“Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning”

-Anonymous

A couple weeks ago I was in Minneapolis on a gig. Planning to fly out Saturday morning, I looked for something to do Friday night. I found this ad in the local paper:

So I ran down and bought a ticket to the Friday 9:40 show. I'm a big fan of Bruce Campbell, and his ever "B" movies. In fact, a little know piece of trivia is that I named my malamute "Brisco" after Brisco County Junior. So, in addition to enjoying the My Name is Bruce movie - which was about Bruce Campbell playing an horror-movie actor who gets asked to fit a real-life zombie. Ya, I know.

After the movie, Bruce appeared, joked a bit, and then started answering questions. I asked about the status of Bubba Nosferatu, and he said that he wasn't going to have any part in it, but that Paul Giamatti and Ron Perlman were involved. Here's a couple of (poor quality) photos of Bruce at the theater and an Apple MOV file (43mb) of him answering some questions (video bad, sound good).

I lost a friend from High School a few weeks ago - Scott Chestnut (yes that's a Toga). I've known Scott since junior high and spent many a weekend evening with him in high school. We drifted apart since graduation, but saw each other a few times. One such encounter was an impromptu lunch with some other 1986'ers here in Boise in 2006 (Scott's in the center with his trademark "turban" haircut).

Here is his official obituary from the Times News newspaper.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- Scott Thomas Chestnut passed away peacefully and surrounded by the love of his family and friends in the early morning hours of Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008, after a long battle with alcoholism. Scott will be remembered for his sense of humor, intelligence, generosity, and ability to live life in the moment.

Scott was born in California and grew up in Twin Falls. He graduated from Twin Falls High School in 1986, leaving behind a legacy of many memorable stories. After Twin Falls High School, he graduated from Saddleback Community College and continued his study of physics at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Scott lived in Twin Falls, Boise and, most recently, Walnut Creek, Calif., while working as a network engineer.

He is survived by his fiancee, Amy Gibbons; his parents, David and Jill Chestnut; his siblings, Shannon and Steve Reheuser, Amy and Jeff Dodds, and Todd and Lacie Chestnut; his grandmother, Anna Dugan; his grandfather, Wesley Chestnut; three nephews and one niece; aunts and uncles; cousins; and numerous friends.

A celebration of Scott's life was held Dec. 6 in Alameda, Calif. A service will be held at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 13, at the Ascension Episcopal Church, 371 Eastland Drive N. in Twin Falls.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Scripps Research Institute, Pearson Center for Alcoholism & Addiction Research, www.pearsoncenter.org, (858)784-7268 or a charity of your choice.

I met up with Steve Smith at PDC last week, as well as Rick Strahl and Jeffrey Palermo (of Party with Palermo). It seems that these guys along with some other respected technologists (Hanselman, Guthrie, Osherove, and Howard) are aggregating over at DevMavens. The term Maven means an expert, connoisseur, or a person with special knowledge, which these guys have plenty of.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 delivers an intuitive, Office-like report authoring environment enabling business and power users to leverage their experience with Microsoft Office 2007 products. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 supports the full capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services including:

• Flexible report layout capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Report Definition Language
• Data Visualizations including charts and gauges
• Richly formatted textboxes
• Export to Microsoft Office Word format

Features specific to Report Builder 2.0 are focused on simplifying the process of creating and editing reports and queries and include the following:

• Easy to use wizards for creating table, matrix and chart data regions
• Support for directly opening and editing reports stored on the report server
• Support for using server resources such as shared data sources
• Query designers for multiple data sources including a Microsoft SQL Server-specific query designer

The Seattle developer community is holding Seattle Code Camp November 15-16, 2008 at the DigiPen campus in Redmond, Washington (close to Seattle). Please pass this notice on to folks you think are interested in either attending or speaking. Speaking of speaking, they are looking for speakers. If you hit the code camp site, you will see that they don't have sessions or tracks listed at this point. This 'camp is a blank page at this point that needs to be colored in - which is a great venue for presentations. If you have something you are passionate about but have never done any public speaking I encourage you to give it a try. If you are an experienced speaker, this is your time to get involved in your local community and share some of your experience.

What types of topics are they looking for?  Pretty much anything goes as long as (A) it involves code, and )B) It isn't a direct advertisement for a product or service. This means that this isn't limited to .NET or even Microsoft technologies. Past 'camps have included sessions on XBOX 360 development, Java, PHP, Delphi, and Rails. Submit your sessions here. Alternatively if you have no desire to get up in front of a bunch of developers and impart your wisdom, they could still use your help. Please promote this code camp at your user group meetings, post it on your blog (like I did), email it to interested locals and encourage your friends and coworkers to submit sessions.

