The Design-Time Developer : Developer Knowledge

You can take the developer out of the technology company, but you can't take the technology out of the developer

jacobcy — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:19:00 GMT

Despite the title, I'm not a cyborg. For those of you who missed that implication, I'll give you a moment...

Seriously though, even though I've been a non-MSer for a little over 3 months now, I'm still passionate about technology. You can witness the evidence of this in the article I wrote for the Illinois Real Estate Journal. To be honest, I'm surprised that there are not more technology consultants dedicated exclusively to professional services users like lawyers and real estate professionals. Since this is my first publication in the real estate world, check out the article and give me feedback. As technical professionals, I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this article and suggestions for future articles.

Note: If you look really closely at my photo, you'll see that it is in fact a Microsoft shirt that I was wearing. Those "in the know" will even recognize when the picture was taken.

[After-blog mint] Given my new employment, I have decided to officially create a blog to replace the void in my life from giving up this lovely little number. You can find it at http://corporaterealestate.wordpress.com/.

Figured out how to keep this blog active a little bit longer...

jacobcy — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 02:55:00 GMT

That's going to remain a secret, but those of you who make your way to my blog and want to stay in touch, the "Contact Me" functionality should now work properly.

Cheers (and Happy Coding),
Jacob

Farewell to Microsoft

jacobcy — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 22:44:00 GMT

During my three-year tenure at Microsoft, I have met many wonderful people. For those of you I have worked with along the way, I wanted to share my bittersweet news. After three amazing years at Microsoft, I will be leaving to start a new chapter in my life. While I am not writing out the possibility of returning to Microsoft in the future, now is the optimal time in my life to transition to the next phase of my career path. Thank you for joining me on my wonderful three-year roller coaster ride of challenges and opportunities – I hope that our paths will cross again in the future.

I will be moving to Equis Corporation, a real estate advisory group based in Chicago. My new opportunity will be as a transaction advisory associate with Equis. My duties will include working with business clients to identify their real estate usage and needs, work closely with my clients to evaluate the various space options and negotiate the best lease or purchase arrangements to help my clients save money. It will be a great opportunity for me to develop my customer relations and sales skills, while simultaneously having a significant impact on my clients’ businesses.

My last day at Microsoft will be 10/31/2006. Feel free to contact me via this blog if you would like to stay in touch following my transition.

Happy Coding,

Jacob Cynamon

Developer Community Champion/Partner Relations Lead

Microsoft Across America

It's official - our webcast series is off the ground...

jacobcy — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 20:02:00 GMT

Hey everybody,

After several weeks of planning, Glen Gordon and I have our first webcast in the MSDN geekSpeak program! We've got Jim Wilson as our special guest - he will be discussing mobility and Windows Mobile 5.0 development as well as answering your live questions (possibly with short "demos", so you can view the answers live). Full details are available on our MSDN geekSpeak website.

Happy coding,
Jacob

Developer training opportunities in Chicago and beyond

jacobcy — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:44:00 GMT

As a developer community champion (DCC), I always want to keep my community abreast of training opportunities to keep your tech skills sharp and competitive. To that end, I have compiled a couple of training opportunities that you may want to check out.

IMG (Chicago-based)

IMG just recently rolled out some training on Visual Studio 2005 Team System. For those of you looking to get more out of your MSDN Universal subscription, this is one of the first official training programs dedicated to VSTS.

Total Training (DVD-based)

Total Training™ for Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0

Get up to speed with one of the hottest tools for building powerful, dynamic web applications. ASP.NET’s easy programming model makes building real world Web applications dramatically easier. You will learn how to enable an HTML-like style of declarative programming that lets you build great pages with far less effort than with classic ASP or technologies like PHP or JSP.

Happy coding,
Jacob

Stay tuned: upcoming webcast series pilots in September

jacobcy — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 03:00:00 GMT

Howdy loyal blog readers,

We don't have all of the details worked out yet, but I wanted to let you all know about an experimental webcast series that my friend Glen Gordon and I are putting together. Basically, we're going to be interviewing experts on various .NET and developer technologies, while leveraging Live Meeting to allow for dynamic demonstrations. You can find out more on our special blog site - geekSpeak.

We'll be posting more details to the geekSpeak blog as we line up speakers for Wednesdays in September.

