In the last article, I talked about how I prepare to record an episode of Technology and Friends. In this article, I'll discuss the interview itself.

Framing the scene

I nearly always work alone on this show, which means I don't have a cameraman. So it's up to me to properly frame the shot. I affix the camera to a tripod and ask my guest to sit or stand in front of the camera. Then I frame my guest in the digital viewfinder (an LED screen that shows an image of what the camera will capture when recording). On most television talk shows, the  host sits on the right. However I prefer to sit on the left. The reason is that my digital viewfinder swivels, so I can see it even when the camera is facing me and the viewfinder is more visible to me if I sit on the left. My goal is to frame each shot so that it includes me and my guest or guests, but very little beyond that. The shot looks best if we are close together, almost touching.

Without an assistant, I am forced to start recording, then walk into the camera view and check the frame. Sometimes I need to walk back behind the camera to adjust the framing. Of course, I cut out all this walking in and out during post-production.

The conversation

The Interview itself is generally the most enjoyable part of the show.

In my show, I want the guest to do most of the talking, so I ask a lot of open-ended questions. Rather than: Is this technology easy to use, I'll ask "What are the advantages of this technology"? Ideally, I'll ask a 15-second question and the guest will talk for 3 minutes. I try not to interrupt him* unless I feel they need to clarify something. If they introduce an unfamiliar term or acronym, I'll ask them to define it.

I will ask follow-up questions, based on what the guest says on camera.

Sometimes, he mentions something that sparks my interest and I'll ask for more detail.

Sometimes, I'll feel his explanation is too vague and I'll ask for clarification or an example.

Sometimes, he'll make an unsupported assertion and I'll ask him to defend that assertion.

Sometimes, I'll volunteer a relevant story from my own experience.

After a long explanation by the guest, I'll often try to summarize what they said and ask if I have understood it correctly.

Generally, I want the guest to sound relaxed and I want the tone to be conversational. As much as possible, I try to set him at ease. If either of us makes a mistake, I say “Edit Point” and let him know we can cut out that part later.

Sometimes, we may elect to re-record an entire sequence if someone misspoke or was unclear.

Although the show doesn't have a set length, I try to keep the interview less than 30 minutes because I want it to be concise. If I feel it may go longer, I will usually edit it for length or split it into two shows.

At the end of each interview, I give my guest a chance to promote himself by mentioning a blog or other online presence.

I wrap up the show by thanking the viewer and saying goodbye to the audience. Of course, I also ask each guest to speak a sentence using the words "Technology" and "Friends" as this has become a trademark of the show.

* For simplicity, I will use the masculine pronoun when describing a generic guest. I have had many female guests and plan to have more in the future.

If you are reading this blog, you probably know, I have been recording and producing the mildly popular online TV show Technology and Friends for over a year. I have recorded and released over 75 episodes and I plan to release a lot more in the future.

Recently, a number of people have asked me what goes into producing an online show.

There are four aspects to the show that I'll cover in this series: preparation, interview, equipment, and post-production. In this article, I'll cover preparing for the show

Finding a Guest

Everything starts with the interview and the interview starts with a good interviewee and a good topic.

I attend quite a few conferences and user groups, so I get to hear a lot of good speakers presenting technical material. I will often pick a guest because I have recently heard him or her deliver a good technical presentation and I want to record those thoughts for others to hear. I look for people who are knowledgeable and passionate about a topic and who can communicate well.

A conference is a good place to find guests because

1. Conferences tend to attract a lot of smart people to a single location
2. Speakers at a conference come prepared to talk in detail about a topic
3. Most people cannot attend every session of every conference, so this gives a wider audience to the speaker
4. I can sit in the session ahead of time and educate myself on a topic prior to speaking about it on camera.

A user group is also a good place to find a guest. Many of my interviews were recorded immediately after a speaker delivered a presentation at a user group. The challenge here is that user groups tend to end late at night and you must ask the host facility to stay open an extra half hour while you record.

I have also recorded interviews with co-workers that I know are knowledgeable on a topic. In most work environments, it’s possible to reserve a small conference room in which to record.

After I identify a good speaker, I approach him* and ask if he is willing to speak on camera for a half hour or so.

I nearly always give my guest the flexibility to schedule the time of the interview. People are busy and I recognize that they are doing me a favor by taking the time to record with me.

Selecting a Topic

I like to keep my show short and focused, so the guest and I need to agree on a topic. There are really only 3 criteria for a good topic.
1. The guest must be knowledgeable about the topic. Our goal is to share information with the viewers.
2. The guest must have some passion for this topic. Passionate speakers make for much better shows.
3. The topic must be of interest to my audience. Typically anything in the technology field meets these criteria, especially if it is new technology.

