Phil Leggetter - Real-Time Web Software and Technology Evangelist » Microsoft

DDD Scotland 2011 – Maybe .NET developers aren’t scared of the tech community

Phil Leggetter — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:42:50 +0000

On Saturday I went to DDD Scotland for the first time and really enjoyed myself. Not only were there some really good talks on a range of subjects but the it was great to meet people I interact with on Twitter and make new connections. I managed my schedule for the day using a mobile app created for DDD Scotland by the recently formed Level Up.

The DDD Scotland schedule covered a number of interesting topics and I decided to jump between the tracks to try and get a bit of everything. I started off with From .NET to Rails by Colin Gemmell which is particularly interesting to me since just the other day I tackled my first Ruby on Rails application and even wrote up a small blog post on my findings. Colin’s enthusiasm is second to none and it was really interesting to hear that he finds himself to be more productive writing rails applications using Vim than he was building ASP.NET websites.

The second session I went to was Building seriously scalable websites with ASP.NET with and without Windows by Chris Hay. My reasoning behind attending this session was two-fold; I’ve met Chris briefly for a coffee around a month ago so wanted to make sure I caught up with him again and I’ve also been trying to build an IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) product using a combination of Microsoft and non-MS components (Kwwika). I think my tweet about the session pretty much sums things up.

.@chrishayuk is nuts, knows his stuff, is a bit disorganised, uses cool tech & I have a lot more knowledge on scaling than I did 1 hour ago.

I actually knew that Chris had been still putting the presentation together late in to the night before and was even updating things 10 minutes before the session started so the tweet was a bit “tongue in cheek”. The main thing was that in everything that Chris did there was a glimpse of another new exciting technology combined with some proven ones; nodeJS, MonoDevelop, redis, nginx and HAProxy all got a mention along with CDNs, ASP.NET, IIS, Amazon EC2 and much more. He also covered techniques that can be used to speed up servers and page load times. Chris mentioned that he will be writing a book on the subjects he covered – where’s the pre-order link?

I then sat in on two Grok talks. The first was by Aaron Bassett of Level Up delivering 20 Django hints and tips in just 10 minutes. Wow! The second was a thought-provoking grok by Rob Lally (asked to come up with the talk only a few hours beforehand). Rob showed three ways of social interaction to try and achieve the same goal (I wished I had a video recorder) and then went on to discuss how we need to consider how we interact with others in order to achieve goals – with an emphasis on ensuring the goal, and the reason behind it, must be understood.

DDD Scotland also introduced an alternative track so I decided to give that a go next. Mark Rendle gave a talk on How to Manage Your Manager (future managers beware ). He explained that managers and developers can be two very different animals but for them to get on they each need to understand how the other works and understand the driving factors behind their decisions. He covered things like shadowing, how to convince your manager that better hardware and software (e.g. faster computers, a 2nd monitor, productivity tools like ReSharper) can improve your productivity and benefit them and general communication tips. I wish I’d known some of those tips about a year ago: for example, ask for a “respond by” date when sending an email and set appointments in your managers calendar as they really are calendar driven and without the calendar to prompt them they can easily forget (as I’ve found).

Then I attended a session on SpecFlow – functional testing made easy by Paul Stack. This covered what BDD was and Paul explained why he had moved away from TDD. He then focused on showing how SpecFlow made BDD, well, easy. Paul also demonstrated how WatiN can be used to write an acceptance framework for your application driven by specifications written in SpecFlow.

The final session I attended was another alternative track one called Ask the Speakers. This gave me the opportunity to raise my Are .NET developers scared of the tech community and cutting edge technologies? question that I posed and blogged about earlier that week. It really go things going and there were some great points echoing the comments made in my post.

The day ended with some a whole group of us grabbing some food where I was lucky enough to be surrounded by Paul Stack, Chris Canal and Gary Park where we unsurprisingly discussed Continuous Integration, MVC, SOLID, Paul’s phone being stolen last week, jobs, tech stuff and quite a lot of nonsense. Generally fun chat!

This was a really good community event which leaned heavily towards the Microsoft technology stack. With my recently blog post stirring up so much comment it was great to see an event like this and raises my hopes that .NET developers definitely do have a sense of community and we just need to get together to re-ignite the interest in Scotland. Microsoft also need to get involved and for the moment one big event a year probably isn’t enough. Scottish Developers and Aberdeen developers are definitely doing what they can, and Scottish Developers in particular have now set a high standard with DDD Scotland, but we need to increase the interest in .NET technologies by attending events that aren’t purely .NET focused and representing the .NET community.

More information
Here’s the schedule from the day and below that there are links to even more information such as other write-ups, slides and photos from DDD Scotland 2011:

Are .NET developers scared of the tech community and cutting edge technologies?

Phil Leggetter — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:32:09 +0000

I’m a .NET guy and I’m excited and interested in cutting edge technologies. I’ve found the lack of a .NET community (particularly in Scotland) and not seeing enough developers who primarily using Microsoft technologies getting involved with tech communities really frustrating .

