The theme of the webcast series is "staying on top of change". I can't deny hat there's a certain thrill to the changes in this still-very-new industry (remember, the formal definition of "computable" isn't even a hundred years old, and some of the pioneers, like C.A.R. Hoare, are still alive). They can also be overwhelming. All the guests on the show have ideas about how to cope with the ongoing changes, how to make the most of your career and life as a developer and intriguing stories about their life "in the trenches".

Joey and I started getting interviewees for the show by drafting a list of "dream guests" and then inviting them to speak. I'm pretty well-established in the .NET world, so I went after people that Microsoft developers would know well. Joey has spent more time in the world outside Microsoft development, so he was assigned to invite people often seen in those spheres. We ended up with a great and varied set of guests, some you might have expected and some who might surprise you. We think that you'll enjoy the webcast and find it both entertaining and informative, whether you eat, breathe and sleep Visual Studio, dream in TextMate or stand on the front lines in the Emacs/vi holy war.

All you have to do to catch the live Ignite Your Coding webcasts is register for the ones you want (see below). We'll record them all, so if you can't catch the live shows, you can at least listen to them later.

Here are the guests and the dates:

Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning (Andy Hunt)

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he's had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we'll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We'll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, "just the plain old weirdness that is people".

Thursday, March 4, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

Composable Applications FTW (Glenn Block)

Glenn Block is an industry expert who has broad enterprise software development experience including architecture and system design. Typically, developers of client applications face a number of challenges. One of the more common challenges is to build applications in a way that allows its various parts & pieces to be interchanged quickly and seamlessly. In this conversation, Glenn Block will provide guidance on how to structure your applications in such a way that will facilitate this capability.

Thursday, March 11, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

Essence versus Ceremony (Jeremy Miller)

Jeremy Miller is no stranger to the developer community of .NET. He is the author of StructureMap and the forthcoming StoryTeller, as well as being a major contributor to FubuMVC and Fluent NHibernate. In this one-hour webcast, we'll discuss a wide range of topics; including how newer OSS efforts in the developer community of .NET are trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and much more!

Thursday, March 18, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt (David Laribee)

David Laribee is currently an Agile Coach at VersionOne. Technical debt refers to the costs associated with byzantine dependencies and sloppy code. Technical debt is a drag. It can kill productivity, making maintenance annoying, difficult, or, in some cases, impossible. In this one-hour webcast, David will provide us with some advice for "paying back technical debt" with agile techniques.

Thursday, March 25, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

Scalability and Performance for All (Richard Campbell)

Richard Campbell knows a thing or two about scalability and performance, having designed and built applications for over 30 years with a number of leading North American organizations. He's also taken that knowledge and applied it at his company Strangeloop, which builds an appliance that specializes in website acceleration. In this webcast, Richard will help us navigate the world of scalability and performance and how developers need to think differently when building applications for the future.

Thursday, April 8, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST, (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

State of the .NET Developer Nation (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is a household name to nearly every developer of .NET worldwide. From his deeply-informative blog to his engaging podcast, Scott is well known for his expertise and insights that he shares willingly with the broader community of .NET. In this webcast, we'll talk to Scott about the state of the developer nation of .NET; a "what's hot and what's not" with developers of .NET today. We'll also chat with Scott about his role at Microsoft and tips on staying on top of your game as a developer in the industry today.

Thursday, April 15, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock (Jeff Atwood)

Jeff Atwood writes the popular developer blog Coding Horror, created and helps run the Stack Overflow and Server Fault and SuperUser community Q&A sites and co-hosts the Stack Overflow podcast with Joel "Joel on Software" Spolsky. With a schedule like this and a one-year-old, he somehow stills finds the time to keep his Rock Band skills finely honed. Join us as we chat with Jeff in a one-hour webcast where we talk about the Stack Overflow phenomenon, how Coding Horror grew to become one of the most-read developer blogs and career strategies in the post-desktop age.

Thursday, April 22, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

A Chat with "Uncle Bob" Martin (Robert C. Martin)

His business card may say "Robert C. Martin", founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as "Uncle Bob". He's been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he's known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We'll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we'll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

Thursday, April 29, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 AM PST)
Register for this webcast (it's free!)

