I posted this community wiki in the hopes of creating a thread of expertise. My question is thus ... "Where do the experts go to learn about the newest coding techniques?".
I'm basically looking for the leading/bleeding edge of architecture, design, development and theory.
I know conferences and trade shows are probably the best venues to see the latest and greatest, but for those on a limited budget (of both time and money) such as myself, I'm looking for websites that I can read in the evenings that will keep me current on what's new in the world.
I program mostly in C# but the websites need not be geared towards C#.
Blogs
Martin Fowler, the best starting point I think. (http://martinfowler.com/)
articles like "Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern", "Mocks Aren't Stubs", "Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern" (http://martinfowler.com/articles.html)
David Hayden (http://www.davidhayden.com/)
Reflective Perspective, a good daily feed (http://blog.cwa.me.uk/tags/morning-brew/)
Ayende (http://ayende.com/Blog/)
Eric Lippert - Works on the language. Sometimes read about new C# features before they're announced elsewhere.
Scott Hanselman
Journals
The Architecture Journal (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx) And what's a great option - you can order free, paper based copies!
MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx)
Community
Codeproject.com, short and large articles
pnpguidance.com, tutorials, blogs and articles
Real applications and devteams
pattern&practices home: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx, and P&P products
SCSF, the Smart Client Software Factory home. Learn about desktop enterprise systems. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480482.aspx)
WCSF, the Web Client Software Factory home. Learn about busines(process) oriented web architecures. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264518.aspx)
Enterprise Library
For free - I would recommend MSDN, particularly keep an eye on the C# and .NET technology pages. Lots of blogs, and nearly every announcements about what's up and coming is put there.
Serverside.net
The ondemand(previously recorded) webcasts from Microsoft are normally really good, but it's a painful number of clicks to actually get to the point where you can download the file, and sometimes you find that it is not available.
Also sometimes you can find a .NET User Group locally that will have speakers/sessions occasionally. These are also great ways to network and find out what kind of work is going on in your area.
Books, books, books! Good books are written by subject matter expects, involve input from many sources, are peer reviewed, well structured and go orders of magnitude deeper than trade shows, and most online material. When you buy a book, you get the experience of an expert for a very reasonable price.
NDepend documentation comes with two white books and also online blog posts and articles concerning the architecture for large .NET application:
Partitioning code base through .NET assemblies and Visual Studio projects (8 pages)
Defining .NET Components with Namespaces (7 pages)
Control Components Dependencies to gain Clean Architecture
Re-factoring, Re-Structuring and the cost of Levelizing
Evolutionary Design and Acyclic componentization
Layering, the Level metric and the Discourse of Method
Fighting Fabricated Complexity
I never get to go to PDC, but I do love to watch the videos.
As a previous post mentioned the MS PDC videos are on online. Same with Mix which has good MS Web development related content. Also, for general MS videos there is Channel 9, it's not all technical content, but it's worth searching if you are looking for something in particular.
Someone already mentioned blogs, here are a few more:
Scott Hansleman - lots of stuff on there, a lot of ASP, MVC stuff.
Phil Haack - another good MVC guy.
Rob Connery - again a lot of focus on MVC.
ScottGu - according to his blog he "builds a few products for Microsoft", which has to be the understatment of the year - he is in charge of ASP, IIS, SIlverlight and much more besides at MS.
Check out Sharp Architecture, it's very promising.
I've collected several RSS feeds that I regularly to stay up-to-date on .NET and Agile. If you like I can share the list with you. It contains most of the stuff already mentioned here.
Related
What have been some of the most helpful resources for learning Blend from a developers perspective?
I suspect in the end we will hand off the XAML of our app to a design expert, but until that blessed day there are some things even a coding grunt should be able to manage in Blend that are painful in Visual Studio (styles for example)
Have you checked out the Microsoft training site? There is also lynda.com which has some free training to make use of. Overtime I have found the videos to the most rewarding, as walking through static screenshots is not very beneficial. Especially when attempting to understand the layout of Blend and making use of the varying tools within the product.
