Spin the Moose

I’m quite excited lately by the movement buzzing around Nubular (a.k.a. #nuproj), a package management system for .NET. The smart folks behind Nu have decided to use Ruby, the Ruby Gems package manager, and RubyGems.org to host, deploy, and install .NET libraries.  One of those folks, Rob Reynolds, has done a good write-up of the [...]

I’ve seen several developers recently give or refer to presentations on “UI Design Patterns” and then proceed to talk about Model-View-Controller, Model-View-Presenter, and Model-View-ViewModel. I think as an industry we need to push our language a bit. MVC, MVP, and MVVM are UI Architecture Patterns; they refer how to organize UI-level code so that it [...]

Recently while at Prairie Dev Con 2010 I gave a presentation entitled “Designing for Success: Why User Experience matters for your app.” Following that talk several people asked for a list of UX- and design-related podcasts, so here they are! User Interface Engineering Jared Spool and his crew at UIE are some of my favorite [...]

I just finished my first of two presentations at the Prairie Developer Conference here in Regina!  It went really well, and a big thank you to all who attended.  As promised, here are my slides and some links to online resources, some of which were mentioned during my session other which I just find really [...]

I recently came across EF’s post entitled 5 Things to Think About On Your Day Off and started to comment; instead I thought I’d pull out some etiquette from before twitter and post a response on my blog. I know, who blogs anymore? Well, here it is, with my humble apologies to Opinion @ Large. [...]

According to this post on StackOverflow, a ConfigurationErrorsException in a .NET application means that you put an element in your config that is not recognized and not able to be serialized from the custom configuration class. While this can indeed be a legitimate error that you need to trap and deal with in your code, [...]

The 3rd annual Winnipeg Code Camp is coming up quick, this Saturday, February 27th, 8am – 5pm at Red River College on Princess St. here in the ‘Peg.  Attendance is free, though they are asking people to register to get an idea of numbers; breakfast and lunch will be provided. I’m giving a session called [...]

If you work with the web, by now you’ve probably heard that on Thursday afternoon Google announced they will be phasing out support for IE6 on some of their key web properties, namely Google Docs and Google Sites. Tech writers are all abuzz over this development, and many of them are suggesting that this marks [...]

I just recently received word that I’m presenting a session at Microsoft tech days in Winnipeg next month. The conference will be held at the Winnipeg Convention Centre on December 15th and 16th. I’ll be doing Session 4 on Day 1 in the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track: Optimizing Your Apps for the Windows [...]

In my recent quest to fine-tune the deployment process for bundl.it I’ve been investigating Microsoft’s new Web Deployment Tool, a.k.a MSDeploy.  Recently released into v1.0, here’s what the IIS site says about it: The Web Deployment Tool simplifies the migration, management and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications and Web sites. It sounded interesting [...]