One of the great things about being a web developer today is the large amount of tools available to help troubleshoot and optimize applications. Over the past number of years, my team and I have shared information about these tools through the Canadian Developer Connection blog and events like the realDEVELOPMENT_07 tour. Some examples include Firebug, YSlow, YUI Compressor, the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar and others. In fact, I wrote about a great episode of Hanselminutes where Jeff Atwood provided the audience with a list of some tools that he uses.
Of all the tools available for web developers, there’s one that I particularly like and that tool is Fiddler:
Fiddler is a freeware utility written by Eric Lawrence that logs all of the HTTP(S) traffic occurring on your machine. Recently, Eric delivered a presentation at Microsoft PDC 2009 entitled, "Become a Web Debugging Virtuoso with Fiddler", which you download from here. For the uninitiated, this session provides a great primer to Fiddler. Highly recommended.
I like Fiddler a lot because it gives me an ability to watch all HTTP(S) traffic that occurs on my machine and inspect the underlying aspects of this traffic on a request-by-request basis. This is important when building a web application where you want to have a clear understanding of what it's doing underneath the user interface.
Another aspect of Fiddler that I like is the ability to get a better sense of the HTTP(S) traffic itself. For example, with Fiddler I can examine the HTTP headers (including cookies). This is useful when you want to see how your web server utilizes caching via content expiration or compression via GZIP encoding. These aspects turn out to be quite important, especially when trying to reduce the frequency and size of your client requests.
Extensibility in the form of add-ons is the probably the best feature of Fiddler. With this capability, developers are free to extend the functionality of Fiddler to provide more meaningful information around the HTTP(S) traffic that occurs on a machine. There are many add-ons available for Fiddler. For a full listing, check out the extensions page here.
In conclusion, many tools exist for web developers. However, if there's one tool that's an absolute must, it's Fiddler. Download it today!
Mark Wednesday, December 9th on your calendars: that’s when Ottawa’s having it’s next DemoCamp! This one’s a special edition, with the space provided by Microsoft (it’s the venue for the Techdays Ottawa conference, which isn’t being used in the evening) and the presentations gathered by both Ottawa IT Community.ca and Startup Ottawa.
This DemoCamp will take place at the Hampton Inn and Conference Centre (100 Coventry Road) on Wednesday, December 9th at 7:00 p.m. and running until around 8:30. Attendance is free-as-in-beer, and there are plans to do some holiday celebrating once the demos have finished.
There will be two kinds of presentations at this DemoCamp:
- Demos: These are straight-up, five-minute demonstrations of the presenters’ current projects. The only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen is your project in action – no slides allowed! The idea is for the audience to see working products explained by the people who helped build them, not pitches by marketers.
- Ignite Presentations: When something won’t work as a demo – say, an explanation about a specific technology or idea – it’s time for an Ignite presentation. These are slide-assisted presentations with a twist: you;re allowed only 20 slides, and they must auto-advance every 15 seconds for a grand total of 5 minutes. It’s a test of your knowledge of the topic and your presentation skills!
I’ll post more details about the presentation once I get all the details – watch this space!
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
TechDays Canada, Microsoft’s cross-country conference covering how developers and IT pros can best make use of current Microsoft tools and technologies, hits Montreal next week. As with TechDays Halifax, which took place earlier this month, Techdays Montreal is completely sold out – there aren’t any tickets left to be had for love or money.
TechDays Montreal will feature some interesting Quebec twists, one of which is that all the presentations in the developer tracks – that’s Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform and Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices – will be done in French. If you’re an Anglophone, worry not: there will be a translation service to help you out. We’re happy to be able to do our presentations in our freres’ and souers' mother tongue.
On the evening of the first day of TechDays Montreal, we’ll be loaning out our conference space to the fine folks at PHP Quebec and ConFoo so they can hold Career Demo Camp Montreal, a gathering that combines a career advice workshop with a DemoCamp-style event (I’ll be doing a presentation about boosting your career through blogging). Admission to this event is free-as-in-beer, and no, you don;t have to be a TechDays attendee to get in. For more details about Career DemoCamp Montreal, see their sign-up page.
