Sam Abraham

In the past few weeks, I have been busy reading Murach’s Javascript and jQuery. I had already been introduced to the Murach’s book series and knew their books as a preferred choice for instructors and students alike in various technical training schools I have had a relationship with and was glad to have been extended the opportunity to finally get to read one myself.

Murach’s Javascript and jQuery is designed to serve both those looking for a quick desk reference as well as those looking to learn Javascript, jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile in more detail.

I particularly appreciated the authors’ choice to present all related jQuery libraries and necessary Javascript background information in one book thereby making it a single source of reference for all these technologies.

In conclusion, I would definitely recommend this book to my fellow developers and IT students looking to either get introduced to or carry a desk reference on jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.

For more information on this book, checkout its website: http://www.murach.com/books/qury/index.htm

Wayne Filin-Matthews, Microsoft’s Architect Role Owner, was our special guest speaker for the West Palm Beach Developers’ Group January meeting. Wayne shared with us his vision for the future and what Microsoft is doing to make computing truly ubiquitous.

Wayne also spoke about the international Association for All IT Architects (IASA) and our SE Florida Chapter which organizes a highly regarded annual in-classroom Architect Core training class held in Ft Lauderdale. For more information on IASA and our local chapter, please visit http://www.iasaglobal.org/iasa/South_East_Florida.asp

We appreciate Wayne’s second visit to our group and look forward to his next visit.

Below are some photos of the event:

I am very excited to be speaking at IT Palooza next week. As this event’s audience will span professionals working in different facets of Information Technology, I chose to speak on NuGet, an essential tool for any Microsoft Stack developer, as the topic can be of value to managers, architects, IT personnel, as well as developers.

For more information on ITPalooza, please visit: http://itpalooza.e2mktg.com/

To register please visit: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=627

Below are the abstract and speaker bio:

Leveraging NuGet for Open Source and Enterprise Environments

NuGet is an open source package management system for .NET and Visual Studio that makes it easy to add, update, or remove external libraries in a .Net Project. In this session, we will be covering how NuGet makes open source libraries easily discoverable and usable. We will then move to demonstrate "NuGet for the Enterprise" as we setup a local library repository and configure NuGet to ensure external library versioning is consistent among project developers.

Speakers:
Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5, 4.0 and Silverlight 4) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) striving to leverage proven technology solutions to produce cost-effective, quality software that meets customer needs, timelines and budgets. He is currently a member of the Software Engineering Team at SISCO, the leader in maritime security solutions with customers including Princess, Carnival, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as well as the US Coast Guard. A strong believer in learning through sharing and the value of community fellowship, Sam has been actively involved in the local community as leader of the West Palm Beach Developers' Group, volunteer board member at the International Association for All IT Architects South Florida Chapter (IASA), and former volunteer at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Our special guest speaker at our October meeting was Joe Healy, Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist for the state of Florida (http://www.devfish.net)

Joe demonstrated how one can easily develop for Windows 8 using XAML, Javascript and C++.

Below are some photos of our 10/23/2012 event:

In the next few lines, I will be providing a brief review of Telerik’s JustDecompile, a free .Net decompiler and assembly browser.

In using Telerik’s 2012 Q3 JustDecompile release, one can see many great features.  First off, I loved the built-in options for loading .Net assemblies automatically using the Open->Load Framework menu option. Other options enable loading assemblies from GAC, XAP URL or locally from disk. The ability to create an “Assembly List” is quiet handy for grouping and saving a “List” of DLLs to load.

All loaded assemblies are shown in the left panel of a split-panel screen. Clicking an assembly expands all namespaces within. Drilling further to class level displays the actual source code in the right panel in either IL, C# or Visual Basic.

In conclusion, JustDecompile has grown and quickly matured into an indispensible handy tool for us developers. Telerik’s effort in maintaining and updating JustDecompile as well as the company’s commitment to keeping it free is much appreciated and valued.

The past few weeks have been particularly busy as I continue to dedicate a bigger portion of my free time to refreshing my memory and enhancing my knowledge of best practices pertaining to technologies we plan on using for a major upcoming project.

In this blog post, I will be providing a brief overview of my latest reading “Professional ASP.Net MVC4” by Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson and K. Scott Allen. This book is a must read for web developers looking to enhance their MVC expertise with best practices and tips shared from recognized industry experts.

This book takes the reader on a 16-chapter long journey towards being a better ASP.NET MVC developer with chapter 16 putting all information covered in practical context by dissecting the implementation of Nuget.org, a real-life open-source, ASP.NET MVC project.  All code samples referenced in this book are conveniently accessible via NuGet, a free, open-source Library package manager that installs as a Visual Studio Extension.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 thoroughly cover MVC’s various components: Controllers “C”, Views “V” and Models “M” respectively.

Chapter 5 covers additional extension methods (Helpers) provided to speed and ease the use of common HTML elements such as forms, textboxes, grids, to name a few…

Chapter 6 tackles built-in validation while providing examples and use cases on implementing custom validation that plugs into the MVC framework.

Chapters 7 thru 13 discusses the latest on Membership, Ajax, Routing, NuGet and the ASP.Net Web API.