I try to avoid repeating topics, but I will cover the same subject twice if the second guest can add a new perspective.

If we are at a conference or user group, I often suggest that we talk about a topic on which they are presenting. This works well because the presenter has spent time preparing a presentation and knows the material really well. However, he may want to discuss something different. For example, a presenter may be researching and writing a book on a different topic and want to speak about that. As long as I feel the topic will be of interest to my audience, I'm happy to let my guest select it.

Location

As often as possible, I try to find a quiet place to record interviews. This should be a room with a door I can close and shut out external noise. Ideally, this room should be small and should not covered walls. Large rooms with bare walls echo much more. 

Unfortunately, this isn't always possible, so I try to find as isolated a place as I can.

Of course, the room must have available power for my camera and microphone. (My camera will run on batteries but I don't like to risk this)

Prepping the guest

Prior to the interview, I discuss with my guest what we will talk about. I nearly always write down an outline of the conversation. Depending on the situation, I have a couple approaches.

• I may sit in on their presentation and take notes. Then, I can ask open questions and guide the guest through an abbreviated version of the presentation.
• It may be a topic that I am already familiar with. In this case, I outline what I think are key points and I review these with the guest. They are free to add or modify my outline.
• It may be a topic with which I am not familiar. In this case, I rely on the guest to create an outline. Generally, I ask them the key points they want to cover and I write them down in outline form.  I also spend a little extra time learning about the topic in advance, so I can understand it well enough to ask follow-up questions or spark an intelligent dialogue. I find these conversations are enjoyable but much harder.
  Location

I also try to chat with my guest for a few minutes before the camera rolls in order to help him relax and establish a rapport. In more than one case, I had just met the guest prior to the interview.

In the next article, I'll discuss the interview itself.

* For simplicity, I will use the masculine pronoun when describing a generic guest. I have had many female guests and plan to have more in the future.

Episode 76

In this interview, DevExpress evangelist Gary Short discusses technical debt and its effects on a software project.

Episode 75

Sam Corder is the founder of the MongoDB-CSharp open source project In this interview, he describes the use of MongoDB and other document database

Tuesday March 23, I will be presenting "Extending your Application with the Managed Extensibility Framework" at the Cleveland .Net User Group in Cleveland, OH. More information is available at http://clevelanddotnet.blogspot.com.

Saturday April 17, I will be presenting "Building Your First ASP.Net MVC Application" at the Pittsburgh Code Camp at The University of Pittsburgh. More information is available at http://codecamppgh.com/codecamp.aspx

Episode 74

Debbie Must describes the unique challenges of deploying her software and how she attacked these challenges.

Episode 73

In this interview, Corey Haines talks about software craftsmanship, what it means to him and his plan to improve the quality of coding in our industry.

Episode 72

C# MVP Darrell Hawley spends a lot of his time programming in Python these days. In this interview, Darrell describes the Django framework for developing web applications in Python.

Episode 71

In this interview, Tim Wingfield describes the Kanban system and how he uses it.

You could start at the beginning and read all the way through Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration Instant Reference by Matt Hester and Chris Henley. Part 1 of the book of the book ("Getting Started") walks the reader through planning, installing and upgrading the operating system, while subsequent sections dive into details about specific areas of the software.

But a more reasonable approach is to open to the section on which you are working today. Each chapter is structured so that you can dig into the detail you need. Each topic begins with an explanation of concepts and definitions of key terms. This part is critical for someone like me, who doesn't spend his days managing servers. Experienced administrators may skip this section and jump to the detailed explanations of how to use and configure each feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. Basic functionality is described first, followed by more advanced features.

A section on Active Directory, for example, begins with a description of built-in groups, followed by a description of custom users and groups and how rights are granted. After establishing these basics, the author describes how to use Active Directory to manage groups, users and rights and how to configure this in Windows Server.

Hester and Henley write in a clear, concise style that simplifies everything they describe. Step-by-step instructions are amplified by screen shots.

The smaller dimensions of the book make it fit easily into a laptop bag, despite the 500+ pages of text.

This is a solid book for a full- or part-time network administrator to keep on hand for a quick reference or for a more detailed look into important concepts of Windows Server.

Official Book site

Episode 70

Dave Bost, the host of the popular Thirsty Developer podcast discusses what goes into each episode and some of the technology he uses to record and produce the show.

