Chris Garty's Weblog : Community

Introduction to Dynamics AX for Developers

chrisgarty — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:27:00 GMT

I did a presentation for the Fargo Moorhead .NET Developers Group last night at the Microsoft Fargo office. The agenda was pretty simple and hopefully it was a useful for some of the 15 people that managed to sit through it prior to Andy Vig wowing us with demonstrations of the cool stuff he saw at Mix 08 :)

Agenda:

· ERP Defined

· Let’s have a look…

· Integrated Modules

· Technology

· Developing in Dynamics AX

· Let’s write some code…

Here's a link to the presentation: Introduction to Dynamics AX for Developers

Geek humour: The search dog

chrisgarty — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:52:00 GMT

Rory is the co-host of the DotNetRocks online talk show and a Microsoft MSDN presenter. His blog is quite funny most of the time, and occasionally it is completely hilarious.

I just saw a post he pointed to last week. Check this out.

Ward Cunningham on Patterns and XP

chrisgarty — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:21:00 GMT

Ward Cunningham recently did a great interview with TSS.Net. In the interview he talks at length on some great topics including XP, patterns, team development, communication, simplicity, testing, and feedback.

If you haven't seen it already, it is definitely worth the bandwidth. It is available in two sizes for 56k or DSL

PDC 2005: Will you be there?

chrisgarty — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 19:31:00 GMT

It is almost the end of another year. It has been a VERY eventful 12 months with changes in jobs and countries among other things. It was just over a year ago that I attended PDC 2003 [Edited] in LA, and it was quite a defining time for me. It'll be fun to see what I'm doing by the time PDC 2005 rolls around next year.

If you are a developer working with Microsoft technologies, you need to mark the 13th till the 16th of September 2005 down in your calendar now. I'll be there: http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

Spring has arrived!

chrisgarty — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 19:42:00 GMT

In the land down-under, it is springtime. The birds are chirping louder, the days are getting longer, and the sun is getting hotter. I even got sunburnt playing soccer on Sunday :).

And for .Net developers Spring in another form has arrived in joyous splendor... Spring.Net 0.6 RC1 has been released.

The arrival of Spring.Net gives .Net developers another solid choice on the road to more loosely coupled component-based systems. Spring.Net will soon be MUCH more than just a lightweight container, but even just as a lightweight dependency injection container it is an excellent offering for the .Net development community.

Martin Fowler’s recent article on lightweight containers and dependency injection highlighted two excellent Java offerings; Spring and PicoContainer. Now both of these alternatives are available to the .Net world.

Whether you use a dedicated dependency injection container like PicoContainer, a service locator offering like .Net's own System.ComponentModel namespace, a pluggable model like the provider pattern, or a dependency injection container ‘with more’ like Spring.Net the important goal of separating configuration from use during .Net software development has never been more widely supported or easier to achieve.

A Big Change: I’m Joining Microsoft

chrisgarty — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 00:59:00 GMT

I don’t have a firm start date or travel plan yet (I have my final visa interview on Friday), but I have accepted a position with Microsoft Business Solutions in Fargo, North Dakota to be a Program Manager (PM) in the Microsoft Business Framework (MBF - my previous mention of it, announcement, presentation) team. I expect to fly out sometime between the 9th and 19th of October and start in Fargo between the 25th of October and the 1st of November.

I had mentioned MBF and described it (based on some correct and incorrect knowledge pulled from around the web) previously (May 11). Here is what I wrote:

“[MBF] is an exciting area of technology for Microsoft since it touches so many 'hot' areas: Microsoft's business application development (Green), service oriented architecture (Indigo), object relational persistence (ObjectSpaces), lightweight process support (in-process Biztalk process engine), and model driven architecture (Whitehorse) to name a few.”

And so now I'm going to be involved in building this framework and getting it into the hands of developers and customers around the world!.

How did you find out about this position?

I really love my current position at iP3, but about 8 months ago (March 2004) I sat down and had a think about other things that I would really enjoy working on. Sometime later I went onto the careers site and submitted my resume. I originally applied for a different position as a Software Development Engineering Lead, but I had mentioned in my initial communications with the Microsoft technical recruiter that a program manager position was something that interested me in the medium- to long-term and the guys in the MBF team decided I would be better suited to a PM position right now.

Do you get to write code?