My feeling is that there aren’t a lot of regular .NET events or general tech meetups involving .NET. This is for a number of reasons; bad feeling towards Microsoft, difficult access to Microsoft technologies due to cost and Microsoft’s undoubted focus on enterprise to name but a few. With the exception of Aberdeen techmeetup (due to all the Oil companies up there) the majority of developers at techmeetup events don’t seem to be using Microsoft technologies. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t the developers – my feeling is that they just don’t go to those sorts of things. Techmeetup Edinburgh, Refresh Edinburgh and Techmeetup Glasgow is full of non-MS guys.

The only .NET events and communities, accessible to me, that I know about are:

Aberdeen .NET User Group, Scot ALT.NET (seems pretty inactive)
Developer Developer Developer Scotland (held once a year – I’m going to it)
A book club (just heard about this today)

Most of this can be found via the Scottish Developers site. If I’m honest I’m not all that bothered that there are .NET focused groups, it’s more that the .NET devs don’t seem to get involved in the existing communities.

Are tech communities driven by the startup up scene and this is why we don’t see developers who use .NET at these events? I bet 95% of all startups do not use Microsoft technologies. Why? Money Dashboard, an Edinburgh (or close-by), startup built things on the Microsoft technology stack. Are there any others?

Another annoyance I have is that a lot Microsoft devs don’t seem to want to try out new technologies. Is this because they work at financial services companies who are still using .NET 2.0, have some legacy VBScript systems to maintain and are still targeting IE6? Another way of looking at this is that Ruby, PHP and Python developers are commonly found at tech events, are always trying out new technologies and aren’t afraid to upgrade to get new features following a new release of something.

Am I wrong?

If I’m not wrong why is this the case and what are Microsoft doing about it? What are we doing about it?

Master does not have a definition for ViewData (ASP.NET MVC2)

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:05:28 +0000

I’m building an ASP.NET MVC2 web application and I was trying to access ViewData in my Site.Master page and I kept getting “master does not have a definition for ViewData”.

<%= ViewData["topic"] %>

The simple answer was that my Master Page was not an ASP.NET MVC2 master page. Somehow I had a standard master page.

So, all I did was swap the existing page declaration

<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Site.Master.cs" Inherits="HubSubscriber.Views.Shared.Site" %>

With an ASP.NET MVC2 declaration:

<%@ Master Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" %>

And bingo! ViewData was now accessible from my master page.

This post on Passing Data to View Master Pages may also be useful.

Using Fiddler to trick Silverlight into allowing a crossdomain Web Request

Phil Leggetter — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:06:06 +0000

If you are trying to make a web request from a Silverlight application the first thing the Silverlight runtime will do is request a security policy file (see Network Security Access Restrictions in Silverlight) from the root of the server you are making your web request to. This happens if you are making your request using the HttpWebRequest or WebClient class. If the Silverlight runtime fails to get a security policy file your web request will fail. If your Silverlight application relies on this web request then you are going to need to contact the server owner and get them to add a security file but until then you can use the Fiddler HTTP Proxy to trick the Silverlight runtime into believing that it does have permission to make the request.

If you want to skip the explanation you can jump straight to the screencast

How Silverlight makes a web request

If you were making a web request from Silverlight to download the following page:

http://www.leggetter.co.uk/2009/10/23/how-i-approach-problem-solving-in-code.html

The Silverlight runtime would first request

http://www.leggetter.co.uk/clientaccesspolicy.xml

If this request fails it will then request

http://www.leggetter.co.uk/crossdomain.xml

If both of these requests fail (return a 404 HTTP status) the Silverlight runtime will not allow you to make your web request. *

* Note: The web request failure due to a failure to download a security policy file can manifest itself in a number of ways. I’ll try to remember to put a post up about this later.

The clientaccesspolicy.xml file is Microsoft’s own security policy file. The crossdomain.xml file is used by Adobe Flash but is also supported by Silverlight. For more information see master-policy file.

Now that we’ve got the background information out of the way we can get on to the interesting stuff.

An example using the Twitter Streaming Feed

If you wanted to write your own Real-Time Rich Internet Application (RTRIA) that consumed data from the Twitter real-time data stream you’d be stuck. Well, you’ll be stuck until Twitter puts a security policy file up **. Until then you can trick the Silverlight runtime by using Fiddler to detect the security policy file request and fake a response.

** The following URLs are where Twitter would put their security policy files should they decide to allow cross domain access. Please not that you’ll be prompted for your Twitter username and password if you click on them by the browser because you need to sign in with valid twitter credentials to access the twitter stream domain: http://stream.twitter.com/clientaccesspolicy.xml and http://stream.twitter.com/crossdomain.xml)

To do this you will need to set up an AutoResponder in Fiddler that intercepts the request for the security policy file by the Silverlight runtime and returns a fake security policy file. In the example below I have an AutoResponder set up for http://stream.twitter.com/crossdomain.xml.

Using Fiddler to AutoRespond with a fake Security Policy File

Here’s an example of a crossdomain.xml security policy file which grants access to requests from all domains.

