Michael Paladino

5 Reasons I Love TweetDeck

I have used Twitter now for a few months and have really enjoyed the experience.  If you don't know what Twitter is, check out the wikipedia entry or this short YouTube video for more information before reading the rest of this post.  During the time I've used Twitter, I've tried quite a few clients including Twhirl, Digsby, and Witty, but my favorite by far has been TweetDeck.  I've mentioned to others how much I've enjoyed using it so often that I thought I'd go ahead and write a blog post about it.

Below, I've listed the top 5 reasons I love TweetDeck with an explanation of each.  Enjoy!

1. Groups

   
   Of the Twitter clients I've seen, TweetDeck is the only one with the concept of "Groups".  I follow over 100 people, some of whom are friends I've actually met in person, and others whom I may not personally know but "tweet" about things that I'm interested in.  I don't mind missing tweets from those in the latter group, but I like to monitor those of my personal friends more closely.  With the concept of groups, TweetDeck allows me to setup a group (I call it "Personal Friends") and choose the people whom I choose to keep up with the most.  Then I can more closely monitor that group while paying less attention to the "All Tweets" group.
   
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2. Local Search

       
   Any tweets downloaded by TweetDeck within the last 48 hours get cached locally.  TweetDeck offers a "Local" search that allows you to search through those cached tweets.  This comes in handy if I remember someone tweeting about something but can't remember who or when.
   
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3. Global Search - Topics of Interest - Long Term

   
   TweetDeck also has a "Global" search that will create a column of all tweets matching the typed-in search term.  It will update every time the rest of your tweets update.  This feature allows me to track tweets on topics that I am deeply interested in.  For example, I have global searches for SubSonic and INETA to keep up with anything that is being said about those topics.
   
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4. Global Search - Topics of Interest - Short Term

       
   I also use the global search feature to track certain events like conferences.  For example during Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC), I had a global search setup for "PDC" that allowed me to keep up with what folks were talking about surrounding that event.  Once the event is over, I delete that search.
   
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5. Global Search - My Twitter Name

   
   Finally, one of the issues that bugged me prior to TweetDeck was that I had a hard time seeing my own tweets and replies in context.  I might see a reply that I sent to a tweet from a couple of hours before, but that tweet might be way down the list and difficult to find.  With TweetDeck, I've created a global search of my twitter name (mpaladino).  TweetDeck then creates a column showing all of my tweets as well as any replies directed at me.  This really makes it easier to see the context of an entire conversation.
   
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Upcoming Community Events

As a .NET developer in the south central portion of the United States, I am very fortunate to have access to a large number of high quality but free or low cost community events.  I wanted to make sure that people are aware of a couple of these events in November and a couple more in January.

I am planning on attending the We Are Microsoft Charity Weekend and am hoping to put together a team of five from Fort Smith.  In fact, Tim Rayburn has graciously offered to give us 2 copies of Windows Vista if we can get a team together.  We've already got a couple of people committed with some others who are still thinking it over. Please let me know soon if you're interested as the deadline to register is November 28.

If you're interested in keeping up-to-date on these types of events in the area, the blogs of Chris Koenig and Zain Naboulsi would be great places to start.  They are both developer evangelists for Microsoft for the South Central District (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas) and often post about local events.

• AgileDotNet Conference 2008

  Dallas, TX
  November 14, 2008 (Friday)
  Cost: Free
  
  Improving Enterprises in conjunction with Microsoft and the Dallas C# SIG invite you to an exciting one-day event to bring together the world of Microsoft .NET development with the world of Agile methods. Designed for both those experienced with Agile techniques and for those new to them, attendees can expect interesting presentations based on real-world experience from some of the industry’s leading Project Managers, Developers, and Business Analysts who have embraced Agile principles within .NET development environments.

• TechDays 2008

  Dallas, TX
  November 18-20 (Tuesday-Thursday)
  Cost: Free
  
  If technology is the backbone of your business, you won't want to miss out on the TechDays '08 event in Dallas. Filled with exclusive product information presented by insider experts, TechDays '08 will show developers, IT professionals, IT executives, and partners how Microsoft technology can take their business to the next level.

• We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend

  Dallas, TX
  January 16-19 (Friday-Sunday)
  Cost: Free
  
  The We Are Microsoft - Charity Challenge Weekend is a software development competition for a good cause. This 3-day event matches developers with charities to develop applications for those charities. At the end of the 3 days, all of the participants will vote and the winners will be proclaimed champion coders.

• MSDN Developer Conference

  Dallas, TX
  Friday, January 26 (Monday)
  Cost: Free
  
  Prepare yourself for a demanding future. Attend the MSDN Developer Conference. Experience Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform. Create applications that seamlessly bridge the gaps between PC, Web, and phone. Be among the first to see Windows 7. See the latest advances in Multi-Touch Application Development. Take your .NET skills to the next level. See sessions on WPF 4.0, Silverlight 2, ASP.NET 4.0, Parallel Programming, Live Mesh and more.

