft lacks a very important thing, Hosting, and it is quite surprising, with all those Azure nodes running around that I’m not sure are 100% occupied all day long 24-7. I mean if WordPress can offer free hosting for blogs, so can Microsoft. Actually I’m expecting much more than Microsoft, a free hosting for Orchard blogs is a minimum, but imagine you are writing an app with WebMatrix and you got to the last step, which is publish, what do you get now? a list of available hosts service which do cost money. For WebMatrix’s targeted audience which are mostly, avid amateurs, it is actually a showstopper, well even though it is not really tons of money, it makes one stop and question himself, am I serious with it so I should invest money in it. Hello, if WebMatrix or even Visual Studio (express) is free, why can’t I put my little tiny, WebMatrix app out there. More than that from a business perspective it makes sense, offer free host for little sites, support SQL CE but when one need to scale up either on size or capabilities than please show him the way towards a better hosts that offer more functionality, hell even offer Azure, and why not, why can’t it be the infrastructure for such endeavor. Not only it will not kill competition but make the eco-system even better.

So that was actually my positive feedback, I have also some negative feedback. I don’t know how to say it, I’m tired of the IE vs Chrome showdowns, not just tired, even offended, it’s just like mocking our intelligence, do they really think we are that dumb? It reminds me that once upon a time when Bing was out of the door and suddenly there was a competition to Google’s Search engine, presenters in Microsoft Israel’s events where encouraged to use Bing instead of Google, it was artificial and awkward for some presenters (“In case you wanted to further explore it, Google it, errr Bing it I mean” followed by embarrassed chuckles). I was “really” surprised that IE had kicked the crap out Chrome, really I was sure that in it’s own conference Microsoft is gonna show us IE being humiliated. So if results are expected from the start, the only interesting thing left is to watch what rigged environment or in what specific tests those planning this Keynote have chosen to show us. I haven’t been to any Google’s conference but I’m pretty sure without even knowing that they don’t act the same, and why should they? if you are certain of your own product’s supremacy you don’t need to stoop so low. Not to mention that those tests were not really fair, from several reasons: first it is not surprising that you take GPU accelerated browser and compare it with one which is not configured to use the GPU by default (at least for now). Second you are comparing your next version browser which will only see daylight in a few more months with today’s competitors, Perhaps compare IE10 with FireFox vNext or Chrome 1000 or whatever version they will reach in a few more months, but you can’t. So I’ve a perfect solution for you, why not compare IE10 against IE9. It actually make sense, show us how better you make you own products evolve, this display of confidence, and it is perfectly reasonable IE10 will be better than IE9 there is nothing wrong with this message. Another think I can make jokes on Chrome rapid release cycles but you can’t, I actually think that by using this approach the Chrome Team have better granularity for adding more support from the HTML5 spec as it shapes in front of our eyes. You can also make jokes on the revisions of parts of the HTML5 spec (or Sockets in that case) but truly, it is not smart, that the way it goes, stay in the game and be agile.

One last message, I hope someone in the IE team listens, I going to say more in the next part, but for now, IE team hear me out, Lose your dependency on the Windows platform. Yes you heard me right, Am I nuts? Have you ever met a guy who said to you, I must use IE so I’m going to prefer a Windows license over other OS?

Staying available only for Windows is getting down with the ship. Perhaps during The First Browser war it made sense, but today it is much more heterogeneous than it was back than. I guess this dependency was the reason Netscape was obliterated, but times has change. Just count the MacBooks around you, all this market is non-existent for IE. I guess at first it’s going to be like having a good look in the mirror after a long time and discovering you have gained weight and dear god aged. MacBooks now are a fashion statement, many people immigrate from Windows for MacBooks, those that still used IE back than, will just go over to the competitors and tell you a secret, even when they will be on Windows, they will not fast be coming back. Because those browsers are all damn good, and as IE showed us back than most users stays with the default if it is good enough, only when IE started to suck people moved to other Browsers on Windows, so I’m used to Chrome, guess what I am going to use on my new Windows machine, and why not I’ve my bookmarks synched automatically for me, it is quick and I like the UI.

So IE lose your fixations, love. Ariel

The second keynote was much better. Scott Guthrie did a hell of a job, when they are putting some miserable guys talking about their apps and almost shitting themselves, you can really admire how good he is when on stage. Memorable moment was when Scott showed an “hidden” feature of the MIX app for Windows Phone 7 where there is a 3D model of himself. And while touching himself Scott undeliberately(?) zoomed in to his figure crutch, he sounded so embarrassed, if it was acting, I’m applauding for making himself look so embarrassed, and if he was embarrassed than I’m applauding for him being so genuine, either way Scott is winning. Even the Blue Angels scene while weird (Front end homepage with HTML5 video and then drills down Silverlight) was enjoyable and perhaps that was the thing, I even showed my non-tech girl a few highlights from that keynote, and what not to like? the Kinect stuff were inspiring (World-WIde-Telescope) and funny (Wall Panic 3000). Another thing worth noting is the direct line Joe approached the audience while explaining, no apologizing, about all the wackiness of the Windows Phone 7 Update story, well when I was still negativity I thought this will not happen to Apple, after that I come to appreciate it very much, and also the new features look awesome, I waiting for the time when I can put my hand on a WP7 piece.