I have heard that Program Manager’s write code as examples for SDE’s (developers) and to test out the products. In my case, MBF is a framework for developers so I probably will be writing a bunch of code.

Do you get to work with the community?

I hope so, but I’m unsure. Hopefully I'll be able to put my presentation skills to work and hopefully I be able to post information regularly on my site about my experiences and about the product as it nears release.

Do you get to influence product direction?

I'll have a lot to catch up on and they are all very smart people, but I sure hope I can put a little piece of me in there.

Why the MBF team? What products other than MBF will you be involved with?

Because they are working to raise the level of abstraction that developers work at like never before and MBF will have a huge impact on how businesses build business applications. The MBF team is also involved in a lot of the areas that I have found so interesting for so long including distributed systems, web services and service oriented architecture (Indigo), ERP’s (Green), model driven architecture (Whitehorse), business processes and workflow (BizTalk), and object relational mapping (WinFS/ObjectSpaces).

Why Fargo, North Dakota and not Redmond?

That is where the a large part of the team for MBF is based. The Great Plains company was based in Fargo when Microsoft purchased it and turned it into Microsoft Business Solutions. It seems like a great environment and a great little city. Maybe I’ll get an opportunity to work in Redmond at some time in the future.

Where is Fargo? How big is Fargo?

Here is a map of Fargo (zoom out for a better idea of the location). Here is the Microsoft description of the Fargo office location.

The “I’m going to work at Microsoft” chat usually goes something like this:

Other person: Wow! Congratulations.

Chris: Thanks

Other person: But where/what is Fargo?

Chris: Fargo has about 180,000 people. It is near the border with Canada in the middle. Did you see the movie ‘Fargo’?

Other person: Wow. That’ll be small/cold…

Yes, I know it is going to be a lot colder than anything I have experienced, but hopefully it won’t be too hard to get used to.

With regards to the size (120,000 metro, 180,000 greater Fargo area), Fargo is about the same size as Hamilton (the city I grew up in) so it’ll be like going home :). Minneapolis-St. Paul (3-4 million?) is about three hours drive away, just in case ;).

How long was the interview process?

By the time I get there it will have been about 6 months since I submitted my resume. That is probably pretty fast for an international hire.

How did you prepare for the interview process?

I read “How Would You Move Mount Fuji?”, The Technical Careers at Microsoft weblog by Zoe and Gretchen, Chris Sells’ Interviewing at Microsoft page, and a couple of weblog posts (1, 2, and 3).

Aren’t you the head of R&D for iP3? What is happening to iP3?

I handled a great number of things at iP3. Different people and groups of people are going to pick up many of the responsibilities I had. iP3 has a bright future, and I'm proud to be involved with it. I still have a small shareholding in iP3. I won’t be losing contact and Ahmed has talked to me about assisting with advice during the transition and in the future.

Are you sad to be leaving the Melbourne developer community?

Yes. But I’m not really leaving entirely since I’ll still be on the mailing lists and hopefully I'll be regularly in touch.

You are leaving behind your current job, girlfriend, developer community, soccer club, family, and friends. Are you sure this is going to be worth it?

It is a big change, and I hope it will be worth it. This change feels good and I’m really excited to be helping to ship a product that I think will have a huge effect on business applications development!

Thanks!

This is such a big change for me and such a big move that I feel compelled to say thanks to a bunch of people and include answers to a bunch of questions that I have had from people over the last couple of days (for some) and weeks (for others).

Thanks to all the great people at iP3 for creating such a wonderful work environment over the past three years as we grew and learnt together… Madhu, Hafeez, Phil, Nishi, Bronson, Kestrel, Sachin, Lance, Kevin, Sunny, Joe, Alastair, Pamela, Paul, Nathalie, Kat, Jasmine, Collette, Ron, Mario, Don, Ken, John, Andrew, Chris, Michael. A special thanks to my friend, coach and mentor Ahmed, for guiding me and teaching me over the past four years at iP3 and PwC.

Thanks to .Net (MDNUG and the Stanski list) and agile (VAMSIG and MXPEG) developer communities. The knowledge and experience I have gained and the support I received through the Australian and Melbourne software development communities over the past couple of years has been hugely beneficial. A special thanks to my friends Steve Hayes (MXPEG) and Bill Chesnut (MDNUG) for the opportunities you have given me. A special thanks also to the Microsoft developer and architect evangelists Jason McConnell, Charles Sterling (Chuck), Frank Arrigo, David Sajfar, David Glover, Nigel Watson, Nils, Bill K and many others.

