I’m headed to the Visual Studio Live conference in Las Vegas on Sunday. I'll be doing a full-day precon on WCF on Monday then two WPF talks on Tuesday.

If you’re going to be there, please stop by and say hi !

I’m running two events in the northeast called MVVM DevReady coming up this month.

The first one is in Philly (Malvern actually) and will run on Saturday the 19th of March.  The second is the following Monday, the 21st, in the NYC Microsoft office.

Both events are FREE of charge but registration is limited and is quickly filling up.  We just put up the registration site yesterday and are more than half full already.

I will be giving the first three sessions, with the local DE giving the fourth, and our sponsor providing the last session of the day. These events could not have been possible if not for our sponsor, Developer Express.  They are not only covering event expenses but are flying out one of their chief evangelists, Seth Juarez, to present the session personally.

The registration sites are:

3/19/2011 - Philly: http://devready-estw.eventbrite.com/

3/21/2011 - NYC: http://devreadynyc.eventbrite.com/

Get your development skills ready for MVVM (Model View View Model Design Pattern) and build some exciting applications for WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone. In this all day event you will learn everything you need to know to get start with MVVM. We will start with the basics and end with some more advance topics.

The following text was originall written by Rachel Appel, Developer Evangelist for the NY region:

On July 7th, 2010 at 7pm in Manhattan the NYC area developer community will be holding an event to benefit NYC-area .NET software developer Wendy Friedlander.

Wendy is a 30 year old software agilista from Long Island. She's a strong WPF developer and a firm believer in the agile method of development including pair programming and TDD. Wendy is wife and mother of a beautiful girl named Kaylee who will be 2 in August of this year. In August of 2009 Wendy learned that she had a rare and aggressive pediatric cancer called aveolar rhabdomyosarcoma. Her treatment consists of high dose chemotherapy and radiation. She has had to leave her job, and her husband has been forced into part time work in order to care for their daughter.
Come and be part of something special!

We are very pleased to be able to announce that the evening will include a unique presentation by noted .NET luminary and author Charles Petzold on an obscure (but interesting) chapter in the history of computing with appearances (in chronological order) by Cicero, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Fourier, Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Madame Curie, and Albert Einstein.

In addition, Miguel Castro has volunteered to provide a very special talk for the attendees where he promises to demonstrate some of his own pet software development projects for us!

In addition to the opportunity to see these unique talks, every attendee will be given a free unlimited 30-day subscription to TekPub (http://www.tekpub.com), the video screencasting site with hours and hours of screencasts on topics including Silverlight, Entity Framework, NHibernate, JQuery, Ruby-on-Rails, developing for the iPhone, and developing for Android. Everyone who attends the event is guaranteed this free subscription just for their cost of attending.

Other SWAG that will be raffled off to attendees includes multiple software licenses for the following products:
* JetBrains Resharper, DotTrace, and DotCover!
* Developer Express CodeRush, Refactor! Pro, and DXperience Suite (every control they make!)
* Telerik RAD Controls!
* TypeMock Isolator!
* Visual Studio MSDN Ultimate i-year Subscriptions!
* ...and more!

Specific details for this event including location, RSVP links, and more can be found at the site:
http://www.DevsForWendy.com

For more details about the event, please see this comprehensive blog post by Steve Bohlen:
http://unhandled-exceptions.com/blog/index.php/2010/06/30/devsforwendy/

Attendance is $75 per person with all proceeds going to Wendy and her family. Since dinner will consist of pizza and soda, you can be assured that more than $65 of that attendance fee will go to benefit the Friedlanders directly!

Even if you cannot attend the benefit event itself, please consider using the [Donate] link on the site (http://devsforwendy.com/donate.html) to make a contribution directly to Wendy and her family. Any amount you may be able to spare would be very much appreciated -- whether $1, $5, $10, $50, or more it all adds up and it all goes to a great cause!

If there are any questions, please do not hesitate to email either Sara Chipps (sarajchipps@gmail.com) or Steve Bohlen (sbohlen@gmail.com) directly.
Otherwise, please consider either attending the event, making a direct donation, or both!

Wow, what a day!

The first ever WCF Firestarter event was yesterday at the New York City Microsoft offices and it was awesome.  The agenda was simple and to-the-point.

I started the day with the first two sessions, introducing everyone to WCF an then segueing them into more advanced binding and behavior configurations by showing the most commonly used configuration scenarios.  Seems that transaction handling was the more popular one there.  After lunch, one of our local DEs, Peter Laudati took the stage to talk about WCF REST capabilities.  After which, Don Demsak introduced everyone to WCF Data Services, rounding out the capability set of this technology.  I came back on at the end of the day to talk about the new WCF 4 stuff and it seems that routing capabilities was the highlight on that one.

