Rails in .Net

John Lam just announced publicly that IronRuby is able to run Rails. It doesn’t run it fast at this point, but it is compatible. Speed and performance will be drastically improved as the project develops. This is a good thing for .Net to be able run Rails; it’s only going to make the .Net platform richer with its available languages.

When I was at RailsConf last May Microsoft was almost completely ignored in the normal part of the conference. I think there was a single session related to installing and deploying on the Microsoft platform.

In the hallways Scott Hanselman and Chris Sells got some good hallway conversations going with Martin Fowler and other ThoughtWorks people. This year and even more in the following year it will be much harder to ignore the Microsoft implementation of the language.

ALT.Net Functional Programming

I got to sit in Dustin Campbell‘s Functional Programming session and really enjoyed it.  I’m starting to wrap my mind around what makes something functional programming. Next step is to download the bits and test it out.

ILT MOC and E-Learning

Yesterday I was talking with an ex-MSL employee about Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) and E-Learning. During our discussion the suggestion came up that ILT MOC doesn’t have to be really well presented (as opposed to E-Learning) because a good trainer/MCT can create a good experience regardless of the quality of the courseware.  With E-Learning what a student sees and hears in the course is their full experience so it has to shine(which I don’t think E-Learning achieves and it has struggled accordingly).

My take on this – I suspect that this opinion isn’t a spoken one at MSL, but can imagine that this attitude is prevalent regardless.  Labs are typically marginally relevant, they hit the right topic generally, but frequently don’t illustrate the concepts well.  Next Gen MOC seems to be stripping much out of the actual printed courseware and pushing it onto the CD. Personally I’m 10 times more likely to look at a book as opposed to loading up book CD content. 5 years down the road the CD might be a better choice if screen readers are more common.

So I agree that the MCT/trainer is 90% of the experience, but I don’t think that should ever be an excuse for producing less than excellent courseware.

Alt.Net – Choosing Sessions

I had my first Open Space session building experience. It felt a bit chaotic, but was really remarkable in how it worked out. We actually get to pick the topics that we want to hear. The topics look great. There are at least 2-3 that I want to be in for each timeslot.

I got to see my first fishbowl with Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler, Jeffrey Palermo, Scott Bellware and many others. It could have used 6 chairs instead of 4, but it was fast moving and intelligent. It also gives you many different viewpoints which is great.

Jeffrey Palermo did some videos of some of the opening sessions if you want to see what it looked like.

I’m off to get some sleep so I’m ready for tomorrow.

Alt.Net – Friday Afternoon

I made it to Seattle around noon and had lunch with Roy Osherove, Adam Tybor, Sergio, Ian Cooper and Tim.  We had some interesting conversations from mocking to mobile phones (until Roy said he was tired of that talk) to firing practices in the UK.

It was good to put some faces to blogs I have been reading for a quite awhile.

Alt.Net

I’m heading up to Alt.Net in Seattle tomorrow morning to listen and learn. Other Iowans at Alt.Net are Tim Barcz and Nick Parker.

Twin Cities Code Camp MVC Session

Thanks to everyone who attended my ASP.Net MVC session. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you get the opportunity to try out what the MVC framework has to offer. The slides have a lot more information than what I was able to get through in my talk. The project is still very young, but has so much potential.

Please leave comments here and let me know what you thought of the session. I’m trying to constantly improve it to make it the right fit.

More ASP.Net MVC Slides.

Twin Cities Code Camp IV

Yesterday, I was in the Cities at the fourth Twin Cities Code Camp.  It really was a fantastic experience, likely the the best one yet (I presented at the first two code camps as well). From the presentations I attended I would say that the quality of the presentations was very high. They easily would rival what you get at a paid conference. I also met a bunch of people I had never seen in person which is really cool.

Some of the Iowa crowd that went up was Javier Lozano, Bryan Sampica and Greg Wilson. There were several other attendees from Bryan’s company as well. The Iowa presenters and attendees have grown significantly since the first one where I was the sole Iowan as far as I know.

Some interesting people I met/saw were D’Arcy Lussier, Neil Iverson (Inetium), Brandy Favilla (New Horizons), Robert Boedigheimer, Chris Williams (Magenic), Aaron Erickson (Magenic), Kent Tegels (DevelopMentor), Jeff Ferguson, Chris Johnson, Saviz Artang, John Thurow, Kirstin (Magenic), Nicole and Kristen (New Horizons) and Justin Chase.

My favorite session was Neil Iverson’s PowerShell for Developers.  It was a fast paced live demo that kept incrementally building.  Rarely have I been so engaged in a session. D’Arcy’s MVC vs ASP.Net talk was also really interesting.  We only had about 6 people in the session, so we went around the room and said where we were coming from in our ASP.Net development experience. Then D’Arcy showed us how he typically structures his webforms applications, and we peppered him with questions.  I learned a lot from the session.

My talk was the second of the day in the large seminar room so we actually had about 50 people in the session.  One thing that was cool was that D’Arcy Lussier did an intro talk right before mine, so I got to build off of what he did in the session before. Mine seemed to go pretty well. There were a lot of questions and interest in what MVC brings to web development in the Microsoft space.

Jason Bock did a great job again bringing this all together.  It’s a lot of work coordinating an event like this.

If you liked what you got at the Twin Cities Code Camp you’ll definitely want to check out the Iowa Code Camp.  We’ll be a little bit smaller, but have some top notch presenters, a great facility and will have great prizes as well.  The registration is right on the home page and is as simple as it gets.

Team System 2008 VPC

If you would like to experiment with the new Team System bits you can just download the vpc here. The bonus here is that there are 38 hands-on labs right in the vpc.

TechEd 2008 – Developers

This year for the first time TechEd is spanning two weeks. The first week is for developers and the second week is for the “other” people – the IT Pro crowd :)

I’ll be working at TechEd as a Technical Learning Guide(TLG) in the Hands on Labs area and may do an Instructor Led Lab. It’ll take 32 hours of the week, but I’m hoping to catch some of the other sessions as well.

The word on the street is that all of the TLG’s will be wearing sexy black shirts, so it should be pretty easy to find us. 

The conference is in Orlando the first week of June. It might be worth checking it out if you have a week to spare and want to get some insight on the latest technologies from Microsoft.