CodeClimber

A few days ago I attended the second event of the newly born Belgian Node.js User Group. The event was about deploying and testing node.js applications and has been hosted in Microsoft Belgium offices near Brussels, thanks to Tom Crombez (aka @artymoony) and Windows Azure. There were 3 presentations: Mine, about deploying a MongoDB powered Node.js app on Windows Azure: a walkthrough of the steps needed to deploy the app. Then another talk on how to build your own “cloud-like” environment on Linux, using systemd. Talk by Ruben Vermeersch. ...

Together with the traditional Christmas and New Year wishes, I wanted to give all European developer a small Xmas present: Web.NET Conference 2013 will be held in Paris, around the end of May This year's edition is possible thanks to the help of Rui Carvalho, which already came to talk at last Web.NET Conference. So, let's look forward to an amazing 2013!! webnetconf, xmas

UPDATE (15 December): Boo... The Conference has been cancelled. Do you use JavaScript? Do you like skiing or snowboarding? Do you live in Europe? If you answered yes to at least the first 2 questions than you definitely have to attend the MountainJS conference held on the 4th and 5th of February in ski station of Leysin, near Geneva Lake, in the Swiss Alps. The conference will be about JavaScript being used as the unique and exclusive language for both frontend and backend web development, covering the hottest topics, technologies, techniques and platforms to build the next generation of web and mobile...

Over the last few months I worked, on my spare time, on a new web development project: the site for the Web.NET Conference. It was a refreshing experience, going back working on custom development on ASP.NET MVC 4 and all the latest bits of technology. That gave me quite a few ideas for posts, so over the next weeks I'm going to blog about some of the bits and pieces of code that I think are worth sharing with the community, like ActionResults, HtmlHelpers together with my first real-coding experiences with RavenDb. As first post I’m not focusing...

On the 11 of November I had the pleasure to present at the Node.js Conference Italy the work I’ve been doing with Dominik and a bunch of other guys in the San Francisco area on the “brain” of the robotic submarine called OpenROV. On my way back from Brescia I stopped by at the first Italian Maker Faire, held in the big expo area of Milano Rho, where I wandered among stands full of flying drones, biped robots, 3D printers, FabLabs and electronics shops. Together with web development, the makers and open hardware movement is something I’m getting...

Apart from the obvious twitter and facebook, the Web.NET Conference is using a few specific social networks. We are also on: Geekli.st – A social network for “geeks” OleaPark – A conference specific networking app Lanyrd – A conference social directory I’m going to explain a bit more what they are, and for we have decided to use them. Geekli.st Probably I should have added geekli.st in the first line of this post, next to twitter and facebook after the adjective “obvious”. If you are a...

I have to say that lately all my spare time has been dedicated to the organization of the Web.NET Conference: I firmly believe that the future of web development will move away from the enterprise features and the needless over-engineering typical of the last decade. That’s why I’m putting so much effort in this conference. And I’m super happy of how it’s rolling out. Registration: Sold out and waitlist is open We opened registration the 18 of September, at midday, and by 2:30PM all the 120 places available have been given out: that means 120 seats in 2:30....

Over the month of July, 29 speaker submitted 44 presentations' proposals. But we have only 19 slots, so even limiting to one session per speaker we will not be able to accept all the speakers that submitted a proposal. Today we are opening the voting phase: till the beginning of September you’ll be able to vote for the 5 sessions you’d like to attend to at the Web.NET Conference on the 20 October. Speakers are coming from all Europe (and beyond), like Pierre Spring from Switzerland, Niels Hartvig from Umbraco, Jakob Mattsson from Sweden, Maarten Balliauw, Kris van...

Not only .NET, but Node.js too. There are just 4 days left for submitting your proposal for the Web.NET Conference, but in this post I wanted to share a bit of love for the Node.js conference, happening in Brescia (if you are not from Italy it’s more or less near Milano), in November. They have opened the Call For Papers that will stay open till the 10 of September. If you are doing Node.js, and you want to share some of your knowledge, this is the conference for you: to submit a...

It’s a great day for the Web.NET Conference today. Today we are announcing the date of the conference, launching the new site and graphics, announcing correlated events, our sponsors and launching the call for presentations. The date The date for the event has been fixed: it will be Saturday 20 October 2012. It will be in Milano, at Avanade Italy offices near Milano Central Railway Station. Start blocking your agenda and making your travel arrangements. Registration will one at the beginning of September Call for presentations Also today we opened the call for presentation: so...

The Italian .NET community is full of bright people, but with the exception of a few, most of them are unknown outside of Italian borders because they don’t blog that much, and when they do, they do it in Italian. One of these really smart guys is Ugo Lattanzi (aka imperugo), web developer (or web addict as he calls himself), founder of the Dexter Blog Engine project, ASP.NET MVP since 2009 and long time community guy. He is also, together with me, organizing this fall’s Web.NET European Conference in Milano (btw, the call for speakers is coming out...

A few days ago I started migrating a web app I was working on from ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF4 to ASP.NET MVC 4 and EF 4.3.1. All went well, except for some problems with the automatic generation of the DB scheme using EF Code First: it was creating the database, but no tables and not even the __MigrationHistory table added in 4.3; and during the execution of the schema generation an error was raised with a weird datetime conversion error. I tried this both on SQL Express 2005 and SQL Compact and I got the same outcome, just different...

The web is evolving, and so are the techniques, technologies and frameworks used in web development. Together with Ugo Lattanzi we are organizing the Web.NET Conference Europe, this fall, in North Italy. Logistics is not 100% certain yet: it will be in North Italy, probably in Milano, and will be this fall, probably toward the mid/end of October. What is sure, instead, are the topics: Advanced JavaScript frameworks, REST frameworks, Cloud, lightweight http servers, real-time web, low-ceremony web frameworks, both in .NET and in other technologies. We’ll probably launch a call for...

TechDays 2012 Belgium is just 2 weeks away, and it’s time to have a look at the agenda and decide which of the sessions to attend. My highlights are: A Look at ASP.NET MVC 4 - Scott Guthrie MVVM Applied: From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8 - Laurent Bugnion SignalR. Code, not toothpaste - Maarten Balliauw Building rich Single Page Applications (SPAs) for desktop, mobile, and tablet with ASP.NET MVC 4 - Steve Sanderson But filling in all...

Last Saturday it was the 7th and last Conference organized by UGIALT.net. With last I really mean last, as in there won’t be any more conferences organized by UGIALT.net, at least not in its current form. This is the end Those who attended know the reasons why we decided to terminate operations, but if you were not there, you can have a look at the keynote’s slides, watch the video of the keynote, or reading the more detailed explanations on Emanuele’s blog post, Perchè UGIALT.net ha chiuso?, or on my Italian blog L’ultima UGIALT.net conference. And...

Today I had my first live webcast for Microsoft Belgium, about the new features released with ASP.NET MVC 4 at Build in September. There were around 80+ people registered and around 50 people attending, and almost nobody left before the end of the webcast, so I guess it pretty well. We also are aware there were some glitches in the audio during the async part of the webcast: the audio was also recorded directly from the mic, so the video that will be published in the next week on Channel9 will have good audio. Or just register for...

Every time there is a MVP renewal there are always some tweets or posts from people not being re-awarded, but this New Year re-awarding cycle was different: a few vocal and prominent community members didn't get re-awarded. Most of them were MVPs because of their OSS projects, so conspiracy theories started about Microsoft dropping his support to Open Source, and the bashing game started. Contributes to the community because you like it, not because of the incentives You should contribute to the community because you love doing it. Not because of the incentives MS gives you with the MVP program. I love doing...

ASP.NET MVC 4 is the new version of ASP.NET MVC that came out during Build in September: it included a few pretty interesting features like a newly revamped project template, a better asynchronous controller and, the main feature, native support for mobile version of the site, with device detection and mobile only views. Also some productivity enhancement were introduced, like recipes to automate repetitive coding tasks. And finally, if you run ASP.NET MVC 4 on top of ASP.NET 4.5, you also get its new features, like script&styles minification and bundling. I’ll talk about all that and, hopefully something...

The voting for the UGIALT.net conference just ended, and just in time for the opening of the registration at noon we published, on the new web site the list of the 19 sessions chosen by the more than 180 voters: Perché a fare i preventivi facciamo così schifo? (Cristiano Rastelli) DDD Brutto Sporco e Cattivo (Alberto Brandolini) Organize your chickens: NuGet for the enterprise (Xavier Decoster) SignalR. Code, not toothpaste. Using SignalR for realtime client/server communication (Maarten Balliauw) WinRT e...

The Call for Presenters concluded yesterday evening, and I’m very happy to say that we received 50 proposals from more or less 40 different speakers. Voting From now, logging in with your twitter or (activated during this week) facebook account, you’ll be able to vote for the 5 sessions you’d like to attend; the 19 sessions with most votes will be selected and put into the agenda. The voting will close on December 19th and the agenda will be out before the Christmas. Vote!! We also have some proposals from speakers from the (enlarged) Belgian .NET...

I’m a Meet member Not sure if it’s the same in every country, but here in Belgium & Luxemburg they just setup a team of community members, called the MEET (which stands for Microsoft Extended Experts Team) that is there to help via their blogs and with speeches and acts as advisors for the events organized by MS Belgium. I’m glad to say that, despite my short time in Belgium, I’m part of that team. And among the other things, now I also have a bio both in French and Dutch (scroll at the bottom to see...

During the last 3 weeks I’ve been pretty busy with the organization of the UGIALT.net of next 21st January. This post is a quick update on the status of the Call For Presenters and the next steps that will lead to the big day. First of all: the official closing date for the CFP is November 27, at 23:59 CET, so you still have 9 days to think about something and submit it. So far, we have received 29 proposals, from 23 different speakers, and the agenda will have 3 tracks of 5 slots and one track with...

The usual annual UGIALT.net conference will take place on the 21 of January (21/1/12… another palindrome day) in Milano, in the same place it’s being held since 4 years: in the offices of Avanade Italy, near Milano Central Railway Station. Registration will open sometime in December, but for the moment we are opening the call for presenter: if you want to share an ALT.NET experience or topic with other people, don’t hesitate to propose a session for the conference. The call will close around mid/end November and if we receive more proposals than slot available we’ll setup a public voting. Just...

After a long gestation period, today it was published on Channel9 a series of webcasts about ASP.NET MVC 3. This webcasts Ugo Lattanzi, a fellow ASP.NET Italian MVP, and I recorded (in Italian) covers the following topics: Introduction to the new features of ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor, the new view engine of ASP.NET MVC 3 How ASP.NET MVC 3, SQL CE 4 and EF CodeFirst work together Introduction to IoC/DI and how to use Ninject inside ASP.NET MVC 3 ...

Yesterday, while I was enjoying this strange beginning of October on the beach, I received the email from Microsoft notifying me about the renewal of my MVP award: this time for the 4th time. I want to thank the Belgian community and the Italian for community for making that possible. And now, looking forward to a higher engagement with the Belgian .NET community. MVP

Last week I registered to the Agile .NET 2011 Europe conference, held in Gent, on 10 - 11 October, and I’m really looking forward to it. I think that if you live in Belgium (or near Belgium) and are into .NET development this is a conference you cannot miss: 2 days of sessions about Agile Principles and Software Craftsmanship with .NET flavor, and at reasonable price (350€ till end of September and 450€ later, using the coupon code, 300€ till the end of September and 400€ afterwards) and good (IMHO, better and cheaper) replacement for the cancelled StackOverflow DevDays in...