In addition, since you mention Silverlight, Tim Heuer has a blog which covers Silverlight and at times touches on Expression Blend. There is also Jesse Liberty who has since moved into WP7 to some degree but has varying tutorials on his web site which again touch on Blend to some degree. Both Tim and Jesse work for Microsoft so they can often times provide insightful information and are fairly active within the community in getting questions answered.
I've been trying to find a good advanced Silverlight 4 course, but can't really find anything. I've found this:
http://www.develop.com/training-course/silverlight-4
But the most interesting topics are only talked about in the course material, not in the actual course. The extra topics from this course which is of particular interest, are:
Working with Files: local files, Isolated Storage, data files, zip files.
Extensibility: working with MEF to build extensible applications
PRISM: using PRISM (Composite Application Guidance) to structure Silverlight applications
Also: Test driven development with Silverlight would be good to learn better.
Does anyone know anyone who gives good courses which include these topics? I'm not a total Silverlight newbie, but not an expert either. Preferably the course will be held in Europe or Eastern USA.
Chr.
Agilitrain offers an advanced course. Check out https://agilitrain.com/. This is the company that offers the "Silverlight Tour" courses. I haven't been to any of their offerings, but the instructors are well known in the Silverlight arena. (Shawn Wildermuth and Erik Mork are two of them.)
Take a look at the web site. They display full course outlines and bios of the instructors.
The prices (as with any course) are hefty for an independent programmer/consultant, but if you have a corporation footing the bill, the prices seem a bit more competitive.
Here's a good resource for MEF and Prism: http://development-guides.silverbaylabs.org/
Erik provides some really useful videos explaining the topics. Not exactly a course per se though.
And here is Channel9's collection of Silverlight 4 training courses: http://development-guides.silverbaylabs.org/
There's at least one covering MEF.
The following is a link to ScottGu's blog. This is another collection of pretty useful Silverlight 4 training videos: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/22/silverlight-4-training-kit.aspx
That should be a good start. :)
I work on a project known as the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) project at Microsoft (http://microsoft.com/sdl) - in short it's a set of practices that must be used by product groups before they ship products to help improve security.
Over the last couple of years, we have published a great deal of SDL documentation, as customers ask for more information about what we're doing.
But what I'd like to know is:
What are you doing within your organization to help improve the security of your product?
What works? What doesn't work?
How did you get management to agree to this work?
Thanks.
Honestly, Reading your book was a good start. :-)
Responding to your questions:
Crypto is a hobby of mine that I sometimes blog about (e.g. on TLS and AES). After writing my own implementation of AES, I learned enough to know beyond a reasonable doubt that I should never use my own implementation but rather use the ones written by the CryptoAPI and OpenSSL guys.
Code reviews where people that are good at security issues are marked as required.
Having a class on-site with labs to raise awareness of issues mentioned in your book as well internal mailing lists discussing new issues.
Several folks listen to the Security Now podcast to keep current on what types of issues are out there and what is getting attacked. This indirectly affects design.
Except for an on-site course and buying the code review tool, none of these require management approval.
I'm an indie mac developer, but also a platform security evangelist: I'm the author of Pro Cocoa Application Security published by Wrox. In that book I champion the secure dev technique I use myself: it's based on the Swiderski and Snyder threat modeling, but with two changes. I make it lighter weight by considering which entry points access which assets without using DFDs. I also put more focus on identifying users and misusers, which I think makes it more applicable to shrinkwrap software.
As far as tool support is concerned, I use the Xcode static analyzer (based on clang), but have found it doesn't detect some common vulnerabilities. I did file bugs though :-). I also always use the gcc _FORTIFY_SOURCE macro. There aren't good Mac risk analysis tools but I'm working on that... ;-)
I've spoken on security to Mac devs at conferences and in podcasts and gotten plenty of feedback, if you want me to clarify anything I've said or are interested in the community feedback please ask in comments. Private questions are welcome to (though I'd prefer to stay on the forum): iamleeg at securemacprogramming dot
com.
