Community Blogs

While I was planning to write about the same topic and have the draft ready in my Windows Live Writer waiting to complete, I found an interesting question in StackOVerflow and couldn’t just resist to answer: ORM/Persistence layer Advice The question starts with: I'm starting a new project and I'm looking around for either a very good ORM or for a non-SQL-based persistence layer. Then follows up with a REALLY GOOD summary of what he believes about each known ORM he knew out of his own findings and search. I advice you to go read it. However, all this investigation didn’t get him to a single choice answer. And I can’t blame him. This is one fo the questions that will remain for so long without a single answer, or maybe having the popular...

This was originally an email I sent to .NET team in my company, then decided to share as a blog post. The problem: Let’s say you have a complex application, and this application (or part of it) runs very slowly. No bug s in results, no errors or exceptions, but it just so slow! Now you want to know which part of your code is the reason, which method(s) you need to go and modify., which methods take so long to execute or consume so much memory/CPU. How would you know that? Let’s say you want to improve the performance of your application in general (say add caching or such), so, you want to identify which parts of your code deserve your attention and will really make difference (so that you don’t waste your time on optimizing something that will...

Emad Ashri ( @splashup on twitter) interviewed me in the 5th episode of his first Arabic podcast series DotNetArabi to talk about Object Relational Mapping in .NET in Arabic. Podcast Page: Mohamed Meligy Talking about ORMs ( MP3 Direct Download ) السلام عليكم   أصدقائي العرب ممن يتابعون هذه المدونة.. يسعدني أن أعلن عن أول حديث لي على الانترنت - و كذلك أول حديث لي على الانترنت بالعربية ، عن الـ Object Relational Mappers – ORMs شكرا جزيلا لـ “ عماد العشري ” ( splashup@ على تويتر) على استضافته لي في موقع “ دوت نت عربي DotNetArabi ”، و هو موقع عربي يتضمن لقاءات صوتية مع العديد من المطورين في مجال الدوت نت، تماما على غرار DotNetRocks ، HanselMinutes و سواها، و هو في حد ذاته فخر لي أن أكون ضيفا للحلقة الخامسة في برنامج كهذا، خاصة عندما يكون ضيف...

Here’s another email from the internal mailing list of Injazat .NET Ninjas (Ninjazat, AKA  as we call ourselves), that I’m sharing with blog readers as well. Just a place holder, until I move one of my 18 (just discovered the number now – terrifying!) drafts in my Windows Live Writer into a published post, or delete them all! Subject: [Learning] Some very interesting videos Some videos from NDC 2009 event (Norwegian Developers Conference 2009) - about software design and related issues: · NDC Video – Robert Martin – S.O.L.I.D Principles of OO class design · NDC Video – Robert Martin – Craftsmanship and Ethics · NDC Video – Robert Martin – Component Principles · NDC Video – Robert Martin – Clean Code III – Functions · NDC Video – Michael...

The March meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on March 25th from 7-9PM EDT.  Check the our mailing list for continuing updates and future meetings.  This month we have Jonathan Cogley providing an introduction to Test Driven Development.  This session will walk through a real-world problem and how to identify and isolate the dependencies in the logic.  This is in the series of getting back to the basics series that I hope to mix in with our regular meetings.  This might also include Firestarter events, coding dojos and so on to help build the development community here in the Washington DC area. Back To Basics and Software Craftsmanship After a lot of discussions have been going on around the community around software craftsmanship...

Inspired by Bullshit Bingo I've created ALT.NET Bingo for you next ALT.NET conference, Twitter conversation, or blog reading session.  It's simple: Get your card! http://is.gd/oA0A Every time you hear a word, you mark it off.  If you get bingo you stand up and shout, "WATERFALL!!" Happy playing! Read More...

Several months ago, Justin Wilcox introduced me to the idea of a live programming contest. The basic idea is that you get a bunch of programmers together, form teams of two if you wish, and set them off to write a bot for some sort of game (think Rock, Paper, Scissors) with the ultimate goal of them pitting their bots against each other to determine a winner. Check out a video of the first event . Not too long ago, Glenn Block convinced me to put on a similar contest for ALT.NET Seattle. We held the contest on Saturday evening and got around 14 participants. The event was a lot of fun. The first hour ended up being more of a contest for Jacob and I than the actual participants while we practiced extreme agile just-in-time development on the...

In the next meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET users group we will try an Open Space format — or rather maybe I should say a format with some characteristics of Open Spaces given our time and space constraints. If you haven't been to a meeting held in this format, maybe you think this sounds crazy. I'd encourage you to see it for yourself. The meeting will be on March 11 th . Open Space 6:00 pm Pizza and networking time 6:30 pm This month we will have an Open Space -inspired meeting. Open Spaces are considered an effective meeting layout to find solutions to problems that would benefit from a wide range of opinions. We don't have enough time to do a full-blown Open Spaces event so we will cut some corners. Here's the plan:...

The February meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on February 25th from 7-9PM. Check the our mailing list for continuing updates and future meetings. This month, Paolo del Mundo will be presenting "Advanced jQuery ". With the inclusion of jQuery support from Microsoft, understanding this library is a must. Being the language enthusiast that I am, I'm always looking for deep dives into languages, and Javascript has been one of those languages that I have a passion for. Once again, I'd like to thank the Motley Fool for hosting us this month. We're always looking for sponsors, so if you'd like to sponsor us, please contact me via the mailing list. JSConf 2009 Just as a side note, for those also interested in Javascript developmment...

After his presentation , Robert stayed a little more answering questions from the audience. Read More...