More than 6 months ago I blogged about Lucene.net starting his path toward extinction. Soon after that, due to the "stubbornness" of the main committer, a few forks appeared, the biggest of which was Lucere.net by Troy Howard. At the end of the year, despite the promises of the main committer of complying to the request of the Apache board by himself, nothing happened and Lucene.net went really close to be being shut down. But luckily, the same Troy Howard that forked Lucene.net a few months before, decided, together with a bunch of other volunteers, to resubmit...

At the end of April, Microsoft Belgium organized the TechDays Belgium, the annual developer and IT conference in Belgium, to which I had the pleasure to attend. I also manned the Ask The Expert booth and helped attendees with their questions about ASP.NET MVC, Orchard and web development. It was 3 days of very interesting sessions, ranging from the keynote/standup comedy show by Scott Hanselman to the ASP.NET MVC Deep Dive sessions by Hadi Hariri and to the Girls-Power WP7 development session by Katrien DeGraeve and Isabel Gomez Miragaya. And the last day was a deep-dive on everything ALM: a bit of...

This is again the time of the year where all .NET developers would love to go to Vegas. Some can go, but most of them are staying at home and suffering from Pre Mix Envy. Luckily, since a few years, all the sessions will be available online in a matter of hours. And most importantly the keynotes will be streamed live from Vegas, both the 12 and the 13 of April, starting from 4:00 PM GMT (18:00 in Belgium, Italy and most of Western/Central Europe). What will they talk about? Most likely it will be about Internet Explorer 9, Silverlight 5 and...

During last Saturday’s UGIALT.Net Conference in Milano I shared a talk together with Italian RoR expert Sandro Paganotti: “RoR vs ASP.NET MVC”. We had 20 minutes each to build a super easy conference registration page and also explaining to the audience what we were doing. The goal of the talk was not to choose the best platform or the most productive one, but to show the steps needed to setup and create a simple but fully functional web application. It was a very nice experience and I think it showed how similar the the web frameworks are. To...

The 6th UGIALT.net conference starts in 15 days, and here is a quick update on the agenda and the prizes. Donations Thanks to the donation of 21 out of 175 registered we gathered around 350€. If you want to help us cover the costs of the conference but didn’t donate when you registered you do it now on the UGIALT.net site and clicking on the button “Donazione”. Agenda The agenda of the day is ready: 4 rooms x 5 slots, for 19 sessions in total. Really pleased by the fact that this time most of the sessions have been proposed by the attendees, so, the...

One of the reasons for the failures of 2010 is over-commitment. Number one priority for 2011, will be: do not over-commit. Starting from my resolutions, so just 3 per 3 categories. Personal life XC-Skiing: at last for this winter, train, practice and try to take part in the Engadin Ski Marathon with Daniela and Davide Vosti. Climbing: go back climbing. Period. Be more constant with training...

As announced around one month ago, the 6th UGIALT.net conference will happen next February 19th in Milano. Tomorrow morning, 11 January 2011, at 11:11, the registration will be opened. Last year we sold out all the 160 available tickets in less than two days: cancel all your meetings, set an alarm on Outlook (or you calendar app of choice) and hit the registration site at the right time: 11/01/11 at 11:11 Url http://ugialtnetconf11.eventbrite.com/ One more thing: a prize will be given to the 11th person registered… yes, we love binary-looking numbers ...

Last Thursday I held a presentation about SOLID principles at the .NET User Group Bern. It was a real pleasure for me to go to Switzerland and speak to a very interested audience. My talk was actually made of two parts: An introduction to SOLID principles A deep dive into Dependency Injection and IoC containers In the IoC part I mainly showed samples using my favorite IoC, Ninject. But I also did one sample using Unity and one with Funq, the new super-fast IoC container developed by Daniel...

A weeks ago I wrote a call for help for Lucene.Net: not enough activity and not enough contributors. A lot happened since that post so I think it’s worth doing a little recap of what the situation is now. What happened? The newsletter thread received hundreds of emails, and lot of discussion on my post as well. Most of the discussions were about trying to understand the reason of such a lack of activity and committers, and try not to repeat the same errors: it turned out that most people think the reason is that Lucene.Net is “just”...

While I was organizing the NHDay, this summer I got in contact with Kay Herzam, one of the founder of the Bern .NET User Group: we started talking and we decided to do something together: the collaboration started with Kay announcing the NHDay to his fellow user group members, and this turned out pretty well, since 5 people from Switzerland registered and came to the NHDay after Kay announced it. We decided to go on with the collaboration: so on December 9th, 2010 I will be speaking in Bern, at the 5th annual user group meeting, about SOLID principles....

Almost one month passed since the NHDay in Bologna and but we didn’t forget about the promise we made about streaming and having the videos online for people that couldn’t attend. And now, after all the processing required to get the vidoes out of the cameras, processing and uploading them fighting with the “digital divide” that affects some areas of Italy, all the vidoes, presentations and samples (when available) are online. Keynote by Simone Chiaretta: video and slide What’s new in NH3 by Ayende: video and slide From relational...

UPDATE: There is a follow-up, which explains what happened in the community after this post: What happened to Lucene.Net? It got forked Lucene.Net, the .NET version of the famous Lucene search engine, is in a pretty critical stage. The short version is that Apache Software Foundation is considering killing the project because the community behind Lucene.Net is not active enough and since the project graduated from the incubator to a real project on its own, no “official” releases have been made (only source releases) and the site is not compliant to the “branding” guidelines. For the long version,...

Update: Added links to all downloadable videos If you are not living under a rock, probably you know that yesterday (October 28th) the PDC2010 started. This year’s format is quite different from the other years’ one: just 2 days, hosted inside Microsoft Campus, all sessions (not just the keynotes) available live and some sessions have been pre-recorded to give more content than it could fit into just 2 days. And they developed a great website so that people could watch the whole conference from home (of course, they wouldn’t get the WP7 phone). The main themes The...

Less than 10 days ago the First European NHibernate Day took place in Bologna: here are some comments on the day and in a future post, being among the organizers, the process that lead to event. The Attendance Let’s start from the event day: even if the biggest part of the attendance was Italian, it was amazing to see so many people coming from various countries, and travelling even from Sweden and Norway to attend this event. This made the European NHDay a really international event. The sessions Unfortunately I was not able...

At the beginning of October I received an email saying that my MVP award has been renewed again: this is my 3rd time. But I also receive the communication that my MVP lead changed from Alessandro Teglia, to William Jansen, MVP Lead for the BeNeLux and Nordics area. So I'm now officially a Belgian MVP. I want to thank Alessandro Teglia for being such a good MVP Lead, and for initiating me to being an MVP. And I hope I'll be able to take part in the Belgian .NET community more than I'm doing now. MVP

The NHibernate Day is just 21 days from today, so I wanted to give some updates on it. Did you receive the email? We sent an email to all the attendees, but seems like there might be some problems with spam (a few people already contacted me saying they didn’t receive anything). If you are registered for the NHDay, but you didn’t receive any email last week, please contact us (using the email specified on the event page) and we will forward the email to you. Call for action: fill the form But...

As last year, before going on holiday I’m list some of the books that are in my reading list. It’s not entirely about .NET book, but will also cover other languages not related with .NET development at all, like Scala or Arduino. JavaScript and jQuery I think JavaScript is still the most unknown language among all the ones used to write web applications: mostly due to the fact that it lives in the limbo between developer and designer. JavaScript: The Good Parts It seems incredible, but I never read this “must have” book about the...

Today when I woke up and started skimming my twitter feed, I was stuck by a flood of comments about IronRuby being somehow discontinued. Not really killed, but, as Jimmy Schementi says in his post that announces his change of job, moved out of the pool of opensource projects that Microsoft is directly funding. Justin Etheredge already commented on what it means for IronRuby itself, but I want to analyze the fact from an another angle. Maybe I'm just paranoid, and unfunding IronRuby is just... unfunding IronRuby, but the facts are leading me to think (and might lead also other people...

In October the First European NHibernate Day will be held in Bologna and there will be two tracks: Advanced NH with Ayende and Steve Strong Generic ORM, for which we had an open call for speakers Nine sessions have been proposed, but we have room only for 5 of them: today we are opening the votes to decided which of 9 sessions will be presented at the NHDay. To vote please rank the sessions in order of preference (1 is the one you definitely want to see, and...

I'm here in Copenhagen at the 6th Umbraco CodeGarden "festival" and currently chilling in the nice garden while resting between the talks of the fist day. First of all I want to say "THANK YOU!!" to Niels Hartvig for inviting me to talk to the event, and for setting up what I think is the best conference I attended ever. No, no... I'm not just sucking up... this event is really great: great food, great community, great amusements, a great channel tour and side activities... as they said at the keynote: it's more of a festival rather then a normal developer...

Next week I’ll be speaking about ASP.NET MVC Extensibility at the MVC pre-conference during annual Umbraco CodeGarden conference in Copenhagen starting next June 23rd. The presentation will be split in the two parts (just before and just after lunch) and it will cover the most of the main extensibility points of ASP.NET MVC which I covered in my most popular post: 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know. And I will also talk about the new extensibility points introduced in ASP.NET MVC 2, like Validation Rules and custom templates (which I covered in my Wrox Blox about ASP.NET MVC...

Today the registration to the first European NHibernate Day opens, at 3:15pm CET (2:15pm in London). We setup a countdown on the NHDay.eu website that will redirect you to the registration page at the precise moment the registration opens. But remember that there are only 220 seats available, and last time we finished them all in less than one day. If you are not decided yet, here are some facts that can help you decide: the event is donation based, so no fixed entry fee. Ayende and Steve Strong will talk...

My latest book, the What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2 Wrox Blox, is now available for purchase from the Wrox store at the cost of US $6.99. For those who are not familiar with them, Wrox Blox are short and concise ebooks that cover very specific topics. Ranging from 30 to 70-80 pages, they are a very good option in case you need to solve a specific problem, or learn a specific technology, but you don’t to buy a whole book only when you would read a chapter or two. And this ebook is exactly like that:...

UgiAlt.NET together with DotNetMarche organizes the First European NHibernate Day: it will be held in Bologna (Italy) next 9th October. The event is open to everyone (not only from Italy) as most of the sessions will be delivered in English. We just setup the site for the NHDay, but at the moment it’s only in Italian: an English version will be published in a few weeks. The topics It will be a full day free two tracks conference on everything about NHibernate: the main track will be on medium/advanced topics on NHibernate itself, and will be presented by...

Michele Minorello, aka minorello, from Padova, Italy. If you didn’t win, don’t despair: there are still places available, and if you took part in this competition (and even if you didn’t) you can buy a ticket with 75€ discount (375€ instead of the regular price of 450€), using the coupon code SIMONECHIARETTA. Back to the giveaway: Last week I announced that, with the help of Niels Hartvig, I was giving away one free ticket for the umbraco CodeGarden 2010 and 4 nights in the hotel. Signing up for the giveaway was easy: all you needed was to...

UPDATE: This competition is closed, stay tuned to know who is the lucky winner The Umbraco CodeGarder ‘10 is less than 2 months away, starting on June 23rd till June 25th, and thanks to the awesome Niels Hartvig, founder of Umbraco, I’m giving away an interesting package. The prize The winner will receive a more then 1000€ worth prize, consisting in: One ticket for the full 3 days of the umbraco Codegarden conference 4 nights (22nd to 25th of June) in the same hotel where all...

The Italian MSDN video portal BE-IT just published the first two of a series of screencasts presenting the opensource applications available to install through the Web Platform Installer. Installing Subtext with WebPI The first one, recorded by myself, is presenting Subtext and the how to install it very quickly on a machine that doesn’t have anything on it, leveraging the automatic dependencies download feature of the WebPI. You can go and have a look at it on the BE-IT site (it’s in Italian but it’s mostly action, so might be easy to understand also for not Italian...

