Silverlight In The Enterprise This Friday in NYC
So we are just two short days away from the first Silverlight in the Enterprise event. If you are registered for the event we will see you there and best of luck winning the xbox that is currently sitting under my desk! We also have some other great prizes including a Visual Studio 2010 license as well as several Infragistics and ComponentOne licenses and assorted Swag. Sadly we didn't have the budget for a t-shirt cannon is it just me or is this common sense that every presenter should have one?
Speaking at Islin User Group 9/1/11
So I am finally back to my most frequently spoken at user group... The islin user group has seen probably too much of me. This will be if i remember correctly my 4th presentation there in the last year. I will be presenting on MVVM so come on out and lets have some fun... Details at http://www.njmsdev.org/
Presenting at VT Code Camp Sept. 10, 2011
I am really looking forward to this camp. I haven't ever been to VT let alone presented there so this should be a good experience for me. I am also hoping to bring my lovely girlfriend with me and find a nice bed and breakfast. I hear that that is the thing to do in VT. Anyone know of a good one please let me know.
This is going to be the first of my new presentations for this year and early next year. I will be presenting on MEF in a presentation I named Getting High on MEF where I will show some of the great ways to use MEF.
The second presentation that I'll be doing for this event is a session aimed at professional development. They have asked me to lead a open forum discussion on software consulting. I will be talking about how to get into it how to find business if you are into it and how to deal with us consultants if you aren't one.
I hope to make some new friends while there so please don't hesitate to say hi. 
Presenting at NYC dot NET User Group
Jason Beres and I will be presenting at the NYC .NET user group this month. (ie this Thursday 3/17) on LightSwitch. you can check out the details here. Jason will be talking about how to build applications with LightSwitch and I will be speaking to the extensibility story of LightSwitch. I am one of the few people that has really gotten down and dirty with the core of LightSwitch and worked closely with the LightSwitch product team and my colleagues at Infragistics to produce the Touch Friendly Shell which was featured at the LightSwitch Beta Launch announcement. You can check out this blog post from the LightSwitch product team where they talk about some of the UI extensibility of  LightSwitch. In that article they actually link to my corporate blog where I discuss my experience and thoughts on being part of that project and working with the team to produce a awesome product.
Fixed 7z MIME type issues blocking downloads
My thanks to Corey Castillo for pointing out that my download links were broken for the files that I uploaded for my presentations for the Southern FL Code Camp. I about 2 years back switched to using 7-Zip for file archives naturally if I wish to allow people to download files with an extension of .7z I need to add that MIME Type to my server which for the record the MIME Type for *.7z is "application/x-7z-compressed". I know that know because I just finished adding it to my IIS for this server.
My Appearance at the 7th Annual South Florida Code Camp
So this weekend I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions at the South Florida Code Camp. My first session was entitled Strong Typed RIA Services and was about a design pattern that I proposed that heavily relied on generics and RIA Services to produce a pretty useful control design pattern. I am attaching the solution that demonstrates that code here. It is called RiaServicesViewModel.7z.
My next presentation was call "Dependency Properties can do what?" It was aimed at a more advanced audience that wanted to see some of the more interesting things that you could do with dependency properties. I also showed several code snippets and a project item template. I am attaching them all here.
RiaServicesViewModel
Infragistics.XamlTricks
Infragistics.AttachedBusinessLogic
the following file has 4 code snippets that are very useful for control and ViewModel development. To use them extract them to:
%HOMEPATH%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets\
MVVM Snippets
And the generic command template extracts to:
%HOMEPATH%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#\
Generic Command
The box we think in
I have been wanting to talk about the means that I notice that many people go about solving programming problems. It seems that given that most of use have at our disposal we should inevitably arrive at very similar solutions to most problems.
I have only considered myself a programmer by profession for the last 3.5 years but I have been programming for over 10 now. I have always had nack for programming and even mo importantly I enjoy doing it. But I never thought that I would end up doing it for a living. The reason for this is that for the most part professional software development just isn't fun. I challenge anyone that is reading this to speak of the joys of regression testing or long term legacy system maintenance.
It is sad but true that most programmers by trade never get to know the joy of nurturing a concept from thought baby to it's graduation day as a real work application. Never get to take part in the first steps that the idea will take in a POC or be there to see it for the first time interact with the domain problem that it will hopefully grow up to solve. Or the pride that you take as your application or framework begins being consumed by those that were just waiting for something like it to come along to change their quality of life. ( ok I'm laying it on thick here)
I work with so many programmers that are very smart and have been building real world very well written applications as long as I have been alive. The more skilled (enterprise) programmers that i have run into that have survived large scale projects seem to always go to the same approach to solving a problem. Do what i have seen or read worked in the past. There is a natural reason for this people like a sure thing something that is known.
It is funny given how much and how often that software, tools, and frameworks change how terrified the average programmer I meet is of change even on the small scale.
I am going to be finishing this up eventually
Long Time No See
It sure has been a while since I have posted anything new on my blog but I am going to start up posing again pretty regularly. I am currently on the books for 3 events coming up and will be posting details on them shortly and a nice recap article of what I have been up to shortly.
The Story Behind My Pseudo Arrest
OK, so the story behind getting arrested was that I had a ticket for letting my cars registration expire that I got right before my chemo started. Well the day before I got arrested I got a notice in the mail saying that there is a warrant for my arrest and to clear it up go to the local police station. So naturally I head right over and clear it up, the police woman that helped me said to make sure that I held onto the paperwork for a week. As she pointed out and I would soon learn it can take a while for a warrant to clear the system.
So when I was driving home from work with my carpool yesterday a police officer randomly ran my plate like they often do when they pull up behind you and BAM he sees the warrant and stops me. I got cuffed and put in the back of the car before I had time to even realize what was happening. While I was sitting in the car I was able to explain things to the police officer (who was for the record a really nice guy about the whole thing) about what had happened and directed him to the paperwork that the stated I had cleared up the warrant. At that point the tone of the whole thing changed and the two officers and I started joking around about the whole thing.
Grand total time arrested was about 5 minutes before the police officer jokingly said "OK Matt, I am officially unarresting you now".
Speaking at the 1st New England Business Intelligence Code Camp
This Saturday May 22nd I will be presenting three sessions at the New England Business Intelligence Code Camp.
My sessions will be:
- Intro to SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 - 100 Level session designed to show people some of the basic concepts in SSRS 2008.
- SSRS Interactive Reports - Walk through of how to use SSRS to make interactive reports that empower the report's consumers.
- Visualize you data with Silverlight. - High level walk through of Silverlight as a data visualization platform.
Blogroll
Companies of note
Professional Groups
Twitter: phpn00b
- @PeteDominick hate your show and last night was the worst show yet #fanforlife gust have been great for at least 2 weeks now
- @girldevelopit I am a frequent speaker at events around the east coast and would love to get involved.
- @SaraJChipps hey sara we met up a few times through user groups and a friend just linked me to http://t.co/h2iJBSsb how can i help?
- I just contacted Rep. Robert Andrews to oppose #SOPA/#PIPA - Join me! http://t.co/ZYqTC9Nu #wikipediablackout
- I just contacted Sen. Frank Lautenberg to oppose #SOPA/#PIPA - Join me! http://t.co/ZYqTC9Nu #wikipediablackout
- I just contacted Sen. Robert Menéndez to oppose #SOPA/#PIPA - Join me! http://t.co/ZYqTC9Nu #wikipediablackout