Unit testing the critical methods of your application is important.

Generally, I focus on testing public methods because this is the interface that others use to interact with my library. Testing only public methods also safeguards me from modifying unit tests every time I refactor or optimize the encapsulated code of my libraries.

Unfortunately, sometimes critical methods are marked Private. Because I always create my unit tests in a separate project, this presents a problem: Private methods are only accessible to other methods in the same class; You cannot call a Private method from an external assembly.

You have several options when testing Private methods from a separate project.

• Change the method's accessor to Public
• Create a public 'accessor' to the method
• Use reflection to access the method
• Test a public method that calls this method.
• Change the method's accessor to Internal and make Internal methods visible to your test project.

Each of these approaches has its shortcomings

Change the method's accessor to Public

This is probably too extreme as it breaks any abstraction you were trying to create. Too many public methods can clutter an API, making it overly complex.

Create a public 'accessor' to the method

This involves creating a public class and method decorated with the [Shadowing] attribute. It definitely adds a level of complexity to your class. When you ask MSTest to create a new Unit Test of a private method, you will be prompted to create an accessor.

Test a public method that calls this method

This is a popular choice. The idea is that public methods call private methods, so testing your public methods will call and test your private methods. To get good code coverage, you will need to know which methods are called (an approach known as "White Box testing".) Some people don't like to call this a unit test because multiple methods are called.

Use reflection to access the method

This is the most complicated of the methods listed here; But, if you don't have the source code and you feel you must test a private method, this is your only option.

Change the method's accessor to Internal and make Internal methods visible to your test project.

This method is a good compromise. By default, Internal methods are available only to other methods in the same assembly. However, you can an external project explicit permission to access Internal methods by adding the following line to AssemblyInfo.cs class of the file containing the method you want to test.

          [assembly:
System.Runtime.CompilerServices.InternalsVisibleTo("TestProject")]
        

where TestProject is the name of the project containing your unit tests.

When I have access to the source code, marking Internal methods visible is my preferred method of testing private methods. When I don't have access to source code, I tend only to test public methods.

Episode 69

Shortly after CodeMash, chief cat herder Jim Holmes discusses what went into the planning and what makes this conference different.

Episode 68

James Bender, Mike Wood and Chris Woodruff created NPlus1.org to assist software architects, lead developers and those aspiring to these roles. In this interview, James and Mike discuss the goals and accomplishments of NPlus1.

Many software developers are using Pair Programming to increase the quality and maintainability of their code. In a pair programming environment, two programmers work together to write code.

Tonight in Southfield, MI, the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group is sponsoring a pair programming event, which we have labeled The Motor City Codeslingers. We invite programmers who work in any language to bring their laptops and pair with another developer. You may bring a side project with you, work on an open source project, work on a programming exercise (we'll provide a few) or just exchange ideas.

Joe O'Brien is a noted Ruby developer and owner of EdgeCase in Columbus, OH. He has agreed to stop by and provide some mentoring on pair programming techniques. Joe's company is well-known for its commitment to pairing as a way to maintain high quality.

The Motor City Codeslingers will meet at the Biggby Coffee House at 26185 Evergreen Rd in Southfield, MI tonight from 6-9PM. If we fill up Biggby, the overflow crowd can head to the Potbelly or Chipotle next door. The official announcement for this event is at http://is.gd/7pFGL

I hope to see you there.

Episode 67

In this interview, Steven "Doc" List discusses the concepts behind Open Spaces and Community Courtyards and his role in facilitating these events.

I smiled as I drove across the state line into Michigan Friday morning. I was returning home from spending most of the week in Ohio, speaking at user groups throughout the state.

I spoke about Managed Extensibility Framework at four user groups over three days in four different cities.

Tuesday, I spoke at an internal user group of the Cincinnati Financial Corporation, before heading over to the Cincinnati .Net User Group in Mason, OH. Wednesday I drove up to Dayton to speak at the Dayton .Net Developers Group. Thursday I presented to a packed house in Columbus at the Central Ohio .Net Developers Group.

The trip was a great success. At each stop, the crowd was larger than their average meeting.  Everywhere I went I heard probing questions that indicated that I was communicating the concepts of MEF and loosely-coupled architecture. This was gratifying as most people had no idea what MEF was when they arrived at my talk.

The best of the trip was that I had a chance to see old friends. I spent ten years living and working in the Cincinnati area and many of my former colleagues came out to hear me. Some I hadn't seen in years. I once worked for a Columbus-based company, and through them I got to know much of the developer community in that area and I saw many familiar faces in Central Ohio this week. Tuesday and Thursday night, we went out for drinks after the meeting, which gave me a chance to talk one-on-one with a lot of smart people.