And finally the Summit has arrived: on Monday I'm leaving from Milano (at 6:50am, which means waking up at 3:00am) and I'll arriving in Bellevue on Monday afternoon. I'll be staying at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue. It will be a pretty packed up week, with sessions all the days, and parties all the nights. This is my "tentative" schedule for the parties. Monday 15th - Party with Palermo Tuesday 16th - Avanade MVP Dinner (6-8) and Insiders Party by Infragistics (8 - 10) Wednesday 17th - ASP.NET Product Group Dinner Thursday 18th - MVP Attendee Party ...

This 2009 has been in important year in my career, more on the community than in the real day-time work side of things, but I’ll come on this later. For now, I just want to send to my almost 2400 readers my best wishes for a Merry Christmas and an Happy New Year

Keeping the usual half-yearly pace (one in winter and one in summer), the 5th Italian ALT.NET Conference will take in Milano, Saturday January 23rd 2010, kindly hosted by Avanade. It will be a openspace conference (like all the previous ones) and this time we will have all the 9th floor of the building: this means we will have rooms for 4 concurrent tracks, and room for more than 100 people. We are heading for at least 15 sessions so, if you want to propose something, please do it by sending an email to cfp@ugialt.net. Session in English...

Last Wednesday I was at the StackOverflow DevDays event in London (and the AltNetBeers afterward), and finally this weekend I was able to collect my thoughts and find the time to write my review. In 30 seconds If I had to sum it up one sentence I’d say that DevDays was a quick overview of the “cool” technologies of the moment, all at a pretty basic level. And since I didn’t know most of them if found the event useful and worth the 99€ of the price and the effort to take the plane and come to London....

Last week I held two presentations about ASP.NET MVC for the new-born DotNetRomaCeStà user group in Rome. And one of them was about what I consider to be ASP.NET MVC Best Practices. The presentation was in Italian so I decided to translate my slide in English so that everybody can read them. Controller’s best practices 1 – Delete the AccountController You will never use it and it’s a super-bad practice to keep demo code in your applications. 2 – Isolate Controllers from the outside World Dependencies on the HttpContext, on data access classes, configuration, logging,...

This August, Sean Chambers, blogger on Los Techies, wrote an awesome series of posts, called 31 Days of Refactoring, during which he wrote one post per day, describing one refactoring technique. In August I was on holiday, and I never had time to read the 31 posts, so last week I decided to create a easy to read version of the series, and I assembled a eBook, putting together all the posts, doing some minor edits, and applying some formatting. And I sent it over to Sean so that he could share it with all his readers. You...

This news it’s a few days old, but if you hadn’t heard of it yet, Twitter is going to be available in more languages: not only English and Japanese, but also Italian, French, German and Spanish. The cool thing is that the interface is not being translated by a team of professional translators but by a selected number of users. And I’m happy to have been invited to help the translation of Twitter to Italian (notice the “Translator Badge” at the top right corner of my profile page on Twitter). There are many considerations that can be done about...

I just came back from a week of vacation in Berlin, and I found out that my MVP award has been renewed for the second year. I want to keep this post short, so all I'm going to do is say "Thank you" to all the communities that gave me a slot to speak about ASP.NET MVC, to Wrox that let me write a book and to Keyvan for having partnered with me in writing my first book, and to all the friends of UGIALT.NET and ugidotnet. And then I want to congratulate with all the newly awarded devs of the community,...

My friend Sergejus Barinovas, developer, community lead, speaker and much more (I think he is also the only MS MVP of Lithuania) has just started a new blogging experience: after running his Lithuanian blog for two years, he decided to start sharing is knowledge, experience and passion for development in English, in his blog called Thinking in .NET. He will mainly talk about web development, Ajax,  data access technologies and best practices. One of the cool thing of his blog is that it runs on Oxite, and it’s hosted on Windows Azure and SQL Azure, and in his...

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be speaking in Rome at the Gladiators Fest (see the original in Italian): this is the first event organized by the .NET user group in Rome and I’ve been invited by Emanuele Mattei to talk about my IT passion: ASP.NET MVC. I’ll held two session: just before the lunch break, the first will be about some of the Best Practices for developing web applications based on ASP.NET MVC (level 300) and immediately after the lunch, I’ll talk about the new features that are going...

... Martin Harris, from Wellington, NZ (@BlackMael) and Andrea Balducci, from Castelfidardo, Italy (@andreabalducci). They both won a yearly subscription to the Mindscape Mega Pack Professional, which includes a license of Lightspeed Professional, all the WPF controls developed by Mindscape, future updates and any other software and control this prolific software factory from Wellington will release in the next 12 months. Martin is the "official" winner, selected by picking a random tweet from all the ones tweeted. He won by tweeting the following message: RT @simonech isolated in the void my only salvation to retreat into self with hope for...

UPDATE: The winner has been announced: And the winners of the Mindscape Professional Pack are... Today it’s my 35th birthday, but instead of boring you with the usual “what happened in the last year” kind of post I’m going to give one of my readers and Twitter followers a gift. But before the prize, I just want to do a very quick roundup of what my 34th year was: I became an MVP, I became an ASP Insider, I published my first book and I took part in my first triathlon. So quite a good year after all. But back to the...

After completing our book, Keyvan and I decided to combine our efforts again, and write a quick reference about ASP.NET MVC. And today this quick reference is available from DZone, in the RefCardz section of the site. The refcard doesn’t try to explain what the library is (would have not been possible in just 6 pages) but instead focuses on giving a quick reference of the conventions used by the framework, of the API available and of all the aspect of developing with ASP.NET MVC. More details are available on Keyvan’s post. Get it here: Getting Started...

Our book is out in the wild since almost a month, and many people out there already received their copies, some also wrote reviews of the book and even had parties to present the book, but I didn’t have the pleasure to hold in my hands a real copy of the book till this morning (yeah, I know, Italian post is very slow delivering parcels). And being my first book I’m very excited and pleased to see the real thing, and to see my face on the its cover. Tags: book,aspnetmvc

Lucene.net tutorial How to get started with Lucene.net Lucene.net: the main concepts Lucene.net: your first application Dissecting Lucene.net storage: Documents and Fields Lucene - or how I stopped worrying, and learned to love unstructured data How Subtext’s Lucene.net index is structured A few weeks ago I expressed my intention of introducing Lucene.net into Subtext, and that I would have written about the journey. In...

After a long period of development, the new major release of FCKEditor has shipped. The most notable change is the new name: it went from FCKEditor, which many people didn’t like because of its similarity to an English bad word (it was made by the initials of the project founder, Frederico Caldeira Knabben) to CKEditor where CK stands for “content & knowledge”. But obviously this is not the only change: it’s amazingly fast, it has a completely new UI, no more popup but only js modal dialogs, produces valid XHTML code (and hopefully it will not screw-up the...

Now that my book is on shelves, I’m out of things to do when I come back from work. Furthermore during this year I bought or I was given quite a few interesting programming book, so I think I’ll start using my spare time to improve my skills. Here is the list of books I’m going to read, some of which I think are a must read for all .NET developers. Frontend development and JavaScript I’m a web developer at heart, and I truly believe that a web developer must know everything about Javascript, CSS and HTML....

In February I joined the "IE6: Do NOT want!" campaign, which was started by some big media sites in Norway: I was planning to remove the script that showed more modern browsers to the user after one week, but I kept it till now. Probably not because of me joining the campaign, but IE6 is slightly dropping. I only have stats for my blog, but the percentage of users running IE6 dropped to 8.5% of January, to the 6.4% of July. But still it's not enough: IE6 is a 8 years old browser, there is no reason to keep on using it....

In the last two weeks I got three packaging that made me thing the way products are packaged, and how with a little bit of care, industries could make lower impact on environment The Facts HP printer cartridge Today I bought a cartridge for my HP printer, and I was positively surprised by how much HP cares about recycling. The package is all cardboard, plus a thin aluminum wrap around the cartridge itself, and enclosed in the box there is a prepaid and self-addressed envelope where I can put the old cartridge in and sent it back to HP for recycling. Microsoft...

In order to promote our book on ASP.NET MVC and to spread some love for the library itself, for the Italian ALT.NET conference I printed 40 T-Shirts similar to the one that Chad Myers created on Zazzle last year. It was quite an interesting experience, as I didn’t know how many people would have been interested in buying such “marketing” t-shirts. And it turned out that quite a few developers wanted them, as you can notice from the people in the first rows of the room. I ran out of T-Shirts, but I’m thinking...

At the beginning of this year I write a “New Year’s Resolutions” post, and I promised I would have kept you updated with the progress. I did it at the beginning of April (end of Q1 report) and now this is post is about the second quarter of 2009. Personal Resolutions Go back Climbing – This was probably the most successful part of Q2: if you followed my tweets, you might have noticed that I started climbing again: bouldering in Switzerland, 4 days...

I’m happy to announce that my first 3 webcasts have just been published on BE-IT, the video portal of MSDN Italy. They are the first 3 of a longer series about ASP.NET MVC, and they cover: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC - level 200 ASP.NET MVC: HTML forms – level 300 ASP.NET MVC and Ajax – level 300 They are in Italian, but they are mostly screencasts of code editing inside Visual Studio, so I think even people that understand a little of Italian will...

I usually don’t do political posts here, but I think what is happening in Iran deserves it. It shows us that most of the Iranian people are totally different from what the media tell us. I’ve been following what’s happening over there with twitter, and I thought I’d show my support to the cause wearing green on blog. A lot of other sites are doing it (Reddit.com put a green t-shirt on his alien). If you have a blog you can help spread some love to the guys in Iran: just add a green background to you blog....

UPDATE: The survey is closed. The results are published: Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied. After 3 days and a half, with a weekend and a public holiday in between, the survey about Ajax adoption among .NET developers already received 1047 responses. Here some quick stats: an incredible (in my eyes) 5% claims he is not doing Ajax development at all; the most used web frameworks is pretty obviously WebForms (89%) followed by ASP.NET MVC (38%); the most used JavaScript library is jQuery...

UPDATE2: The survey is closed. The results are published: Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied. UPDATE: I posted some quick stats after 3 days and 1050 answers received In December 2007, taking inspiration from a survey promoted by Ajaxian, I created a survey to understand in which environment .NET developers are using Ajax, in conjunction with which web framework, and which javascript libraries they are using. Here you can read the results of the survey and the analysis of the results. But long time passed, so I think it’s useful to repeat the...

Now that the book I’m writing with Keyvan has gone to production (will be available in stores at the end of July), I decided to spend some time reading other programming books: I’ve got a few of them in the queue, and I’ll probably post a review of them on my blog. Quick look at the book My first review is about another book about ASP.NET MVC: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly, written by the Belgian blogger and community speaker Maarten Balliauw. This book is, as the title says, a quick overview (around 190 pages plus 50 pages...

Today we opened the registration for the IV Italian ALT.NET Conference, that will be held in Bologna on Saturday June 27th and which is was co-organized together with DotNetMarche. If you are interested in coming, go and register for the conference. But be quick, we opened the registration less than 8 hours ago and we already filled half room (around 45 registered out of 90 seats available). The agenda has not been finalized yet: the survey to decide the topics is still open (if plan to attend the conference and you haven’t voted yet, please...