  Peter and Don did an awesome job, as always.  As for my performance, I was happy but I’ll let others blog about what they thought.  All in all, I was comfortable with the outcome and I think the crowd was pleased.  We had about 200 attendees in the room and another 108 on LiveMeeting.  The event brought in people from around the country and world I think.  I put out a call for listeners to send me an email telling me where they are and immediately I received one from a listener in Southern Australia.  Kudos goes out to Coral who was listening in the middle of the night, down under.

When I took a poll at the beginning as to how many WCF users I had in the room, the count was extremely low (about 10) so I think this was definitely the target audience.

Thank you to Peter for getting Microsoft behind this event and for handling all the logistics, and thanks for letting me spearhead the agenda and content for the event.  I had a great time doing it.  O’Reilly was awesome and sent me 5 copies of Michele’s book and 5 of Juval’s to give away.  Also thanks to Developer Express and Telerik for donating product licenses for the event.  Both those companies can always be counted on to support these kind of events and their giveaways were the first ones to disappear.  Also, we had a tech out in Redmond with us every step of the way, monitoring the live feed and standing by in case of problems and we couldn’t have been more grateful to Erik Ostrowski for his help and for being there at 3am his time, to help us out.

As a goof, I have away a couple of “What Would Miguel Do?” t-shirts that a client of mine made for me.  I couldn’t believe it when one of the guys put it on and wore it for the entire event.  It was certainly flattering a very cool gesture.

I think that Danny, the DE down in the Philly market wants to put this event on in his territory so I guess that’s where we’ll be taking it next.

Thanks again to Microsoft, the local DEs, Don, and all the attendees and listener for help making it a great event.

Until next time…

Stop starting new projects with ASMX Web Services or .NET Remoting!  OK, now that we have your attention, let’s get serious.  These two

technologies are so 2002!  You need to start learning Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) if you haven't already.  This is the platform for connected applications on the Windows platform going forward, and you know what?  It's easier to use than you may think.

Even if you've been tinkering with writing basic services in WCF for a while but haven't dived into anything more advanced, you should come in for the NYC WCF Firestarter.

Join us for a full day of nothing but WCF sessions.  Ranging from an introductory so you can hit the ground running, and with best practices, continuing with topics involving the most important features of WCF, and ending with some cutting edge material on REST & Microsoft's new service bus and Azure technology in .NET 4.0.

We’ve got a great line up of speakers!  Presenting at the NYC WCF Firestarter will be Miguel Castro, Don Demsak, and myself (Peter Laudati).

Microsoft NYC Office - 1290 Ave of the Americas - 6th Floor

Event Details

Event Date: Saturday June 19^th, 2010

Event Location:

Microsoft NYC Offices
1290 Ave of the Americas 6^th Floor
New York, NY 10104

REGISTER HERE!

Event Agenda

Doors open 8:30am. Sessions run from 9:00am – 5:00pm. Lunch will be served.

• Session 1: Keynote – Intro to SOA & WCF
• Session 2: Most Common WCF Usage Scenarios
• LUNCH
• Session 3: REST Programming with WCF
• Session 4: WCF Made Easy – Data & RIA Services
• Session 5: What’s New With WCF 4.0

Session Details

Intro to SOA & WCF

Jump right in to understanding what service orientation is and how WCF is the preferred technology for this architecture.  You'll see how services get written in WCF from scratch and using best practices from the beginning.

Most Common WCF Usage Configurations

WCF has many characteristics, each with several options.  There are however some optimal settings for the most common scenarios.  In this session you'll learn the whys and hows for configuring WCF services to work optimally in the areas of instantiation, concurrency, transactions, security, and bindings.

REST Programming With WCF

With .NET 3.5 came the addition of the System.Service.Web assembly and the addition of REST capabilities to WCF.  REST is an HTTP-based messaging protocol that is common in web applications today and even more common in non-.NET services that expose API (think Twitter & Google).  In this session, you'll learn how to expose your services using REST and also how to consume non-.NET REST APIs using WCF.

WCF Made Easy - Data & RIA Services

You have seen all the various ways you can leverage WCF, but what if all you want to do is expose your data via HTTP?  In that case, you can simplify your development, by using WCF Data Services or WCF RIA Services.  In this session we will learn how to easily expose your data using Entity Framework in a RESTful fashion using WCF Data Services, how to consume WCF Data Services, and then dive into WCF RIA Services.

What's New With WCF 4.0

No Day-Of-WCF would be complete without letting you know what's new with .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.  This session will give you a heads up on several new and powerful features introduced in WCF 4.0.  Among these are "Configuration-less Hosting", "Discovery", "Routing", and an intro to the new Azure Service Bus.

Swag & Prizes

We hope you come to attend the NYC WCF Firestarter for the unique content, providing a FREE opportunity to advance your skills by learning a new technology. However, like many events, we’ll have some fun stuff to giveaway at the end.  If you stick around, you will have the chance TO BE THE LUCKY WINNER OF A MICROSOFT ZUNE!  YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN.