We think before we code. Strangely enough, it avoids many bugs, including those which are exploitable by adverse parties and henceforth known as "security holes".
Part of the trick is not letting anyone near a keyboard unless he has a solid amount of experience and expertise.
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I try to be very cautious with this question. There are at least three different web-development frameworks available in Smalltalk. The most prominent seems to be Seaside but there is also AIDA/Web and Iliad.
They seem to be very similiar, but this impresson may be wrong. I wonder who has tried the different tools and can share the pros/cons of the different packages.
A more concrete question would be, do yo know of let's say any software in the bookkeeing area which has choosen to use either of the three (or other) web development frameworks.
Here's one other question. What about maturity and compatiblity. Which framework can one judge as the "most" stable?
99% of my practical experience is with Iliad, so my comparison is primarily about how I got to choose Iliad instead of the others.
Seaside. Tried it first, it is the most known and the first you stumble in. I found it hard to understand (as always, no matter what you use, when it gets to real implementation you always run into issues that fit badly with the general theory), there was little documentation around and the community seemed to care little about telling n00bs how to grow up. I eventually dropped it to check Aida. You find them here: http://seaside.st/ and on IRC at #seaside
Aida. I really liked it, as Janko is extremely patient and supportive. It is large, though. I decided to use it, when I was to start implementation for our project and it was only by chance that I ran into Iliad a few days before starting. You find Aida here: http://www.aidaweb.si/ and on IRC at #Aida
Iliad. The main reason I chose it was that I had just dropped Squeak and switched to gnu-smalltalk. gst seemed to have a lot of ongoing activity on Iliad, so I reckoned I was probably going to get a better assistance with it. It is much smaller as a concept (though it does absolutely everything) and I had very little trouble in getting started and in tweaking it to what I needed for. It also proved to be well managed, as I went thru 3 releases without ever being in trouble with what I had already deployed. You get answers to questions usually in 12-24 hours max, which is fine for me. You find Iliad here: http://www.iliadproject.org/index on IRC issues are usually channeled on the #gnu-smalltalk channel
What we are doing is a GUI for a PostgreSQL database used to manage a large multimedia dictionary, that in turn produces content (among others, for KDE-edu). I have no notion of booking apps in general, so I cannot answer to your question properly.
Yet, speaking as an analyst, a booking app is mostly a DB with an online GUI, so I see no reason why you could not make it. Much will depend on how easily your db can translate into objects. You could use a RDBMS, as we did, and design tables to map objects, or use an OODBMS. Both solutions have pluses and minuses, none of them is going to have an impact on your choice of framework, I'd say.
My suggestion is that you take a month or so in making experiments and see what better fits you. I don't think there is a tool that fits everyone, we are all different and what is easy for me may be hell for someone else (and the other way round, obviously). So try your car before buying it ;)
I would not invest too much time in studying the general theory. Using a smalltalk framework is going to turn upside down the way you make a web app anyway, and your first contact is going to be full of "false friends" you inherit from previous mindsets. Your best asset is definitely going to be "how quick can I grasp what they tell me", and this is largely an individual thing, depending on you and on who you bump into. So I'd really suggest you get your hands dirty BEFORE reading too much theoretical stuff.
These frameworks are all quite different and have different goals. It would be interesting to collaboratively create some kind of comparison.
As an author of Seaside I can provide the key properties of Seaside only:
Seaside makes building web applications feel like composing traditional GUIs: components can be freely composed and reused. Sequences of components are defined using a sequence of Smalltalk statements.
Seaside has a layered architecture, providing you with high-level abstractions (components, control flow, callbacks, HTML generation, JavaScript generation, ...) over low-level concepts (HTTP, Request, Response, URLs, HTML, JavaScript). If you need to, Seaside gives you full access to low-level constructs too.