I just bought my ticket for the European edition of StackOverflow DevDays conference, that will be held in London on October 28th. The agenda is not out yet, but I’m pretty sure Jeff and Joel will come out with something interesting, and it seems like it’s not going to be a .NET event, but a technology event about all languages. Will be fun. And will be great to met some of the guys I know that are living in UK and coming to the event as well, like Nic Wise, Barry Dorrans, Simon Philp and the guys from...

Probably it was the last big area of Italy with IT companies without a .NET User group. But around one month ago Emanuele Mattei and a few other developers from the “Urbe” fixed this problem and founded DotNetRomaCestà. A big welcome to the 7th .NET Regional Italian UserGroup born in the last few years. A small note on the name: it means “in Roma there is dotNet” (“ce stà” means, in Roman dialect, “there is”). Looking forward to see what they are going to organize. Good look! Technorati Tags: usergroup,dotnetromacesta

June 27th is the date for the next Italian ALT.NET conference. And for the first time in Italy in a .NET UserGroup the sessions have all been proposed by the members of the user group. And since we received 18 proposal out of only 5 time slots, last week we also started the public voting. If you are planning to attend to the conference, please join the group, and go voting. Among the many proposals and think that a few require a special mention: “How to design the User Experience”, a skill that...

The Lounge, the advertising network I’m part of, is running a survey in order to understand better the readers who visit the blogs of the network. At the end of the survey, two random entries will win all the 41 books of the Manning In Action series, and the results will be made public. Go and take the survey now. Technorati Tags: survey,thelounge

I just learnt that I’ve be invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Looking forward to help with my feedbacks the ASP.NET team build a better web application framework on the .NET platform, especially in the area of ASP.NET MVC. If don’t know who they are, here is a quick “elevator speech”, taken from the site: “The ASPInsiders is a select group of international professionals who have demonstrated expertise in ASP.NET technologies and who provide valuable, early feedback on related...

Just a quick reminder, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be talking about ASP.NET MVC at the local DotNetUmbria usergroup. Today I spent the whole day putting the finishing touches on tomorrow’s talks and demos. I’ll talk from 3PM to 6PM (or till when people ask for mercy). I’ve two talks planned: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, my “usual” introductory presentation, update with the RTM bits and yesterday’s big announcement ASP.NET MVC, so what? This was originally planned to be a “live refactoring” of an old WebForm application to ASP.NET MVC, but I changed it...

MIX09 is starting in two days, and again, even this year, I’m not going to Vegas: I had to choose between ALT.NET Conf + MVP Summit and MIX09, and I chose for the former. Can’t fly from Italy to US twice in 3 weeks (and I’m still recovering from last flight’s jetlag). But luckily, as they did with last PDC, the keynotes will be streamed live, and all the session recordings will be available almost immediately. I’ll miss the community interactions and I’ll not meet all the awesome guys that will go to Vegas, but at least I won’t...

After the ALT.NET Conference, I spent the week attending the MVP Summit. It was great to meet in person most of the people I only know via blog, like ScottGu and Rob Conery, and many others (I met the most part already at the ALT.NET Conference) There were keynotes from executives, sessions from the product teams that told us which are the new features they are putting into the new version of products and the new products that are coming out in the future. I’ll not tell you what I heard, because everything is under NDA (but you...

I’m still recovering from the jet-lag, after the almost 15hrs of travel time back from Seattle, were I attended both the ALT.NET Conference and the MVP Summit. In this post I’m going to tell you my thoughts on the weekend of discussions that happened at the ALT.NET conference. Thoughts on the MVP Summit will follow in another posts. The ALT.NET Conf way They were 2 days full of valuable contents and valuable discussions: there were 4-5 parallel sessions each hour, on the most various topics: from what can be done to make the opensource community on .NET grow,...

Phil Haack just announced that ASP.NET MVC R2 has been released. There are not many changes, and the biggest one is the installation procedure: there is a dependency requirement on .NET 3.5 SP1 (that means you have to have .NET 3.5 SP1 in order for the ASP.NET MVC RC2 to work) there is a “server-only” install mode That’s a big change in the installation tools and, since it’s a new process, it’s the thing that is most likely to break. So, if you want to see...

Matt Berseth just posted on his blog a survey about how .NET developers relate to social networks and jobs. I think it would be interesting to see the results. The survey is just 20 questions and won’t take much time so, take the survey. Technorati Tags: survey

We have been planning this since a half a year, and finally we made it: I’ll be going to talk about the usual, boring stuff I so excited about and that I always talk about (ASP.NET MVC) at the next workshop of DotNetUmbria, the .NET UserGroup of Umbria, the weekend before Easter: Friday April 3rd, in Perugia. It will be an afternoon long workshop, with two sessions: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, where I’ll introduce ASP.NET MVC, what it is, and how to do things with it ASP.NET MVC, so what? where I’ll be discussing...

It’s been a great trip, and landed yesterday in Seattle with snow on the ground, but a wonderful sun. And this morning it’s still sunny (that’s the view from my hotel room). Right now I’m the lounge at DigiPen, waiting for the second day of ALT.NET Conf to start. The opening evening was very very interesting, and Phil Haack already wrote a great commentary of it. I’m really impressed by the huge amount of smart people that are attending, and it’s also a great opportunity to meet people I’ve been interacting with only online....

We just booked the room, and fixed the date for the next Italian ALT.NET Conference: it will happen on Saturday June 27th, and will be held in Bologna (which is not where Spaghetti alla Bolognese was invented). The event is co-hosted by UGIALT.NET, the Italian ALT.NET user group, and DotNetMarche, the .NET user group from Marche. I’m really happy to be able to organize this event together with the DotNetMarche guys, which proposed this collaboration last year when I talked about ASP.NET MVC at one of their workshops. This workshop was supposed to be held on a beach...

Ninject with ASP.NET MVC series How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC How to use Ninject to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters Extending Ninject to inject dependencies into Action Filters Ninject.FilterInjector v1.5: now injecting inside all filters The first version of my tiny FilterInjector included only the action invoker for ActionFilters. But ASP.NET MVC has four different filters: Action Filters: executed before and after an Action is executed Result Filters: executed before and after the ActionResult returned by...

As probably you read somewhere else, a few days ago the Channel9 team released the latest version of Oxite. If you remember, when it was first released back in December, there was a lot of negative feedbacks, but now it seems like the latest release contains a lot of refactoring. I think I’ll start to play with it. All the team members have a blog (which runs on Oxite, of course) and they posted some blog posts to explain the new changes. Duncan Mackenzie, which is the PM, wrote a post explaining the PR...

...Or at least this is what we can infer from Google Trends. From this graph we can see that searches started in 4th quarter of 2007 (when ASP.NET MVC was first announced) and spikes always happened at each release of the various preview versions. The final ramp coincides with the announcement of the RC and the wait for the actual RC release. I wonder what is going to happen when the RTW is released. If you browse to the graph, you'll notice a funny thing: the city that performs most searches...

UPDATE: Stackoverflow #41 is out. I bet it's going to be the most listened episode ever. This morning I woke up, and suddenly I was flooded by tweets and posts. All of that were about the latest buzz of the moment: “Are Jeff and Joel going crazy or are they just playing going crazy?”. I just want to think that, at least Jeff, is just playing the devil’s advocate, and giving a voice to the silent crowd that thinks that “getting things done” and “ship the product/project” is more important than crafting a good piece of software that can be maintained for...

Last Friday I headed to Microsoft Italy offices in Segrate (with my Vespa and under a pouring rain), for being interviewed by Pietro Brambati, Italian Developer Evangelist, about ASP.NET MVC. You can watch the video (in Italian) on Channel9. I want to thank Pietro and the Italian DPE team for the interview and for the nice tech chat we had during the day. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,interview,channel9

I just published the first two recordings from the Italian ALT.NET Conference of last Saturday. The first, and probably more interesting because the session was in English, is Ivan’s one about IronRuby, titled “Ruby <3 .NET”. Ruby <3 .NET from Piyodesign on Vimeo. And the slides and demo are available on the SVN repository for the conference. I also published the last session of the day, that was about Fitnesse and acceptance tests in general, held by Jacopo Franzoi. Here you can see the video (in Italian, sorry) ...

Last Saturday it was the day of the 3rd Italian ALT.NET Conference, held in Milano, and it’s now time to think about it, and learn for the next future conferences. The room was completely full, with around 45-50 people that attended the conference, and I think this shows how people are getting interested in the topics covered during the session. It was a big increase from the first 10 people conference. We experimented with 3 different way of presenting the sessions: Complete OpenSpace discussion for topics we thought everybody knew something about (Domain Driven...

As I announced a month ago, next Saturday there will be the 3rd Italian ALT.NET Conference in Milano. I'm pretty excited to say that last week all the seats available went sold out, and we probably will expand the limit to 60 to include the people in wait list. The agenda of the event, which is a kind of OpenSpace with "fixed" session, is: How to write User Stories and Planning Game IronRuby, by Ivan Porto Carrero, author of IronRuby in Action Domain Driven Design Advanced TDD in real world ...

Yesterday I finally I booked the flight to Seattle for the MVP Summit and for the ALT.NET Conference. I'll have a pretty tight schedule for the week I'll be there: I'll leave from Milano on February 27th in the morning and I'll land in Seattle at 2:30PM The ALT.NET Conference will begin at 5PM of the same day, I hope I can clear the customs and take a taxi to the venue on time for the opening. Then Saturday and Sunday I will be at the ALT.NET Conference Sunday evening at the Party with Palermo Monday,...

Year 2008 finished with a post about my best 5 posts of the year: year 2009 must start with the usual New Year’s resolutions. Personal Resolutions Go back climbing Last year, due to various personal problems, general bad weather and book writing I was not able to train and go the climbing gym as I used to. And I also didn’t go too much out in the mountains doing climbing. I hope I can train and go climbing more this year. Take part in one triathlon competition During last year I started going back to...

Last month Alvin Ashcraft sent me a email notifying that I was selected as MVB (Most Valuable Bloggers) by DZone. Actually I forgot to thank him when it happened so: “Thank you Alvin!”. And on the day of Christmas one of my posts about ASP.NET MVC has been resyndicated on the .NET Zone: How to Call Controllers in External Assemblies in an ASP.NET MVC Application. Actually it’s not exactly the same article I posted: all the code is displayed using SyntaxHighlighter, a javascript syntax highlighter. I was thinking about using it on my blog instead of the Insert...

It took us a while to organize it, but finally we made it: the 3rd Italian ALT.NET Conference will take place in Milano on January 24th 2009. We will have Ivan Porto Carrero, author of IronRuby in Action, come down from Bruxelles and talk about IronRuby, and then there will be some talk on TDD, DDD, user stories, mocking and that kind of stuff. You can help shape the meeting: just go to ugialtnet group and vote at the poll. If you want to attend, please register at altdotnet.org/events/italy. I want to thank David Laribee...

Not all blog memes are about your youth or gadgets you like. The one started by Scott Watermasysk is also going to help to World: Bloggers Holiday Charity Challenge. It started as eBay challenge, but other made it into a more general money raising challenge. [...]James, he's decided to sweeten the deal by donating his portion of revenue of any blogger in The Lounge who does the same thing. That's pretty cool. So I’m doing the same: I’m going to donate my December revenue from The Lounge to Greenpeace NZ. The...

During the TechDays-WPC that happened in Milano in the last 3 days I distributed around 130 cards at the ASP.NET MVC related sessions, and yesterday, during the MVP Q&A session, we did the draw for the 5 numbers whose owner will receive a copy of Beginning ASP.NET MVC. The winning numbers are: 8 48 60 78 97 If you are own one of those lucky winners, please contact me. aspnetmvc

As some of you might already know, in July I started writing a book for Wrox. It was a completely new experience for me, and I’ve to thank Keyvan and the guys at Wrox for helping me in understanding the book writing process. During these months I received lots of question on this process from people that never wrote a book, but also from people that wrote a book in Italy: all asking how it is to write a book and how much I’m paid for the book. So here I’m, writing a blog post to answer all...