Chapters 12 (Dependency Injection) and 13 (Unit Testing) demonstrate a big competitive advantage of MVC with its ease of test-ability and plug-ability.

Chapters 14 and 15 targets the advanced developer showcasing how to extend MVC to customize and replace every piece in the framework.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 as an excellent read for both developers already using MVC as well as those getting started with the framework. 

Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group. 

You can access my reviews of books I recently read:

• Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns
• Professional WCF 4.0
• Inside Windows Communication Foundation
• Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008 series

In the next few lines, I will be providing a brief review of Wrox’s Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett.

Design patterns have been a hot topic for many years as developers looked to do more with less, re-use as much code as possible by creating common libraries, as well as make their code easier to understand, extend and collaborate on.

Scott Millett’s book covered classic and emerging patterns in a practical presentation that demonstrated with thorough examples how to put each pattern to use in the context of multi-tiered ASP.NET applications. The author’s unique approach and content earned him much kudos in the foreword by Scott Hanselman as well as online reviews.

The book has 14 chapters of which 5 are dedicated to a comprehensive case study. Patterns covered therein include S.O.L.I.D, Gang of Four (GoF) as well as Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Applications.

Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group.

Best regards,

--Sam

You can access my reviews of books I recently read:

• Professional WCF 4.0
• Inside Windows Communication Foundation
• Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008 series

My Investigation of WCF internals have set the right stage to revisit Professional WCF 4 by Pablo Cibraro, Kurt Claeys, Fabio Cozzolino and Johann Grabner.

In this book, the authors dive deep into all aspects of the WCF API in a reading targeted towards intermediate and advanced developers.

Book quality so far as presentation, code completeness, content clarity and organization was superb. The authors have taken a hands-on approach to thoroughly covering the WCF 4.0 API with three chapters totaling 100+ pages completely dedicated to business cases with downloadable source code readily available.

Chapter 1 outlines SOA best-practice considerations. Next three chapters take a top-down approach to the WCF API covering service and data contracts, bindings, clients, instancing and Workflow Services followed by another carefully-thought three chapters covering the security options available via the WCF API.

In conclusion, Professional WCF 4.0 provides a thorough coverage of the WCF API and is a recommended read for anybody looking to reinforce their understanding of the various features available in the WCF framework.

Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group.

All the best,

--Sam

As the saying goes, it’s better late than never. Such is the case with my overdue West Palm Beach Dev Group August 2012 meeting report. Our August meeting was full of both knowledge and adventure.

It comes as no surprise that the knowledge was brought to us by our favorite DotNetNuke Technical Evangelist, Will Strohl. Will introduced and thoroughly presented the new social features in DNN 6.2.

Unfortunately, our meeting date coincided with Hurricane Isaac having just passed us by. Aside from road closures and floods that kept public schools closed for two days, our meeting host, PC Professor, had to close the school the day of our meeting on a short notice due to flooding which we found out about at midnight on the day of the event.  This left us scrambling to find an available alternate meeting location close enough to our original venue. Cancelling the meeting was always an option, but we opted to keep it as the very last resort.

Luckily, we were fortunate to find a meeting room at the Hampton Inn only a few minutes away from our original location. Having heard of our challenge, our event sponsor, Applied Innovations, stepped-in and covered the meeting room cost in addition to the food and beverages.

We would like to thank our volunteers and sponsors who made that event a success: Jess Coburn, CEO and Cara Pluff, Director of Sales at Applied Innovations, Dave Noderer for suggesting the alternate venue and Venkat Subramanian for his hard work keeping our members informed of the venue change and for being our event photographer.

We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming meetings:

-September 25th, 2012 with Jonas Stawski, Microsoft MVP

-October 23rd, 2012 with our Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Joe “DevFish” Healy

-Ending an exciting year will be our November 27th meeting with Dycom Industries’ Senior Software Developer, Tom Huynh.

All the best,

--Sam

Earlier this week marked our fifth anniversary as an INETA group, a fact that we had forgotten but thankfully INETA remembered. In celebrating our membership, INETA sent us a certificate recognizing our membership which we will be sharing with our members at our upcoming meeting.

It‘s been a great two-year tenure for me as group co-coordinator working with Venkat Subramanian who had been involved with the group since its inception.

Moving into the future we hope to grow both group membership and leadership. We continue to strive to bring added value to our membership which can only happen with your ideas, feedback and involvement in our community-driven group.

Our next almost sold-out meeting will be taking place on 8/28/2012 6:30PM (Register at: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=607) . Will Strohl, DotNetNuke’s Technical Evangelist will be presenting to us an overview on getting started with DNN’s latest 6.2 version all while taking us on a deep dive into its built-in social networking integration features. There is still time to register, but don’t procrastinate!

Our September meeting will feature Jonas Stawski, Microsoft MVP sharing with us on SignalR while October will bring us the much anticipated visit by our Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joe Healy who will be talking to us about the latest with Windows 8. Joe will be also presenting in Miami the next day after our event in case you miss his West Palm appearance.

We look forward to meeting you at our upcoming meetings.

All the best

--Sam Abraham