Tulsa TechFest 2008 Recap

Last Thursday and Friday, I was lucky enough to get to attend Tulsa TechFest.  David Walker and the other volunteers did a great job and put on a great event.  The quality and quantity of both the keynote speakers and the session speakers were outstanding.  Here were some of the highlights for me:

• Loose Coupling by Caleb Jenkins: I've read about these concepts such as Dependency Injection (DI) before, but Caleb brings an energy to his talks that made this well worth the time.  Hopefully, I can start to put some of this into practice.
• Continuous Integration by Rob Reynolds: Rob started with just a Visual Studio project and walked through installing and configuring a build server with CruiseControl.NET.  There's a lot of XML configuration and the setup looked to be a bit tedious, but it looked great once it was all setup and running correctly.  Again, this is something I hope to experiment with in the next few weeks.
• Becoming a .NET Jedi with ReSharper by Ben Scheirman: Ben did a great job of showing what's possible with ReSharper.  I came out of the talk fired up about getting more proficient with it, but it appears that a lot of the functionality that he showed has not been implemented in the VB version.  I'll have to spend more time with this to try and see what all is available.
• Building a Blog with ASP.NET MVC by Ben Scheirman: Ben did another good presentation on creating a blog using the new ASP.NET MVC framework.  I actually tried to follow along with this one on my laptop but had difficulties with some of the C# to VB translations and didn't have some of the third party components installed.  I still got a lot out of it and want to dig into this as well.  Ben also briefly mentioned jQuery towards the end of his talk so I went ahead and downloaded it and started experimenting.  Wow!  Really looking forward to getting more into this as well.
• Prizes: Again, wow!  David Walker managed to get a ton of prizes from books to software to a couple of laptops and a 50" TV.  The really cool part about it is I actually won one of the 2 laptops!  It's a Toshiba Satellite A305 with pretty good specs: 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of ram, 320GB hard drive, built-in webcam and lots of goodies.  It's much more powerful than my existing Dell that I've been using for developing, so I am planning on using it as my development laptop.  It's a little glossy and smudges easily, but I'm getting used to it.  And, hey, you can't beat the price!  I carpooled to Tulsa with fellow Fort Smith .NET User Group member Michael Johnson who also walked away with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite with MSDN Premium subscription worth over $10,000.  So I'd say it was worth the trip for us.

I was also privileged to get to speak this year.  I've spoken to our local user group before, but this was my first time to speak at a large event like this.  I spoke about SubSonic again and only had about 8 people attend.  But participation was good and hopefully the attendees got enough of a feel for it to be able to make a decision as far as whether or not to investigate it any more.

I'll definitely do my best to make Tulsa TechFest a yearly event.  With such high-quality events such as this, Dallas TechFest, and DevLink, I really don't see the ROI being worth it on the larger and more expensive conferences such as TechEd or PDC.

Screencast - SQL Examiner Suite 2008

Monday, October 6, I'll be presenting a brief demo of SQL Examiner Suite 2008 at the monthly Fort Smith .NET User Group meeting prior to the main presentation by Scott Cate.  I went ahead and recorded a screencast of that presentation for anyone who might be interested.

SQL Examiner Suite consists of a couple of tools, SQL Examiner and SQL Data Examiner, that allow the user to compare and synchronize database schemas and data.  It's a tool that I use on a regular basis and have found to be invaluable in my software development. 

As a disclaimer, the makers of SQL Examiner Suite, TulaSoft, are one of the sponsors of the Fort Smith .NET User Group, and I am using a free copy that I won at one of the meetings.  However, it was my decision to make this presentation to the group and to create this screencast and neither were in any way solicited by TulaSoft.

WMV | Zune

FSDNUG Featured in Apress Catalog

I just found out today that the Fort Smith .NET User Group has been profiled in the Apress Fall/Winter 2008 Catalog (check out page 15).  One of our officers, Jeremy Sloan, has done a great job of maintaining the group's relationship with Apress including requesting review copies of books and keeping them updated on the group's activities. 

In addition to the recognition in the catalog, Apress will also be sending us an "Apress tote bag full of books".  Looking forward to that!

So, thanks to Jeremy and thanks to all the members that have made FSDNUG a vibrant user group and a great place to learn and network.  And thanks to Apress for being such a great sponsor!

Path to .NET 3.5 Developer Certification

This afternoon I saw a great diagram from Jorgen Thelin showing the .NET 3.5 developer certification paths including exams and certifications achieved.  This can be a confusing thing to try and understand when reading the text-based information in a table or paragraph format, so this really helped me see it all clearly.  Click the thumbnail below to see the full-size version.

