The night before my presentation to FSDNUG on Easy Database Access with SubSonic, I recorded a rough screencast of the presentation.  It was partly done to work out the kinks in my presentation, but I was hoping that it would be polished enough to post.  Well, it was late, I was tired, it's not the best audio quality, and I didn't finish it, but here's what I recorded in multiple formats if you're interested:

Screencast: WMV | Zune | iPod

I know it was long and the audio wasn't great.  If you have any other feedback, good or bad, please leave a comment.  I hope to record future presentations so would appreciate any tips you have related to that.  By the way, a few months ago Scott Hanselman posted the results of a survey he ran on screencast techniques.  Next time I'll make sure and take that information into account.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  I love working with SubSonic!  One of the only problems I've had with it is figuring out how to properly separate layers while using SubSonic.  Rather than dealing with that problem, I have just avoided it and let all my data access and business rules all hang out together in my UI (specifically ASP.NET code-behind).  And since I'm not writing tests for this project, testability hasn't been an issue.  Wow.  I feel dirty having just written those two sentences.  Luckily, due to the relatively small scope of the project I'm on, those issues haven't burned me too bad yet.

Anyway, Rob Conery just posted a great entry on his blog dealing with this exact issue.  He talks about using the Repository pattern and SubSonic 2.1 to properly separate your layers and allow for mapping between your DB and your application's model.  Of course, separation leads to better testability as well. 

It's too late in the game for me to change the architecture on my existing project, but I will definitely be looking at this approach very seriously on any new development.  If you're actively using SubSonic and don't already have your layers adequately separated, I would highly recommend Rob's post.  Thanks for the info, Rob!

Last night I presented for the first time at the Fort Smith .NET User Group on "Easy Database Access with SubSonic".  It was an intro level talk with some basics about the need for ORM / code generation tools at the beginning.  Trying to squeeze in everything in a one hour talk proved to be difficult, but I think attendees at least got enough exposure to SubSonic to know whether or not it's something they want to look into further.

I learned that I can't possibly over-prepare for a presentation of that length.  I'm a very detail-oriented person and like to know exactly what I'm going to talk about beforehand.  I got some great feedback on the talk last week from Kerry Jenkins who had presented the previous month.  Then I also recorded a rough screencast Sunday night to practice.  By the time Monday night rolled around, I felt pretty comfortable with the material although I feel like another walkthrough might have helped me work out some of the timing.

Here are the files and links from the presentation:

• PowerPoint Presentation
• Demo App
• SubSonic Website
• SubSonic on CodePlex
• Rob Conery's Blog
• Comments about the talk from FSDNUG member Sam Erwin

Update: I've posted the screencast from the presentation here.

Thanks to Jeremy Sharp for the picture

Dallas TechFest 2008 is occurring on May 3rd, 2008 and will be a day of .NET, Java and Ruby learning for FREE. Speakers to include Richard Campbell, Don Demsak, and Raymond Lewallen and topics to include Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC framework, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

I along with some others from the Fort Smith .NET User Group and Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group are planning on attending. See this forum thread if you're interested in carpooling.

Hope to see you there!

The Rational Guide to Building Technical User Communities does a good job of covering a variety of topics related to starting and maintaining technical user communities.  The author's opinions come from years of working with user groups in various capacities, and all his opinions are backed up with stories from his own experiences.  His ideas seem to be mostly common sense, but it is helpful to have all the information aggregated in one location.

The book is easy to read and is a good length.  I found the discussion of recruiting volunteers to be very helpful.  The one point on which I disagree with the author is his opinion that meetings should always have two topics.  I certainly don't have the experience that the author has, but I have found that there is just not enough time to allow for disussion, handle group business and giveaways, and cover two topics in a reasonable amount of time.

Overall, I was very pleased with the book and will be passing it around to the rest of the leadership of our user group.

If you're running Visual Studio 2008, I would highly recommend PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008.

From their page on MSDN Code Gallery:

PowerCommands is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2008 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.

Basically, it adds a number of menu items to the right-click menu in various areas of Visual Studio.  My favorites are "Open Command Prompt", "Open Containing Folder", and the ability to modify recent files and properties.  Head over to the MSDN Code Gallery page for full details.

Last night, the Fort Smith .NET User Group (FSDNUG) had its first meeting with Raymond Lewallen speaking on Behavior-Driven Design (BDD).  We had 35 people show up from Data-Tronics, EagleOne, Golden Living, OK Industries, and Wingfoot.  There were a couple of minor logistical issues with signing in, but overall everything went really well.  David Mohundro has an excellent writeup of the content of the meeting on his blog along with links to numerous BDD resources.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the meeting happen.  I'm looking forward to our next meeting March 31 when Chris Koenig will be talking about Silverlight.

This has been in the works for a while, but I'm just now getting to blogging about it. A group of .NET developers in the Fort Smith area are starting a Fort Smith .NET User Group (FSDNUG) and our first meeting is Monday, March 3 at 6:00 PM. See our website for more details and directions. There are many individuals locally and from the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group that have put in a lot of work to make this happen.

The vendor participation has been much greater than I initially thought it would. We've got books, T-shirts, and tons of really good software to give away. Of course, much credit goes to the guys from our group that are handling that as they sent out countless emails.

Announcements by others involved with the group:

• David Mohundro
• Randy Walker

If you are in the area Monday and can attend the meeting, we'd love to have you!

I typically shy away from posting links to new versions of products, patches, etc. because I know there's no way I can keep up and there are already so many good sources available for that type of thing.  However after installing the Visual Studio 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix, I have been so pleased that I thought I should share.

The hot fix deals primarily with performance issues related to web development in VS 2008.  I knew that the HTML view was often taking a long time to load, but I attributed that to me having something setup incorrectly or invalid HTML.  However, this hot fix has drastically reduced the screen freezes I was getting on a regular basis.

Another issue that was driving me crazy was the occassional disappearance of the "View Code" link from the context menu when in HTML view.  I never realized how much I used that feature until it was no longer there.  Luckily, one of the fixes listed on ScottGu's blog entry is:

“View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.

So evidently the issue had to do with my use of the web application project model.  Interesting.

Anyway, the download was small (~ 2.6 MB) and the install took less than a minute.  I would highly recommend this update to anyone writing web applications with Visual Studio 2008.  Thanks Microsoft!

After encouragement from Zain Naboulsi, Saturday I attended my first meeting of the Second Life .NET User Group.  This was actually the first time I even ventured into the Second Life world and was surprised at how similar the meeting was to a user group meeting in real life.  Just like in real life, it was slightly uncomfortable for me to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation.  But just like in real life, once I did start conversations, everyone I spoke to was friendly and interesting.

There is a virtual auditorium with a podium and stage and seats for attendees.  The speaker at the meeting was using a microphone so I could actually hear him through my computer speakers.  Most of the others interacted through text chatting which was a bit difficult to follow, but helpful too.  The speaker was reading the chats, too, so he could respond to any comments or questions.  This particular meeting there was no formal presentation, but I'm told Powerpoint presentations can be shown on screens in Second Life.

Overall, it was a much more natural-feeling experience than what I thought it would be.  I'll try to attend the next couple of meetings to continue to get a feel for it.