About a month ago, I registered for a Twitter account. I thought it would be a fad that I would toss out quickly, but nope - am hooked. More than Facebook. Why? It's simple, it's brief, and you don't need all that extra crap that comes with Facebook (freaking "Little Green Tree" application...).

So, for those interested in adding me, you can add me here.

I also recommend getting Twhirl, which is a desktop application that resides in your systray to follow your Twitter information. It's nice as it is hidden there and you don't need to go into the web site to get the information.

Enjoy!

Like the rest of this week, not starting off well. I couldn't fall asleep until 6 AM, so getting up for the morning sessions was out of the question. This is going to be bad for tomorrow, as the all-day Silverlight presentation is tomorrow. I better get my @$$ out of bed.

So far this afternoon, attended one full session and in the middle of another. First, was Markus Egger's presentation which served as an introduction to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). It was an introductory session, which was good to have as I know some but not a ton. What's nice is that Silverlight is a subset of WPF, so getting to learn Silverlight will give me an idea of what to expect when playing more with WPF.

Currently, am in Rod Paddock's presenting on AJAXing your ASP.NET application. A few nice tips and tricks here, but is more or less the basics of AJAX of which I understand the root basics as well. However, some of the tweaks are really cool.

I said I was gonna blog after each session yesterday afternoon, but didn't. Turning the laptop on and off each time... nah, didn't want to.

I planned on doing it from the hotel. However, I was not planning on my hotel having no internet all night. So, no update for yesterday. Now for today...

A bunch of good talks, but as usual the more interesting (and fun) conversations take place out of the rooms. Over lunch, sat with a bunch of people including Dave Laribee, James Kovacs, Oren Eini, Peter Ritchie and Scott Bellware. There were some interesting talks there, with Scott and another individual (whose names eludes me) talking about an upcoming Agile conference in Vancouver in the fall. There was also a pre-recorded video interview from Dave with the aforementioned name-I-cannot-remember which was kind of cool (Dave's phone automatically streamed video up).

After that, went to Oren's session on Zero Friction Development. Was really good. But then the day went to the REALLY fun...

D'Arcy managed to get 4 tickets to The Hour. So, Henry, D'Arcy, Donald and I headed to the show. Tonight's guest was Sam Roberts. (There was also an interview with Ivan Reitman, but it was pre-recorded.) After the show was done, the Q and A with George S was just going on - he took the time to answer everyone's questions! It went on for like an hour after the show ended. It was still going on, but alas, we had to leave - we needed dinner before our evening entertainment. So, we met Rod Paddock and Dave Woods for dinner. The meal was quick, but good.

So, after dinner, Henry and Donald parted ways with us and the remaining 4 of us went to see Evil Dead: The Musical. Yes, you read that right. A group of Toronto playwrights took the movie trilogy (well, mostly the first 2 with many quotes from Army of Darkness) and turned it into a musical with such classics as "What the ^&*% was that?". We sat in the 3rd row. The first 2 rows were more or less right on stage and were arranged like seats on a bar. We were in the first tabled area right behind it. Those first 2 rows are called the "Splatter Section", and after act 2 began we know why. During intermission, theatre staff handed out ponchos to the first 2 rows. They offered them to us, but we were mostly safe they said, although some splatter may hit us. That phrase was about 75% true for us. I was fine, Dave was fine, Rod was fine, D'Arcy was not. You know it's bad when you have a homeless guy come up to you and ask you if you're OK, a random street vendor ask what caused it (and his specific question was just WRONG), and a cop really look at us funny as he was watching traffic. We stopped in at Fran's for food (our local diner hangout) and had the same waiter as last night. He just looked at us like we were crazy, but that's what happens when one person in your party looks like he just domated a kidney in a back alley somewhere and his stitches ripped open.

Overall, a really good night. And perhaps heading back to it AGAIN on Friday with Rod and a few others. Should be interesting...

Woke up this morning. Kind of. After hacking up a lung last night, stayed back at the hotel in the morning, which SUCKED! I really wanted to see Scott Hanselman's keynote. The morning sessions, not a big loss, but the keynote I really wanted to see.

I managed to steam most of the sore throat out of me this morning, so am at DevTeach this PM. Hopefully will be much better. Will post on each presentation as I go through.

Well day one is now done.

 Got up in the morning and met DL for breakfast. I have a feeling that Fran's will be the place to go for this DevTeach.

We made it to the UG summit and spent the day talking to other UG leads around the country, and planned for a special event for a new WebTV channel MS is doing called UGTV. All the UG leads were interviewed for this channel, and then a special project was going to be filmed Tuesday morning... and I have a feeling that a certain senor will make an appearance there...

