Had a Great Time at Austin Code Camp 2011

Every year there is one event that I look forward to attending and that is Austin Code Camp. This year I had a great time once again at this event.  I've learned that one of the greatest benefits of attending the event is being introduced to some many valuable gems of information. Usually the classes are great and just deep enough to spark my curiosity. I think the one hour duration for those talks is perfect for a few reasons:

  1. The talk covers enough ground to allow me to decide if I want to delve deeper into the topic on my own.  I usually do (eventually).
  2. The talk introduces me to tools, concepts, events or resources I've never heard of before (and that's exactly the reason I love attending these events).  
  3. It gives me a chance to attend more classes throughout the day than if they were two hours or longer.
Here is a list of the things that I learned about that made the day worthwhile

Orchard

Orchard is an open source(Web) Content Management System (CMS) framework by Microsoft that allows rapid development of websites.  Lately I've been getting a quite few requests from some of my family members and friends to build some simple websites for their businesses ventures.  Orchard is what seems to me as the perfect tool for this.  There is no way I can reasonably develop a quality LOB application on a small budget.  No offense to small business owners but LOB software development is expensive.

Orchard provides enough capability for even my non-techie family members to manage some of their content reasonably well (at least I hope it does). That's a great benefit because I can release some of the maintenance responsibility to them.  If you are interested in learning more about Orchard, download WebMatrix and look for it in the options when building a new website or visit the Orchard Download website.

Business Intelligence

The talk on Business Intelligence (BI) with Jeffrey Palermo was great.  Why I have never heard of BI is beyond me.  It seems that everyone in the room had heard of it.  Even Jeffrey admitted that BI is simply a buzz word for reporting, or better said, providing the information necessary to make intelligent decisions.  BI is not what I found interesting though.  What I found interesting was the talk on this concept of Star Schemas to denormalize and store data for reporting.  Quite an interesting topic and something that I should look into for use in my current project.

jQuery

Ok, I must admit, I had heard of jQuery, but the intro class was still great because Kassandra Perch pointed out some cool tools.  For example jsfiddle.net to test your jQuery on the fly; jsfiddle.net.  And also color-schemer for us poor non-designers.

Furthermore, it was refreshing to see intro level classes like the Intro to jQuery class.

Dallas Day of Dot Net (2012)

Dallas Day of Dot Net  - March 9-10 2012 Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack will be speaking. Enough said.


User Group TV

UserGroup.Tv - If you want to see user group speakers but couldn't make the conference or want to see speakers outside of your user group area visit usergroup.tv.

Summary
This year was a great success for the Austin Code Camp.  We all had a great time. If you want your inspiration stimulated and would like to pick up some of these gems, make sure that you attend Austin Code Camp next year, or if you're from a different area attend your local code camp. 














Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Putting Files on the Rackspace File Cloud

Recently, I’ve been playing around with Asp.Net MVC and I (along with some friends) am creating an Asp.Net MVC application that can access files from our website. This means that files must display on the site as well as provide a way to download/upload them. I won’t give away all the details of the project but I will say this: Sharing photos is one of the driving forces for our project.  The files are only image type files( jpg, etc) The files must be uploaded by the users and stored somewhere within our system.  We don’t necessarily know at this time how much storage space we need but we think that we will need a little at first but possibly a lot more down the road. This means that the storage of these files must be scalable. The uploading of files must be controlled by our system.  Right off the bat we started our application and were uploading files to the web server with no problem.  We only did it this way to kind of prove our system model. We wer...
Read more

Setting Up XnaMobileUnit to run unit tests in Windows Phone 7 XNA Games

Image
Introducing XnaMobileUnit I decided to roll my own unit test framework for Windows Phone 7 XNA games.   I have a couple of reasons why I decided to roll my own.  Among them was the fact that you cannot reference regular .Net assemblies from Windows Mobile Framework.  That means that referencing NUnit was out of the question.  Also using some of the other libraries that can be used for Silverlight Applications didn't quite feel right for me. The framework that I have created, XnaMobileUnit, is very simple to use and provides all the necessary functionality to run unit tests.  I am still working on the framework to provide a few more capabilities and features, but for the most part it is ready to use out of the box.  XnaMobileUnit is open source licensed under the Apache 2.0 License and can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/xna-mobile-unit/ .  I recommend downloading the latest source and compiling it then referencing the new DLL. Othe...
Read more

Reasons to Stay Away from CSLA

We've been using CSLA - Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture in a product for approximately one year and while it solves quite a few problems it violates some major good practices. No Clear Separation of Layers While at the time that we chose CSLA we knew very little about domain driven design, it is no excuse for the framework to possess the data access layer within the business object. This makes it extremely difficult to separate the concerns. As a result, it is difficult to mock the data-access layer creating many problems when attempting to perform unit tests. This also puts the additional responsibility of data access on the business object class, violating the Single Responsibility Principle( SRP ). Data access layer should be totally separated from the business object period. Having the data access within the within the BO class is not the only additional responsibility placed on the class but is the most significant one I can think of. No Context Validation...
Read more