I started out the chronicle  that I recently wrote giving an angle at the information society we live in today. This is also what I will cover as a starter in this first web 2.0 blog post.

For developers, the information society is very real indeed since the knowledge base required for programming is huge these days. I have only been in the industry for about 10 years, but even in this time I can surely notice the change from when I began. In the .NET field alone, which is my field of specialty, there are thousands of classes that are good to know of. It is not always that documentation provided from Microsoft covers the need that exists.  Also, the number of frameworks, libraries, components, third party open source products, tools etc seem to have exploded the last couple of years. It is not easy these days to call yourself an expert developer of .NET; Nor in any other programming domain for that matter. Most, if not all, people don’t call like to be called experts in such a broad field because of the expectations it may raise. My experience is that an overall humble attitude resides when it comes to programming knowledge nowadays. Something that is quite alright I think. We should be humble for the unknown I think.

Anyway, for developers, the provided information on the Internet has become a reliable source of information. This includes blogs, communities, articles, wikis etc. There is less of a need for developers today to keep track of all intricate details of language and frameworks since there are so many resources available out there. So many people share their experience in blogs and communities which many times makes is quite easy to find a solution to a specific problem.

However, we do have to distinguish between semantics and syntax. Syntax being the language we program in and I dare to say knowledge of the Frameworks provided to us; Semantics being how we program in the language and Frameworks. Both types of knowledge are to be found on the Internet. Semantics, however, is so much harder to learn than syntax knowledge. Semantics deal with the architecture and the design of software and this takes knowledge (lots of reading) and experienced practice (lots of programming).  We are talking years of studying and programming in a professional domain specific environment. The funny thing is that even though I think I’ve reached perhaps the middle of the tunnel, occasionally it seems like I am thrown back to the start of it due to some new experience or gained knowledge. What other profession allows you from time to time to have the sensation of being a rookie again?  To me, this is fun. And frustrating.

Well, this blog post kind of made the introduction of what I am hoping to become a series of blog post in the web 2.0 field. I have many thoughts to share, especially when it comes to wikis as software development tool in software projects. So stay tuned for upcoming post if you’re interested of my thoughts.

For about a year now, I have on a monthly basis been writing a chronicle for the Computer Sweden magazine. I receive a software developer related question in various software areas each month. Most of these chronicles can be found here, but you will need to be able to speak Swedish in order to understand them… J

However, each month I do end up with the same kind of struggle: to shorten the chronicle to the text length I am allowed to have. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. On the contrary I think a chronicle should be enjoyable and somewhat light weight to read, not covering too much details and especially not be too lengthy. In short: enjoyable to read. Don’t know if I accomplish this really but I do my best.

However, it is really difficult and a very special art of writing to be able to be precise and tell something meaningful on a limited length of text. I believe it was August Strindberg, a quite famous Swedish author who once said: “I do not have time to write short”. Now, I am definitely not comparing myself with Strindberg but I do understand what he means. All too often I have been writing emails to my colleagues at Dotway that perhaps have been a few pages to long (pages being a metaphor obviously... J ). Some colleagues have even coined such long mails as “Tobias mail”… all to my utter frustration of course. I dare to say that I really do try to shorten long mails down, but sometimes this just takes too much time to go all the way. I always do spend long times reviewing such long mails so that the structure is ok and understandable and that spelling and grammatical is ok. Anything else I think would be disrespectful to whomever I am writing to since I am opting for precious time on my account.

As a side note: The last couples of month I have a couple of times successfully changed tactics going from quantity to multiplicity … J Maybe this is the road to take.

When it comes to the Computer Sweden chronicles, the editors leave me no choice and I really have to spend time to be brief and consistent. Even though I occasionally has slipped the quota and received a gentle and friendly mail distributed slam on my fingers from the editors, most often I have been able to keep myself at a maximum of 120% of allowed text length... Anyway, I am thankful to the Computer Sweden for giving me this opportunity to practice being brief and nail those specific points.

So why am I writing all of this? Well first of all because it is my blog. I can write whatever I want in it without bothering if people will read it or not. Second of all, in the last chronicle I wrote, which is supposed to be published soon, I did add a reference in the end of it to my own blog. Why? Because the topic, web 2.0, is huge! I actually have a lot of more thoughts on the subject than what I could fit into the chronicle. And the chronicle being a web 2.0 chronicle, it seems like the perfect ending for it too. J So after this --- ehem --- rather lengthy blog post, I intend to get right at writing a blog entry about web 2.0.  

This week I finally did something about my blog engine. I have gotten tired of the DasBlog skin I was using so I found another one that I liked. So finally, I downloaded the last version of DasBlog v2.0. It was over 2 and a half years since I looked at the source code the last time (open source) and it seems like people have been doing a great job since then bringing new functionality to it. I am not sure if I like/understand everything that I see in the code yet, but it is definitely an amazingly good open source project. Many thanks to those of you who have contributed with your time to make this possible!

Btw, there might be some errors still on this new site of mine due to missing configuration, so please let me know if you find one. Promise I’ll buy you a beer next time you’re in Gothenburg if you do

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.