This is certainly worth blogging about.  DevExpress, whom we all know are famous for their component suites and of course CodeRush, is working with Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans.  Rather than regurgitate their description on this posting, go here to read all about it.

Way to go guys !

The user group in New York City last night was great.  The turn out was around 85 people and the response, attentiveness, and questions were very good.  This talk is a hell of a memory dump since I cover so many things.

The name of the session was “Integrating Search: An Adventure in Dependency Injection” and I cover not only the APIs of the three major search engines, Bing, Google, and Yahoo (soon to use Bing), but also some provider design, dependency injection, and custom controls (both windows and web).

I also showed off my new FluentSearch DSL which I’ll have on this site very soon.  I talked about this session and the FluentSearch DSL in a previous posting regarding the Philly Code Camp, so you can go there to read more.

I want to cover an answer to one of the questions last night since I wasn’t able to answer it off the cuff and gave the attendee an honest, “I’m not sure”.  The question was regarding the WebGet attribute that I used to decorate the operations in my service contracts in order to consume the REST APIs of both Google and Bing.  The ResponseFormat argument of this attribute had the optional settings of either XML or JSON.  This determined the format for the data that the search engine API would return and instruct WCF how to decode it.  The exact question was regarding the RequestFormat argument of the attribute and what it would be used for in this scenario.  The answer is that it wouldn’t be used so its value wouldn’t matter.  The RequestFormat argument determines the format used when the operation is used to expose a service, not to consume it.  In all my usage for this talk, I was using this service contract for consumption of the external API so ResponseFormat is all that was important.  If I was actually writing a service to implement my service contract and would provide my own implementation of that operation, then the RequestFormat would determine what format of data I would expose through that operation.  But once again, I was only using my service contract to map to a REST URL that was exposed by another API so it was only in the context of a proxy-based consumption.

My sincere apologies for not having the answer to this question off the top of my head.  This talk covered so much that when the question was asked, I guess my head was elsewhere.  Thank you to whoever it was that asked it because it is definitely information that I should have covered in more detail.

As always, kudos to Andrew Brust for running a great group and inviting me to once again be a part of it.

You can get the session material from the Downloads section of this site.

Until next time…

The Philly Code Camp this last weekend was awesome as always.  The talk I did was “Integrating Search: Adventure In Dependency Injection”, and I was extremely pleased by the turnout.  I was a bit nervous about this one because I gave it in DevConnections last year and had a very small turnout.  Though the people that did show up loved it, I set out to make some modifications here and there and tried again in Philly.  I think there were over 75 people in the room and the response and feedback was awesome.

The material for the session can be found in the Downloads section of this site.

I’m looking forward to doing this talk again this Thursday in the NYC .NET User Group.  The New York group is run by Andrew Brust, Stephen Forte, and William Zack and has been around for a very long time.  It’s at this group where I first met my friend Carl Franklin (host of .NET Rocks!), and the group was also the second .NET user group in which I ever spoke.  Though I’ve remained an active attendee at this group, I’m looking forward to returning this Thursday as a speaker once again.

If you want to see a brief on the upcoming talk, see my posting prior to the Philly Code Camp.

Until next time…

The first 2010 Code Camp for the Philly.NET community is going on this coming Saturday, April 10th.

I’ll be doing a session called “Integrating Search: An Adventure In Dependency Injection”.  This one covers quite a bit so hopefully attendees will leave with their heads ready to explode.  I’ll be covering an intro to the search engine APIs of all three major search engines: Bing, Google, and Yahoo.  I’ll be showing how to use WCF to access each API, each being different from the other.  The Bing API will be using SOAP, the Google and Yahoo ones, REST.  Google’s API however will use JSON while Yahoo will use POX.

Afterwards I’ll be using a small makeshift DI container to put everything together so a common API is exposed to the consumer.

Finally, I’ll show off some drag-and-drop custom controls that will give you search capability in your applications.  And I have both Windows and Web versions of these.

Time permitting, I’ll be showing off a freeware product I’m working on called FluentSearch.  This will let you perform searches against any search engine using a fluent interface, like this:

private void btnBingSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{ 
    var request = FluentSearch.CreateRequest().SearchEngine("bing")
        .SearchFor("Miguel A. Castro").PageSize(5).PageNumber(1)
        .Web.UseKey("{your API key goes here}")
        .CallbackTo(ResponseCallback, SynchronizationContext.Current);

    IAsyncResult asyncResult = request.ExecuteAsync(); 
}


private void ResponseCallback(SearchResponse response)
{
    DisplayResults(response);
}

This tool is not quite completed but will hopefully be far enough to share by the time of this code camp.