Stay tuned for Part 3.

Ariel

As the dust settled over MIX11 and Las Vegas stopped wasting money out of hard earned lines of code being typed by dozens of developers, I think it is safe enough we can start drawing conclusions.

While on the surface everything is shiny and Mix with its’ extravagant location and many spoils that really keep you entertained and wishing it will never end, and really, “Free” food and drinks, Occasional prizes and giveways that keep you going forward with technology (PDC09’s Notebook, PDC10’ Phones and this year Mix Kinect), Sessions all day to peek your intellectual interest, Parties at night (well at least till 1AM), and the best part, meeting with People that usually you are miles away,and now understanding that if they are nice on twitter than they are as nice on reality, you just can’t fake it for so long. So a conference such as MIX is actually a huge tweetup. I’ve spent all my phone’s battery to refresh my twitter stream relentlessly. During keynotes it was in full harness when the attention of everyone is on the same thing and the side chatter of twitter was am unlimited well of impressions, comments, witty remarks, sarcastic remarks, that often of not were as interesting as the real thing going on in stage.

While the official announcements of MIX had yielded low bounty, I found myself beginning to wander about what was NOT said and where this train is really headed.

A domestic flight Back from Vegas to Philly where I had only twitter access free wifi had resulted with me firing speculations and ideas all over the place,some were silly, or absurd, but who knows it Vegas I might have hit a jackpot or two .

For those I’ve flooded their Feed Stream I apologize, but I’m going to repeat some of those absurd ideas here.

Sessions

But before jumping into my own conclusions, you might wonder, where are my sessions impressions and summaries? I did promise to live blog on twitter.

First my algorithm of picking sessions is favoring high session level and disfavoring areas I already consider myself proficient. Second, I’ve almost didn’t attend WP7 sessions, while the emulator is good and it is getting better, it still less appealing to me when I don’t have a real phone at hand.

But don’t you want to announce that RIA services is available to JavaScript clients (and btw, not WPF), just spread this great piece of news with the world? No. It’s Booooring. You can go and read dozens of those blog posts till you have your fill, or much better download them and watch them for yourself. As it appear I just couldn’t see all. No more than you can. I’m going to watch most of them though, because the most important messages were either subtle or unspoken at all. I want to make sure I’ve not missed something important to my analysis.

But still. how were the sessions you did attend ? They were OK. Just OK?. Yes. Why?

In almost every session I’ve been attending it contained major flows, such as level was not right, Pace was too slow, too much less-important content, too much slides, Code in slides lose its effectiveness unless you show me it running in Visual Studio or your favorite IDE, and it’s not a contradiction with too much information, this is exactly the information I want, I want to see you use it in Visual Studio, because this is what I’m going to do tomorrow, I’m going to open up Visual Studio and try the Canvas element of HTML5. If you don’t show me how to get there, than I’m back to square one. On the other hand some where demoing too complicated code, @damianEdwards had implemented a Comet, parking requests with HTTP Handlers to be used with jQuery, ambitious but the message got lost with all the unnecessary details of writing it. Forgive me for saying but if I need now to implement 3D for my next silverlight project I’m going to vaguely remember the 3d engine execution flow, no more, and I understand the guy presenting this session, that engine his is baby, he loves it and proud of it, and thinks it is important, well for an 1 hour session it is not.

Some sessions were not executed good enough or weren’t as tight as you might expect from this high-end conference. In this regard I’ve passed down popular sessions such the HaHa shows (Hanselman and Haack) and my dear friend @lbugnion with his MVVMlight talk, sessions that are usually so well executed that could have lifted my overall impression, but I’ve left them to viewed later on Video.

So, not a single session you liked?

I’ve liked the Knockout.JS session by Steven Sanderson, which unfortunately I don’t have his twitter handle, not sure that he got one. It was well executed, clear and concise, Pace was perfect; not too fast you can’t follow, not to slow you got bored, it was packed with goodies and the message was clear. it also showed you the outer scope, I can now go and open my visual studio and by following this session I will know what to do, because it is there, than I can just go and explore it further. I am urging you to go and see it for your self, it is just 25 minutes. Hold on. 25 minutes you say? Yes. it was a mini-session. Perhaps that was the key. Steve planned for a 25 minutes session, he knew the message got to be clear, he knew he had limited time to show what is important, and top that all he didn’t just show fragmented pieces of functionality, you could just saw the whole full picture and how everything connects and relates, but this I credit Steve for executing this so well. And while Knockout.JS is his baby and probably contains some neat stuff in its internal he resisted the temptation to explain how it works, it just showed it working, with Visual Studio at hand and code, just the way I like it.

