The 8^th of November Dotway will give our first breakfast seminar in Gothenborg. It is free of charge and everyone interested in the subject are welcome. I know that my two collegues Björn and Truls have moslty looked into the 1.1 version and it is going to be a thrill to see it for me also. This is actually Dotways first "seminar tour" in Sweden and the seminar will be given in Linköping later on during the afternoon and in Stockholm on the 9^th of November in the morning. You can read more about it here: www.dotway.se/silverlight. 

So far I've only got 6 people signed up and I know they have had a full house twice in Malmö. ;( Well, well, hopefully more people will hear about this. The more, the merrier I think.

Wow! Emabarrasing. I didn't realize it was almost a year since I made a promise to keep writing in my blog... Ok. Now I make a new promise, here and now: to never make any promises about writing in my blog. That's definitely a more easy one to keep. Allthough I do actually have a lot of subjects piled up that I want to write about and I hope that I can get started at it in november. But that's not a promise..

I have just spoken about Model View Controller at Pimp My Code that Cornerstone arranged. Yesterday in Stockholm and today in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was a great event and my brain is boiling down all the impressions I got during these two days, Both from hearing the other, in my opinion, excellent speakers but also just from the atmosphere during those two days. Hopefully I will get to do this again.

Anyway, I did promise to hand out my code demos in my blog and here they are: MVC demos.7z (167,42 KB).
(Download 7-zip here). I was worried for a while since out of convenience I placed the SQL Express server database (files) in all projects that needed it. Well, the database had a size of about 2 MB (although very little content) which rendered a total size of about 23 MB.. But 7zip did an amazing compressing job so I think I am home free.

Now, some words about the demos. I did write them all this weekend and rather hastily. I did do some refactoring as I created the next demo and so on, but I did not bother to clean up the old ones. But the total code mass is so small as it is so that should be no problem to you. Also, I wanted the demos as clean and simple as possible in order to demonstrate different aspects and flavours of Model View Controller. Hopefully I did manage this. Although I do admit I would have liked to tidy the code a bit. But what the heck. Enjoy or destroy.

Nevertheless, feel free to contact me if you have any question about something. My name is tobias.fjalling and I work at dotway.se. I think you can figure out the rest.

Here my powerpoint slides too: MVC.pdf (0,4 MB)

PS. I just gotta do something abour this crappy blog GUI of mine. This is embarrasing too...

Last week, the Öredev 2006 conference took place. I though it was a great event and I listen too many interesting speakers. I'll probably get back to write some reflections on some of the sessions in later blog posts.  My own workshop session took place last Tuesday and I was assitested with Göran Halvarsson at Dotway for this session. I thought the workshop went fine although I have'nt taken part of the workshop evaluations just yet..  As I been writing previously, the workshop was based on the ASP.NET AJAX July CTP rather than the newly released beta 2 version.  Not that it mattered that much I though since the concepts are the same.

I just sent the workshop labs and the instructions for the walkthroughs to Michael Tiberg, the project leader of Öredev, so they should be dowloadable from the Öredev website soon.  However, I've put in a lot of effort to convert the labs into the beta 2 syntax. This is quite cumbersome since much of the client control documentation still is missing at the ajax.asp.net web site. I'm almost done however, and I promise I will write about my endevaours with this matter in a future blog post.

I've been so tuned in lately on upgrading a .NET introduction course for Dotway, the company I work for, that I've totaly missed out on the ASP.NET AJAX beta 1 release that occured the 20^th of October. Feeling a bit embarassed about this I'm currently catching up on the news also in this release. As always, Scott Guthrie writes a spendid summary of the features in his blog. A lot of the features I found new in the beta 2 release yesterday apparantly were already there in the beta 1 release. Ohh, and sure, Scott writes an exellent summary on the beta 2 release as well.

So I'll be using my weekend to look through the changes that have been made, especially considering the Öredev AJAX workshop comming up on Tuesday. Yippidiye! 

I'm definetly not the only one blogging this news, but ASP.NET AJAX beta 2 has just been released. This would probably mean that we are not far from a final release. This version is said to be feature complete although there already is a CTP version available with some parts that are being worked on. (I'll probably get back with info on what.) My tip of the hand is 2-3 months.

I've just dowloaded the beta 2 and I haven't yet dug into it to see what changes there are since last CTP. But there is one thing I'd like to reflect upon already now.  When installing the beta 2,  it actually states ASP.NET AJAX extention. So we see that the ASP.NET AJAX will be completly integrated with the regular .NET Framework. My bet is that with time,  ASP.NET AJAX will be a natural part of ASP.NET. Also seing in the release notes, that the <atlas: prefix for web controls is changed to the regular <asp: prefix. Nice.

Oh well. Time to get my hands dirty.

Almost forgot. The .NET Framework 3.0 has just been relased too. But I'll refer to a collegue of mine for this news.

It's been a while since I last wrote something in my blog. Last time that happen was just before the Developer Summit conference in the beginning og June. The workshop went very well and I was quite happy that I had put soo much work preparing myself and the material. And guess what! next week I will be doing the workshop once again at the Öredev conference in Malmö on the 14th of November. Actually it is a pre-conference workshop day. This time I will get some assistance of my collegue Göran Halvarsson and since it looks like it's going to be fully booked I most likly will need it.