Tomorrow is the starting day of TechDays-WPC, a conference for developers and IT professionals held every year since more that 10 years, in the Congress Center of Assago, just outside of Milano. I’ll be there, at the Ask The Expert booth, answering questions about ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET 3.5 and the “ALT.NET stack”. I still don’t know my schedule there: I guess I’ll find it out tomorrow morning when I arrive there. And for all the length of the conference I’ll distribute cards with the cover of our book “Beginning ASP.NET MVC” and with a number on them. The last day of the...

Tomorrow I’ll be at the Italian Agile Day in Bologna: it’s going to be “my first time” at an Agile conference and I’m pretty excited about that. Two members of the UGIALT.NET user group, Emanuele Del Bono and Claudio Maccari, are going to drive a TDD on .NET lab, and for those that were not able to take part at the lab (only 12 seats out of 400 people attending the conference) and are interested on listening to SCRUM-W (the wrong approach to Scrum), there is going to be an OpenSpace that will probably be about tools for an...

October was a pretty busy month for me, especially because of two events I attended in two weekends: Italian MVP Open Days Workshop DotNetSide “Web Development with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1” Italian MVP OpenDays It was great to meet all the other MVPs, especially the ones of other specialties like Office and IT. We had an overview of how MS is moving about the community, and where it’s heading in the market. We had a brief overview of the Azure thing (at the time it was still called...

Last week Jeremy Miller introduced their own opinionated MVC stack built on top of the MS ASP.NET MVC framework. They talked about this at the KaizenConf that was held last weekend in Austin and as it happened for all the PDC sessions, here are the videos of their “Using and Abusing ASP.NET MVC for Fun and Profit” session. It’s available in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,KaizenConf

That’s the latest “episode” of my review of the PDC videos I’m downloading and plan to watch in the future. I’m now at 8Gb of videos. For those who are interested, on Channel9 the same video are available also in lower quality WMV, formatted for the Zune and in MP4 for those who want to watch on a iPhone or iPod. .NET: PC49 - Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR Futures - Ian Carmichael, Joshua Goodman ASP.NET: ...

As PDC goes one, other sessions are being redistributed online as downloadable videos. I already wrote about the sessions I downloaded from the first two days @ PDC 2008, but now more from day two and from day three are appearing online: Oslo: TL27 - "Oslo": The Language - Don Box, David Langworthy Velocity: TL14 - Project "Velocity": A...

I’m not at PDC 2008, so I’ve to keep up with what’s being announced in LA only through videos. I watched the two keynotes live (for those who missed them, they are available on demand from the homepage of PDC site). But there are many other interesting videos to watch. Here is a list of the ones I’m downloading and I’m planning to watch over the next days (well, probably nights): ASP.NET and Web Development PC20 - ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap - Scott...

Another weekend, another community event: last Friday/Saturday I was at the Italian MVP OpenDays in Milano and next Friday (October 24th) I’ll be talking in front of more than 70 person (the event is sold out) at the “ASP.NET 3.5 and beyond Web Development” workshop organized by DotNetSide, the .NET usergroup of South Italy. I’ll speak for 3 hours (and probably more) about ASP.NET MVC and the new features that the .NET 3.5 SP1 brings to the table. There will be 2 sessions: Life after SP1: I’ll talk about Dynamic Data, Routing, the new...

Tomorrow I’ll be attending my first MVP event: the Italian MVP Open Days 2008. I’m looking forward to it, as it’s a great opportunity to meet all the other guys involved in MS communities in Italy, especially the ones of areas I’m not involved with (like all the server and desktop products). And I’ll finally be able to ask to the Italian MVP lead all the questions that came to my mind about what I can/can’t do and the general information I still have an hard time to grasp. They said there will some news coming...

This afternoon I received an email with a strange subject: "Congratulations MVP Microsoft 2009!". At first I thought the usual spam email that just got better, but then I saw the post of the Italian MVP lead that announced the new MVPs for October 1st, and realized it was not spam, but that someone decided to award me with the MVP title in the category ASP/ASP.NET. When I started taking part in the community I was looking at MVPs as Guru and unreachable people, and now I'm one of them: I still can't believe it. I'd like to thank Alessandro Teglia, the Italian/Baltic...

As every year on September 11th I’m getting one year older… and today I’m becoming 34. My 33rd year has been an exciting one from the professional stand point, and pretty good from the open-air ones as well. I started an exciting job in Avanade and I met great colleagues, I co-founded the UGIALT.NET community, I got excited by the ASP.NET MVC framework and started evangelizing it, I became a Mac addicted, I wrote a bunch of articles on ASP.NET MVC for DotNetSlackers, I started writing a book, again on ASP.NET MVC (it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon UK and...

Andrew Peters, one of the smart guys I met during my 9 month of life in New Zealand, is joining Microsoft, as member of the team that will work on the Entity Framework. I’m pretty sure that his experience building LightSpeed, a kind of lightweight ORM and domain modeling framework built by Mindscape, will help with development of the Entity Framework. Andrew is also the man behind NHaml, a custom view engine for ASP.NET MVC, a port of the popular Rail Haml view engine. My best wishes to him and to his wife Kara for the relocation...

The answer is: it depends. Flash/Flex is faster when it comes to graphic rendering, but Silverlight is faster when it comes to pure computation speed. There are two speed benchmarks for RIA application, and they both focus on UI rendering: BubbleMark: it displays many bubble floating around the screen as fastest as possible, and use the resulting frame per second as result of the test GUIMark: similar to the BubbleMark, but with more effects and animations used: vectorial images, alpha transparencies, text reflow and so on. Then another benchmark has been developed, CountingPrimes, which...

Like the drop carves the stone, Rob Conery’s tweets about his pushups convinced me to try the HundredPushups program. What is this program about: you do a startup test, with this results you start a training program. After 6 weeks of training 3 times a week you should be able to do 100 consecutive pushups. Rob also started a twitter challenge you can take part and this seems to have become the ALT.NET-ian trend of the moment: yesterday evening I did the test and I got the do 15 pushups. Next monday I’ll start week...

After dark years, seems like good things are coming out from the Italian .NET community lately: the latest one is the free eBook on Data Structures and Algorithms wrote by Granville Barnett and the Italian UGIdotNET member, Luca Del Tongo. I remember studying such things at the university, and the last time I helped a friend with his studies the books were still the same, and still based on "old" languages like C. Finally now a book covers the same important topics but with samples written in a modern object oriented language. All the algorithms of the book are available in form...

Far from me to start yet another religious war, but on the blog a friend from the Italian User Group I found a very amusing cartoon about .NET and PHP in the enterprise (made by David Betz in February 2008), so I thought it would have been funny to repost it here. The original post seems to be unreachable but when I first saw it, I read that there should be other comic strips on that topic. UPDATE: Seems like the original site is back to life, here is the second comic strip. Technorati Tags: php,asp.net,comics

If you subscribed to my blog through an RSS reader you will notice an advertisement at the bottom of this post. That’s because I’m testing the RSS Room of the The Lounge advertising network: it’s creator James Avery unveiled the RSS Room it only a few days ago and in the next weeks it will be a test period and will show only Lounge related ads. For people that are reading this post from my blog, here is how it appears on the RSS reader: I’m still tuning it in order to be less...

My friend Ivan, blogger, writer and coder extraordinaire has been interviewed on InfoQ, a main-stream enterprise development portal, about his new opensource project IronNails. Ivan started this project a few days ago because, while working on same samples for his book about IronRuby, he had this vision of a Rail like development for WPF and Silverlight applications, based on the MVC pattern. And here it is: announced on his blog (which, by the way, has a new awesome skin), published on git, and got a lot of media attention. Read the complete article here: Talking with Ivan Porto Carrero about IronNails. Congratulations Ivan! IronRuby, Ivan,...

Last year Google announced it would have released a version of Google in Maori and a few days ago, during the Maori language week, they released it. To visit the Maori version of Google there are two url. http://www.google.co.nz/intl/mi/ will take you to the Google NZ Aotearoa in the Maori language. http://www.google.com/intl/mi/ will take you to the international version of Google, in Maori. Kia Ora!! Technorati Tags: Google,Maori,Aotearoa

Seems like the Borgification of the opensource .NET community is going on: Hamilton Verissimo aka Hammett, the father of Castle, is joining Microsoft as the PM on the MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) team. Congratulation to Hammett for the achievement, and hope he has fun moving from the sunny São Paulo to rainy Redmond. The good thing is that he will continue working on Castle. How’s next? Ayende? or Scott Bellware? Technorati Tags: Hammett,Castle,Microsoft,MEF

TechCult, a famous blog about what’s going on in the Net world just published the list of the top 100 web celebrities. The standing is mainly based on how many results they have on Google. Pretty strange that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs don’t show up in this top 100, even though they influenced the web much more than Tila Tequila, Perez Hilton or  Beppe Grillo which are the top 3 web celebrities of the list. The list is full of web developers, Web2.0 startups’ founders, but only 2 from the .NET blogging space: ...

Michael Eaton started a meme with the question: How did you get started in software development? Yesterday Matt Berseth tagged me in his post, so it’s now my turn to answer the questions and tag other bloggers: How old were you when you started programming? While probably most developers started programming at the primary school, I started using computers for more than playing games at my first course at the university in ‘93, when I was 19 years old. Actually it was even the first time I turned on a x86 PC: I used to...

A few days ago, looking at the referrers to my blog, I found a reference to site I never see before: aspdotnetmvc.com. It’s a really nice content aggregator that collects anything related to ASP.NET MVC, gathering it automatically from various sources. It already helped me discover a few ASP.NET MVC related blogs I was not following. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,blogs

On Friday I’m delivering my third presentation on ASP.NET MVC in less than one month (actually the 4th because I repeated twice the one I delivered inside Avanade). This time it will be inside the 6th DotNetMarche Workshop on “Applications’ automated testing and ASP.NET MVC”. You can have a look at the agenda of the event (translated by Google). I’ll try and make everything available online after the event, especially the code samples. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,event,dotnetmarche

One thing you might know about me is that I’m a long time user of Firefox, and than in 2004 I’ve been chosen as “as one of the top 25 most active, energetic and productive sfx community members” (read here the original post, in Italian). And now as 3 years ago I’m pushing Firefox again. Today is day of the final release of Firefox 3, and spreadfirefox is organizing the Download Day: they want to set a new world record for “most software downloads in 24 hours”. Helping is easy: just download Firefox 3 from the official page, starting...

Yesterday it was the day of the second UGIALT.NET conference in Milano: almost 40 people attending, 8 different speakers/moderators and a lot of interaction (and a free lunch courtesy of the sponsor of the event, Avanade). Many people were new to the ALT.NET thing, and to the "good design principles" as well, so we decided to try and spread the good news. With that intent the event started, after the welcome speech, with 6 lightning talks (thanks to the Welly .NET UG for the idea) on the basic concepts we would have used in the afternoon for the hands...

Yesterday I delivered the first of the 3 presentations on ASP.NET MVC I'll be delivering in less then a month. It was also my first webcast ever and I'd like to share my impressions on the presenter experience and what an attendee can do to make life easier for the presenter, thus increasing the overall experience for everybody. The biggest and probably the most obvious difference between a webcast and a in person presentation is that you (as presenter) don't have a visual feedback, you don't get to see the people that are attending the presentation: you cannot...