While my friend Shay Friedman (@ironshay) disagrees with me on this point, I think that keeping sessions short helps in keeping on the presenter mind that he needs to deliver fewer messages and make those few perfect, also while Steve performed extraordinary, it encourages me you don’t have to be Hanselman or Guthrie or even the colorful Word Bell to do a top-notch session. You have to be good enough and with a good enough content than I’m satisfied.

Another clear advantage is that you can support much more variation in content when you got much more shorter sessions, sure it is a roller caster of information, but this is what’s fun, falling a sleep in low pace talks is not my way of fun.

And if you by chance worried about speakers, the Open-Call for 3rd party speakers had showed that there are plenty of amazing talks to be heard out there.

There are still room for longer sessions, I don’t want to deprive you with annual excellent and fun Hanselman’s session, so I am thinking out loud, keep one slot of long session and one slot of Keynote/long sessions (usually) and keep the rest shorter. You like it? Tweet about it? Comment about it. Who knows perhaps we can evolve a better format (or worse, who knows till we try).

Focus Groups

During the last day of MIX I’ve attended a Windows Phone 7 focus group, I was hesitant to participate, I didn’t know if I had so much input to give, and I was actually right, compared to the guys sitting with me around the table which they were flowing with amazing feedback and information. I know my ways around Windows Phone so I can develop an app today but as it appears most problems are are not the SDK, or other Silverlight related features but mostly the Marketplace story, localizations and Hardware features oddities suchas the Back and Search buttons.

I’ve learned about what really going on in that Windows Phone development scene than any session I could have participated, people were discussing every painful curve of the road between development to actually publishing the app the customer. Discussing ideas with the members of the development teams in such an informal way is always my preferred way, hack that why I love twitter so much.

I must congratulate the WP7 team for being transparent, open and responsive for sometimes painful criticism and frustration by the developers themselves. I urge other teams to forge their own focus groups in future conferences.

There is more!

but not now, I need to battle jetlag, writing this post till 3AM local time is not a good way to undo jetlag.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

Ariel

I’m happy to announce the creation of a new community: UI-Binders.

Its purpose to maintain a place where WPF/SL developers and HTML5/CSS/JS developers can share ideas, patterns, and actually discuss with each other best practices in a new era where HTML abilities are increasingly competitive versus traditional Addins platforms such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

Furthermore frameworks such as KnockoutJS and backbone.js are implementing the MVVM pattern in JavaScript, once mostly used in WPF/SL. This is a great example how an Idea coming from WPF/SL found his way to the HTML5 audience.

In contrary of what I’ve mentioned in the first paragraph Scope of the group is not limited for WPF/SL vs HTML/CSS/JS. discussions on all flavors of UI such as IPhone UI, Andoird UI are welcome, but to keep things in focus for now it is a bit left unsaid.

So without further due, I am inviting you to join and participate in the group.

http://groups.google.com/group/ui-binders

Ariel

It’s 01:30AM, just in time to summarize the 1st day of Teched 2010.

Actually I have arrived rather late as I came here by car and as we like to say at CodeValue “We are enjoying the way to our goals” so we bide our time and stopped to observe the amazing scenery of southern Israel.

But driving wasn’t the only thing we did today.

I’m proud to present you Cloudoscope, our innovative product for the cloud.

CodeValue’s CTO Alon Fliess wrote a quick summary on it, go over it and than register to our beta partners program which will enable you to get early versions of our product and help us refine it’s future features and roadmap.

I will be happy to hear your questions and comments so feel free to contact me, via this post comment, blog contact, our my twitter (@arielbh).

Back to Teched, I’ve participated on the keynote, which included many of Microsofts Ranana best people on board showing us things as trivial the new messenger, new collaboration features in office and XNA programming which targets XBOX, Desktop and Mobile.

One Microsoft representative discussed future trends and again emphasized on Gartner report which states that on the following years 80% of the top 1000 companies in the world will find themselves on the cloud. It is a very promising and fertile land for our products on the cloud, I believe we at CodeValue are on the right track. I’ll disregard the Music parts of the keynote and even the Kinect show off. Both were irrelevant. Nobody mentioned the fact the both XBOX and Kinect are unavailable to purchase from Microsoft Israel (but this is an old promise unfulfilled). I was rather disappointed not to see any developers tools: where is WebMatrix, where is SwitchLightl, where is HTML5?  Where is Silverlight? The Keynote failed to mention most initiatives made by Microsoft Redmond. Bassicly Teched does take IT higher, but what about developers?

Soon after the keynote, all attendees when to another hanger and met Microsoft Partners and heard their offerings. I was able to talk to many of you, explaining you about Cloudoscope, or just catching up with old friends.

A few of us found ourselves finishing the evening gulping beer on a local bar. Anyway I turned this around I had a lot of fun and I felt myself surrounded by friends (Mainly because of my CodeValue peers, Uri Goldstien, Uri Lavie and Vlad).

Tomorrow I will be getting my self on few of the sessions (mainly cloud), also hoping to get some interviews for our CodeRadio podcast. hmm, maybe eat something so I won’t die out of hunger.

Ariel