There are two Seaside books to help you get started: Dynamic Web Development with Seaside and Seaside Tutorial.
Seaside provides a tight integration into various state of the art web technologies: JavaScript (JQuery and JQueryUI), SVG, RSS, HTML5, Comet (Server-Push)
Seaside runs identically on most today's Smalltalk platforms: Pharo Smalltalk, Squeak, GNU Smalltalk, GemStone Smalltalk, VW Smalltalk, VA Smalltalk, and Dolphin Smalltalk. It is supported by all vendors of Smalltalk platforms.
Seaside provides industry proven open-source components for meta-modeling (Magritte) and content management (Pier).
Let me introduce some strengths of Aida/Web too, because as its author it would be hard to me to compare with other two frameworks. Aida strengths are:
RESTfull URLs
MVC support, every domain object can
have its own RESTfull URL, each domain class has its own web presentation class,
Integrated AJAX and Comet
support, you don't see any difference
between a traditional and Ajax
programming anymore,
Tree-like control flow for GUI-like
control flows, without need for
continuations
Building web pages programatically by
composing from components/elements
(no template based)
Scalable in complexity and performance
Integrated security with access
control and users/groups management
Ported to most Smalltalk dialects:
Squeak/Pharo, VisualWorks, Gemstone
GLASS, Dolphin, Smalltalk/X
Prime and most fresh example of Aida at work is this year Smalltalk Google Summer of
Code site.
This is the is a nice example because it was developed it in maybe a week in
total, together with a development of GSoC process in parallel and in
the same time managing that process as an admin. This site is actually
an extended Aida/Scribo CMS, with strong use of so called scriblets,
that is, dynamic web "includes" directly into the content of the site.
That way I was able to very quickly support the new ideas which come
during the evolving GSoC process.
Well, Suixo uses Seaside. Take a look at the GSoC projects we defined. Its more ERP than bookkeeping, and currently focused on healthcare.
A similar question has been asked: MSDN subscriptions on the cheap?, but I am not interested in the solutions provided:
I am not developing a product for sale, I am starting up a consulting company, so Empower is not an option.
I have visited the links to MS regarding MSDN subscriptions and they do not point to a way to get an inexpensive copy.
I am not interested in suggestions that I become a MVP. Frankly, I'm desiring to focus on developing my company, not jumping through MS's hoops.
There are really only a few options available
Buy it at standard price
Become a Microsoft Certified Partner, and get a good discount (Actually much simpler than you would think, I did it in under 2 weeks for my business)
Find a MVP buddy that is willing to share a free giveaway
But in all reality, these are the ONLY legal options. You might also try calling Microsoft, you never know what might happen, they have many special programs that are not necessarily publicly advertised.
What you want is the Action Pack: https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40016455.
(Note, as an employee of Microsoft, I apologize that you have to LOG OUT of your LiveID to see this page if that LiveID is not already attached to a Registered Partner.)
You don't have to be certified to get access to this, just registered (there are three levels of partnership: 1. Registered, 2. Certified, 3. Gold Certified). You do have to pass a fairly simple assessment test, though.
See the pdf referenced at https://partner.microsoft.com/US/40082823 for an overview of the process.
One last thing - if you are a student (I suspect the OP is not), you can get many Microsoft tools free from http://www.dreamspark.com.
Surely your consultancy will need a website in ASP.NET and perhaps your clients would like a widget that talks directly to a web service on your site? There's your product.
Also, look into "Value added Services" amongst the Empower documentation.
I'm on the Empower program - there really aren't any barriers to entry, as such.
I used to go directly through MS, but nowadays, I always order mine through Xtras.net - they have good multi-year discounts and you manage the subscription online through Microsoft's site as normal.
Does Empower require that the 'main' use is developing a product?
You can always develop a product as well - doesn't have to be very sucessfull, perhaps something to display the time in a window?