Yet another friend of mine is writing a book. After Keyvan with his "Professional Visual Studio Extensibility", today Ivan Porto Carrero announced his book IronRuby in Action. It will be published by Manning and, as always with them, a Early Access Preview is available. Congratulations Ivan for your first book!! IronRuby, Ivan

Spring arrived, days are getting longer and I started jogging after work again (of course, with my Nike+iPod gear). I also found out that Vito Arconzo, a .NET developer in Italy, also started running with an iPod, so I decided to set up a running challenge, and see how many .NET developers out there are using this geeky stuff. The challenge is named "Train for the UGIALT.net meeting", will start tomorrow, May 15th, and the winner will be the one that runs more kilometers in 30 days, before the UGIALT.net conference that will take place on June 14th. If you want to take...

One of the problem of having a blog with a Google PageRank higher than 3 is that you get flooded by a storm of spam. Be it comment spam or trackback spam it's a waste of server resources and, if not filtered, could fill your blog with tons of sex related links and more. Last year Subtext included a integration with Akismet, the de-facto only spam blocking service available for free on the net. But last autumn I received more than 1000 spam trackback in one day and more than 30.000 on the same day in my Italian blog...

Seems like a lot of Italian .NET blogger are making the big step of starting a blog in English: writing in a language that is not the one you use in your everyday life is not easy, but it can be a good way to improve the other language. After 2 of the founders of UGIALT.net, Marco De Sanctis, a friend and active Italian community member started blogging in English on his brand new Subtext blog: CodeMetropolis. Why an English blog? Well, honestly because I recently realized that I'm reading more English blogs than Italian...

After the "small success" of the first UGIALT.net mini conference in February, UGIALT.net is organizing another conference in June. The second UGIALT.net conference will take place on Saturday June 14th, and will take place at the offices of Avanade Italy, in the center of Milano. As for the other conference there will not be a fixed agenda, but the event will be a day-long discussion on the topics decided by the participants, probably developing a small app to focus on the various stages of the development. If you are Italian and want to know...

Two of the guys that co-founded with me the Italian UGIALT.net usergroup started blogging in English: Emanuele DelBono - Plastic/blog Claudio Maccari - TDD developer For those who read Italian they are still writing on their Italian blogs: BlogEma and Makka. blog, ugialt.net

This year it's going to be a busy spring for me: April 26th/27th: Loci - Evoluzione generativa: Aurora - an art exhibition where there I presented a short video I made with Processing (on Vimeo 2 drafts of the final video) - Porto Sant'Elpidio End of May: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC - This is a private 2h workshop I'll deliver for my colleagues at Avanade Italy - online June 14th: UGIALT.NET conference - The second conference of the the Italian ALT.NET group. Actually not a real talk, but an OpenSpace meeting......

It's not April 1st... And it's not about me... A friend of mine, a member of the Italian .NET user group, is doing the big step, and moving to Bermuda, the sunny, surfy, sharky islands in front of Florida. I did the same more than one year ago and I know how difficult it is to leave all your friends, family and completely change the way you used to do, and start a new life somewhere else, so I wish him all the best. He is blogging his experiences relocating to Bermuda,...

IOC(SM):IOC(CW):MOC(RM):MOC(MQ):TDD(NU):TDD(Mb):TDD(MS):SCC(Svn):SCC(TFS):ORM(NH):ORM(L2S):ORM(!?):XPP(++):DDD(T+):DDD(+):JSL(Jq):JSL(ext):JSL(MS):CIS(CC):CIS(TFS):GoF(++) via ALT.NET Geek Code: Should you care about these ALT.NET guys? Technorati Tag: altnet,altnetcode

Another important community member is joining Microsoft. This time is not the member of some cool opensource project, but is a very active blogger and TFS expert Lorenzo Barbieri. Today it's his last day as "free man" in his old company, and from tomorrow he will start his new career as Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Italy, and will start to go around Italy and Europe trying to push TFS to everybody. My best wishes and congratulations to Lorenzo. Hope he will not stop blogging and taking part in the community as he is doing now. Technorati...

I was looking at blogs with reports on the MVP Summit 08 and on a post from a TFS MVP from Canberra I found this picture of one of the meeting rooms: In this little portion of the room 3 MS MVPs are using MacBookPro (highlighted with the black circles)... are MacBooks becoming one of the favorite brands of laptops for .NET developers? Technorati Tag: macbook,mvpsummit08

Last week, while working on the new features for Subtext vNext, I encountered a strange problem that never happened to me before. I was running the latest "works here" Nightly Build of ReSharper 4 (build num 767) and started getting tons of OutOfMemoryException. The problem started to happen when, after developing all the DataAccess and BusinessLogic with a TDD approach (so no UI involved), I started adding textboxes and method calls in aspx pages. So I guess the problem has something to do with handling aspx files and all the added complexity that a simple class file doesn't have....

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my friend Keyvan from Iran just published his first book with Wrox: Professional Visual Studio Extensibility. Today I got my copy of the book. I never had the need to extend Visual Studio in the past but now I'm building some tools to facilitate the migration of a large project (more than 1M lines of code) from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0, so this will really help. Thank you Keyvan for being releasing the book in time to help me with that work project.   Technorati Tag: Keyvan Nayyeri,Visual Studio,Book,VSX

A song by Jonathan Coulton, a computer programmer and self-described geek turned folk rock singer: Code Monkey. Picture by Len Seems like there quite a lot of videos for this song. via Travis Illig on twitter Humor, Song, Code Monkey

The Golden Boy of the Wellington .NET user group (aka JD) just received his MVP Award for his contributions to the ASP.NET community in Wellington and NZ: Congratulations JD!! I remember him as one of the first developers from the community I met last year back in January, when I had my first talk at the Welly UG. MVP, Wellington, New Zealand

A few years ago I developed an add-on for Community Server 2.0 to automatically submit contributions to the Community Credit website. Yesterday I finally found the time to test it with the latest version of Community Server (version 2007), I made some small changes and published it on my public code repository on Google Code. How does it work? For those who don't know what Community Credit is I suggest he goes and visit the site and the post I wrote about it more than a year ago "Get Credits for you Community involvement". The main...

Keyvan Nayyeri just announced the official release of his book about Visual Studio Extensibility, published by Wrox. This is quite a unique book since the VSX technology is new with VS2005 and is a leap forward compared to the old macro-based extensibility, but nothing has been written on this topic, yet. The book will cover all the aspects of Visual Studio Extensibility: Macro, Add-Ins, Visualizers, MSBuild, VSPackages, DSL tools, using the Shell. I also what to thank Keyvan for adding me to his acknowledgement page on the book: I would thank anyone else who helped us get this book done, both inside Wiley...

At the first MIX08 keynote we saw ScottG juggling for a fictitious job interview for Cirque du Soleil that was demoing his new recruiting tool. But at the second keynote Steve Ballmer replayed his famous Monkey Developer dance, this time for web developers. Have a look at this video recorded by one of they guys that was lucky enough to sit in of the first rows of the theater: Steve Ballmer screams “Web developers. Web developers. Web developers” Technorati Tag: MIX08,Ballmer,Monkey Developer

Just watch the MIX '08 webcast live. Tim Sneath just announced that the keynote will be webcasted live from Vegas.   The live webcast will begin at 9:30AM Pacific Time on Wednesday March 5th, which is: 5:30PM GMT (London time) 6:30PM CET (Italy, France, Spain and Germany) 11:00PM Indian Time 6:30AM, Thursday 6h Wellington For other times: TimeAndDate.com I have to make sure I get home in time for the live webcast: there will be 3 different bandwidths: 100kbps 300kbps ...

Today a new psychological condition is born: Pre Mix Envy. A new condition for developers who want to be in Vegas but can't. It was coined by Chris Hayuk, a British .NET developer and Silverlight blogger that can't go to the MIX08 event that is starting in a week in Las Vegas. I would have been to the event as well, and hear from the mouth of ScottGu all the cool announcements that they are going to make (ASP.NET MVC vNext, Silverlight 2.0, IIS7, IE8 and so on), but I guess I'll have to stay up at night and watch the...

Yesterday I went to the first conference of the recent born UGIALT.net usergroup. It was my first time at a OpenSpace conference and I really like it. We talked about ASP.NET MVC, about UnitTesting, TDD, Mocks, and also about code metrics with NDepend and SourceMonitor. I was the moderator of the session on the ASP.NET MVC framework, and was nice to see all the other bringing to the table their experiences, especially Gianluca that, for each feature of the ASP.NET MVC, made a comparison with MonoRail. We noticed that ASP.NET MVC lacks of a feature that might be interesting: the possibility to...

Community Credit Hall of Famers are those contributors whose reputation precedes them in the development community. They are developers and technology evangelists who have contributed so substantially that they become among the forces that really help the development community thrive. I just want to thank David Silverlight (for those who don't know, Microsoft Silverlight is named after him) for including me among the Community Credit members that have been awarded in 2008. And also for the kinds words that he put on the Hall of Fame page. Simone Chiaretta Simone has been active in the Development Community in some very unique...

Do you remember the scandal behind the release of www.italia.it, the website developed by IBM for 45.000.000 euro to promote the tourism in Italy? Well, a few days ago the site has been closed as the vicepremier Francesco Rutelli said back in October. And still no answers to the questions of transparency. www.italia.it

At the end of October the UGIALT.net was born in Italy (where UGI stands for User Group Italiano). Now we are organizing our first conference, on February 23th, in Brescia. In the title I say "mini" because the place in which we decided to gather is not very big, only around 10-15 people can fit into the conference room of ABSistemi. But I'm pretty sure we will end with a lot of great discussion on "good ways" of building software and for sure we will have a lot of fun watching at the CI...

Tomorrow I'm going at the first meeting organized by the Italian .NET UserGroup UGIdotNET since I came back to Italy this August, and I'm super excited about this: first I'm going to see in person on of my .NET heroes, Dino Esposito, which will talk all the morning about how to build an animated GIF using a declarative language Ajax and Silverlight development second because I'll see all the other guys of the usergroup, most of which I don't see since more than an year or so. I hope I can get to the Microsoft auditorium since these days...

I thought I already mentioned it previously, but probably the things that happened to me in the last month made me forget to mention it. But going to the point, my Belgian Kiwi friend Ivan is starting to write a book about IronRuby. Congratulations Ivan!! Technorati tags: IronRuby, Ivan, book

Hammett, founder of Castle, the father of MonoRail, went to Redmond invited by the ASP.NET MVC team, to review the new framework, and give his opinion based on his experience having built a similar framework. You can have a look at the blog post where he wrote his opinions, but I'd like to quote here the ones I feel are the most impressive: [...] surprisingly - at least to me - is how MS is approaching this framework. They are not in a rush, they are more concerned about getting it right than getting it done fast. My overall impression is that...

I just stumbled upon a video that has just been published on channel9: Ron Jacobs interviewing JB and JD of Mindscape about their domain model framework LightSpeed. Congratulations Mindscape!! At the moment I'm still (unfortunately for the last week) at the lake with hamsters powering my Internet connection, so cannot check it out, but if you have a normal Internet connection speed, go and check it out on ARCast.TV. (Too bad that Channel9 doesn't offer video encoded for the iPod format). Technorati tags: mindscape, lightspeed, arcast.tv

Unveiled by one of the founders, yesterday an ALT.NET group is born in Italy (and I'm among the 5 founding members). The main objective of the group is to organize OpenSpace meetings, to fosters exchange of experiences with tools and approaches that are not easy to find on the usual user groups. It's something very similar to the Lunches with Geeks organized by Ivan in Wellington, but unfortunately here in Milano it's not possible to gather at lunch time. What is ALT.NET has already been said many times, so I'll not quote the usual paragraph, but I'll translate here...