I also got a chance to see the inside of the Sogeti offices in Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus and talk with some of the team in these offices.

I had a great time on this tour and I'd love to do another one.

Thank you to all who came out to hear my talk. Thank you especially to Mike Wood, Jim Holmes and James Bender, who allowed me to stay at their homes on my trip.

Episode 66

In this interview, Mary and Tom Poppendieck define competency, describe the importance of leadership and define the factors that make up these qualities.

Tomorrow I travel to Ohio for a user group tour. This is a trip I've been hoping to do for some time. The .Net user groups in Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus meet on consecutive evenings, so I am planning to speak at each of these this week. The idea began last summer, when I invited Phil Japikse to come to Michigan from Cincinnati and speak at the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group. I notified the leaders of user groups in Toledo and Lansing that Phil would be in town and they invited him to speak at their groups the same week. Phil asked me to come to Cincinnati in January and he reached out to Dayton User Group president Joe Wirtley about hosting me in Dayton the following night. Joe liked the idea and confirmed the meeting. Later, I contacted James Bender, the newly-elected president of the Central Ohio .Net Developers Group in Columbus about completing the sweep through the Buckeye state. He had already booked Jeff McPherson for January but Jeff was willing to defer his talk to March, allowing me to speak Thursday in Columbus.

Phil and Mike Wood have also arranged for me to speak at an internal user group at the Cincinnati Financial Group Tuesday afternoon.

So I'll be doing 4 user group presentations in 3 cities in 3 days. The topic will be the same for each talk: Extending your application with the Microsoft Managed Extensibility Framework. I've given this talk a number of times in the past, but I recently reworked my presentation and added to my demos. I'm excited to do this tour. It reminds me of a similar tour I did during the fall of 2008, when I spoke at user groups in Toledo, Southfield and Lansing on consecutive nights. By the time I got to Lansing, I knew the material inside and out.

My schedule at public groups this week is

Tuesday 1/26: Cincinnati .Net User Group (http://www.cinnug.org)

Wednesday 1/27: Dayton .Net Developers Group (http://daytondevgroup.net)

Thursday 1/28: Central Ohio .Net Developers Group (http://condg.org)

If you are in or near Cincinnati, Dayton or Columbus this week, I hope you come to hear my talk and to say 'Hello'.

Episode 65

Wrox just released a new book 'Testing ASP.Net web applications' by Jeff McWherter and Ben Hall. In this interview, Jeff and Ben discuss the importance of testing, the different types of tests and how to effectively test your web application.

Today I host my first meeting as president of the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group (GANG). I've been an active member of this group for a couple years and I've always been impressed with the way it was run. Still I had ideas about ways it can be improved and I've lately given a lot of thought as to the direction I want to the group this year. In this column, I'll share some of my goals for GANG for the year and discuss how I and my team plan to meet those goals.

Below are my goals for GANG for 2010

• Get members more engaged and involved
• Increase meeting attendance by 50%
• Increase supporting membership by 30%
• Continue to attract high-quality speakers
• Increase sponsorship by 100%
• Finish year in the black financially
• Here is how I expect us to meet these goals

Goal: Get members more engaged and involved
For the next few months, we will give members an opportunity to present a Lightning Talk prior to the main presentation. A Lightning Talk is a technical presentation lasting 10 minutes or less. It gives the group a chance to hear a new voice and a new topic; and gives the presenter experience at public speaking in a safe and friendly environment.
We will designate 20-30 minutes prior to each meeting as "networking time". Food will be served during this period and members will be encouraged to meet and talk with one another. We will provide name tags to facilitate this networking.
Typically a few of us go out for a drink after each meeting. Going forward, we will announce this to the group, so that anyone is welcome to attend. Note that this is not a GANG-sponsored activity (translation: buy your own drinks and be responsible for your own actions)
Between each meeting, we are sponsoring a pair-programming session known as Motor City Codeslingers. This is a chance for developers to get together with their laptop and discuss coding issues or work on programs together. The next meeting takes place Monday February 1 at 6PM at Biggby Coffee House (26185 Evergreen Rd in Southfield)

Goal: Increase meeting attendance by 50%
Southeast Michigan has thousands of .Net developers and we are reaching only a small fraction of them. I believe we can increase our attendance by reaching out to the following groups: Developers active in nearby user groups; Developers in corporate IT departments; graduating computer science students; and independent developers. We are asking our current members to advertise their friends and co-workers to tell them about this group. I plan to contact local universities to promote the group to graduating seniors; and I have been reaching out to leaders of user groups in Michigan and Ohio, offering to promote their group in exchange for them promoting ours.
As an attendance incentive, we are running a promotion the first half of 2010. In June, we will have a drawing for a Zune HD. You can increase your chances in this drawing by attending meetings and by bringing guests to meetings.