And finally, there’s the matter of how we’ll get there. My coworker Damir Bersinic and I will be hopping in his van and drive from Toronto to Montreal. The usual sort of hilarity is likely to ensue, and we’ll take pictures and shoot some video and post tweets (he’s @DamirB on Twitter, I’m @AccordionGuy) along the way.
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
Sooner or later, unless you’re going to hide in a monastery or settle for entry-level jobs for the rest of your life, you will have to speak in front of a crowd of people. It may happen in front of a small circle of peers, a boardroom meeting, online or in front of an auditorium with thousands of people.
Whether you're like me -- I enjoy public speaking; it's one way I get my jollies -- or whether the thought of standing in front of a crowd to deliver a presentation turns your blood to ice, I think you'll find Scott Berkun's book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, both helpful and entertaining. I’ve been reading this book for a handful of reasons:
- As a way to get myself fired up to take on three weeks of being a track lead at TechDays conferences in cities away from home: next week it’s Montreal, the week after that I’m in Ottawa, and finally, the week after that, Winnipeg.
- To help crystallize my own thoughts on public speaking in order to give advice to my fellow programmers about speaking in front of crowds.
- Because Scott Berkun’s a great writer and has some interesting (and often amusing) stories to tell.
At 240 small pages with decent-sized type and with Berkun’s storytelling style, Confessions of a Public Speaker is a pretty quick read. He provides insights, advice, tips and probably most important of all, true “road warrior” stories that come from his own 15 years of public speaking plus stories of disasters faced by other well-known public speakers. Topics covered in the book include:
- It’s okay to get “the butterflies” before public speaking; the trick is getting them to fly in formation!
- “Umm”, “Ahh” and other verbal placeholders that people use, and how to stop using them (I’m guilty of this one myself).
- How to work a tough room, and why a “tough room” is often actually the fault of the room, not the audience.
- A very important chapter titled The Science of Not Boring People
- Why most speaker evaluations are useless (I may have to show this one to the folks at Microsoft; we use speaker evaluations all the time).
- The little things pros do (Luckily, we do every one on the list at Microsoft!).
- What to do if your talk sucks, what to do if things go wrong, and which of these your audience will notice.
Confessions of a Public Speaker is one of those rare books that’s both entertaining and immediately useful. I’m going to recommend it to my fellow evangelists, and I certainly recommend it to you as well! It’s available directly from O’Reilly in both paper and ebook formats (I went with the ebook, which is US$19.99 / CA$21.45 as of this writing) as well as from the usual suspects: Chapters/Indigo, Amazon.ca and Amazon.
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
Editor’s Note: If you’re an introvert and going to be attending TechDays Montreal, Ottawa or Winnipeg, Career Demo Camp in Montreal or the upcoming DemoCamp Ottawa, or any other tech event, this article’s for you!
My friend Sacha Chua is not someone who you’d think of as an introvert, but she is. Hang out in Toronto’s tech scene and sooner or later, you’ll catch one of her presentations, which she does with all with the energetic bounce that is her stock in trade. She considers technology evangelism and outreach not just part of her job, but part of her life. She has hundreds of blog subscribers, Facebook followers and LinkedIn contacts, and her Twitter followers number in the thousands. Despite all her public appearances, blog entries, and vast social network, she’s still an introvert.
There’s a reason the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” has endured: it’s true (so true, in fact, that Malcolm Gladwell has done quite well for himself telling stories based on this particular nugget of wisdom). Wonderful things arise from opportunities, opportunities often come from connections and the some of the best connections are “weak ties”: those casual acquaintances who exist slightly outside our regular circles and who thus have information that we might otherwise never acquire. For a madly-grinning accordion-playing extrovert like Yours Truly, gathering weak ties is quite easy, and I’ve parleyed many a weak tie into an opportunity.
But what if you’re not an extrovert? Can introverts make the connections that can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead? The answer is yes, by playing to introversion’s strengths, taking advantage of some tools and following the steps in Sacha’s presentation, The Shy Connector, which I’ve included below:
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.]