In 2005, Shaun Walker, founder of DotNetNuke carved the DNN logo in his Halloween pumpkin. Last year, in 2006, I carved into my pumpkin the Subtext submarine. Now with Halloween just a few days away, who is going to carve the logo of his OpenSource project into his pumpkin? Are we going to see Ayende carving his Rhino? Or Rob Conery carving the angle-bracketed DB of Subsonic? Or maybe Ivan carving the (Iron)Ruby gem? So, who's next? Technorati tags: Halloween, pumpkin, Opensource, logo

W00t.... Rob "Subsonic" Conery just joined Microsoft, and will make (more or less) Subsonic a high-level API on top of the MVC framework Phil Haack is the PM for. Seems like MS is hiring the cream of the US based .NET bloggers lately: are they kind of endorsing their contribution to the .NET space or just assimilating them? "Ai posteri l'ardua sentenza" (cit.). For the moment I just uber-happy for Rob and Phil, and for all of us .NET developer as whole: they will sure come up with something great. Technorati tags: Microsoft, Subsonic, Rob Conery

I already posted on my Italian blog last week, but I think this is great, so wanted to share here on Codeclimber:   Technorati tags: humor

Not a real censorship, like the Chinese one, but the Italian government is about to issue a new law to "organize" anything that can inform people: newspaper, magazines, public website but also private ones and blogs. In order to have a blog, if this law is really issued, its owner must be registered to the ROC (Registro degli Operatori di Comunicazione), and must have a registered journalist as "Chief Editor". I know this sounds like a joke, but it's not. Not a real law for the moment, but has been proposed in August and seems like it has been approved...

Last week I posted a screenshot of my VS pimped with the same color schema used by ScottGu and ScottHa during the MVC.NET presentation at the ALT.NET conference. I found out that it was developed by Rob Conery, which yesterday released a new version of the schema, switching back to Consolas (as I did in my personal version) and easing a bit the contrast. Download the schema on Rob's blog, and remember to change the ApplicationIdentity version=”9.0″ to version=”8.0″ if you are still using (as I'm) Visual Studio 2005. Technorati tags: Vibrant Ink, TextMate, Visual Studio, vs.settings

Tomorrow, October 17th, I'll be at Mono Day, an event organized by Novell to spread the word about this Open Source project, sponsored by Novell, that implements the .NET API and allow .NET software to run on Linux, OS X and Unix. I read the agenda and it seems that the only interesting part of the event is the last speech, by Massimiliano Mantione, developer part of the Mono core team. The rest is just promotion of Novell products and partnerships. I hope the "Mono from the source" speech will be the main part of the event, and the other only a...

Reading what Fowler and Palermo say about organizing an ALT.NET Conference my mind wandered back to the short chats Ivan Porto Carrero is organizing since mid-May at lunch time in Wellington: the Lunch with Geeks. AltNetConf's are open spaces conferences where DotNetters get together to discuss how to build better .Net software. They are held every Tuesday at midday at Syn Bar, in Bond Street, and, even if there is a rough topic of the day, they are kind of short OpenSpaces, and the usual topics, thanks to Ivan and the guys from MindScape (which are among the regular attendants), are usually about "alternative...

One of the thing that excited me from last week videos about the ASP.NET MVC framework is the amazing color schema that both ScottHa and ScottGu had on their Visual Studio: I sent an email and Scott was soo kind to answer me back with the VS schema. Looking on the net I found that the color schema was "developed" by John "DLR" Lam, porting to Visual Studio the Vibrant Ink theme for TextMate. Later Rob "SubSonic" Conery tweaked it, changed the black to shade of gray, and replaced Consolas with Monaco. Since I'm, as Jeff "CodingHorror" Atwood, a fan...

In Italy they just started broadcasting the first season of Heros, and a few bloggers of the local .NET usergroup took a personality test: Which 'Hero' are you? And I am: The same "hero" as Mr. President: does this mean something? Technorati tags: Heros

This is about a meeting I'm organizing in Italy, in the Alps near the border with Swiss, under the Mt Disgrazia,  in the Gerli/Porro hut at 6500 ft. The agenda is: 1 hour climb uphill to reach the hut lucullian lunch, based on Pizzoccheri, herbs pasta and polenta short trek (1 1/2 hours) till the beginning of the glacier (for the ones who feel like doing it) 40 minutes walk downhill All interleaved with rests and tech talk This is an Italian event, but anyone that happens to be around Milano this weekend can...

Blogging engines don't allow a quick way to change categories, or to add tags to many posts at the same time, so managing your old posts can be a lengthy process. A friend of mine, Marco De Sanctis, had to add tags to all his old posts and to reorganize the categories of his blog, so he built a small tool that retrieves all the posts via MetaWeblog API, and allow to select many posts, and add tags or categories in batch. More information about this wonderful tool, named "Blog Manager", on Marco's blog: A tool to manage your blog categories and Technorati...

After coming back from my long weekend in Barcelona I finally uploaded the slides and demos of the presentation I held two weeks ago at the XeDotNet user group meeting about Developing Vista Sidebar Gadgets. The presentation and the demos take you step by step in the creation of a Vista Sidebar Gadget, starting from a basic gadget to a full-blown localized gadget, with settings, flyout and undocked view: basic gadget adding transparent background adding a Settings page adding the Undocked view adding a Flyout getting ready for localization Since I used a Mac, the main presentation is Keynote format,...

After Scott Hanselman, Peli, Alex James and a lot more other active community member and opensource developers, also Phil Haack, founder of Subtext, is going to join Microsoft as Senior Program Manager in the ASP.NET team, and will be working on a MVC framework for a future version of ASP.NET. Congratulations Phil: two big achievements in just one year. Now, when is Microsoft coming to me for a job in the ASP.NET team as well? Technorati tags: Phil Haack, Microsoft, ASP.NET, aspnetmvc

I just came back from the post-event dinner, and here some picture of the presentation on Vista Gadgets running on a MacBook.     Not many people attended the presentation: too close to the end of the summer season, and probably not many people likes Vista. But I think this evening I showed some good reasons why developing Vista Sidebar Gadgets matters. I received some good questions from the elite that listened to my 2 hours long presentation, some of which are still unanswered. I promise I'll look for some answers and post them on my...

Tomorrow evening I'm going to do a presentation about Developing Gadgets for the Vista Sidebar at the XeDotNET user group in Venice. What are Sidebar Gadgets Why developing Sidebar Gadgets Structure of a Gadget How to develop a Gadget (with 6 demos) Tips&Tricks And since my laptop cannot run Vista, I'll do the presentation using my wife's MacBook, running Vista inside Parallels. If you are interested in coming, you can register here: the presentation is in Mestre, on Friday September 16th starting from 7:30pm. Next week I'll upload the slides (in Italian) and the demos. Technorati tags: sidebar, gadget, vista

Last week the UGIdotNET community blog portal migrated to Subtext, and yesterday, another Italian .NET blogger, Michele Locuratolo, C# MVP and co-founder of a regional .NET UG (dotnetside), moved from Community Server to SubText. Seems like he had a few issues exporting his blog from CommunityServer to BlogML, so he had to transform the DB schema from CS to Subtext manually. Happy blogging Mighel! Technorati tags: Subtext, UGIdotNET

 goes to   After GeeksWithBlogs, also UGIdotNET, the Italian .NET user group, migrated from .Text to Subtext. Andrea, the president of the user group, waited for the week of "Ferragosto" when almost all the Italians are on holiday, to minimize the down time of the blog portal. The first comments are positive, users like the new RichTextEditor, or the possibility to close the comments after N days, or to use Akismet to filter the spam. A lot of the very old skins are not available on Subtext, so most the personal blogs changed their skin, and I'm happy to see that most have them have...

Ivan, the Belgian .NET developer and member of the Wellington.NET user group just moved his blog from DasBlog to Subtext. He is a very smart guy, with lot of interesting opinions about development, not only .NET but also Ruby and other "cool" languages, so if are not already subscribed to his blog I encourage you to do so. He also decided to stop developing nBlogr, his own blogging engine: it's always sad when someone decides to stop developing his own project for lack of time. Hopefully Ivan will contribute to Subtext, and with the plugin framework we are adding to Poseidon, he will...

A few weeks ago I received a message from Valentina Baraldi, the Italian Country Manager of LinkLift, asking me if I wanted to take part in the beta testing of their Text Links. At the moment they are hitting the Italian, German and Spanish markets, but they are delivering Text Links also in other languages (English, French, Polish and Portuguese) Text links are a new way to monetize your blog, that should be more targeted then Google AdSense: the most famous company that delivers these kinds of links is text-link-ads. So I decided to give it a try since at the moment...

I just got back home from the SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, which turned out to be quite a nice event: lots of coders, lots of Mac and Linux, a few .NET developers, free food, free drinks, free Internet wireless connectivity. Nice chats with the other .NET developers, mainly about the "usual" topics: ORM, dynamic languages, Reflector (which I finally decided to install). I also helped Ivan migrate his blog to Subtext, importing all his old posts from DasBlog using Ayende procedure, only to discover at the end that his hosting control panel cannot change the .NET runtime, so we rolled back to migration, and wait...

Tomorrow I'll be at SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, the NZ version of the US SuperHappyDevHouse held monthly in the SF bay area. I still haven't grasped what it is about, so I just report the "official" description: SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa is inspired by SuperHappyDevHouse, a monthly hackathon event in the US, combining serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. The whole thing is about rapid development, ad-hoc collaboration and cross pollination. Hardcore coders, l33t hax0r, passionate designers, and other types that enjoy software and technology development will be at home in the SuperHappyDevHouse. This is...

Today the Firefox marketing team released some marketing material to promote the next release of Firefox 3, codename Gran Paradiso, but I think they didn't get the real meaning of the reference to Gran Paradiso. According to Wikipedia: "Gran Paradiso" (trans. "Great Paradise"), like other Firefox development names, is an actual place; in this case the highest mountain group in the Graian Alps. With the release of version 3.0 alpha 1 on December 8, 2006, it adopted the "Gran Paradiso" codename. And also according to all codenames in the history of...

Seems like Connected Ventures, the company behind Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker is taking the Friday's afternoon to the next level. Here is what they produced... Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo

Scott Hanselman started this "meme" a few days ago, then Nic jumped in, so why not joining and tell you my 4 life changing gadgets? They both agree on GPS, iPod and DVR being their life changing gadgets: I don't have a TV (nor a DVR), and only watch movies or a few TV series, and I use GPS only when going trekking or doing mountaineering, so I cannot say that a DVR and the GPS are among my life changing gadgets. Cellphone: a friend of mine in Italy wrote a post about why the cellphone changed his life...

I just found two interesting articles by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on the ZDNET Hardware blog: Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user Three more things that the Linux community doesn’t get The second article is a follow-up of the first one, triggered by the tons of comments from people in the Linux community still going on not understanding. The author tries to answer the following question: Why is it that the average computer user still chooses to spend hundreds of dollars on Windows or Mac when there are countless Linux alternatives that they...

Looking at Digg page on Microsoft I just found an interesting article written on One Microsoft Way, the column about Microsoft on ArsTechnica. The article, titled  "A good question: Where ARE the Microsoft fanboys?" is an answer to another article written on Information Week a few days before: Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion? Fanboy: A person who is completely loyal to a game or company regardless of if they suck or not.[urbandictionary] Fanboy is a term used to describe an individual ... who is utterly devoted to a single fannish subject, or to a single point...