By the way, back in December 2007 I passed that tiny little 70-536 exam at the very bottom.  I've got a long ways to go to get to MCPD Enterprise Application Developer :)

Switch to BlogEngine.NET

As you can probably tell by the RSS craziness or by the new look, I have followed in the footsteps of numerous others (Brian, Zach, Tim, and others I'm not remembering) who have switched to BlogEngine.NET.  My blog was previously running on the blog module of a DotNetNuke install.  While DotNetNuke is a reasonable solution for sites with a lot of different types of content or sites needing a lot of out of the box functionality, it was a bit overkill for just a blog.  Also, the blog module was a relatively late entry into the DotNetNuke world and just didn't yet have all the functionality that other blog engines have.

I've heard a lot of good things about BlogEngine.NET and so far have been impressed.  I used a template from DesignsByDarren.com and was able to create a "theme" relatively painlessly.  The migration process ended up being a combination of custom SQL to move over the content and comments and manually re-uploading the images into the new blog.  I'm planning on migrating my family's personal site as well which will pose a bigger challenge as it is extremely image-heavy and manually moving them all is not an option.  I'm looking forward to the challenge!

How I Got Started in Programming

Brian Sullivan tagged me on this, so here goes...

I was a late bloomer. College was the first time I actually wrote any code.

Like a lot of programmers, I had a Commodore 64 as a kid. But unlike a lot of programmers, I wasn't really that interested in it. I remember trying to type in a BASIC program and getting bored after about the 10th line of code. I played a little with my dad's PC through grade school and learned enough DOS to move files around as needed. The first time I really remember a light bulb going off and realizing that programming might be a career choice was my freshman year of college in my "Intro to Computers" class. We had an assignment to build a basic 2-3 page website and while most people paid someone else to do it or copied their buddy's, I remember spending about a week's worth of late nights in the lab working on just the right spacing on my HTML-based resume. It was also a couple of years before the year 2000, so at that time when they showed starting salaries for the different majors, CIS was at the top of the list. I would like to say that didn't influence me at all, but the fact that I still remember that should tell you whether it had an effect on me or not. :)

The aforementioned HTML website was my first experience with programming. But since that's not neccessarily a language, I'd have to say C++ during college.

While interning at an insurance company after my junior year of college, I wrote a VB6 application to allow claims adjustors to add descriptions and upload photos from their cameras to a backend to later be read by Lotus Notes. It took me most of the summer because I was really hired to do PC support and just wrote the app in my spare time. It actually ended up being used by claims adjustors throughout the state for at least a couple of years. That was the first time I got a taste of what happened when you shipped a buggy and non-user-friendly product to a large number of end users. The funny thing is, I could probably sit down and write the whole app in about 2 hours now.

Like Brian, I'll distinguish between college and real-world. College: C, C++, Cobol, Java. Real-world: VB6, classic ASP, Javascript, VB.NET, C#. Wow, that's really not much compared to most of the other people I've seen.

I've already talked about my job at the insurance company, but I wouldn't neccessarily call that a professional programming gig since I was hired for PC support. My first job out of college was at Data-Tronics which is an IT company who provides services mostly to ABF Freight System in Fort Smith, AR. I started in Marketing working on ABF's website and helped to implement Microsoft Content Management Server 2000 to allow the ABF employees to maintain their own content.  I then moved to the Intranet group creating shared components in classic ASP for consumption by the rest of the company's intranet developers. It was a great job in which I gained invaluable experience in a wide range of technology and learned a ton from some really brilliant developers.

Like most people that are answering these questions, I will say "Definitely". I guess if you're interested enough to maintain a technical blog, odds are you enjoy what you are doing. The profession is a constant challenge and requires consistent growth and learning. I can't imagine working in a job where I could learn what I needed to know and never have to learn anything else.

Pay attention in those computer classes in school! I often feel like I should have a better base in computer science because I don't have an excellent understanding of underlying memory structures, etc. My last piece of advice would be to try to find a mentor. I've been lucky enough to work under some very intelligent developers and have learned a lot from them.

It would probably have to be my time in the Intranet group at Data-Tronics when I was developing components for use by other developers. Because of the heavy use of these classes, quality was extremely important, but usability of the class was very important as well. It was a challenge to me to make the interface to these components as clean and understandable as possible. I also took pride in the documentation because I knew that if the documentation was easy to write and understand that I had probably done a good job designing the component. I guess maybe I should be working for a component vendor. David, if you're reading this, please ignore that last line. :)

MSDN Ramp Up and Certification Exam Discount

I first heard about this from Zain Naboulsi back in January and am finally getting back to blogging about it. MSDN has a developer learning program called Ramp Up that they describe as follows:

Do you want to gain new Microsoft .NET development skills, but aren’t sure where to begin? If so, MSDN Ramp Up is the place to be.

Through a solid foundation of premium technical content from renowned experts, Ramp Up provides the step-by-step guidance and in-depth learning content you need to build your portfolio of professional development skills.

Basically, you choose your track (most likely the Visual Studio 2008 Tech Ed Track for most people reading this blog), complete that track, and then at the end you get a "Graduation Award" consisting of a 50% discount on exam 70-536 among other things. That exam is the first exam on the road to a number of Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) and Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) certifications for developers.

Hope this helps and good luck!

SubSonic Presentation Screencast

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.