Here’s a salmagundi of information and links covering the just-released Beta of the up-and-coming Silverlight 4.
(In case you were wondering, I’m using the term salmagundi to refer to a mishmash of little things. A salmagundi is an salad dish dating back to England in the 1600s made of meat, seafood, vegetables, fruit, leaves, nuts and flowers.)
What’s New in Silverlight 4 Beta?
The short answer is: a lot. The long answer is provided by Tim Heuer (one of the program managers for Silverlight), who’s written a blog article titled Silverlight 4 Beta – A Guide to the New Features, which are:
The Tools You Need
Here’s a quick list of what you need to get started with developing with Silverlight 4 Beta.
Must-Haves
Optional
- Windows and Mac Developer Runtimes. If you installed the Silverlight 4 Beta Tools for Visual Studio 2010 above, you’ll have the Windows runtime. These runtimes are for test machines. Please note that these are developer runtimes – there aren’t any ready-for-average-user-consumption Silverlight 4 runtimes yet!
- Microsoft Expression Blend for .NET 4 Preview. If you’re serious about building user interfaces with Silverlight 4 (and WPF 4, if you’re using the full-on Visual Studio 2010 Beta or Visual C# Express 2010), you’ll want to use Blend in conjunction with Visual Studio 2010/Visual Web Developer Express.
- Silverlight Toolkit. This provides additional open source controls for Silverlight applications.
- WCF RIA Services. These simplify building n-tier apps by pairing ASP.NET on the server side with client-side Silverlight. They provide a pattern in which you write application logic running on the mid-tier, control access to data, and end-to-end support for common tasks like data validation, authentication and roles using ASPNET’s services.
Documentation
Getting Started with Silverlight Development
If you’re new to Silverlight development, Tim Heuer’s got a great series of articles on his blog that will get you up and running quickly! You can see the index in his entry titled Getting Started with Silverlight Development or you can hit one of the individual links below:
Silverlight 4 Videos
If you’re an experienced Silverlight developer, you’ll probably want to check out these videos, which show you how to use the new features in Silverlight 4:
Silverlight’s Commitment to the Mac
Jesse Liberty’s MacBook Pro and Cinema Display, running both Win7 and Snow Leopard.
The org chart at The Empire describes Jesse Liberty as the Senior Program Manager of the Silverlight Development Team, but both his business card and he himself will tell you that his title is “Silverlight Geek”. No matter which title you choose, it’s clear that he is the keeper of the Silverlight flame.
In a recent entry on his blog, he wrote:
When I joined Microsoft and started talking about Silverlight, many in the Mac community expressed skepticism about Microsoft’s long-term commitment to the Mac platform. In its most rabid form, the concern was that we were supporting the Mac only preemptively and would drop our support for the Mac as soon as enough Mac developers embraced it (!)
So, 2.5 years later, with the worst not having happened, I have renewed my personal pledge to make sure, to the best of my ability, that Silverlight not only continues to work on the Mac but looks and feels like a Mac app.
And what’s his machine? It’s a MacBook Pro, running both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, hooked to a 24” Cinema Display. He writes:
I absolutely understand company loyalty (and loving the Mac is not disloyal to Microsoft) but I tend to believe that we do best in recognizing the strengths of our allies and our competition.
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
That’s a wrap for the PDC. I spent a fair amount of time meeting partners and visiting the expo so I attended only one more session on XAML 2009. There are many changes coming in the runtime to streamline it and improve the performance across all platforms (WPF, WF and SL4).
I did catch the fact that there was a quiet announcement on the new release of Biztalk Server 2009 R2 in the Future roadmap which will be available in 2010.
After 3 days of cool announcements, it is time to go back to TechDays for the last 3 stops. Your job is to find out more about these new technologies and the best way is to go watch the videos of the sessions at the Microsoft PDC web site.
Good Bye LA!
Here we are with Day 2 at PDC 09. Keynote duties were handled by Steven Sinofsky, Scott Gutrie and Kirk DelBene.