Cheers,
Jacob

Omaha beats out Boston!

jacobcy — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 02:05:00 GMT

So I was in Omaha yesterday for the MSDN Event this quarter, and I was overwhelmed by the tremendous enthusiasm that poured forth from the developer community. We usually average about 45% drop-off, meaning that 55% of the registered customers actually attend. Well, we saw only 30% drop off, so that, paired with unprecedented registration of 380 meant that we had a pretty packed house with 266 developers in attendance.

That alone wouldn't be so impressive, except that on the same day, with the same content, half a country away, Beantown could only draw out 265 attendees. Congratulations, Omaha! Keep up the great excitement.

If I didn't live in Chicago, I wouldn't hold such animosity for Boston, but given that I do have massive amounts of Chicago pride, I can only assume that all of the other attendees were stuck somewhere in the labyrinth of the Big Dig.

PS How 'bout them BoSox? Beantown, just remember that there's only one true Sox in our parts.

Resources for fourth webcast: Deploying Visual Basic 2005 Applications with ClickOnce

jacobcy — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:56:00 GMT

Friday, July 21, 2005, 2 PM Central

View here: Deploying Visual Basic 2005 Applications with ClickOnce

Resources for after Friday's webcast

Visit the ClickOnce Team Blog
Using ClickOnce
- Check out the ClickOnce FAQ at windowsforms.net
- ClickOnce articles in MSDN Library
Bootstrapping Custom Components
- Download the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator tool

Tune in for the "RAD for VB 2005 Developers" webcast

jacobcy — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:31:00 GMT

Thursday, July 20, 2006, 2 PM Central

Resources for after today's webcast

Visit the Visual Studio IDE Blog
Writing Correct Code
- See below!
Code Snippets
- Read How to: Create a Basic Code Snippet
- Download the Snippet Editor Tool
- Take part in the code snippet community
Using the My.* Namespace
- Read Development with My articles
BONUS: Download Refactor! for Visual Basic 2005

Do you have other resources to share with the volkswebcast community? Comment to this post with the resource that you find most useful when it comes to rapid application development.

If you are looking all the way down here, you were probably looking above at the "Writing Correct Code" segment. If you did not see it, look above and you will see that it tells you to "See below!" Now that you are back down here, if you viewed the RAD webcast, you probably call that I put out a challenge, in the form of a homework assignment. The goal is to share poorly-written code snippets. Submit, in the form of comments, code that is poorly written*. If you have a file or code project (less than 1 megabyte in size), email it to me and I will post it up here for everyone to enjoy. This will serve as an exercise in identifying what's bad about the code, as well as giving us a chance to exercise some of the "writing correct code" features of Visual Basic 2005.

* Be sure to remove personally-identifiable information from code and resist the urge to share proprietary code.

A couple of BIG upcoming user group events

jacobcy — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 04:06:00 GMT

I'm taking a bit of a breather from all of my event travel of the last few weeks, but I wanted to make sure that you, my loyal blog readers, have advanced notice of a couple large developer conferences coming up in October.

For those of you in the North Central area of the US, the 2006 Annual Heartland Developers Conference will be coming up in Omaha, NE on October 26 and 27 (two days!!!). There is a great collection of speakers, although it appears that anyone can get their name on the list (look at the 4th one down). Added bonus: one of the web buttons has this Charleton Heston-looking fellow, which inspires confidence in me (and strangely, the urge to pick up some automatic weapons the next time I'm at my neighborhood pawn shop).

If you don't live in North Central, don't despair - the devLink Technical Conference is drawing a great set of speakers ('yours truly' not included... this time around) on October 13 in Nashville, TN. This event is free and has lots of great prizes (scroll down to the bottom of the page) - everyone loves prizes, so check this one out :-D

They don't have a Charleton Heston look-alike, but Nashville is one fine-looking city:

Unanswerables from this week's MSDN Events

jacobcy — Tue, 30 May 2006 04:57:00 GMT

It's good to be back home in Chicago. I have had a whirlwind tour, going from Chicago to Des Moines, St. Paul, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Phoenix and Las Vegas. I now have a few days of R&R before the ultimate trip - visiting my two beautiful nieces in Cleveland.

In the mean time, I did have a couple of clarifying comments about some of the developer discussions we had in Phoenix on Tuesday of last week.

Q) How do you encrypt sections of the config file?

A) Thanks to Robert Shelton, Jr., Federal DE for Microsoft, we have a hosted video demonstrating just how to do this invaluable technique

Q) What is the ASP.NET 2.0 web parts support in FireFox?