Thanks to my friends (esp. Kamil, Steve, and Hamish) and family and the guys from my soccer club.

And finally, thanks to Kerri (who is staying in Melbourne) for all her love and support throughout the past 4 years and through the changes of the last six months.

And now…

I’ll be making a move sometime around mid-late October, but in the meantime if you have any questions then shoot them my way and I’ll do my best to answer them. I know some will be interested in more personal stuff and some in the technology and recruitment angles so I’ll probably just answer the technology and recruitment questions here and leave the personal material for offline and email.

MDNUG: DotNetNuke on the 28th of September

chrisgarty — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 19:52:00 GMT

The next MDNUG (Melbourne Microsoft Developer Group) meeting will be on the 28th of September.

Frank Arrigo just posted a good summary:

Microsoft joins forces with local user groups and brings you the DotNetNuke Development Team (Scott McCulloch and Phil Beadle). Don't miss this introduction to DotNetNuke and why this open source, solution kit portal application has become one of the most successful open source projects utilizing Microsoft ASP.NET.

The session will start with an overview of the DotNetNuke Features then take a look at the High-Level Architecture before diving into some advanced topics such as Skinning and Module Development and finish with Open Source Challenges.

It sounds great and it should cover the whole meeting time. That would make this the first meeting in four months where I haven't given a presentation ;)

I hope you can all make it!

MDNUG: Melbourne MS Developer Group - Meeting Review - 24 August 2004

chrisgarty — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:39:00 GMT

Last night we had the monthly MDNUG meeting at Microsoft's offices in Melbourne.

Thank-you everyone for an excellent meeting. A special thank-you to Jill Martindale for hosting the meeting, Brett for his impromptu talk on TechEd 2004, Todd Mitchell for his thoughts on WSE 2 and Reflector, Will for his list of links and information about blogging, Adrian for his information about Reflector plugins, Matt Cosier for his AU TechEd 2004 photos, and to the ten people that gave us a one minute ‘Who am I?’ talk.

We had about 40 people present last night and did some ‘hands up polling’. Here are the (very) approximate results:

'What do you do?' Statistics

Mostly C# developers – 15

Mostly VB developers – 10

Mostly ASP.Net developers - 15

Mostly Win forms developers – 15

Mostly Back-end developers – 10

‘Why didn’t you attend TechEd?’ Statistics

Attended – 1

Didn’t attend – 39

Couldn’t afford the cost – 10

Couldn’t afford the time – 4

Time and cost – 5

Not interested – 6

Topics too wide in focus – 3

Would have gone if it was MSDN/Developer specific – 4

Further Information About Topics

Please see William Luu's list and the addition list of links below for further information on the topics we discussed:

'Top Ten .Net Developer Tools' List

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/07/MustHaveTools/default.aspx

Developer Education/Information Videos

The Indigo building tour video - http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=28161

TheServerSide.Net tech talks - http://www.theserverside.net/talks/index.tss

Microsoft Reality TV - MSDN's Channel 9 - http://channel9.msdn.com/

Channel 9 Videos via RSS - http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=14

Enterprise Developer News and Information

http://www.theserverside.net/

Object Relational Mappers

NHibernate - http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=28038

OJB.Net - http://ojb-net.sourceforge.net/

WinFS (Longhorn) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/pillars/WinFS/default.aspx

Data Access Layer Generators

LLBLGen - http://www.llblgen.com/

CodeSmith - http://www.ericjsmith.net/codesmith/ (See also: http://www.codegeneration.net/)

WSE 2.0

WSE 2 Home - http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/wse/default.aspx

DotNetRocks on WSE 2 - http://www.franklins.net/fnetdotnetrocks/dotnetrocks.aspx?showid=69

MS RD Benjamin Mitchell - http://benjaminm.net/

MS RD John Bristowe - http://bristowe.com/blog/

WSE 2 Trace Tool - http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=28219

Mitch Denny on WSE 2 - http://notgartner.com/category/62.aspx

Reflector Plugins

Dump to files - http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/FileDisassembler.aspx

Reflector graph - http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/archive/2004/06/12/411.aspx

Random

Microsoft Business Framework (for Paul) - http://weblogs.asp.net/chrisgarty/archive/2004/05/24/140059.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/timbrookins/archive/2004/05/10/129124.aspx

NUnit (Unit Testing) - http://nunit.org/

Australian .Net Mailing List - To Subscribe: send "subscribe dotnet <Your Name>" in the body of an email to: imailsrv at stanski.com

Next month's meeting will be on the 28th of September. See you all there!