The list of announcements was fantastic again. Steven kicked it off with an overview of the Windows 7 developement and some of the telemetry used. Do you realized that 46,447,784 Aero snap and shake happened during the beta? He also showed some User testing videos which were really funny. He then gave a bit of an overview on IE 9 development and some of the improvements they’re making including Direct 2D graphic acceleration. He closed up with the most amazing announcements. Every paying attendees got a free Touch tablet notebook from Acer. Here’re some photos and the line up to pick them up.
Scott Guthrie than took the stage and made a really big announcement as well. He started by listing the features of Silverlight 4 and then shocked everyone by telling them that the Beta was available the same day. Here’re some of the new features:
- Media support of microphone and camera.
- Business – Printing, rich text, clipboard, Right click and mouse wheel
- Implicit styles, drag and drop, Bidi&RTL, HTML hosting
- Complete out of browser experience in SL4 with Elevated Trust mode
Kirk DelBene then closed the keynote by talking about Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 and announced the immediate availability of the Beta.
I then attended some of the session in the day. The first one was an overview of Windows Identity Foundation. It RTM’d yesterday. It is a claims based system integrated with .NET identity API. It is config driven and usese the same programming model on premise or in the cloud.
I attended Joe Stegman session on the Out of Browser enhancements in SL 4
- Out of browser WebBrowser control included in SL4
- Works only out of browser
- Browser control does not support Opacity, Rotation, Effects, overlay content
- HTML Brush overcomes the above limitation
I then closed the day on a session about Securing REST services in Azure Access Control Service (ACS)
- Based on OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol). A protocol developed with the community like Google and Yahoo.
- Very simple and cool. Implemented all in Azure.
Again you can follow the action on Channel 9 which is broadcasting live from the show floor. And all the session content will be available there as well.
If you’re a techie in Montreal, you want to attend Career Demo Camp on Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Mont-Royal Centre! It’s part tech career guidance conference, part DemoCamp-style event, and an opportunity for developers and start-ups to get together and learn about the job market, see projects that Montreal-area techies are working on and get to know and network with your local nerds. It’s presented by the Confoo conference (taking place in March 2010) and PHUG and will be hosted by Yours Truly and Jean-Luc SansCartier.
Here’s the schedule:
- 6:30 p.m.: Intro to Career Demo Camp
- 7:00 p.m.: Alex Kovalenko - IT Headhunting and Recruiting
- 7:30 p.m.: Joey deVilla; Better Living Through Blogging
- 8:00 p.m.: DemoCamp Introduction
- 8:15 p.m.: DemoCamp Presentations
- 10:00 p.m.: Networking Session
The event is free of charge! All you have to do to attend is sign up at Career Demo Camp’s Registration page.
Microsoft Canada’s providing the space – we booked the Mont-Royal Centre for TechDays Montreal for two days (December 2nd and 3rd) and we weren’t doing anything with the space on the evening of Day 1. We decided to offer the space for some kind of community event, and Confoo and PHUG put together Career Demo Camp. I love doing developer community events and was only too happy to co-host.
The DemoCamp portion of the evening needs people to do DemoCamp-style demos: 5 minutes of “Show and Tell” where you show your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not to do a sales pitch. Think you’ve got a demo in you? Contact Jean-Luc Sans Cartier or Yann Larrivee and let them know you want to demo at Career Demo Camp!
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:
I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!
As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:
There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:
The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:
…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:
Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:
Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:
Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:
The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:
Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:
And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:
Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:
“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”
And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:
Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:
And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:
Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
Wow! What a first day. This year the PDC is again at Los Angeles Convention Center.
Opening Keynote was by Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia and they made lots of announcements around Azure and the services provided plus a whole bunch of new ones as well that will come out later in 2010.
The big first news was that Wordpress has been ported and now runs in Azure. Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress made the announcement and demonstrated it on Azure.
Then it was a rolling thunder of announcements like:
These are just a few of the announcements but in my opinion the most important. There were demos of the whole end to end scenario including the last one which showed an asp.net app from inside the firewall being moved to the Azure cloud using the new models in VS 2010 and then being monitored by the next version of System Center. You’ll be able to view the entire keynote from the PDC09 site soon. Make sure to tune in this morning for the live day 2 keynote. It will be even louder :-)
I also walked the partner and Microsoft fair and got to see a container used to host Azure in the new modern Data Center. Here’re some photos.
