Development

And finally I have the time to post about my new job, yes I changed jobs and now it’s Readify. I have never seen anything like it! Readify’s consultants are the top professionals in the IT industry working on the Microsoft stack; when I step in the office every morning, I sit in a room in which there are two MVP’s (of 12 MVP’s work in Readify already!), two book authors and user group leads, couple of speakers, and many silent geniuses. And I am drinking knowledge from a fire hose! ...

Let’s take the example: @Html.Action("Latest", "Episode") What this will do is to invoke the “Latest” action method in the “Episode” controller. But what really happens behind the scenes is NOT a direct invoke; it will actually start from the beginning of the ASP.NET MVC execution pipeline using “Latest” and “Episode” as Route values for the keys “action” and “controller” respectively. This means that you should pay very good attention to your Routes definition in the Application_Start() in Global.asax; Html.Action() will try to match the best route in your defined routes according to the RouteValueDictionary created above (action and controller) along with any additional route values provided in the overload. ...

Recently I had to go through some health checkup that included tests for my eye, one of these tests required from me to keep my eye open for a long period of time concentrating continuously into an extremely strong and annoying light. During the test I kept receiving encouraging words from the examining doctor every couple of seconds: “Bravo Emad! very good concentration, keep it up, that’s it”. Even though it was a simple task and me being in my 30’s!… I still had a strong feeling that I was doing something right! and that I should keep doing what I was doing, to give more effort no matter how annoying and hurting this intense light was; and all of this was due to his words! the more he encouraged the wider I opened my eye and concentrated. ...

In a nutshell, a query string will not be part of the RouteData dictionary in the routing process, yet it will affect the route matching. On the other hand, when Model Binding takes place, query string will be used to bind to the parameters of the action method, unless there is an item in route data with the same key. Now the details. Let us consider this ASP.NET MVC application. We have an action method: ...

During the last quarter of 2011 we have hosted two amazing Jordanian Microsoft guests, Yousef Al Khalidi (Distinguished Engineer), and Ayman Dahleh (Development Manager for the Global Experience Platform group), who happened to be having their vacation here, they generously accepted our invitation to deliver sessions here in Jordan despite their busy times. The community recorded these two inspiring interviews with our guests through which I can see how close achievements can be. ...

After I have moved to WinHost, I was surprised they don’t support multiple domains under one site out of the box; you have to rely on IIS URL Rewrite magic to achieve that. So as expected, I looked for a solution in their KB and the internet (you don’t reinvent the wheel, remember?) and found couple of posts here, here, here, and here that helped a lot in achieving this. So I managed to have www.emadashi.com and www.dotnetarabi.com working fine together residing in the folders “emadashi-blog” and “dotnetarabi-root” respectively under the root; they both have same IP address, but upon request a redirection is made to the proper application folder. ...

It was a very interesting event “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” which took place last Tuesday; the team did a very good job putting it together, it is really great seeing this great effort put into such fruitful events; moving the community steps forward, so thank you AmmanTT team, you rock. Hereby I post the slides I presented in my talk: Software Life Cycle, Humans & Code ...

I will be speaking at “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” next Tuesday 6th of December 2011. Never heard about AmmanTT? quoting from their About page: Coming to you on the first Tuesday of every month is a 2-hour event that brings industry experts, local technologists/engineers, entrepreneurs, idea-generators and just about any enthusiast together in a casual setting to meet and learn from each other I will be talking about the real-life side of the software development life cycle, and about the overlapping between Process and Humans in the cycle. So mark your calendars, I will be very happy to meet you there. ...

And it’s over, the Microsoft Open Door event is behind us now, and so was my presentation about HTML5 and IE; all praise to god, the feedback was great and I am humbled by the nice compliments. If you were among the audience and you have any comment, question, or critique, you are most welcome to contact me anytime. Below is the presentation slides as I promised: HTML5 & IE ...

I will be speaking at this year’s Microsoft event Open Door; the session will be about HTML5 & IE, including highlights on the main new specifications for HTML5, and how Microsoft is approaching it through IE and some of the dev tools. It will be on Day 2, Track 3, at 3:00 PM. Check the event details and agenda here, catch you there hopefully.