CodeStock 2009 Call for Speakers

<p>CodeStock 2009 is just around the corner.</p><p>CodeStock is a .NET developer’s conference held in Knoxville, TN on June 26-27, 2009.</p><p>This is a great opportunity to hear lots of great speakers and collaborate with other geeks for only $25!</p><p>If you are at all interested in speaking at CodeStock then I encourage you to submit your abstracts today!. You have until March 30th to submit yourself as a speaker.</p><p>Here is a snippet from their website…</p><blockquote><p>CodeStock 2009 is going to be held on June 26th and 27th. Registration will open on or after March 31st and the cost for CodeStock will stay the same as 2008 - $25.</p> <p>CodeStock will be held on June 26th and 27th, 2009 in Knoxville, TN. Speaker applications are due March 30th. Speaker selections will be announced on or before May 15th.</p></blockquote>

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM, Source, Docs, Videos, and More

For all of you who've been waiting long and hard, the time has finally come... ASP.NET MVC has been released!

You can download the 1.0 release from the Microsoft Downloads site.

You can also view the documentation for ASP.NET MVC on the MSDN Microsoft Developer Network.

Updated: If you are the curious type or just want to see how something works, then you can download the full source code (including all the tests and the futures project) from codeplex.

For many of you this means you finally might be able to convince your boss to use ASP.NET MVC in one of your production applications :)

Thanks to everyone involved in making ASP.NET MVC a reality!

If you would like a good start on learning the ASP.NET MVC, then I recommend checking out...

• Scott Guthrie's rough draft chapter from his upcoming book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0
• Stephen Walther's rough draft series from his upcoming book ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed
• The official ASP.NET MVC website that has tons of videos and tutorials

Twitter Stats using Greasemonkey & jQuery

I wrote a simple Greasemonkey script that uses jQuery to read the Following, Followers, and Updates count from your Twitter Home page and displays them in the title of your Firefox tab (as seen in the image to the left). Since I enjoy using jQuery, I tend to use this script as the starting point for several other of my custom Greasemoney scripts.

You can install the following Greasemonkey script from the userscripts.org website.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Twitter Stats
// @namespace      http://zi.ma/webdev
// @description    Display your Twitter Stats in the Tab Title
// @include        http://twitter.com/home
// ==/UserScript==

//BEGIN - Load jQueryhttp://is.gd/j6G
var GM_JQ = document.createElement('script');
GM_JQ.src = 'http://jquery.com/src/jquery-latest.js';
GM_JQ.type = 'text/javascript';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(GM_JQ);

function GM_wait() {
   if (typeof unsafeWindow.jQuery == 'undefined') { window.setTimeout(GM_wait,100); }
   else { $ = unsafeWindow.jQuery; letsJQuery(); }
}
GM_wait();
//END - Load jQuery http://is.gd/j6G

// All your GM code must be inside this function
function letsJQuery() {
   unsafeWindow.console.log('BEGIN letsJQuery'); 

   var followers = $("#follower_count").html();
   var following = $("#following_count").html();
   var updates = $("#update_count").html();
   document.title = 'Twitter / Ing: ' + $.trim(following) + '; Ers: ' + $.trim(followers); 

   unsafeWindow.console.log('END letsJQuery');
}

unsafeWindow.alert = function alert(message) {
   //do nothing
}; 

The above script first loads the jQuery framework and then retrieves the Twitter values. You might notice the use of unsafeWindow.console.log('Your message here...'); I mainly used this to help debug the script. You can find these messages displayed in your Firebug console. Once you have installed the script, it could be easily be coupled with the ReloadEvery firefox extension so that you can sit back and watch your stats update to your heart's content :)

Screencast: Dive Into ASP.NET MVC RC2

Dive into ASP.NET MVC RC2 from Elijah Manor on Vimeo.
<p>Last week I gave a presentation at the Compuware Thought Leadership meeting entitled, “Dive Into ASP.NET MVC RC2”.</p> <p>Several people asked me about the presentaiton and were interested in the material. However, the meeting was closed to only Compuware employees. So, I thought I would make a screencast of the talk.</p> <p>The screencast covers the following: </p><ol><li>An quick overview of what is “MVC”</li><li>Pros & Cons comparing ASP.NET MVC to ASP.NET WebForms</li> <li>Answers to questions you might be thinking</li><li>Review of new features since the beta release</li><li>Demonstration & code review of a demo app using ASP.NET MVC RC2</li></ol><p>Note: This is my first screencast, so please be patient with me :)</p> <p>You can download the sample ASP.NET MVC RC2 application demonstrated in the screencast… PetShop5Rc2.zip</p>

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"We try to solve the problem by rushing through the design process so that enough time is left at the end of the project to uncover the errors that were made because we rushed through the design process." by Glenford J. Myers

"Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction" by Steve C McConnell, ISBN: 1556154844, page: 143