Goal: Increase supporting membership by 30%
It costs money to put on a user group. Our dues are very low relative to other professional organizations. The renewal rate 2010 will be $40 per year. This is the first increase the group has ever had in its existence. If you are currently a supporting member, you remain a member at the until your next renewal date.
In the past, we haven't done a good job of thanking our members and reminding them when it is time for a renewal. We will address both these by including a slide in our presentations listing and thanking each supporting member and displaying their renewal date.
We also offer a new gold membership level for $100. This is for members who wish to contribute more to our organization. Gold members will be recognized publicly at each meeting.

Goal: Continue to attract high-quality speakers
This is something that GANG has always done well, so I have no intention of changing how we get our speakers.

Goal: Increase sponsorship by 100%
Printing, communication, web sites and food at meetings all contribute to the costs of running a user group. Most of this cost is offset by sponsorship.
Due to the weak southeast Michigan economy, sponsorship dropped off significantly in 2009. We have set an ambitious goal this year of doubling the amount of money and merchandise we get from sponsors during 2010. We have already secured two new sponsors for the year and look forward to retaining all our sponsors from last year.
This year, we will display our sponsors more prominently. At the beginning each meeting, a slide show will loop to announce the speaker, the topic, and the sponsor for the meeting. We will also have a framed sponsor flyer next to the attendance sheet during the meeting. Of course, we will continue to promote our sponsors on our web site and in our monthly newsletter.

Goal: Finish year in the black financially
This sounds obvious, but at the end of last year, we borrowed money to cover the cost of food at some meetings. As a result, we owed money at the end of the year. This year, we have decided to be more responsible: We have resolved not to purchase anything until we have money to pay for it. If a meeting has no sponsor, we may end up foregoing food or limiting ourselves to chips and pop.

And Now... Meet the gang behind GANG!
We have a great leadership team this year at GANG. No one holds the same position as last year, but three of our officers have served on the board in the past.
John Hopkins is a former President of GANG and is now the Vice President. His biggest project this year is recruiting sponsorships.
Kent Feribach served as Secretary last year and is now the Treasurer. In my opinion, this is the position with the most responsibility.
Gerhard Weiss is new to the GANG board but he has brought a lot of energy and fresh ideas to the group in the short term he has held this position.

So we hope you will consider being a part of this group and our goals. We meet the third Wednesday evening of each month at the Microsoft office in the Towne Center in Southfield, MI.

Episode 64

In this interview, author and developer Bill Wagner discusses the dynamic features in the upcoming C# 4.0.

CodeMash came to an end too quickly.

Friday lunch featured an entertaining keynote by Andy Hunt, who discussed the challenges of life in the high-tech world, the differences between the generations, and ways for developers to improve their existence.

Late in the day, I delivered a session on the Microsoft Managed Extensibility Framework. My talk wasn't until 3PM, so I spent a good chunk of the day preparing for it.

One of the hallways at CodeMash was filled with PCs, preloaded with Visual Studio 2010 labs. I spent some time going through these labs, including writing F# code for the first time.

Of course, I recorded a few more Technology And Friends episodes with some smart developers.

I had a great experience this week. The CodeMash organizers made an effort to ensure that one always had multiple options at any given time. There were as many as nine sessions during each time slot; If none of those interested you, you could attend an open space, pair program, complete an online lab, or exchange ideas with other attendees. Social hours in the evening, included a game room, a concert (featuring Canadian-Celtic artist Enter the Haggis, and ad hoc gatherings in the hotel bar or in various hotel rooms.

I made a special effort this year to make new connections. I decided in advance that I would not eat with the same people each meal and I would eat with as many strangers as possible.  Doing so helped to expand the network from which I can learn.

It's no wonder that I had no time to set foot in the water park.

Although I've been here at the Kalahari since Tuesday, today was officially the first day of CodeMash.

The first session I attended was an Introduction to Silverlight talk in which Jesse Liberty walked through the basics of creating a simple online data form, showing off the layout elements and databinding features of Silverlight.