All the slides and code from the presentation will be available in the Downloads section of this site.  Also, I’m told that this will be one of a selected few sessions that will be professionally filmed for airing on Microsoft’s Channel 9.

See you there.

Well, Code Camp in NYC is over and I have to say it was really a lot of fun.  Kudos to Steve, Andrew, and the rest of the organization staff for a great job.  The only thing that really holds that code camp back is the fire code in the Microsoft building on 6th Avenue.  There always seems to be a waiting list because the attendance registration fills up real fast, but be that as it may it was still great.

I always submit one or two intro talks and behold, they still get chosen.  I did an intro talk on WCF and the room was so packed that they asked me if I’d repeat it in the afternoon (packed too).  It seems that WCF is still an intimidating technology so I’m always glad to clear it up for people and prove that at its basics, it really is easy to hit the ground running with it.

You can get the code and slides in the downloads section of this site.  I didn’t go through all the slides because after all it is Code Camp and not Slide Camp.  However, the steps I took to write all the code from scratch and the order in which I took them is thoroughly highlighted in the slide deck amongst the slides I did not go through.

All in all, I think everyone seemed to have enjoyed the presentation and I’m always glad to add to the numbers of people getting up to speed on this technology.

Well, Tuesday I got back from Cairo Code Camp in, yeah you guessed it, Cairo.

No, I’m not talking about the umpteen cities in the US called Cairo; I mean the one in Egypt.  I think the only way I can describe the trip and the place is to use the word surreal.  I’m a long time history buff so by the mere concept of being there was unbelievable to me.  Add to that the couple of visits we made to those gargantuan structures in the desert and it was more than enough to keep me in awe for the entire time I was there.

The so-called code camp was not really a code camp, it was really more of a real conference.  It’s attendance and organization both had the feel of such.  This thanks to the folks at DashSoft and the incredible help they acquired for this event.  These folks are all part of .NETWork, a user group based in Egypt.  This conference was hands-down, one of the best trips I’ve ever taken.

My take on Cairo:

Being raised in the United States (though not born here), overseas trips tend to have their share of fascination with me but after going to several western European countries, I’ve grown quite accustomed to it.  There are several aspects of my visit to Cairo for which I could not have been prepared.

1. The first is the traffic.  I don’t know where to even begin here.  The only thing I can possibly say is that you should all go to YouTube and do a search on “Cairo Traffic”.  It will give you hours of pleasure.
2. The second is of course the sheer awesomeness of the Great Pyramids at Giza.  I found out that Giza is actually a province of Greater Cairo and the Pyramids are in fact just outside the city in the area where the desert starts.  I got to see these twice, at night and in the day time.  At night, they weren’t lighted since it was 1:30 in the morning but it’s pretty incredible seeing the black triangles against the black of the sky as you’re on horseback headed toward a Bedouin camp.  Forget about the immense allergic attack (shown in the picture) I got because of the horse, it was totally worth it.  The following day we went to visit them at daylight and it was a completely separate and equally awesome experience.  As if the allergic attack the night before was not enough, this time I suffered a pretty severe cluster phobic attack while entering one of the pyramids.  I’m 6’4” and I had to duck into a passageway about 50-75 feet long, 25 degrees down, with dimensions of about three feet high and two and a half feet wide – not pleasant.
3. The third and most incredible thing about Egypt was the people.  The Egyptian people were the friendliest, warmest bunch I’ve ever met.  Their culture in intertwined with their religion in a way that I didn’t expect.  I guess I was expecting more of a Muslim state like Saudia Arabia, but that was not the case.  The Egyptian Muslims take their religion very seriously.  It becomes part of their guide through life and they respect and follow their customs; but at the same time they enjoy themselves and party no different than any of us, except of course without the drinking.  There is a 20% Christian population there and they get wasted with the best of us :).  I can’t say enough good things about all the people I met and spent time with.  The best thing about this trip is the number of new friends I met, and I hope to stay in touch with them for a long time.

My Sessions:

The folks that ran the conference gave me four sessions to do and the turn-out for all of them was insane:

1. ASP.NET Under The Covers
2. Extensibility: Software That Survives
3. Fun With HTTP Handlers
4. Dynamic State Storage: Custom ASP.NET Provider Features

The skill and understanding level was above average with this crowd and even the language gap turned out to be a non-issue.  The most challenging thing for me was making a conscious effort to lose my New Jersey accent and to speak slower, but it all turned out great.

The slide deck and code for all my sessions can be found on this blog’s download page.

The rest of my pictures from the trip can be found on my Picasa album.

Thank you to the folks at DashSoft, .NETWork, and most of all to the attendees of Cairo Code Camp for making my first visit to Egypt so memorable !

A very special thanks to the Zakari family for the unbelievable spread they put out on Monday.  Thank you for your incredible hospitality !