Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Speaking at Lansing Day of .NET

I got an email last week informing me that my Monorail talk has been accepted for Lansing's Day of .NET on June 21st.  Woo Hoo!!  If you check out the session list, you'll see that Michael Eaton will be presenting an ActiveRecord session and Jay Wren will be using Windsor Container for is IoC talk.  We've got just about the whole Castle Project stack covered -- in one day!  And the event is totally free!  Don't miss it!

Ann Arbor GiveCamp

I'm proud to announce that we've now got a website for the Ann Arbor Give Camp.  This is a great opportunity for local developers to give back to the local community.  The website has all the details but here it is in a nutshell: Local charities gives us a brief overview of some development-related task they need help with (building a new website, updating an existing website, a small data collection app, etc...).  We take a bunch of local developers that have volunteered their time for a weekend and we get stuff done!

Dallas and Kansas City have recently done Give Camps and they've gone over very well.  We've got a great set of folks to help organize this event: Microsoft's Jennifer Marsman, Bill Wagner, myself, John Hopkins and many others.  Our timeframe is pretty short, but we've already gotten a ton of interest from local developers when we've mentioned this at user group meetings.

If you want to help out as a developer, go register at the site.  We're looking for all types of people -- PHP, Ruby, MySql, .NET, Sql Server, Web -- not just .NET developers.  We'll be holding the event at Washtenaw Community College on July 11th, 12th and 13th.  WCC is a great venue.  We've held a number of Day of .NET events there in the past and have been very happy with them.  And to show just how great WCC, they've donated the space and internet access for this event!  Awesome!

If you know of any charities that need help, send them over to the site.  Verio has already committed to providing free webhosting for two (2) years to any charity that we help out during the Give Camp!

If you have any questions, drop me an email or check out the website.

Come to GANG next week!

Next week, our local user group (GANG) is having Jason Beres -- INETA Speaker and Director of Product Management for Infragistics -- come and talk about building applications with Silverlight 2.0.  I'm really looking forward to this one since I haven't had time to dive into Silverlight myself.  Come on down to Microsoft's Southfield, Michigan offices on Wednesday, May 21st at 6:30pm.

PS: Sorry about the GANG website -- it's a little plain right now.  We're in the middle of re-working the website and should have the new one up before next weeks meeting.

The Elder will be back!

Keith Elder will be back in Michigan next month for the Lansing Day of .NET!  This is great news.  Keith is a great presenter and is always entertaining and informative.  I've submitted a couple of abstracts myself.  Even if I don't present, I'll still be there.

Keep watching the site to see what other great speaker speakers will be sharing their expertise at this FREE all-day event.

Lazy Loading/Eager Loading

The NHibernate FAQ has a new post about complex object graphs and lazy loading.  If you use NHibernate (or, ActiveRecord -- which makes NHibernate a whole lot easier), it's worth a look.  The technique described can greatly improve the way your app interacts with the database.  OR mappers are nice, but you need to make sure you understand what is happening with the database calls that are made automatically by your OR framework.

If you're using ActiveRecord, here's a few more items regarding lazy loading:

Enabling Lazy Loading in ActiveRecord

Tuning ActiveRecord

Combating the Select N + 1 Problem In NHibernate

Navigating around in the VS.NET IDE

Last week, Bill Wagner and I were providing some C# training for one of our clients.  Bill showed the class how to use F12 to jump to the definition of a method.  One of the students asked how to go back to your previous position and Bill didn't know the key binding off hand.

As someone who comes from a VB6 background, I've maintained my VB6 keyboard mappings since I moved to C# in 2003.  Navigating around inside the VS.NET IDE has been a no-brainer for me since all of the keystrokes I used for the 7 or 8 years of VB development are the same in VS.NET -- assuming you use the VB6 keyboard layout.

I decided to see if C# has a default key binding to jump back to your previous positions after jumping to a method definition using F12.  First off, I wanted to see what IDE command is mapped to my "go back" function.  I pulled up the VS.NET IDE keyboard options, clicked on the "Press shortcut keys" texbox and hit the keyboard keystroke I use for jumping back to my previous position (Ctrl+Shift+F2):

Looking in the "Shortcut currently used by" field, I see "View.NavigateBackward" is the command used in the IDE to navigate back to your previous position.  Now I changed my keyboard mapping scheme to C# and entered "View.NavigateBackward" into the "Show commands containing" field:

So I see control and "-" (minus) is the keystroke to jump back in C#.  I changed my IDE settings to use C# and tested this out.  Sure enough, I can use F12 to jump to a method definition and then ctrl+- to return to my previous position -- sort of like having my own little callstack within the IDE.  :)

And now I've changed my settings back to VB6 mapping scheme since I'm a creature of habit!