I followed this by attending a session on JQuery. The presenter - Adam McCrea - was a Ruby developer working on a Mac (I'm a .Net developer working on a PC), but it didn't matter as he showed a few simple JQuery functions to perform some tasks inside a browser.

I attended an open space in the afternoon. The topic - MEF and Silverlight - sounded intriguing but I left when it went far off-track, devolving into a debate over the usefulness of MEF and Inversion of Control container. This might have been an interesting side topic, but the arguments seemed fueled by emotion and I had little desire to engage, so I left halfway through.

Lunch featured a keynote address by Microsoft engineer Hank Janssen, who has been instrumental in bringing PHP to the Microsoft platform. IIS now supports PHP and bridges the gap with other open source technologies. This was a topic I know very little about, so I was able to absorb a lot of new information. As an bonus, NPlus1 sponsored a private dinner with Hank, where community leaders could ask him questions about Microsoft's future plans with open source technologies. I wasn't able to contribute much to this conversation, but it was a delight to listen to others discuss it in detail. Microsoft appears to be opening up their technologies and making them available to work with open source tools more than ever and it seems this trend will continue.

I recorded a half dozen more Technology and Friends episodes throughout the day. Topics include MongoDB, Open Spaces, and Software Craftsmanship. I will edit and release in the coming weeks.

CodeMash officially begins tomorrow, but you wouldn't know it if you saw all the activity here at the Kalahari.

My morning was spent seeking out and talking with smart people. Many times, I get more information at a conference from hallway conversations than from sessions. None of the morning sessions appealed to me, so I learned of technologies and Microsoft programs and jobs and people.

In the afternoon, I attended Mary Poppendieck presented a 4-hour session titled "Competency and Leadership in Software Development". I was excited to see this because I recently read and enjoyed the book "Lean Software Development – An Agile Toolkit",

that Mary co-wrote with her husband Tom. This session focused on what it takes for individuals and teams to achieve expert competencies (years of directed practice); followed by types and characteristics of effective leaders (such as transmitting passion and commitment to the team).

Afterwards, I was happy that Tom and Mary agreed to record an episode of Technology And Friends. I expect to release this episode shortly.

In the evening, the folks who produce the Java Posse hosted a panel discussion on stage. Java developers were joined by C# expert Bill Wagner and F# tester and author Chris Smith to answer questions submitted by podcast listeners.

I missed dinner Wednesday night but I did get to meet some of the evangelists from DevExpress whom I know of by reputation.

Bedtime came late and Thursday comes early but tomorrow will be a full schedule.      

Juanary is offically MEF month. I have scheduled "Extending Your Application with the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)" at least 6 times this month. The first time was last week, when I delivered a Grok Talk at Sogeti that was available via Live Meeting.

The following presentations will all be about MEF

• Fri Jan 15 at 3PM, I will be delivering a vendor session at CodeMash in Sandusky, OH.
• Tue Jan 26 at Noon, I will deliver a presentation to Financial Corp User Group in Cincinnati, OH.
• Tue Jan 26 at 6PM, I will present at the Cincinnati .Net User Group in Mason, OH
• Wed Jan 27 at 6PM, I will present at the Dayton .Net User Group in Dayton, OH
• Thu Jan 28 at 6PM, I will present at the Central Ohio .Net User Group in Columbus, OH

In addition, I will deliver two presentations Fri Jan 22 at the State of MI Developer Briefing in Lansing, MI.

• At 1PM, I will deliver my MEF presentation (of course).
  At 2:30PM, I will present on "Speeding your application with Microsoft Velocity".
  

2009 was a difficult year for me in many ways. My sister Denise was less than three years older than me when she passed away in July. Her death left a wound that is still healing. Worse than her death was the revelation afterward that she had been betrayed by someone close to her - someone we all trusted. We are still fighting this battle and it continues to elevate stress in my family.

But I also experienced many positives events in 2009.

The support of friends and family has been instrumental in getting me through these difficult times. If you are in this group, then I thank you. The tragedy shared by my family has brought us closer together in many ways.

My two sons continue to grow (physically and emotionally) and they continue to impress me with each new stage of their life. Timmy is now in high school and is showing more leadership qualities than I expected. Not long ago, he organized an independent basketball team completely on his own. They competed in a large league and he even convinced his brother to coach the team. His team performed well, despite playing in a league with kids mostly 1-2 years older. Timmy is working hard to balance school work with football and basketball. Nick is in his first year at Michigan State University. The time away from home is maturing him and each time I see him, I see more of a man and less of a boy. I remember a similar transformation in me during my first year at MSU. I particularly admire the fact that he is setting high goals for himself.

