Couple of days ago I received the wonderful email from Microsoft telling me that I was awarded the MVP; it really feels nice when you achieve results. But the best part of all this is my friends’ reactions, the congrats, and the big smiles on the faces (not mentioning a generous gift from my colleagues ), to all these true friends I say big thank you! ...
To be frank I hesitated a bit to review a “a Martin Fowlers signature book”, but I have to share this review with others; to set expectations. The book “Continuous Integration” is ok, but it’s too general, that’s it! I have read several articles about Continuous Integration and posts here and there until I thought to myself “that’s it, it’s time to get the book, it’s time to delve deep into this”, to my surprise the content of the book was too general and it didn’t add much to the articles I read. ...
Last Saturday 14th of May 2011 we had the first web camp in Jordan among Jordev’s activities, and it was great! check my presentation slides at the end of this post. The event was like the following: 8:30 AM – 9:00 AM: Registration 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM: Four 50 minutes sessions with 10 minutes between each for breaks, there was a few attendees at the beginning so we delayed the first session for couple of minutes (yes we have a morning problem here). Sessions were “Entity Framework 4.1”, “ASP.NET MVC One Step Deeper”, “Dynamic Data”, and “jQuery” 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM: lunch break, where people went to the near market and had their lunch there. 2:15 PM – 4:30 PM: free coding session. Things went great: ...
For too long, all Jordev’s activities have been in the form of sessions with fast code demos, and for the first time we are going to break this rule and do our first web camp in which attendees will have the chance to have hands-on experience with some of Jordan’s active experts. It will be on the 15th of May 2011. There are two things in web camps that make them more interesting: REAL CODING and COLLABORATION; coding is a practice science, best way to learn it is by practice, and this practice will be much more fruitful and enjoyable if done with a bunch of enthusiasts who share the same passion with you. Speakers will have their share, but the biggest share will go to the hidden experts who have been hiding under excessive working hours and who avoid boring talkative sessions. This gathering will be a chance for us to dig these gems out and have the most geeky fun and benefit we seek in such communities. ...
Today I was looking for a fast way to find the index of a nth occurrence of a string in a string, so I found this very simple and intuitive site on which you can find and share .net extension methods, the website is http://www.extensionmethod.net Dah! I couldn’t find what I looked for, so I shared my solution here; the website made it crazy easy to share this! Something I definitely would add to my log on how to create wonderful websites, simple and effective. ...
The other day I needed an ASP.NET MVC grid control, and I have always heard about Telerik’s ASP.NET MVC Extensions and the great tools they provide, so I decided to give them a try. So I followed the installation guide step by step, and prepared my code to use the extensions; I added a reference to the DLL, added the scripts, etc… and I thought I was ready to test-drive it. I opened Telerik’s sample website which showed the control and below it the code sample that made it work, innocently enough I did what any other developer would do to try out the sample code: copy and paste it in your page and then build. To my surprise there was an error in the View; it didn’t recognize an Extension method called “Configurator”! ...
It was great to get back to presentations after this while; ASP.NET MVC was the topic for the latest session I delivered through Jordev. The audience was great, I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did preparing for it. you can find the slides on Slideshare, embedded here as well: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC View more presentations from Emad Alashi. ...
Here is your chance (with little effort) to win a fully-paid trip to Tech-Ed Middle East 2011. Simple tasks are required from your part and you will find yourself with the ultimate geeks in Dubai next year. For the details check the competitions website on http://compete.jordanruns.net/
Update: Twitter “statuses/followers” API documentation had a small note at the bottom that says it returns only 100 followers if no paging is used. I have updated the script accordingly. Thanks to @RamyMahrous for notifying me in his comment below. For a long time I thought that @DotNetArabi shouldn’t follow it’s own followers due to various reasons I had, but lately I discovered that I was wrong. So I have decided to follow them back no matter how many they are, but that would be a tedious thing to do manually. Here comes Powershell to the rescue. ...
In this post I will show you an example of how smartly built controls and API’s can make the developers programming life extremely enjoyable, hopefully this example will urge you in giving such a smart effort when you build your own control or API. Lately I have been playing around with a very nice tree control based on jQuery called jsTree. One of the nice features is that it allows populating the tree through asynchronous calls with JSON data representation. In order to achieve that, you needed to provide the data by JSON special format suitable to the tree. This format, regrettably, is open to the JSON vulnerability Phil Haack talked about in his two posts here and here. So to avoid this vulnerability I had to change this default data format of the tree, at least until the very end of the data flow just before the tree populates the data, only then I can change it back to the default format, like the following: ...