I’ve been holding off until recently on looking at the ASP.NET MVC framework. It’s not that I was against the MVC approach, I prefer it and understand how useful it is. The problem is that I’ve invested so much time and money into the older web forms approach. For example, I have a complete set of ASP.NET controls that I’ve created, and I’m a subscriber to the Infragistics control set and I like to use them in web pages. They’re not perfect, but I have a lot invested in building great UIs using controls that I can purchase, and there’s no equivalent controls for the MVC framework because the web forms controls are for all intents and purposes incompatible with MVC. But as I look at MVC more as I have during my week off between Christmas and the New Year holiday, I’m finding that my perceptions about MVC were wrong. More...

This must have come out while I was hiding under a rock working on customer projects. Apparently during the PDC back in October, the Microsoft ADO.NET team put out a statement indicating that with the release of LINQ to Entities and their plans for .NET 4.0, LINQ to SQL has come to an end. Well…I don’t actually know that’s the truth, but that’s what it sounds like and that’s what the general community seems to feel. More...

About 5 or 6 months ago, I sat down and decided that I was going to finally take control of my finances. Yes, I did. It was a crazy decision to make, and it was before the start of the great economic collapse of 2008, but I did sit down and vow to take control of my finances. Here’s how I did it. More...

The second meeting of the Phoenix Windows Azure Cloud Computing User Group (we have to come up with a better name) is going to be Thursday, January 22nd, 2009, at the Microsoft office in downtown Phoenix. The meeting is scheduled from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. The focus of the evening is going to be Azure’s storage systems. More...

Ok…it’s that annual time for New Year’s resolutions. They’re the promises that we always make that almost never come true, yet we do it over and over and over again. But this time I’m disciplined and sincere and ready to jump on the bandwagon and start to make it happen. So what do I plan to do better or differently this year? Here’s my set of goals: More...

When I originally created the Composite WPF Shell project on CodePlex, I initially put the project and source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). However, after a bit of reflection this week on the proper licensing model for this project another open source project that I’m going to be announcing shortly, I decided that the CDDL was not the correct license to use for the Composite WPF Shell project. More...

On Thursday, December 11th, the Phoenix Neudesic office is hosting the first Cloud Computing User Group meeting based around the Microsoft Windows Azure technologies. If you’re interested in attending, here’s the link to the invite: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=133685. More...

About a month ago, David Pallman, the leader of the Custom Application Development Practice Council at Neudesic, issued a call to action for more Neudesic consultants to give back to the community through open source CodePlex projects. So I answered his call, and I seem to be the only one at the moment. Nevertheless, I started the Composite WPF Shell project. Check it out. More...

On Thursday I took the Microsoft Technical Specialist certification exam for Windows Presentation Foundation. It was a very tough test. I think it was tougher than the .NET 2.0 Foundation exam which I took last year. I was interested in taking the exam to see if I knew as much as I thought that I did, and I thought that it would be a good marketing thing for the Phoenix Neudesic office to be able to claim at least one WPF-capable consultant in the office. I got an 88% on the test which is a lot better than I thought that I did. More...

I have been admittedly bad at blogging for the past couple of months. So the choice is that I either pick it back up again, or abandon it altogether. I’m not going to do the latter, so I better start blogging again. I think that I need to put an appointment on my calendar every day to write at least one blog post. What’s my excuse? Work and life, of course. Just too much going on between studying, client projects, work projects, etc.

But now I’m back. And I will start blogging regularly once again.