I have been dating a woman for quite a while. She didn't grow up in the US and her background is very different from mine, which presents some challenges; however, she is exceptionally kind and she is the most giving person I have ever met and I'm grateful she remains part of my life.

I did a fair amount of volunteer work this year, but most of it was not altruistic. I volunteer at a local non-profit music club in exchange for free admission to the concerts; I volunteer at the local public access TV station as a way to learn more about television production. The most good I did through volunteering was with the three Give Camps in which I was involved this year. I'm looking forward to participating more next year.

The biggest personal goal I did not hit this year was to lose 25 pounds. Resolving my sister's estate, being a single father, and other commitments kept me in the car so much that I had little time to exercise. Still this needs to be on the list next year.

One of my professional goals for this year was to be more involved in the software development community. In particular, I wanted to do more public speaking.  In 2009, I spoke at 5 conferences, 4 user groups, 3 internal Sogeti talks and 2 special events (ArcReady and NPlus1 summit). I expect this trend to continue as I have 5 presentations scheduled for January 2009.

I also became more involved in the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group this year. As Vice President, I took on the role of speaker coordinator and was able to line up some excellent presentations for the group.

In January I began production of my TV show "Technology and Friends" (although the show did not have a title for the first few episodes). During 2009, I published 63 episodes online. Recently this show has also begun airing on Channel 17 of my local cable system. Recording and producing was a great experience. It gives me the opportunity to talk with a lot of smart people and I have learned a lot about software, communication and video production.

I began my blog two years ago, but I devoted more energy to it in 2009. This article is the 155the entry for the year - an average of almost 13 per month. I don't know if I'll keep up that pace in 2010.

Despite the poor economy in Michigan, I managed to stay employed all year. During 2009, I worked for a significant time for three customers. At the end of each engagement, each customer had wonderful things to say about my work.

As the Microsoft Application Development lead in Michigan for Sogeti, I focused primarily on technical training for our consultants and on building a sense of community. I organized a series of "Grok Talks"  designed to exchange information. Some talks were delivered by Sogeti consultants (giving them valuable presentation experience) and some by experts in the industry. This was a big success and we plan to continue it next year, even though I will not continue in the same lead role.

As I write this, I realize that 2009 had more positives than negatives. The loss of my sister and subsequent discoveries still made it a difficult year, but I was able to accomplish a lot, thanks to some hard work and the support of family and friends.

I am looking forward to a happy and productive 2010. I have big plans, some of which I plan to share soon on this site.

Happy New Year and may God bless you all. 

In this screencast, I demonstrate some of the enhancements in the user interrface of Windows 7.

Complexity is the Enemy! 

This is the message driven home repeatedly by Roger Sessions in his book Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises. 

Sessions recommends tackling a complex enterprise architecture by identifying the subcomponents of a complex system and dividing that system into autonomous subsystems. He refers to these subsystems as Autonomous Business Capabilities (ABCs) and the process of dividing them as a Simple Iterative Process (SIP).  

Before describing how to approach this process, Sessions presents a mathematical proof that subdividing a complex system into a set of subsystems reduces the complexity of the system as a whole. This seems intuitive to many of us, but the mathematics allow us to be more forceful in our commitment to this process. The mathematics is relatively simple (nothing beyond high school math) and he even recommends training team members in this mathematics before beginning any SIP.

A large part of an Enterprise Architect's job is to define the optimal way to partition the complex system. By applying mathematics to his model, he removes the emotions that so often dictate how a project is broken up.

The process of splitting a complex system into appropriate subsystem isn't overwhelming, but it is critical to managing complexity. According to Sessions, Each ABC should contain only elements that relate to one another; and the elements of one ABC should not relate directly to or communicate directly with any element in another ABC. Once partitioned, each ABC should be roughly the same size, although it is possible to split a subsystem further into sub-subsystems. It is also critical that communication between each subsystem take place only at a few clearly-defined points.

If this sounds like a recipe for Service Oriented Architecture, this is no coincidence. Sessions concludes his book with recommendations on moving from business partitions (ABCs) to software partitions, which he describes as "fortresses". These software partitions follow many of the same rules as ABCs created with the SIP, so making this transition is straightforward.

This is a good book for anyone who aspires to be an Architect (Enterprise or otherwise) and wants to apply a systematic approach to managing complexity.

When writing .Net code (or code in any language for that matter) that updates a database, you need to be cognizant of the fact that it takes a finite amount of time to connect to a database and process any commands sent to the database.