Update: added links to Will's meeting write-up.

What makes a good open-source project?

chrisgarty — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 20:48:00 GMT

Ted Neward made an interesting post on TheServerSide.Net about .Net and open source: What makes a good open-source project?

I posted a response and I thought I'd put it here so I could refer back to it later:

Nice post. Those points make alot of sense to me.

I don't think that .Net needs a 'strong open-source community to survive' but I think .Net is stronger with a community that can plug the gaps, create extensions and explore opportunites and innovations. The open-source community allows geeks to explore and think and isn't it better for .Net if this is happening in .Net and not Java? So I think fostering the open-source community is something that should be in Microsoft's interests.

In the world of Java there are many companies. In the world of .Net there (with a few exceptions) is just one.
In the world of Java, an open source project can create something that is 'another option' and people will use it because they are used to having lots of options.
In the world of .Net, an open source project can do the same thing and people are less likely to use it because they are used to only having one option.

I think the mindset of the average Microsoft developer is different. The average Microsoft developer is traditionally a Mort who just wants to use the recommended tools to get stuff done. I think the average Microsoft developer is changing, and so the support for .Net open source is getting larger and louder.

If having a viable open source community is important to Microsoft, then they could do a few things:
1. Stop saying that open source is bad. But rather something more like 'open source is good in certain situations'.
2. Put a Microsoft person as a 'buddy' on open source projects that have achieved a certain momentum.
3. Look for ways to leverage open source efforts rather than replacing them. A good example of this replacement is how VSTS unit test is almost identical to NUnit. If replacement is happening because of licensing issues, then tell the open source community (via the project buddies?) which licenses should be used (or better yet provide one to be used) so that open source projects are extended and not eclipsed. If the replacement is happening for a reason (such as "we want to build on top of a base that we control"), then just explain the reason.

And to add to that...

I'm a big fan of projects such as NUnit, Spring.Net, OJB.Net, and NHibernate. I think they cover areas that Microsoft doesn't at the moment while we are waiting for things like WinFS, MBF, and VSTS to be released. And while they aren't helping .Net 'survive', I definitely believe they are adding something to .Net development... whether that means making it stronger, or more interesting, or easier to develop in, or whatever.

Presentation: Refactoring

chrisgarty — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 22:00:00 GMT

Last week I gave a presentation at the Melbourne Microsoft Developer Group (MDNUG) on Refactoring with code examples in C# (.Net) and using Visual Studio 2005 for some live demonstrations.

The slide deck for my Refactoring presentation is available here.

Presentation: Agile .Net Development - Part 1 - Tools and Basics

chrisgarty — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 21:18:00 GMT

Last night I gave a presentation at the Melbourne Agile Developer Group (MXPEG) about agile .Net development. The group has a higher proportion of Java developers, so I had volunteered to give a view of agile from a .Net perspective.

I only got through half of my material last night, so I'll be talking again next month. Last night I presented information about a set of tools that can help if you are trying to follow some of the Extreme Programming practices while using .Net. Next month I'll be focusing on design decisions in .Net that have helped me create applications with a simple and testable design.

The practices covered were: Coding Standards, Continuous Integration, Refactoring, and Testing.

The technologies covered included: NUnit, NUnitAsp, NUnitAddin, NMock, PicoContainer, FxCop, CruiseControl.Net, NAnt, NCover, and Microsoft's yet-to-be-released Visual Studio Team System.

The presentation is available here.

Australian TechEd 2004

chrisgarty — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 01:07:00 GMT

TechEd Australia will be on the 3rd of August in Canberra. Last week Frank Arrigo posted a schedule for the TechEd Australia developer track. It looks excellent and I sure would love to see the two hours worth of Visual Studio Team System demonstrations.

The early bird deadline for TechEd was recently extended till the 15th of June, so we have another two weeks to try to justify $1500 and a week off work to overselves or someone else :)