Hey, California people, I’m coming your way.  I’ll be speaking at FalafelCon 2013 next month about Refactoring with SOLID Principles.  The event is taking place 10-11 June 2013 at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus.  The speaker lineup looks pretty awesome, with keynotes from Scott Hanselman, Stephen Forte, Michele Bustamante, and Tim Huckaby, and tracks covering Web, Mobile, Sitefinity, and TestComplete. My session will briefly cover the SOLID principles of object-oriented design, which you can of course learn more about in my Pluralsight course on SOLID Principles of Object Oriented Design.  In addition to discussing each principle, this presentation also demonstrates … more

Staying in shape as a programmer can be difficult, but recent studies have shown that even if you’re among those in our profession who do work out regularly, sitting for long periods of time at work is detrimental to your health.  To be a bit more dramatic about it, sitting is killing you (see Phil Haack’s blog post on this from last year).  So, how can we combat this risk while continuing to get our work done (and, if you’re like me, keep on doing the thing you love)?  One option is to take frequent breaks, get up from your desk, go for a walk.  This is good advice, and by all means, follow it.  But it’s not always easy to do, and of course you still have work to … more

If you’ve ever wanted to speed up a YouTube video, like you can do with Pluralsight training videos, here’s a quick tip to show you how to do so. Today, I was watching the KendoUI 2013Q1 Release Keynote on YouTube, because I wasn’t able to catch it live.  It’s a little over an hour long, and I’ve become rather spoiled lately by Pluralsight’s video player, which lets you adjust the speed to whatever level you’re comfortable with between 1x and 2x in .1 increments, like so: The iOS app for Pluralsight also supports this, and I usually set it around 1.5 or 1.6, personally. Back on YouTube, the default Flash player has no such controls: However, if you switch to the HTML5 player for … more

We’ve been doing a lot of interviewing as we grow our team in Hudson, Ohio for Telerik Services.  We have a fairly small office in a suburban environment, where you can basically park right outside the building and walk right in – no elevators, reception area, parking decks, or other hassles you might find in a more urban location.  As a result, we’ve learned that if we schedule an interview, we should be prepared for the candidate to arrive at least ten to fifteen minutes earlier than the allotted time.  This is somewhat in contrast with what I learned was the “right” thing to do, which is to arrive 5 minutes early, so that you’re not interrupting whomever you’re meeting with … more

Update: Winner and Results

The winner of the experiment's prize is Martin Frey (@tinfrey).  You can watch a video of the random drawing here (I'll keep the file up until at least 1 May 2013).

In terms of the results of the experiment, I would say they were somewhat inconclusive.  I noted in the initial post below that my SOLID course averaged just 78 minutes per unique subscriber in February.  Reviewing the figure, it's actually 77.31 minutes.  In March, during the experiment, this jumped all the way up to 77.42 minutes (almost 7 seconds more!).  Looking at another course, Kanban Fundamentals, the course's per-user viewing time average ranged from 41.9 minutes in … more

Recently I upgraded the Stir Trek conference site’s web code from ASP.NET MVC 2 to 4.  When I did, I ran into an issue where the [OutputCache] attribute’s behavior changed for RenderAction code.  Specifically, if you had code like this: [OutputCache(CacheProfile="Default")]public ActionResult SponsorList(){ var context = new DataContext(); var sponsors = context.Sponsors.GetAll().Where(s => s.Type.Amount > 0).OrderByDescending(x => x.Type.Amount).ToList();   return this.View(sponsors);} it would stop working.  You would get an error message like this: Now, this error will make no sense to you if, like me, it used to work just fine in MVC 2, and you … more

Today I gave two sessions at the Telerik Software Professionals Conference in New Delhi, India.  The event is still ongoing (Chris Sells is wrapping up a great talk on building Windows 8 apps with HTML5 and JavaScript), but I wanted to get my talks posted here for attendees to download and review.  I’ve loaded them on Slideshare, so you should be able to view them here, or navigate to Slideshare to get the slides themselves. more

This Saturday (12 January 2013), I’ll be presenting at the Telerik Developers’ Conference in New Delhi, India.  The event kicks off at 9am – here’s the current plan for the agenda: I’m giving two presentations in the afternoon.  The abstracts are as follows: Refactoring Applications using SOLID Principles We’ve all heard about well-designed software projects, where things aren’t (yet) a big ball of mud that’s painful to work with, but many of us aren’t lucky enough to work on these.  Nor is it an option for us to get to start a brand new “greenfield” project, where we can leave behind the legacy of spaghetti code and technical debt our current project might have. But there … more

I’ve been using JustCode regularly, lately, but I’m still learning some of the keyboard shortcuts and features (and probably always will be).  JustCode features a nice view showing all of the common commands that you can access at any time (from the menu, or via ctrl+shift+alt+/): And of course, you can also change these, or even jump to another common set of shortcuts, in the JustCode options: Now, these are all nice features, but something new I learned about recently is a separate Visual Studio extension you can download from the Visual Studio extensions gallery: The extension is called IntelliCommand, which you’ll find if you search Online within Visual Studio: The extension is … more

I’ve had Intel’s preview Ivy Bridge Ultrabook for a little over two months now.  It’s a preview device with a few pre-production quirks, but it’s also a powerful developer machine in a small, lightweight package, complete with a very responsive touch screen that works great with Windows 8.  You can read my first impressions of the device, as well as my first follow-up review. In this last write-up, I wanted to go a little bit deeper into the sensors that come with the device.  As programmers, we can easily incorporate these sensors into our applications, especially Windows 8 apps.  I’ve already described the variety of sensors the device supports.  To get started … more