After the UG summit was complete I went back to the hotel and took a bit of a nap. I was wiped, and my throat was extremely scratch. A package of ultra-strength Halls didnt seem to help. But, still managed to get up and head to the Party With Pallermo on Monday night alongside DL and Henry. That was good, and met up with a few familiar faces: Kyle Baley, James Kovacs, Dave Larabee, Oren Eini. Was a good night in all, but many guys were wiped and wanted to prepare for the next day. (Memories of shooters at the Vancouver PWP probably still rang true within their minds....) That being said, DL, Henry and I, along with an individual from Belgium whose name currently eludes me, went... yes, back to Fran's for a late night snack.

After all was said and done, went back to the hotel, hacking up a long. Found out I had packed some Sinutab (THANK GOD!) and fell asleep after a few minutes. However, kept waking up to myself hacking. Of course it always happens that I get sick during such things. Just my luck.

Arrived in Toronto yesterday for the DevTeach conference.

 After arriving at the hotel, got settled. Am here for 6 days. This was the first time that I have ever unpacked in a hotel, but since I am here for 6 nights... why not? Makes sense.

After getting unpacked, headed out for dinner which changes to drinks which changed to dinner with D'Arcy Lussier, Donald Belcham and Jeffrey Pallermo. Was some good discussion around a local diner near the conference centre, and seemed to set the tone for how discussions will be this week. And that's probably just the start of the week...

I said I wasn't going to comment on pop culture or anything here. I lied. My other blog that I want to set up for that isn't there yet, so it goes here so I don't forget about it.

 I use software from Collectorz.com to manage my comic book collection. It's awesome! They also have a movie collector which I might get for my DVD and book collection. (Don't let the website fool you - they have a really nice looking community site also available.) At any rate, I was reading some of the blogs there and found one referring to a Dutch show called "Dames in de Dop". According to Wikipedia:

The series follows a group of ladettes (i.e. loud, foul-mouthed, uncultured and unpleasant women, who like to drink and smoke and who are often sexually promiscuous), who are given an old-fashioned six-week course in learning how to behave like a real lady. They are sent to Huis 't Velde, a International Butler Academy situated in Warnsveld, Gelderland. Huis 't Velde was specially re-opened in order to try and change the ladettes' habits. 

So basically, the opposite of Velvet Jones' "I Wanna Be A Ho" course. It's "I Don't Wanna Be A Ho"... or, alternately, "I want to show how much of a ho I am on international television".

I'm surprised Fox hasn't picked this up yet...

May 12-16 is the DevTeach conference in Toronto. I will be attending. This will be my 3rd DevTeach, and since I am not a presenter this must tell you something about the technical quality of the presentations and presenters there.

 One of my fellow Winnipeggers, D'arcy Lussier, posted on his blog about some of the presenters who will be there. Including himself. And with his post, he labelled himself D'Arcy "Don't Dare Me, I'll Do It" Lussier.

So... I now open up the floor to accept the list of dares that will be presented to D'Arcy at DevTeach. I will collect them all and take them with me, and at random times around the conference will present D'Arcy with a "Community Dare".

Let the antics begin...

Last night at the Winnipeg .NET User Group, D'Arcy Lussier presented on the ASP.NET MVC Framework. He had spoken previously at our Code Camp on it, and this presentation went into more detail. It was a good intro to many of what MVC is and why it is going to be useful and (relatively) easy to build websites. I have learned about MVC some time ago and wanted to learn more, but needed several things to do it:

1. Visual Studio 2008 (got a full version at the Heroes Happen Here event)
2. An idea of what to do to learn it
3. Time

That last one was the hard part. But today I was home sick from work so decided to play with it a little. And what project did I choose? Well, my company does some public-facing websites for our clients and we are in the midst of reskinning one. As a Project Manager, my role is not to build the applications anymore but to make sure the work gets done. After 10 years (5 years at my current company) of doing such sites and applications, it is easier said than done. However, this is still how I can do the work AND learn MVC: take the project and convert it at home to an MVC app. Now, I know I won't have all the bells and whistles right off the hop, and my CSS skills need some DEFINITE work, but the main functionality should be fairly straightforward. After playing with it for several hours, here is what I have found so far:

Routing Table

Love it. Since I knew what the URL structure would be up front, this was relatively simple to do. There are some things that others out there may know that I do not, though, so here are some issues I have:

I have multiple levels that need analysis. Here is an example of a URL (not the actual URL being used but something to give the same format so it's not a client URL):

http://localhost/books/2008/scifi/home
http://localhost/books/2007/fantasy/home

I use the following route table with it:

            routes.Add(new Route("{controller}/2008/scifi/{action}/{id}", new MvcRouteHandler()) {
                Defaults = new RouteValueDictionary(new { controller = "Books", action = "Home", id = "" }),
            });
            routes.Add(new Route("{controller}/2007/fantasy/{action}/{id}", new MvcRouteHandler()) {
                Defaults = new RouteValueDictionary(new { controller = "Books", action = "Home", id = "" }),
            });

Now, I could use "id" but I still need other sub-pages for similar items and that's what I would use the id for. Now I know I can strip out the other variables with a Request object call in code, but is there an easier way to create the route table, or do I have to have more hard-coded values such as above as I progress? (Suggestions are greatly appreciated.)