ADO.Net permits you to set a TimeOut value on a Connection object and on a Command object.

The Command TimeOut property allows you to configure how long a command waits to successfully complete execution of a query. By default, a Command object will timeout after 30 seconds

It’s important to strike a good balance when setting timeout values.

Sometimes we expect a database action to take a long time and we want to give it time to complete before we pull the rug out, so to speak.

On the other hand, if a problem prevents a command from executing properly, it's useful to know this sooner so our application can handle it.

Changing a command timeout is simple. The Command object exposes a read/write ConnectionTimeout property. Set it to the number of seconds you wish the comand to wait on executing before aborting.

After the Command TimeOut period, if the command has not completed, an exception is thrown. However, the database server does not know this, so the command will continue to execute on the server - your application just won't know the results.

The Connection TimeOut is the amount of time the Connection will spend attempting to connect to a database before giving up and throwing an exception. The default Connection Timeout value is 15 seconds. On a slow network, it may take longer to connect, so you may wish to increase this value. However, if the application is unable to connect to the database - if the server is unavailable, for example - it's best to find this out sooner rather than later.

Changing the Connection Timeout is less obvious than changing the Command Timeout. The Connection class exposes a ConnectionTimeout property; But this property is read-only, so you cannot use it to change the timeout. To change a timeout, you must modify the connection string. Add or update the following to your connection string:
    Connection Timeout=XXX
where XXX is the number of seconds to wait for a connection to remain open before aborting all pending operations on that connection.

In your applications, it is important to strike the right balance when setting timeout properties.

Tomorrow evening - Thursday December 10 - I will speaking at the Flint .Net User Group. My topic is An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, a talk I've done twice before.

More information is available here.

This will probably be my final presentation for 2009.

The Great Lakes Area .Net User Group traditionally does not hold a regular meeting in December.

This year, we will replace the December meeting with a special event. Software developers in the area are invited to come together to share code and ideas in an informal setting.

I first heard of this idea from my friend Mike Wood. He is on the board of the Cincinnati .Net User Group, which sponsors a monthly pair coding meeting that they refer to as "Bitslingers". Shortly after hearing of Mike's group, I learned that a similar meetup took place weekly in Columbus. Because the Columbus folks meet in the morning, they call their group "Code and Coffee". I'm trying to think of a clever name for the Detroit area meetup.

The first Detroit-area meetup will be Wednesday December 16 from 6-9PM at Biggby Coffee at 26185 Evergreen Rd in Southfield, MI. If Biggby gets too crowded, we will move next door to Potbelly.

Bring your laptop and experience pair programming and exchange ideas with other bright .Net developers. Work on an open source project or dive into a new technology or explore a new technique or learn a new language.

I will be there with a personal project I started to help me learn ASP.Net MVC and the Entity Framework.

If this event is successful, we will consider holding it regularly.

For the third consecutive year, I will be attending CodeMash. This annual event will next be held at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, OH January 13-15.

I really like the CodeMash conference. Here's why

1. It has a regional feel.
There are a lot of bright, passionate developers in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. You will see a good number of them at CodeMash, as presenters and as attendees.

2. The content and speakers are excellent.
I've heard many of these speakers before and it's an impressive list. In addition to thought leaders from the Heartland, CodeMash attracts internationally known authors and speakers, such as Mary Poppendieck, Chris Smith, Andy Hunt, Jim Wooley and Gary Short.

3. It's cross-platform.
As a .Net developer, it's easy for me to get tunnel vision regarding how I do software design and development. Learning from Ruby, Java and Python developers gives me a different perspective.

4. The sessions aren't the only place to learn.
There are so many smart people at these conferences that I learn as much outside the sessions as I do in them. I can talk to an expert in the hallway and ask specific questions about my project; or I can attend an open space and discuss a topic of interest with other smart people.

5. It is affordable.
It's tough to find a better deal than this. The cost for the 2-day conference is currently $220 (It would have been only $175 if you had registered last week. Sorry.) An optional "precompiler" day will set you back another $75. Compare that with a national conference like PDC, which costs thousands of dollars.

6. It's fun.
What can I say? I thrive on interacting with these folks. They are passionate about many of the same things I am. Plus there are activities at night, such as parties and poker tournaments. There is even an indoor water park at the resort. Many attendees bring their families with them to enjoy the slides while they are at the conference.

Interested yet? Is so, you can get more information at CodeMash.org. But hurry. I rushed to write this because I just saw a tweet announcing that only about 30 tickets remain.