A) I would like to thank a diligent attendee who pointed out to me that the drag-and-drop layout functionality in the web part framework does not work natively in FireFox. However, with the latest CTP of Atlas and a few tweaks to your config file, you can enable drag-and-drop support for your websites in FireFox.

Post-event resources for Tools and Add-ins for Visual Basic Migration webcast

jacobcy — Wed, 17 May 2006 16:58:00 GMT

Attend Wednesday's webcast on Visual Basic Migration
Time: Wednesday, May 17 at 12PM Pacific
Title: Tools and Add-Ins for Visual Basic Migration
Registration link: Sign up today for live or on-demand viewing

Resources for after the webcast:

Check out the Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center
Visit Upgrade Resources for VB 6.0 Developers
Review the PAG* Upgrade Guidance Book and Assessment Tool
Try out the VB6 Code Analyzer Tool

Happy upgrading! If you have attempted or succeeded with a VB 6.0 -> VB 2005 upgrade, add a comment letting us know about your good or bad upgrade experiences.

This week's MSDN Events question follow-up

jacobcy — Fri, 12 May 2006 21:34:00 GMT

Howdy,

I am so glad that it's Friday. Those of you who attended yesterday's MSDN Event in Roseville, MN can attest to that. To fill you in if you weren't there, my machine started to fail about 15 minutes before my event began. When I say fail, I don't mean that it didn't turn on... in fact, everything appeared to be fine. Until I opened Visual Studio. After about 2 minutes, I got a message that VS 2005 needed to exit. This continued for several iterations. I eventually discovered that I had a corrupted wininet.dll, which prevented me from running Visual Studio, Internet Explorer (hard to demonstrate a web app without it) or even Windows Media Player (I couldn't even show a recording of the 3rd session on Web Parts). Everyone in the audience was amazingly patient and supportive throughout my experience, which shall be referred to as the "Wininet/Loseinet Fiasco". I have since recovered full use of my machine (I think) and decided it was high time to answer your "unanswerables" from this week:

Des Moines, IA

Q) Does the data access application block in Enterprise Library 2.0 support use of typed datasets?

A) Yes [see full details on the application block at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/daab.asp]

Roseville, MN

Q) Is Enterprise Library 2.0 thread-safe?

A) The only application block that is explicitly listed as "thread safe" on the PAG website is the Caching Application Block (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/caching1.asp). I have emailed Tom Hollander, of the team that brought us the Enterprise Library, to confirm which blocks are thread safe. Once I hear back from him, I will update this post.

In the mean time, have a great weekend!

Post-event resources for Creating Best-of-Both-Worlds Hybrid Applications with Visual Basic Fusion

jacobcy — Wed, 10 May 2006 06:57:00 GMT

Attend Wednesday's webcast on VB/.NET Interop
Time: Wednesday, May 10 at 9AM Pacific
Title: Creating Best-of-Both-Worlds Hybrid Applications with Visual Basic Fusion
Registration link: Sign up today for live or on-demand viewing

Resources for after the webcast:

Check out the Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center
Check out the Interop Wiki
Read the following articles
View these videos

Some additional resources from Paul Yuknewicz, VB Lead Program Manager:

Hi Jacob,

Thanks for hosting this talk. I hope people liked it.

Here are a few goodies for your blog:

- Great interop, aka “VB Fusion” articles:
o http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun/vbfusion/
- Snippet for “Set desktop wallpaper” I used in the movie collection starter kit (attached)
- Download Amazon-enabled movie collection starter kit:
o http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/starterkits/default.aspx
- Cool PInvoke article:
o http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/pinvoke.asp
- Resource for other PInvokes:
o www.pinvoke.net

Best,
Paul

Learn how and when to migrate your VB6 applications

jacobcy — Tue, 02 May 2006 23:24:00 GMT

Wednesday, May 3, 2005, 11 AM Central

Details: This webcast explores the what, why, and when of migrating from Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic 2005. We will introduce and explain the migration decision matrix and present migration strategies from a high-level perspective. This session is a prerequisite for the two demonstration-based sessions to follow, covering Visual Basic Fusion (interoperability) and Visual Basic Migration.

View here: Best Practices for Upgrading Visual Basic 6.0 Assets to Visual Basic 2005

Resources for after Wednesday's webcast

Visit the VB 6.0 Resource Center
Review the PAG* Upgrade Guidance Book and Assessment Tool
Try out the VB6 Code Analyzer Tool

Got any other useful upgrade/migration resources to share? Comment below to share them with the community.

* PAG = Prescriptive Architecture Guidance (would also have accepted "Patterns and Practices")