Yeah, I’ve been kind of quiet as of late.  So quiet, I suspect that some people might be wondering if something happened.  I was a bit surprised to see that the last time I had blogged was after TechDays in Calgary.  Well, nothing significant has happened - just a bit of laziness augmented by a touch of tech-burnout compounded by the odd bit of single malt scotch. So, now that one month is almost up on 2010, I figured that it was time to start blogging about something again.

Yesterday I was at TechDays 2009 in Calgary for the day (well, the morning really). I wasn't there as an attendee, but as a speaker. Thanks to everybody who came out to my two talks, the first one on an Introduction to ASP.NET MVC and the second one on SOLIDifying your ASP.NET MVC Application. There were a few hiccups along the way: as usual, I fell victim to the Technical Presentation Time Dilation Syndrome (i.

Out of intellectual curiosity, I sparked up MonoDevelop and decided to see what would happen when I tried to compile the ASP.NET MVC source code. I figured that it would Just Work.  After all, I can use the .NET compiled assembly with no problems on Mono, so there really shouldn't be any problems trying to compile the code.  Bad news is that there is one minor glitch.  Good news is the glitch is easy to work around and has already been fixed so it shouldn't be a problem for future version of Mono.

Well, today was a rather sad around the household.  This morning I had to take Bailey, my dog, to the vet to be put down.  She had just turned 14 years old in September of this year, and age had finally caught up with her.  Her hips were going and we were getting concerned that one day she would be stuck on the floor and wouldn't be able to walk anymore.

Just a heads up that TechDays Canada 2009 is happening in Calgary next week on November 17 and 18. Yours truly will be there for the whole morning of November 18th talking about ASP.NET MVC and SOLID (note that this is not the same SOLID talk from the DevFundamentals track at TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto). If you happen to be there, don't be afraid to come on by and say hello.

A while ago I picked up a Microsoft Notebook Mouse 5000.  Finally decided to use it on my laptop.  I figured that having a bluetooth mouse would mean that I wouldn’t have a USB receiver hanging off my laptop all the time.  Plus, I thought it would be nice to use Blue Proximity. Now, the hiccup came when setting up the new mouse on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit.  It seems that you have to do a little bit extra to get the mouse working.

At the end of my talk on Git at the Edmonton Code Camp, somebody asked if I would put the links to the various git resources up on my website. Here they are: The git website, of course. Pro GIT - an awesome book about git. You can either order the dead tree version, or read it online. Linus Torvalds talking about git. If you're an SVN fan-boy, or have thin skin, you might want to skip this.

One question that has been bouncing around in my mind is what, exactly, does one have to do to be considered Agile?  Let’s look at the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

After a bit of tinkering, I managed to provision my ADP1 setup without a SIM card.  A bit of google, and here is what I did Download the Android SDK.  In my case, I unzipped it to C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1. Connection the phone via the USB cable to my computer.  When the phone asks for a device. You’ll get the new hardware dialog, when prompted for the drivers, you’ll need to specify the location.

Every developer, no matter how experienced, has to dig in and fix bugs. This is, in my experience, the typical cycle: bug is reported bug is assigned to developer developer thinks the bug is fixed developer marks bug as resolved tester checks to see bug is fixed, but it isn’t. tester reopens bug, assigns it back to developer back to step number two. Repeat until developer (or tester) climbs to the top of a 307 foot administrative building with high-powered rifles to demonstrate USMC-worthy marksmanship.