I worked on them all day today, and managed to get my Desert Code Camp presentations produced in video format, and uploaded to my Amazon S3 media store. I am initially making available videos in Windows Media Player format. I’m also going to produce the videos in an iPhone/iPod format, just in case anyone wants to use those. Look for those to be available tomorrow morning as I’m going to run the production process over night. More...

Still recovering from the events of yesterday, but Desert Code Camp seemed to be a success in my book. There are things that I would have liked to have done better, but with four presentations in the can, I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out.

I’m starting to go through the four hours and one gigabyte of screen recording video and audio that I captured yesterday. I did my first presentation this morning on Production Debugging, but the rendering process in Camtasia Studio is taking its sweet time, so it may take a while to get all of the videos up.

I had a great time at Desert Code Camp. I really enjoyed presenting and met a lot of great people. I was astounded by how many people showed up for my debugging sessions. I honestly had not expected those sessions to be as full as they were. There were not enough chairs for both sessions, so I had people sitting around the outside of the room and outside the door to listen in on the presentation.

Since the two debugging session were the most popular, I’m putting together their videos first. I will be publishing them here on my blog later this afternoon. If I have time, I’ll get the other two up as well, otherwise look for them to appear on Monday.

For those of you that attended my sessions, thank you for your attendance. This was my first time speaking at a Code Camp, and I’m looking forward to doing so again next time.

Let’s set the stage for this post. It is late May, 2009. The .com bubble has come and gone. The promise of Java driving the Internet never really materialized. It’s out there, but in its own little niche area. But there are two major players in the server-side web market: Microsoft’s ASP.NET and PHP.

I’m a Windows developer. I jump on the Microsoft bandwagon for almost everything and herald their technologies, because that’s where I’ve chosen to throw my alliances. Then one day Microsoft goes out and does something strange. IIS has been the main host for ASP.NET since ASP.NET was introduced. Everything else was supported to some extent, but not as fully as ASP.NET. Then Microsoft releases Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7 in all of it’s shining glory. (Pause for dramatic effect.) But on the same day that they release Windows Server 2008, what do they also release for IIS 7 in both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista? Microsoft released an upgrade with this shiny little technology called FastCGI. And why is FastCGI important? Because Microsoft has been working with the PHP community to develop this little technology that will result in far superior performance for the PHP platform than has been achievable in the past. Fast forward a few months and what else do we see? Microsoft’s new jewel on the horizon, Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud computing initiative, adds support for PHP in Microsoft’s cloud!!! What does this mean to the Microsoft ASP.NET world? More...

When I initially started hosting my own web site, I had a single domain name: www.imaginaryrealities.com. Since then, I’ve taken advantage of the subdomain support of my hosting provider, WebHost4Life, and I’ve added additional subdomains to my collection such as services.imaginaryrealities.com, downloads.imaginaryrealities.com, media.imaginaryrealities.com, and others. In addition, I’ve started other web sites for other purposes. For example, I host my wife’s classroom website on my account at http://www.mrscollinsclassroom.net. The end result, is that while I started with a single web site, over time I’ve added more.

The traditional model for hosting multiple web sites is that I register the domains or subdomains with the hosting provider, and then I point the domain to a directory on my hosting account where the files for the web site will be hosted from. In the majority of cases, each web site points to a different directory, and a different application. For example, both my blog and my wife’s web site are built using BlogEngine.NET. To accomplish this, I have two copies of BlogEngine.NET installed in two different directories of my hosting account. Twice the space for two web sites. It would be great if, with my new web site engine that I’m building, I could consolidate all of these web sites to a single application installation. This post will show you how I’m thinking of doing this. More...

Yesterday my mother called me up in the middle of the day. She’s been taking nursing classes with my sister through Glendale Community College and her usual class days are Friday and Saturday. Although she’s semi-retired, she’s still looking for a career. My mother called me as she was on her way home from class to remind me that there was a meeting of a new Democratic club in Surprise on Saturday afternoon. I had told her that I would attend the meeting with her, but at that point given that it was 150-degrees outside and about 78 inside (which seems warm every season except for Summer), I wasn’t too keen about going outside.

But I got up and went to the meeting. My mom was intent on being a part of the board for the new group and really wanted me there so that I could nominate her. Being the good son that I was, I went to support her. More...

I’m once again picking up on a project to build a new web site. I’m happy with BlogEngine.NET running my blog, but I’m looking for more features that a blog. As I hopefully build my ImaginaryFinance idea to completion, what I really want for this site is to turn ImaginaryRealities.com into a full company portal that will feature my blog, plus product information, a knowledge base, support site, discussion forums, an online store, and provide other company and customer-related features. More...

Since learning about Source Server and how it works with debuggers such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio or WinDBG from the Debugging Tools for Windows, I’ve become an avid fan of adding version control information to my debug and release-mode PDB symbol files. I’ve learned the value of having this information in my symbol files for debugging programs that I’ve released to users that they have had problems with. Also, having them for debugging minidumps has become an invaluable tool that I simply cannot live without. More...

Desert Code Camp is coming up on Saturday June 13th. I’m pretty excited about this one because I’m going to present for the first time. I’m actually diving in deep because there are quite a few subjects that I want to speak about. The four sessions that I have proposed are below. More...

I used to be a 100% Java programmer back in the late 90’s and 2000-2001. Well, that’s not true. I was about 80% Java, 20% MFC/C++/Windows. But then .NET came into my world and I decided that I really wanted to be back developing true Windows applications (I didn’t need the run anywhere promise of Java), and I haven’t really looked back. But then, in 2009, I hit a problem that I could only solve in Java, and I realize how much of that former knowledge that I have lost. More...

About a week ago, I started taking a look at a new version control system (at least it’s new to me). The version control system is called Git, and it’s one of a new generation of distributed version control systems that are being targeted towards geographically distributed teams. Git is gaining significant ground in the open source world as it was originated by the Linux kernel team to coordinate their development of the Linux kernel. But I’m seeing it pop up on more things such as FitNesse. More...