I then attended a couple of sessions in the afternoon including one on the new Entity Framework 4.0. This new version will be a game changer in the ORM space. You have to download the Beta and try it.
Stay tune for more PDC 09 coverage and follow me on twitter.
In this episode of Developer Night in Canada (DNIC), John Bristowe (@jbristowe) and Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy) chat with Joel Semeniuk (@joel_semeniuk) about a number of topics including Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS).
Download MP3 Audio - Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (24.59 MB - 53 minutes, 58 seconds)
Show Links
About Joel Semeniuk
Joel Semeniuk is a founder of Imaginet Resources Corp; a Canadian based Microsoft Gold Partner. He is also a Microsoft Regional Director and has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba. Joel has spent the last twelve years providing educational, development, and infrastructure consulting services to customers throughout North America. Joel specializes in helping organizations realize their potential through maturing their software development and information technology practices. He employs a customized and incremental approach, promoting the ability to quickly adopt and tailor processes and technologies that best suit the needs of the organization. Backed by industry best practices and his experience, Joel works with organizations to ensure that their technology supports the vision of their business and is adaptable to the ever-changing marketplace, to accomplish this responsiveness without sacrificing quality, and to realize earlier and greater returns on their technology investment. For Joel and his customers, the ultimate goal is to achieve superior business agility.
About Developer Night in Canada (DNIC)
Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is a podcast produced by John Bristowe (@jbristowe) and Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy) of Microsoft Canada. Its focus is to provide insight and analysis from some of the developers and experts in Canada. The RSS feed for Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is available here. Alternatively, you can subscribe through Apple's iTunes here.
Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and it’ll be going live very soon – expect to hear a number of announcements about it from next week’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC).
I’ll be posting articles showing you how to get into developing on Azure, but if you want to get a head start in the meantime, a good place to go is MSDev, Microsoft’s site that’s packed to the rafters with video training on all sorts of Microsoft platform development topics. There’s a series of training videos covering Azure development, including:
…and more videos are on the way.
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
The next stop on the TechDays Canada cross-country conference tour is Calgary! We’ll be there for most of the week, and the conference itself takes place on Tuesday, November 17th and Wednesday, November 18th at the Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre.
After that, we’ve got the following dates in December:
- Montreal (Sold out!) – December 2nd and 3rd
- Ottawa – December 9th and 10th
- Winnipeg – December 15th and 16th
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
The Empire’s been fine-tuning ASP.NET, SQL Server and the .NET runtime from the get-go, so ASP.NET is a pretty snappy platform. Even so, the fastest of platforms will still run like molasses in January if you don’t do things right. With any platform, there’s a body of best practices for getting the best performances, and with far too many platforms, these best practices haven’t been gathered into a single place.
ASP.NET developer are in luck: I just got notified by Apress of the release of a new book, Ultra-Fast ASP.NET. Here’s the blurb:
Ultra-fast ASP.NET by Rick Kiessig presents a practical approach to building fast and scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server. In addition to a wealth of tips, tricks and secrets, you'll find advice and code examples for all tiers of your application. By applying the ultra-fast approach to your projects, you’ll squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your code and infrastructure, giving your site unrivaled speed.
Learn How To:
- Think about performance issues that will help you obtain real results.
- Apply key principles that will help you build ultra-fast and ultra-scalable web sites.
- Use the ultra-fast approach to be fast in multiple dimensions. You’ll have not only fast pages but also fast changes, fast fixes, fast deployments and more.
- Use techniques that are being used by some of the world's largest web sites.
- Structure your HTML and CSS to create pages that load ultra-fast.
- Utilize tips and tricks for optimizing your ASP.NET and SQL Server code for performance and scalability.
You can order the dead-tree edition of Ultra-Fast ASP.NET online (it sells for USD$49.99, which at today’s exchange rate is CAD$52.32), or if you’re like me and try to get the electronic version when possible, the PDF version sells for USD$34.99 (CAD$36.62 at the time of this writing).
[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]