Finally if you plan on attending please register so that we can get some idea of the required space and food needs.

Whether you're attending Microsoft's PDC or not, The Underground is the place to be!

Microsoft and INETA have joined forces to bring you a truly amazing experience in downtown Los Angeles on the Wednesday during PDC. They've got a fantastic speakeasy evening lined up, one that's sure to leave a lasting impression. It'll be a great night of vignettes, networking, music, dancing, food and drinks!

Check it out. See you there!

Thanks to those who attended the second meeting of the Boise SQL Server User Group. We had a good turnout of around 30 people and I hope everyone enjoyed my presentation of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (SSIS). I tried to balance the presentation between those who hadn't used SSIS and those who have.

If you are interested in the sample projects, packages, and data files from the talk, here they are.

I got an email this morning, as I'm sure many of you did, from Lutz Roeder ...

After more than eight years of working on .NET Reflector, I have decided it is time to move on and explore some new opportunities.

I have reached an agreement to have Red Gate Software continue the development of .NET Reflector. Red Gate has a lot of experience creating development tools for both .NET and SQL Server. They have the resources necessary to work on new features, and Reflector fits nicely with other .NET tools the company offers. Red Gate will continue to provide the free community version and is looking for your feedback and ideas for future versions.

Here is the new page for .NET Reflector.

But at least I had a cool party to send me off to my next 40 years. Last Saturday, around 140 of my closest friends and family converged on a park in Boise to roast a pig, drink from the keg, and poke fun at the new-old guy.

Wish you were here. Maybe at my 80th.

Wow, two great speakers in less than a month. Last month, we had Kalen Delaney speaking at Boise's inaugural SQL Server User Group and tonight at the Idaho .NET User Group, Kathleen Dollard an INETA speaker is sharing her "Twelve Gems and Eight Dragons talk."

Here are the Twelve Gems

• System.AddIn - one of two new features in 3.5 that are getting overlooked; allows you to let other people provide customization to your application; wraps everything about managing app domains; check out the Pipeline Builder tool on CodePlex
• HashSet - sets = groups and very high performance, and sets are mutable; LINQ allows set-type functions, but is missing some features and always returns copies
• WPF Async Data Loading - Asynchronous behavior offered for instance loading and (sometimes) property retrieval, by leveraging the ObjectDataProvider IsAsynchronous property in XAML
• Generic Classes C# - Generic classes encapsulate operations that are not specific to a particular data type; the most common use for generic classes is with collections like linked lists, hash tables, stacks, queues, trees, and so on. Operations such as adding and removing items from the collection are performed in basically the same way regardless of the type of data being stored; Why generics? improve performance, enhanced behavior with 3.5, improve robustness by catching typing errors at compile time, reduce amount of code via generic refactoring; Kathleen's guidance is to stop using System.Collections and replace it with System.Collections.Generic
• Refactor/Rename - in her opinion the most commonly used refactoring; now available in Visual Basic as well
• Snippets (your own) - Microsoft's provided snippets are marginal; Kathleen says not to use Microsoft's snippet editor, but rather Bill McCarthy's Snippet Editor 2008 instead
• Understanding Your Code - static analysis (FxCop, VSTS Code Analysis - but custom rules are hard), code-based analysis (CodeIt.Right and StyleCop), and VSTS Code Metrics (maintainability index, cyclomatic complexity, depth of inheritance, class coupling, and lines of code) - cool and (some parts) are useful, unit test code coverage, and performance
• Data Driven Unit Testing - data sources define conditions, can be Excel, quality team can be included and expand the list, consider naming classes by condition, do not demand 1:1 class correspondence, and anticipate n:1 test correspondence
• Extension Methods - Extension methods enable you to "add" methods to existing types without creating a new derived type, recompiling, or otherwise modifying the original type so you don't have to wait for Microsoft to provide functionality you've been waiting for;
• System.Exception.Data - a key/value pair collection to provide additional, user-defined information about the exception
• Partial Methods - separate responsibility, pretty useless unless they can interact; partial methods allow interaction between partial classes; they required definition of clear extensibility points and are a replacement for intra-object dependency
• Document Outline - provides an outline view of elements and scripts in the current document (Web or Windows forms)