To find out more about the Ignite Your Coding webcast series, visit the Ignite Your Coding page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Of all the tools available for web developers, there’s one that I particularly like and that tool is Fiddler:

A Screenshot of Fiddler

Fiddler is a freeware utility written by Eric Lawrence that logs all of the HTTP(S) traffic occurring on your machine. Recently, Eric delivered a presentation at Microsoft PDC 2009 entitled, "Become a Web Debugging Virtuoso with Fiddler", which you download from here. For the uninitiated, this session provides a great primer to Fiddler. Highly recommended.

I like Fiddler a lot because it gives me an ability to watch all HTTP(S) traffic that occurs on my machine and inspect the underlying aspects of this traffic on a request-by-request basis. This is important when building a web application where you want to have a clear understanding of what it's doing underneath the user interface.

Fiddler's Architecture

Another aspect of Fiddler that I like is the ability to get a better sense of the HTTP(S) traffic itself. For example, with Fiddler I can examine the HTTP headers (including cookies). This is useful when you want to see how your web server utilizes caching via content expiration or compression via GZIP encoding. These aspects turn out to be quite important, especially when trying to reduce the frequency and size of your client requests.

Extensibility in the form of add-ons is the probably the best feature of Fiddler. With this capability, developers are free to extend the functionality of Fiddler to provide more meaningful information around the HTTP(S) traffic that occurs on a machine. There are many add-ons available for Fiddler. For a full listing, check out the extensions page here.

In conclusion, many tools exist for web developers. However, if there's one tool that's an absolute must, it's Fiddler. Download it today!

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.

Recently, I had the pleasure of chatting a fellow Developer Evangelist from Microsoft, Dave Bost to discuss some of the latest and greatest features of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. You can check out a recording of this interview here.

I continually find new and exciting things in both Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. Combined with ASP.NET MVC 2 and Silverlight 4, there is a lot of great technology out in the community for developers to hand their hands on.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide some additional/ancillary information about what I covered during my presentation.

Audio and Video

• Concept of Desktop Virtualization
• Hyper-V with Jeff Woolsey at TechEd09
• IT Manager Podcast #26 - Virtualization from the Datacenter to the Small Business
• Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) Overview
• What Virtualization Means for the Desktop
• Windows 7 Boot from VHD
• Windows Server 2008 R2, Remote Desktop, VDI and Virtualization

Blogs and Websites 

• Application Virtualization TechCenter
• Canadian Developer Connection
• Canadian IT Professional Connection
• Hyper-V and Virtualization on Microsoft TechNet
• Visual Studio Lab Management Team
• Windows Azure

As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Download MP3 Audio - Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (24.59 MB - 53 minutes, 58 seconds)

Show Links

• Imaginet Resources Corp.
• Imaginet's Healthcare Software
• TFS Work Item Manager & TFS Project Dashboard
• Lean Software Development
• Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009
• Visual Studio Lab Management Team Blog
• TFS Integration Platform

About Joel Semeniuk

Joel Semeniuk is a founder of Imaginet Resources Corp; a Canadian based Microsoft Gold Partner. He is also a Microsoft Regional Director and has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba. Joel has spent the last twelve years providing educational, development, and infrastructure consulting services to customers throughout North America. Joel specializes in helping organizations realize their potential through maturing their software development and information technology practices. He employs a customized and incremental approach, promoting the ability to quickly adopt and tailor processes and technologies that best suit the needs of the organization. Backed by industry best practices and his experience, Joel works with organizations to ensure that their technology supports the vision of their business and is adaptable to the ever-changing marketplace, to accomplish this responsiveness without sacrificing quality, and to realize earlier and greater returns on their technology investment. For Joel and his customers, the ultimate goal is to achieve superior business agility.

About Developer Night in Canada (DNIC)

Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is a podcast produced by John Bristowe (@jbristowe) and Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy)of Microsoft Canada. Its focus is to provide insight and analysis from some of the developers and experts in Canada. The RSS feed for Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is available here. Alternatively, you can subscribe through Apple's iTunes here.

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.

Based on the video description (above), I was able to create an ugly-yet-usable tag for the Canadian Developer Connection blog:

In order to try this out yourself, point your mobile device to gettag.mobi to get the reader software (which supports many different platforms). From there, you can create your own tags on the Microsoft Tag site.

Finally, take a few moments to check out the Microsoft Tag Development Center if you're interested in bulk creation of tags and other operations.

Finally (and thankfully), Visual Studio 2010 introduces the ability to sort types in the "New File" and "New Project" windows:

Now, instead of hunting for the project or file type that you're searching for, you can help yourself out by sorting the listing by its name in either an ascending or a descending order.

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.