Apart from that, the route table is working really well. I still have to fix a 404 if it's not found at all, but I can always go in there and fix that later (already saw a blog post elsewhere on that). But so far, got the controllers all worked out, the route table, and the base ASPX pages and the primary master page (still have to add in the nested master pages). Not bad for a first attempt at playing with it (more than just watching webcasts and reading blog posts), if I do say so myself...

At the recent Community Connections event in Winnipeg, we had a section talking about workers within the IT industry. (I was not a part of that session, but we all heard the summary of each group there.) Gary Pronych blogged about that same item and how it affects Regina, but we see the same thing in Winnipeg - many companies hiring the experienced, but new graduates don't get the opportunity to get that experience needed to progress.

A friend of mine attended the event with me. She is a recent graduate with a DBA diploma and is having a heck of a time finding work in the industry. Why? She has no experience outside of work, even though from talking with her she knows her stuff. But why won’t companies give new graduates more of a chance?

The company I work for, we do just that with recent developer graduates. We hire both experienced and new, depending upon skill set, the needs of the projects we know we have in queue or have the potential of having, as well as certain elements of the individual. Having been part of the interview process, I have always looked for several criteria in those that I have interviewed:

• Technical skills
• Interest in the field
• Personality

Technical Skills

For a development position, technical skills are the key. If you don’t understand programming, you won’t cut it as a programmer. But what I do (and some others here do as well, but many companies do not; when I say I here I refer to the “royal we”) is look at the potential of the programmer. Many companies see minimal experience and dismiss the person offhand, but that shouldn’t be done. What about that diamond in the rough? (We’ve found quite a few of those.) You don’t need to be the master of your domain, but you need to be able to have the potential to be the master of a domain. Not every domain, but a domain. Which leads to the second criteria…

Interest In The Field

I have had many people come into interviews that look amazing on paper, but when they get in to the interview they don’t have any interest in the field. “I heard it was a good industry to make money.” They heard, but from whom? If all you are in it for is the money, that’s fine, but to me software development is about challenges and pushing people to excel with new problems and technologies. You need a drive in SOMETHING in order to succeed.

We have also interviewed some experienced people who, for one reason or another, have been out of the development game for a while but apply as a developer. Again, this is fine. But one of my key questions I have posed is “What have you done to keep yourself up to date in that time?” It surprised me as to how many responses have been “nothing”. It is understandable that some people need to step back for whatever reason (life circumstance, a mind-break, etc.), but if you want to get back in you need to show some initiative. (Again, personal observation and feeling here.) Keep up to date with blogs, read magazines, side projects, SOMETHING that shows that you actually are interested in the field.

We have hired several people where I am at that were new graduates, but had the most AMAZING potential. They did projects on the side, either for friends or family, or sometimes even just for themselves for fun – and that says a lot. We have a developer who learned Flash and ActionScript for fun, making some nifty little videos and animations. We have one guy who learned how to make games for his Nintendo DS. They may not have the experience right out of school, but this shows the interest and the initiative that they love the field that they have chosen and will most likely excel.

Personality

This is a hard one to gauge and is very subjective. Depending on the company, programmers can work as part of a large team or very independently. We try to have 2-3 developers per large product, so we need a team environment. And for this, personality is key. We need people who can get along with other people, both technical and otherwise. That is somewhat hard to gauge in an interview, but you can still get a feeling from how they present themselves, how they answer your questions, etc. Hard to say here, as everyone who interviews needs to get a grasp of this for themslves, but there is no one metric to gauge a personality.

So what do we do?

When interviewing, you kind of need to have an idea as to the projects that the individual may be working on. This will help determine if they are a right fit. Without that knowledge, you are hiring for the sake of filling a seat, but you might not get the right person or (potential) skill set you need to make that project succeed.

Of the 3 above, technical skills and interest can balance one another out. Strong skills are great, but there has to be some interest. Interest and excitement can balance out someone who doesn’t have the strongest technical skills yet, but who can have the potential for it. And again, personality is extremely subjective.

(And as a side note, my friend is still hunting. If there is anyone in Winnipeg who is looking for a recent graduate DBA, drop me a line and I can put you in contact with her.)