The guys at Mindscape just started a series of video blog posts: BrainDump. Every now and then they will be interviewing a member of the .NET development community in New Zealand. Last week they knocked at my door, and I was very pleased to be part of the first episode of their BrainDump, speaking about my involvement with Subtext and my last project, the CCNET monitor gadget for Vista. Watch the video here: BrainDump #1 - Simone Chiaretta (EDIT: they removed the silverlight player, so here is a link to YouTube) Now I understand how Phil Haack felt when he was interviewed at Mix07. Being interviewed...

Following David Silverlight's suggestion I just took the The Ultimate Star Wars Personality Test, and it turned out that I am:

I just came back home from a very intersting meeting of the Wellington user group:Ivan Porto Carrero (as you can guess by the name, he is not a kiwi, but comes from the land of beer, Belgium) spoke about his blogging engine: nBlogr It's a blogging engine built using castle, base4.net and prototype. It's still in an early alpha phase but given the simplicity and the extensibility of the code and architecture I saw at the presentations, I think it can become a good .NET blogging engine in the future, if Ivan goes one builiding and maintaing it. If you...

Nic, an active .NET blogger and developer is leaving Wellington, after his company decided to "to axe 40 jobs in capital" (no, this is not really true, as Nic himself explain). So he is going to Madison and then taking a sabbatical year (or 2 or 3 or 4 or forever). I'm a bit sad about that, since Nic is the one that hosted me in his house when I arrived in Wellington back in January, helped me discovering Wellington, helped me when I had problems with my laptop and had to reinstall it, and convinced me to move to a...

Yet Another Subtext Blogger: Dave Transom, web developer and web standard evangelist from Auckland has just moved his blog from Blogger to Subtext. Welcome to the Subtext world, and compliments to your webdesigner for the awesome skin: maybe you can share it with us on the Subtext Skin site. The question is: when are Nic and Leonie going to move from dasBlog to Subtext? Technorati tags: Subtext

Igor Damiani, a very active community member, yesterday made a very brave choice, well, 2 choices: he left the safe place which was the UGIdotNET community, and moved to his own domain he decided to install the engine on his own server, and since he never worked with web apps, but only with winforms and T-SQL that is a very brave thing And he did the right choice because he installed Subtext with (almost) no help: which means that the installation procedure is dumb proof Unfortunately he lost all of his previous contents because...

Working on both "real", personal and opensource project sometimes I've to face the problem of managing different visual studio settings based on the project I'm working on. For my personal projects I like a certain tab and curly brace configuration, for Subtext I've to use another convention, and from my real job I've to use yet another configuration. After a few weeks of struggling I decided to adopt the Subtext settings even for my personal projects, but I cannot do it for my job, because that settings have been already used for years: so, every time I've to change type...

Microsoft communities just released to the world a public beta version of Tagspace: Tagspace* is a social bookmarking service for software professionals** that encourages sound sleep and sweet dreams by enabling you to be better informed, better connected, and more productive. The more you use Tagspace, the more you'll wonder how you survived for so long in the cramped quarters of your Web browser's Favorites folder.Source: Introducing Microsoft Tagspace Is it just another del.icio.us clone or will it really have something more "software professionals oriented" as said by Korby Parnell, a product manager in the Microsoft.com Community Technologies Team? Along with tagspace...

Reporting the release to the public of MS Silverlight (codename WPF/E) I was wondering if that product has been named after David Silverlight, creator of many community websites like Community Credit. I heard that Microsoft has just started an extremely high reward system for very active community leaders, and that WPF/E is the first reward issued with that system. David is reporting a conversation he had with Bill Gates: To be honest, I didn't really believe him when told me about actually meeting Bill Gates a few months back to discuss some really high honor, but anyway it's a awesome honor for...

UPDATE: The latest version of CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar is v0.9.5: read more about it on the CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar v0.9.5 release notes. I'm using CruiseControl.NET both at work and for Subtext, and since I'm using Vista I wanted to look at my servers states inside the Vista Sidebar. Last October Ruslan Trifonov built a Vista Sidebar Gadget for Cruise Control.NET, but I didn't like it mainly because it connects to a custom web service he built on purpose, instead of using the REST-like API provided inside CC.NET. So I decided to give the Vista Sidebar Gadget development a try, and I built...

Yesterday I was wondering about the origin of the name "Silverlight". Today I got the answer I was looking for, on the Starbucks .NET Developer blog: Microsoft Silverlight - What an Honor!!! The article reports the reason of why WPF/E has been named "Silverlight"... worth reading

Before heading to Queenstown and Wanaka for Easter, I subscribed to a few blogs by .NET Wellington developers. They are all written by people working for the same company: Mindscape. Mindblog: the company's official blog jb's blog: Jeremy Boyd blog, MS MVP and Regional Director Andrew Peter's blog: quite obviously, the blog of Andrew Peters JD's blog: John-Daniel Trask blog, '06 NZ.NET blog of the year At the moment they are all focused on promoting the Vista Sidebar Gadgets, with some cool gadget released. Great contents, but I've 2 things to point out: Wordpress?? aren't you all .NET...

Apple and EMI just announced that the iTunes store will be selling EMI music in AAC format without DRM. Jobs already expressed his feelings about DRM a few months ago, and now, with the partnership of EMI he made his (and probably everyone except Microsoft ) dream come true. You can read a a full coverage of the press announcement on Word of Apple website or its transcript on AppleInsider, and also the official EMI and Apple press releases. What is it going to happen starting from next May: Singles (of EMI artists) will be sold in an AAC double quality DRM-Free...

Do you want to go from Madison, WI, USA to Milano? Why don't you have a swim across the Ocean? Sounds silly? Well, these are the directions that Google Map is suggestions to go from any place in the US to any place in Europe. And they also estimate that you are going to take 30 days to swim the 3500 miles from Long Wharf NY, to Le Havre. This means that you have to swim without rest for 30 days at around 7,8 km/h (which is the same speed of the 100m swimming male Olympic record) Below is a screenshot,...

Just found a Programmer Personality Test, based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, should tell you which kind of programmer you are. So, I am a: Doer High level Solo programmer liBeral  

One of the latest trend is the inclusion inside operating systems of some kind of visually enhanced desktops: Vista has Aero, the OS X has Exposé and all the nice animations of the desktop, and some projects (like Beryl or Compiz) are adding the same (and even more "extreme") features to Linux distributions. Luigi is using Ubuntu as his main laptop and he filmed the graphic effects he can handle with his 256Mb RAM, 6 years old laptop (he is running Compiz).  Another very nice example of a Linux 3D Desktop is Beryl, a fork of Compiz (thanks...

Exactly what I'm saying: if your browser doesn't have en-US inside the preferred languages you cannot see the Window Live Writer Gallery. And having something with en is not enough because I had en-NZ and was not working too. The quick fix is to add en-US to the languages. Thanks to Scott for the suggestion

The Italian government just released the new site to present Italy to the World: www.italia.it It was developed by IBM, at the cost of 45.000.000 euro (90.000.000 NZ$) of public money, and they took 3 years to build it. As someone said, the most expensive website ever built in the world. Being a public utility website it's amazing to see that it is not accessible (as WAI) but you need to download a few software and browse to specific sections of the site. Also, if you have a look at the code, you don't see DIVs, but just a lot of giant TABLEs. It's...

InformationWeek has a nice article titled: How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers It's a long 6 printed pages article, not read it completely, but at page 2 there is nice chart with 9 points that an OpenSource project should have in order to be a winner. Ayende also wrote a nice blog entry about it. I'm trying to evaluate Subtext using that metrics (and giving points from 0 to 5): A thriving community: we have just 4-5 core dev and a few contrib. But all the main contributors are very committed and a lot of discussion...

Telligent just released the new Licensing Guide for Community Server 2007. The new Community Server 2007, new name for the CS v3.0, has a lot of new features. Above all there is a new dynamic theme engine named Chameleon, that makes the development of new skins more easy than with the previous version. It should also allow non tech person to change the appearance of the site with a sort of WYSIWYG editor for themes. But is post is not about the new features of CS 3.0, but is about the new licensing (here the complete PDF): basically the free license will enforce only...

Yesterday afternoon I delivered my first speech in English: NHibernate in 8 minutes during the Lightining session at the Wellington .NET user group meeting. I hope my English was not too bad, and that I managed in making a brief overview of the power of NHibernate. If you attended my presentation, please write a comment about it, and also if you would like to listen to a more detailed presentation of NHibernate. For the moment you can download the slides and the demo of the Lightning presentation.

Probably not everybody knows that Subtext can automatically notify Community Credits whenever someone posts an entry or an article on his blog. Thanks to Web API provided by Community Credits avid bloggers can earn point immediately without having to go to the Submit Point page and waiting for the approval of Community Credits moderators. You will receive 500 points for each blog post, and 5000 points for each article (story using ST naming) This feature exists since version 1.9.0, but it has never been advertised and explained as it should have been . The configuration is very easy: just open the...

Another major .NET blogger enters Subtext club: Ayende, THE NHibernate man (of course after Janky ) has just moved his blog from DasBlog to Subtext. On his post he explains his migration, and all the configuration changes he made so that Subtext handles the url the same way that DasBlog did. A very good overview of the BlogML import process from DasBlog to Subtext... probably after that post we will make a few changes to the import procedure to make the whole process easier.

This post is not about a concert of a Metallica cover band, the announcement of the next event for the local .NET user group in Wellington. As all years, the first event is a lightning event, which means that there will be a lot of short 5-10 minutes talks on different topics: IIS 7, Ajax, CruiseControl.NET, NHibernate, Windows Home Server, Team System customisation, Telecom processes, and maybe a few more. I'll take part in the event, not only as spectator, but also as speaker: I'll talk about NHibernate, an API that "relieve the developer from 95 percent of common data persistence related...

After a lot of strange things happened at various post and custom office in Italy, I finally received in New Zealand the prizes I won last year taking part in the Community Credit website competition: Yoda shaped backpack Darth Vader as Potato Head the "50 Jobs worse than yours" stomach ache virus plush toy (I won a set of carnivore plants seeds, but since here in NZ they are a bit paranoid about anything that can contaminate the native plants and animals, we decided...

Are you an active technical blogger? Or do you speak at CodeCamp presentations or do you help other people with .NET related problems? Then you are good candidate to win the stupid prizes that Community Credit gives out to "Smart People". I announced that site on my Italian blog back in May 06, and I was accused to have dropped the .NET Italian community productivity. So, if you want to win some of the stupid prizes, have a look at the accepted contributions, and start submitting your contributions.

This afternoon (Italian time) I'll be speaking at small code camp organized by the local user group DotNetMarche in Ancona, Italy. The name of the meeting is: "Sviluppare applicazioni 'migliori': CruiseControl.NET & NHibernate" (in English "How to build better software: CruiseControl.NET & NHibernate"). Here is the link to the meeting agenda. My session, titled "CruiseControl.NET in a real world project" will be an brief introduction to Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.NET. Then I'll show what I think are the Best Practices for successfully implementing a CI process on a real world project using as example the "pretty sweet" implementation I did for Subtext. I'll translate all the PPT slides...

Finally I made it: starting from today, December 11st, 2006, almost 2 years after my first blog post on my Italian blog, I've got an English blog, too... Why did I choose to have a blog written in English? Because I'm moving to Wellington, NZ in less than a month and I'm taking part in the global .NET community. Also, last April I saw this post from Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood about creating one's own personal brand, and since I'm a free climber I decided to go with CodeClimber: a good mix of the 2 things I like the most. If you want...