Canadian MVPs Contribute to Free Developer eBook!

Nine MVPs recently contributed to the Developers, Developers, Developers, IT eBook. The eBook was created by Canadian MVP Derek Hatchard and Dirk Primbs. It contains 17 articles by developers for developers and is available as a free download from Microsoft.

Sections within the book:

• Working with Brownfield Code by MVP Donald Belcham
• Beyond C# and VB by MVP Ted Neward
• All I Wanted Was My Data by Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Barry Gervin
• Efficiency Upgrade by Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Derek Hatchard
• Getting Started with Continuous Integration by Microsoft Regional Director  Sondre Bjellås
• On Strike at the Software Factory by MVP Daniel Crenna
• C# Features You Should Be Using by MVP Ted Neward
• Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets by Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Brian Noyes
• Is Silverlight 2 Ready for Business Applications? by Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Jonas Follesø
• Innovate with Silverlight 2 by MVP Daniel Crenna
• Real World WPF: Rich UI + HD by Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Gill Cleeren

Download the free eBook here!

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.

For a brief description about code camps, check out the Code Camp Manifesto. One of the great things about code camps is that they are run by the community and for the community. Another great thing about code camps is that they are free to attend, which is great for folks who are looking to learn more about particular technologies and processes around software development.

An Overview of Today’s Activities

Earlier today, Bil Simser (@bsimser) and I woke up bright and early and headed north to Edmonton Code Camp (#YegCodeCamp):

The event is occurring at the Grant MacEwan Downtown Campus in the Robbins Health Learning Centre (in Edmonton) and looks to be well-attended. A big-time kudos needs to be conveyed to David Woods (@gotwoods) for helping to organize today’s event:

Session – “Bring Out The Git” by Tom Opgenorth (@topgenorth)

The first session that I attended was Tom Opgenorth’s presentation entitled, “Bring Out The Git”:

Tom’s presentation provided a good overview for folks wanting to learn more about Git (distributed version control system). He also provided a brief overview of GitHub, which provides a centralized repository for various Git-associated projects. (I arrived late so I missed a lot of his presentation.)

Session - “Stupid SharePoint Tricks” by Bil Simser (@bsimser)

Bil Simser (@bsimser) is a Microsoft MVP who lives and breathes SharePoint. (Whenever I struggle with SharePoint, I light up the “SharePoint BatSignal” for his help.) His presentation focused on tips and tricks around SharePoint development, which an emphasis on tools used by the developer community to extend the functionality of SharePoint. In his presentation, Bil highlighted a tool that I had not heard of; STSDEV (Simple Tools for SharePoint 2007 Development). This project is total goodness. From the CodePlex project page:

STSDEV is a proof-of-concept utility application which demonstrates how to generate Visual Studio project files and solution files to facilitate the development and deployment of templates and components for the SharePoint 2007 platform including Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Note that the current version of the STSDEV utility only supports creating projects with the C# programming language.

Another tool Bil mentioned was WSPBuilder (SharePoint WSP Tool), yet another CodePlex project. There’s a great introduction to this tool available from Michael Bowersox here. According to Michael, “it is a tool that, in my opinion, every SharePoint developer should be using.” Sounds nice!

Overall, it was a great overall for developers building solution on SharePoint today.

Session - “Accelerating Development Using Convention-over-Configuration” by James Kovacs (@jameskovacs)

James has been talking a lot about convention over configuration recently. You can listen to his interview on the subject on .NET Rocks! here. In his presentation, his thesis is that there are numerous benefits for convention as it can transform the way we think about software development, leading to better usability and productivity. In his presentation, he cites numerous examples of framework in the .NET world that employ this idea, including ASP.NET MVC. For his first set of demos, he built an ASP.NET MVC application for Darth Vader:

Throughout his demo, he cites jQuery, which employs convention to a high degree. As an example, he shows how to naming convention greatly improves the productivity of a developer by associating behaviours with specific element IDs without a great deal of code.

(More to come.)

Photos

Videos and Other Social Media Goodness Relating to Edmonton Code Camp

Bil Simser (@bsimser) posted a brief interview with me on code camps while en route to Edmonton:

An interview with David Woods (@gotwoods) about Edmonton Code Camp:

D’Arcy Lussier (@DArcy_Lussier) hanging out at lunch:

And the wrap up! The swag session!

A few other links of note include:

• Facebook event page for Edmonton Code Camp is here.
• Follow the conversation on Twitter via the hashtag, #YegCodeCamp.

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.