*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Last year I received an email from the leaders of the Ann Arbor .NET User Group (AADND http://aadnd.org/) asking me if I could make the trip up to Ann Arbor, MI and speak at their 5th anniversary meeting.  I checked the calendar and quickly agreed for a chance to get back to Ann Arbor where we lived for eight years.  Thus on February 9th I’ll be in Ann Arbor speaking to the group and getting to visit with a lot of friends I haven’t seen in awhile.  Here’s what I’ll be speaking on:

Talk Title: Building the Nullius Filius of Twitter and Facebook in Silverlight, RIA Services and Entity Framework

Abstract

Let’s imagine for a minute Twitter and Facebook had a passionate love affair and produced a child (nillius filius) named Johnny. Although Johnny was born from web-based parents there was a genetic defect that caused Johnny to be born a Rich Internet Application (RIA). In this talk we are going to look at the lessons, trials, tribulations and successes Johnny had growing up being a Rich Internet Application. Hopefully we’ll answer the question: “Is Johnny happy with himself or does he wishes he was born from different parents so he wasn’t a RIA.”

If we’ve met face to face at one point or another and you live within 50 miles of Ann Arbor I fully expect you to be there! (kidding)

Help the organizers plan by RSVP’ing here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=187695341259851 

Also check out the giveaways! This should be a great event with great food, prizes and a very sub-par speaker that promises nothing except he will take a bath before showing up.

See ya there!

I spent several days off and on trying to get VirtualBox to install (version 4.0.2 to be exact).  After numerous things I started shutting down everything to see what was going on.  Turns out after I shut down DropBox the install proceeded.  Up until that point it would only get to about 85% of the way through installation and would disconnect from my local network. 

Hopefully this will help someone down the road.  Oh and if you have any other installation problems, please don’t ask for help here as I am sure I do not know the answer. 

The Hub City .Net User Group will hold it’s January meeting on Jan. 20th from 6:30-9 pm at Joseph Cook Library (Room 305) on the Campus of the University of Southern Mississippi.

Free Registration (help us with food)
Register here: http://hubcitynugjan2011.eventbrite.com/ 

We are privileged to to have Robert C. Cain from Birmingham, Al presenting the following topic:

Data Dude for Dev Guys – Making Database Development Painless and Productive

Abstract
Whether you are a .Net Developer, accidental DBA, or full time database developer, Visual Studio Database Projects, aka “Data Dude” can be a boon to you. In this session we’ll start by reverse engineering an existing database into complete scripts to create the tables, indexes, stored procedures, and more. Deployment strategies will be covered, as well as refactoring and unit testing. Finally we’ll look at the powerful data generation capabilities built into “Data Dude”.

Robert C. Cain is a Microsoft MVP in SQL Development, MCTS certified in BI, and works as a Senior Business Intelligence Architect for ComFrame. He is also a technical contributor to Plurasight Training, and co-author of the book “SQL Server MVP Deep Dives”. Robert has over 20 years experience in the IT field, working in a variety of fields ranging from manufacturing to telecommunications to nuclear power. He maintains the popular blog http://arcanecode.com.

This Month’s Sponsor

A big thanks to Telerik for sponsoring this month’s meeting.  Telerik has graciously offered to purchase food for the meeting.  This month we are going to have BBQ!  Get there early to enjoy fellowship and food.

It is with great joy that I get to announce a new user group in Mississippi starting up.  The group is meeting in Biloxi, MS and is called the Mississippi Coast .NET Users Group.

I will be speaking at the first meeting of the group on November 23rd, 2010. 

The topic will be “Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio”.  Here is an abstract:

Visual Studio is an outstanding tool when it comes to building applications on the .Net Framework. It can be confusing for users when trying to initialize a new software deliverable though. For example, how do you name your projects? Where do you put third party assemblies so they can be re-used? How do you set things up for an n-tier architecture? And the list goes on. I’ve given various talks throughout the US and it never fails that I end up in a conversation with multiple people on what are the best ways to organize projects within Visual Studio. This session should answer these questions and provide some proven guidance that works. In this session we’ll cover some best practices on how to organize your projects and solutions. We’ll also look at some tricks and guidance on how to map your folder structure to your namespaces. During the session we are going to build a new application from scratch and cover how to initially incorporate an n-tier design when initializing your project. Even if you are an experienced .Net developer this is one session you will not want to miss!

Hope to see you there!

The other day I mentioned I was working on an API to communicate with Sonic, an enterprise messaging system.  After getting the API to the point where I wanted to send it to some other developers I wanted to package everything up as on DLL.  ILMerge to the rescue!

Sonic provides their own DLLs that were ported from Java for .NET developers.  There are 7 DLLs you have to reference in order to communicate with Sonic.  Here’s how this can be done using ILMerge by simply modifying the project file using an after build target.

The following below does a few things.

1. It takes all of the assemblies that are outputted to the build directory and passes that to the ILMerge command.
2. Once they are merged the files are deleted.

   1: <Target Name="AfterBuild">

   2:     <CreateItem Include="@(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths)" Condition="'%(Extension)'=='.dll'">

   3:       <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="IlmergeAssemblies" />

   4:     </CreateItem>

   5:     <Exec Command="&amp;quot;$(MSBuildProjectPath)..\..\ThirdPartyAssemblies\Ilmerge\Ilmerge.exe&amp;quot; /allowDup /log /keyfile:$(AssemblyOriginatorKeyFile) /out:@(MainAssembly) &amp;quot;@(IntermediateAssembly)&amp;quot; @(IlmergeAssemblies->'&quot;%(FullPath)&quot;', ' ')" />

   6:     <Delete Files="@(ReferenceCopyLocalPaths->'$(OutDir)%(DestinationSubDirectory)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />

   7:   </Target>

Very easy as you can see although the syntax is a little finicky.  What does this mean? It means that developers can just add the one DLL to their project and everything works. 

Hopefully this will help someone as well.