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One aspect of my job that I love is being able to go in front of other developers, my peers, and give presentations on the technologies that my team and I build. I’m very fortunate to be able to do so, especially given the intense stage fright I used to have. But over time, through giving multiple presentations, the stage fright has subsided to mere abject horror levels. Even so, I’m still nowhere near the numbers of much more polished and experienced speakers such as my cohort, Scott Hanselman . Always looking for the silver lining , I’ve found that my lack of raw talent in this area has one great benefit, I make a lot of mistakes. A crap ton of them. But as Byron Pulsifer says, every mistake is a an “opportunity to learn”, which means I’m...

Such a fun time was had at Mix 11 this last week in Vegas. I only saw a few talks as I was busy presenting, but now as I sit at home on my first day back, I say to myself, Self, how can I get all the Mix videos at once? First, you can watch all the videos online at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11   Second, you can get them via RSS. Most major browsers are hiding the RSS button these days, but the discovery metadata is all still there. In IE9, for example, if you show the Command Bar, you can see the RSS Feeds for the Mix site: What's all this awesomeness? Oh, yes, it's the Mix talks via RSS with enclosures, just as you've always wanted. Now you can list the thousand ways that you might retrieve these lovely files and...

Another Spring approaches and once again, another Mix is over. This year at Mix, my team announced the release of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update at Mix, which I blogged about recently. Working on this release as well as NuGet has kept me intensely busy since we released ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM only this past January. Hopefully now, my team and I can take a moment to breath as we start making big plans for ASP.NET MVC 4. It’s interesting to me to think that the version number for ASP.NET MVC is quickly catching up to the version of ASP.NET proper. Once again, Mix has continued to be one of my favorite conferences due to the eclectic mix of folks who attend. The previous photo was taken from Joey De Villa’s Blog post . It’s not just a conference where...

It's Day 1 of the Mix 11 conference here in Las Vegas. I work for the Web Platform and Tools (that's ASP.NET, IIS, IIS Media, etc) group and I did the Web Platform demos for Scott Guthrie's part of the keynote. A lot of people in Dev and QA worked hard all year long to make some fun and cool products and as the designated "talking head," I had just 16 minutes to make all of them (people + products) look good. I hope I did them all justice. We built a backend and a front end for Rob and my sie http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com . The show is something Rob Conery and I do moonlighting on the side (it's our hobby, not our job nor a Microsoft thing) but we needed a new site and this was a fun idea since we built the original...

I did three talks at Mix 10 this year, and I'm going to do blog posts for each one, sharing what I talked about and some code if it's useful. I did a talk on Deployment called " Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong ." You can download the talk here, or watch it online : VIDEO Download: MP4 Video , Windows Media Video , Windows Media Video (High) I always try to sneak cooler titles into conferences if I can. It's better than " WEB101: Deploying Websites using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010's WebDeploy OneClick Publish Wizard Super Karate Monkey Death Car September CTP R2 ." Well, maybe not way better, but still. Here's an outline of what Deployment Related topics...

It’s that time of year again when a young man’s thoughts turn to Las Vegas! Yep, it’s another year and another Mix conference (March 15-17, 2010), but this time they’ve changed locations to Mandalay Bay. It looks like my prediction that the Mix conferences would end at Mix 09 did not pan out. ;) As I did last year , I’ll be giving two talks at Mix 10 this year, one of them with the irrepressible Scott Hanselman . What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2 Come see and hear about the latest innovations in ASP.NET MVC 2 and the tooling support in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. We'll introduce you to a range of productivity (and extensibility) enhancements such as template helpers, model validation, and the new “Areas” feature, which enhances the team development...

While I was running around Mix09 and the MVP Summit this last few weeks I was taking video with my Flip Ultra and my new Creative Vado HD ( I took the Flip Mino HD back , as I thought the quality was poor). I put a bunch of these videos up on Channel 9 and declared it " Hanselminutes On 9 ." It's not official, but maybe if you leave comments they'll make it a regular thing. Some of the videos are pretty cool . Others, totally useless . ;) While Channel 9 recompresses my already compressed streams, I want to point out that the letterboxed 16:9 videos were done with the Creative Vado HD , then the aspect ratio was changed with Expression Encoder . The 4:3 videos were done with my regular Flip Ultra. Let me know which ones you...

My one-hundred-and-fifty-fourth podcast is up . Scott's at Mix09 in Las Vegas this week and he sits down with Chris Woods , a Program Manager on the Mobile Browse Platform Team. They've just open sourced a MASSIVE database of mobile device capabilities , enabling better mobile development for ASP.NET developers. You can also check out Chris's Mix session on Mobile , or my NerdDinner ASP.NET MVC talk . Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show #154 Play in your browser . Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts , a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show. Telerik is a sponsor for this show! Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot...

I gave a talk at Mix 09 today called File | New Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC . It was a fun, if challenging talk to do. I did it it with no slides at all. Just me and Visual Studio. It was one of two talks at Mix that had just code. I wonder if it'll catch on? ;) Anyway, it was quite the tightrope walk. I'll post the video here as soon as it's posted on the Mix 09 Sessions Site . The general structure was to start a File | New Company and build as much of NerdDinner.com as I could in the 75 minutes allotted. Here's a few of the highlights... XHTML Strict I pointed out how nice and easy it is to get a site to validate as XHTML Strict using ASP.NET MVC. You've got complete control over every bit...

We are having a fine time at Mix '09 here in Las Vegas. You may have watched the keynotes live at http://live.visitmix.com/ . Even better, you can watch the sessions as fast as they can get them up online at http://sessions.visitmix.com/MIX09 . Here's a couple of choice (my choice) sessions you should check out. They are really well presented with not just slides, but also video of the presenter. Day One Keynote and Day Two Keynote What's New in Silverlight 3 - Joe Stegman is the Group Program Manager for the SL3 runtime. This is a good overview. Also check out Tim's detailed guide to Silverlight 3 new features   blog post. Building Out of Browser Experiences with Microsoft Silverlight 3 - If you haven't heard, you'll...