All of this post started when I saw this tweet:
@ScottGu (Scott Guthrie) is coming back to Arizona April 22. Register Now! http://SC8.me/gNYIU6
@AZGroups
Scott Cate
You can follow the link in the tweet or use the form at the bottom of this post.
8th Annual Day of .NET with Scott Guthrie and Special Guest
April 6, 2011 at 11:32 am
Mike Hamilton
OK so finally had some time to open my RSS reader and happened upon a nice post covering why and how you should be using NuGet.
I Completely Agree! and decided to follow his post’s desired take away to spread the word on NuGet so I am.
If you are a Microsoft .Net developer, and even though NuGet was packaged with MVC it is not just for MVC, and the libraries in the NuGet directory are for all kinds of .Net development.
So go to http://www.codethinked.com/you-really-should-be-using-nuget and read about it and start using it to ease your pains when using third party libraries.
As I am finishing up the last week of a shortened (by accepting another position) three month contract position I had run into several issues with the referencing of third party controls (and even a couple Microsoft libraries) and even though the current place is targeting .Net 2.0 for their in house development, the work is being done in Visual Studio 2010, so I kept playing with NuGet packages and new technologies when creating support projects to aid in data loading and setup.
What does all this buildup explanation lead to?
Well as I thinking one day there had to be a better way I saw a tweet from @shanselman about NuGet Package of the Week, and that made the connection, and I thought :
The third party control manufacturers should create a directory on the user’s computer (or network location) and place NuGet packages in there for the various controls that are in the library.
I tweeted about it
should/do 3rd party control makers (@Telerik, @Syncfusion, etc) populate a local directory with nuGet packages of thier controls on install?
@MathLionSoft
MathLion Software
So why am I writing this post? I wanted to write it to try to give the idea a little more presence and hopefully it get discovered by the control makers and they think about implementing the idea.
What you can do? If you agree with this idea please talk about it in a blog post and/or tweet the link and lets try to get the idea growing.
This post goes with the presentation I made to the Silverlight user group in Phoenix, AZ for the Feburary 2011 monthly meeting.
continue reading…
In a couple weeks I will be giving my first ever presentation to fellow developers. I will be presenting at the Phoenix Silverlight users group at the Feb meeting which is held on Feb 2nd.
I will be giving a talk on using the Silverlight PivotViewer Control (http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/) as well as using PART of the Pivot Collection Tools (http://pivotcollectiontools.codeplex.com/) to build a collection for viewing in the PivotViewer Control. As part of the demos I do I will also be touching on using Fabricator project (http://fabricator.codeplex.com/) to generate demo data (but I already did a blog post on that aspect)
The Silverlight Group meets at Interface Technical Training, NW corner of Central and Thomas at 6PM on the First Wednesday of each month.
Would say “hope to see you there” but if too many people are there, I’ll only be more nervous! Just Kidding, I hope you can make it out for the meeting, and if I am too boring or too bad a presenter there is also the Phoenix Connected Systems User Group meeting at ITT at the same time in a different room.
Well tonight I was working on building sample projects for a presentation I am working on that is coming up in a couple weeks. During that process I decided to get the NuGet package management system and got playing with it to see if there was any packages I could use for the demos in the presentation. Now the demos I’ve seen of NuGet (like this one by Scott Hanselman) have all used the Package Manager Console. The console is great for installing packages if you know what ones are available, but since I didn’t, I was putzing around with the "get-help" command. I then actually "RTM (Read the Manual)" and read through the Getting Started page for the NuGet system. On that page it shows another way to add packages to a project, using the Add Library Package Reference dialog box as shown below.
I had heard about T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) templates a while ago, but never really looked into them. But then as I was learning Entity Framework (EF) and the articles on using T4 templates with EF to create POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) code I read a little on them. I am including links to T4 basics at the end of the post.
But then came finding the Silverlight PivotViewer and writing some proof of concept (PoC) stuff for it. I had several large table from a data warehouse we wanted to expose the data in, using the PivotViewer. I did a first go of the PoC app using just a couple columns from one of the tables. But then we wanted to do with the full columns (way overkill, but we wanted to see all the data so we could better determine which ones we’d want in various PivotViewer Collections). I had designed the app to use classes that wrapped up our Data Layer objects and exposed the fields as new properties that were flagged as Facets using attributes, so the Pivot Collection Tools could be used using the PivotCollection
Some links collected after hearing the podcast at the first link.
- http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=578 - Matt Jubelirer from Microsoft talks with Carl and Richard about Silverlight PivotViewer, a radical new tool based on Deep Zoom for conceptualizing data.
- http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/pivotviewer/ – PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. By visualizing thousands of related items at once, users can see trends and patterns that would be hidden when looking at one item at a time.
- http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/
- http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info/image-content.aspx
- http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Deep-zooming-on-the-fly.aspx
- http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info/jit-tools.aspx
- http://www.maximumpc.com/article/%5Bprimary-term%5D/how_to_create_a_deep_zoom_photo_album
- http://blog.timmykokke.com/archive/2010/08/16/building-your-first-pivotviewer-application.aspx
Code tools
Just posting a couple links that I liked that were tweeted by @ScottCate
- http://www.generatedata.com/#about
- So what is this site?Ever needed custom formatted sample / test data, like, bad? Well, that’s the idea of the Data Generator. It’s a free, open source script written in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL that lets you quickly generate large volumes of custom data in a variety of formats for use in testing software, populating databases, and scoring with girls.
- http://www.filehelpers.com/
- The FileHelpers are a free and easy to use .NET library to import/export data from fixed length or delimited records in files, strings or streams.
The idea is pretty simple:You can strong type your flat file (fixed or delimited) simply describing a class that maps to each record and later read/write your file as an strong typed .NET arrayThe Library also has support for import/export data from differents storages like Excel, Access, SqlServer, etc.
And a site found from the links on one of the above:
- http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBack.aspx
Record, enhance, share.
Create compelling demos and tutorials
with BB FlashBack screen recorder.
I saw this link from a fellow social media user Matthew Petro (@MatthewPetro) on twitter.
http://www.mysidedoor.com/2010/07/02/social-media-day-2010/
It is a great post by a coffe shop owner who is using Social Media to draw in customers. The main point of the post is to cover his attendance of the Social Media Day event in Tempe, AZ, which I had also attended last week. I agree with him that the stories shared there were not the best, but I blame that on the limited time they were given.
He then proceeds to tell HIS story, which I think is a good one. I wont try to recap it here, and leave it to you to read his blog post.
But the most important points in the post are summarized by him in the last paragraph, which is the one pointed out by Matthew as being important for small businesses. If you are a small business owner you need to learn about Social Media and how it can help grow your business.