So why have'nt I blogged in a while? Well, actually, after the Developer Summit conference in June I went on long vacation for ... 13 weeks. Actually I was'nt only relaxing during this time, but did a different kind of work singing in the opera choral here in Malmö. My first visit in a professional choral was a great experience and hopefully it won't be the last time. We were doing Verdis Nabucco in Denmmark. A very intense choral
piece so I did spend a lot time this summer studying Italien lyrics. Weird. And difficult. Not at all like programming actually...  So after this I really have'nt come around to write in my blog althoug I've been back at my regular work for some time now. But that is going to change now I hope... Here we go!

This afternoon I am holding a workshop on developing web applications with AJAX / "Atlas"in Stockholm at the ExpertZone Developer Summit 2006 conference. I've been preparing the material for quite some time now and I fell very exited for the afternoon. Unfortunately my collegue Göran Halvarsson is sick though so I am sure I will be quite busy with som 30 workshop attendees. Well, anyway, I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun.

This is kind of a late notice, but on Tuesday the 10th of May, I will be holding a brief ASP.NET 2.0 presentation in Malmö, Sweden at the company I for: Dotway. A collegue of mine is also presenting Windows Forms 2.0. If you understand Swedish :~) and if you are interested you are much welcome. You can read more about it here.

Today, I ran across several disturbing usability issues using the version handling tool ClearCase. I was to deliver some bug fixes I've made in an older version of an application in a developer stream to a newer version of the application in another stream using the deliver to alternate stream operation in QlearCase. This is certainly a very valuable operation and since this was the first time for me doing so, I was full of steaming anticipation. I thought, "...just a few clicks and I am home free. No cut 'n paste the ol' fashion way. Hell No!"

I had three bugg fixes in the old version. I figured that I could select these three specific work orders, click on deliver to alternate stream and voilá: I'd get some nice merge code screen shoots in which I could select the code to deliver to the main integration stream in a simple way. I've seen and used the merge view in ClearCase before so I knew this would be a breeze.

First issue: ClearCase would not let me choose only the three work orders that contained my bug fixes. I had to pick all work orders, including some other irrelevant stuff that I didn't want to integrate to my main integration stream. Ok. Fine! I'll do so imagining some extra clicks here and there in the merge view.

Some ~250 click procedures later in the merge view, an increasing awareness arose that something was probably deadly wrong. I had been changing some Controls properties in my user interface which meant that many .resx files had been changed. Further more, I seem to have had my Visual Studio.NET project files checked out for either adding or deleting files. Ok, I'll take the pain I figured and continued to click away... All of such changes would be button number 3 anyway (see algorithm below).

Some ~350 click procedures later my brain, set to 'algorithm mode', started looking for a way of improving efficiency. I define the clicking procedure algorithm accordingly:

Step 1: Move the mouse to the "arrow" button.
Step 2: Click!
Step 3: Move you mouse to either button labeled "2" or button labeled "3". Decide this based upon the merge view. Mostly 3.
Step 4: Click!
Step 5: Goto step 1.

Anyone who has performed this algorithm a couple of hundred times knows that your arm gets tired from moving the mouse. It would be much nicer finding a keyboard shortcut for at least one of the clicks. And, voila! There it was: Alt + "Arrow right" for clicking the "arrow button". Now, most keyboard I know of, there is a certain distance between the 'Alt' key and the right arrow key approximately consisting of some 20 cm. If you don't play the piano or otherwise is skillful at playing the classical guitar, you will have to use two hands. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that my algorithm is worth crap with this approach. I still would have to move at least one hand back and forth. Issue #2 as you might guess.

Light bulb!!! Unfortunately it didn't come from me :o) but from a colleague of mine, Mattias Ask: "Put a heavy something on the Alt key." Tada! My heavy wallet finally found a superior purpose other than containing receipts and, thank good, heavy coins.

Damn! The speed is up! 400! 500! 600! 700! Heavens! Does it ever end? A growing suspicion in my mind tels me that it isn't and that I should chicken out and abort. Yes I'll do so! I dare no longer. Just think if something go wrong and I have to undo some 1000 click procedures manually in the code.... Oh, Abort, abort! --- Hey! Wait a second... There is no clear way of aborting this thing and perform a rollback operation. Guess what the third (!) issue is? :( Coming to some Rational sense, I realised there was never any risk of having to undo a thousand clicks manually. And I started to click away again.

Well, I did give up anyway. :o( Even though not so time consuming I never was much for repeating dull tasks. In the end I did find a way of aborting: just closing the merge views as they appeared finally led you to a button with some kind of abort labeling (forgot the exact name). Doing so makes it possible to continue at a later phase. Ok, so I tried that just to see if it was working. Sure enough it did. But ClearCase got confused with three of my remaining files and refused to accept my choices (button "3" off coarse). I guess that makes my fourth devastating issue. So in the end, after some perhaps 1000 click procedures, I ended up with a complete failure. Here we go: back to the good ol' cut 'n paste. Someone recalls my previous blog about technicians sometimes preferring to do things as done before?

I don't like this at all. It seems to me that this should be working, if doing it right. And the fact that it didn't bothers the hell out of me. The most important lesson would off course be to have only one bug fix as one work orders to deliver to an alternate stream. But since I always would have to do this merging graphically there is still one problem as I see it. The main stream containing the later version of the code has normally some continued developed code (that’s why it is the next version, ehh!). And if a delivery from the developer stream to the integration stream has to take place, there normally should be lots of differences between the two versions. In essence meaning many click procedures. I would very much like some ClearCase expert to give me some answer to this question and some advice of 'best practices'. Hello world! Is anyone reading?