Here are the Eight Dragons

• VB vs. C# nullable operators - be careful here because a lot of combinations of =, <, >, etc. may give unexpected results
• Inheriting from Collections. Generic.List - Microsoft decided List should have max performance so they sealed everything to avoid virtual table calls, so you can't modify, add events, anything;
• Interface versioning - everything implementing the interface is broken, so create a new interface or consider using a base class
• Immutability in anonymous types - once you place something in a dictionary, its hash must not change; anonymous types are used most in LINQ; in C#, all instances of anonymous types are immutable, but VB uses a key to define a immutable fields of anonymous types and if the key is missing, it will use reference semantics so for LINQ consistency, uses full value semantics in LINQ
• The New constraint - the most useless piece of junk related to generics; generics provide 3 constraints: base, interface, and new; the "New" constraint requires public parameterless constructor and this is not consistent with most good development; instead you should use reflection to instantiate
• Unexpected LINQ evaluation

Landscape Complexity

• if we are feeling overwhelmed (and we should be given the complexity of .NET 3.5) with so many languages, data bases, server solutions, data access, presentation
• There is a frightening pace of change, which is a generally a good thing, but we are losing hobbyists, one man shops
• No one is competent anymore
• You cannot know it all
• Code for change - assemblies (n-tier and beyond, wrap XML, wrap communication, wrap office automation, wrap special library access) , class design (interface coding, partial classes, generics), code design (lambdas, LINQ core), big picture (source control, CI, reluctant polyglot programming, code generation, testing, metadata - DRY4D - don't repeat yourself in the 4th dimension (time)

Other terms overheard this evening

• Polyglot Programming - using the best language for the job; in this case, C# or VB
• CTRL + Shift + V - Cycle through the clipboard in Visual Studio
• CTRL + A + C - Copy the text out of a dialog window

I'm sure most of you have seen the (original) movie Predator, released back in 1987.

First, Jesse Ventura became the governor of Minnesota in 1999. Next came Arnold Schwarzenegger who became governor of California in 2003. Also in 2003 Sonny Landham ran for governor of Kentucky. He is now running for the US Senate.

I got an opportunity to attend the LA C# User Group tonight, and listen to Mike Vincent speak on this subject. I'm familiar with the concepts and capabilities of dynamic languages, but looked forward to getting my questions answered.

The behaviors of a dynamic language include several cool behaviors:

• Extend the program by adding new code
• Extend objects and definitions
• Modify the type system

The downside:

• No compiler safety net
• IDE maturity such as Intellisence
• TDD becomes very important

The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a set of services on top of the CLR to support dynamic languages. It will be distributed with Silverlight, IronPython, and IronRuby. Here's a cool graphic Scott Hanselman posted last year that explains the roadmap past, present, and future:

Other notes:

• The Silverlight CLR 2.0 won't support CodeDOM, so the need for a dynamic language really becomes evident.
• Django is a high-level framework for Python comparable to Ruby on Rails, and at PyCon 2008 (March 2008) Microsoft demonstrated Django's use on Iron Python
• John Lam demonstrated Ruby on Rails running on IronRuby at RailsConf (May 2008)

On a side note, one of the attendees told me about the Google App Engine, allowing you to run your application on Google's infrastructure.

You can download Mike's presentation here.

Tonight is the maiden voyage of the Idaho SQL Server User Group and what a way to send it off - with Kalen talking about SQL Server 2005.

Counting heads in the room, it looks like we have about 33 people, including Kalen and Cindy Gross (Microsoft). That's a nice sized group for an evening gathering of a user group in Boise.

After enlightening us with her background, and deep history working with SQL Server, Kalen jumped right into the nuts and bolts of SQL Server 2005: The Costs of Concurrency.

In typical FireStarter event style, this event will be delivering a first class experience to all attendees and make them experts on developing on SharePoint technologies before the end of the event. There should be great speakers from the Microsoft roster presenting some awesome topics that will help you build and customize web sites with SharePoint and Web 2.0 technologies.

Logistics

Where: Microsoft Conference Center (Building 33) – Kodiak Room

When: June 11th 2008 - Wednesday

Free stuff: Breakfast and lunch provided, lots of swag

Attending

Click here to register to attend In-person 

Click here to attend via Live Meeting! (the in-person event will have a better experience)

If you have any questions, please contact Mithun.

Elegant Code is hosting an Open Spaces session.  An Open Spaces session is a discussion where the attendees generate the topics. There will be no presentation, no lecture, no PowerPoint slides, etc.  The main point of this is a discussion were all the attendees can grow and learn from each other. The topics for discussion will be created by the group. The discussion will be facilitated, but just to keep the conversation going, not to drive it in any direction.

The first one will be held on June 3rd, at the Casa Mexico Restaurant in the Hyde Park section of Boise.  They offer beer and wine in addition to the great "South of the Border" food.

If you would like to attend, please RSVP at scott.schimanski@gmail.com.

Location

Casa Mexico Restaurant  1605 N. 13th St. (Hyde Park), Boise, Idaho (Downstairs in the brick building)

When

Tuesday evening, June 3rd, 6:30-8:30.