Once you’ve set up the AutoResponder start Fiddler. Then start your Silverlight application that is trying to stream data from Twitter and bingo! You should have real-time data from Twitter in your RIA – a Real-Time Rich Internet Application (RTRIA).

Fiddler HTTP Proxy Screencast

Microsoft Bing.com round table thoughts

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:07:02 +0000

A couple of days ago I blogged that I was going to attend a Microsoft bing round table. I’ve now attended and here are the key points and interesting facts that I took from the event. You can also search for #meetbing on twitter for relevant tweets.

Bing.com is a re-brand of Live Search

And Microsoft openly admitted this. Basically Live Search wasn’t getting any traction so Microsoft had to do something (see my next point).

“Microsoft believe they will provide as relevant search results as Google in the UK in a number of months #meetbing” @leggetter

What they’ve done is go with a “web 2.0 name” of “Bing” to try and jazz things up a little. They’ve also gone back to basics and want to concentrate on the quality and relevance of search results and believe they will provide as relevant results as Google in a few months and are judging the quality of their results on something called NDCG. I certainly didn’t use Live Search because I found the results pretty useless. Bing definitely returns better results than Live did. An example on this focus on quality is that Bing has only presently indexed around 10 Billion pages which in the scheme of things isn’t very much.

“Only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result. Data from MSN search, tool bar in IE. Could be searching Google, yahoo etc.” @karenblakeman

Microsoft also believe they’ve improved the UX a bit to allow users to refine their search results with the introduction of the quick tabs/suggested links in a menu on the left hand side of the user interface. They’ve done this because they believe that only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result so this allows users to more easily find things faster.

Microsoft seem to think the re-branding and basic search tweaks have worked as they showed us data that they believe proves Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as No.2 in the search market. Their source of data to determine where users were going to perform their web search was quite interesting. Their source was the MSN toolbar which is only available to those with Internet Explorer. I guess since IE still has a large share of the market (W3Schools Stats | Wikipedia Stats) that the figures are more or less correct but some people at the event did question this as a suitable source.

The other thing that Microsoft are doing is to integrate Bing as a “search brand” into all their products in the same way that Google integrate Google search into Gmail, Google Docs etc. So, you will now see “Bing” used to power Hotmail search and most probably all other Microsoft sites or web applications over time.

Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo! to become No.2 in search

“Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo to become No.2 in search. Fact admitted here” @leggetter

This may not be a big surprise to some people but I didn’t know that this was Microsoft’s main motivation to buy Yahoo! and I did read a few articles about the attempted purchase. Microsoft admitted that Yahoo! had the No.2 slot and if they bought them they would gain this position in addition to a well-known brand. They also admitted that they may have kept the Yahoo! brand for their search and ditched Live altogether.

Bing UK is in Beta. Bing US is not

Bing UK is lacking a lot of the functionality of Bing US since it’s still in beta. Microsoft wanted to launch Bing and felt it was better to do it world wide so stuck with the beta. Bing UK will move out of Beta when more of the functionality you can see in the US is available in the UK.

Only the standard verticals are being targeted

Local, travel, maps, videos, shopping and news will be the verticals that Microsoft initially target. This is a little disappointing as it would be great to see Microsoft break the mould and do something innovative. The only unique vertical that was mentioned is that a music search function is being worked on by the Bing China team.

All in all I thought it was a worthwhile exercise by Microsoft to tell people what they are doing and gather a number of opinions. The consensus of the people at the event is that Bing is going to have to something different to take a significant portion of people away from Google and their current offering doesn’t offer too much to do this.

I’m simply happy that Microsoft have upped their game and will at least have Google looking over their shoulders albiet way back into the distance. Hopefully this competition will provoke innovation in search that has been generally stagnent for the past few years up until the introduction of the real-time web. Maybe this could be something that Microsoft could excel at?

Click here to view all the #meetbing tweets

Bing.com round table

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:56:53 +0000

On Monday between 19:00 and 21:00 I’m going to a Bing roundtable (round table) in London. The event is being organise by Colin Mercer and is described as:

a small round-table event to discuss Bing and since we saw your recent tweet regarding comparative search results between Bing and Google, we thought that you might be interested in coming along. The idea would be to get your initial thoughts and you’ll get an update on the future steps for Bing which are being developed specifically for the UK. During the session you’ll have the chance to talk with Microsoft representatives and other people from social media like yourself, who have expressed some early opinion.

It would appear the event is being attended by a number of web 2.0, social media, marketing and internet types.

Phil Bradley: Phil is interested in Internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development. Phil has confirmed. I recommend following Phil Bradley on Twitter.
James Barlow: James Barlow is an independent consultant specialising in information technology and project/programme management.
Tom Warren: I don’t have any additional information on Tom.
Chris Hambly: Chris lists himself as a successful Digital Media Entrepreneur
Josh Russell: Josh has tweeted that he’s going. He provides micro-consulting on web application strategy
David Stuart: David is going. David blog provides thoughts of a Web 2.0 research fellow on all things in the technological sphere that capture his interest.
Karen Blakeman: Karen’s blogs about search tools, Internet technologies and resources for business information. Karen has confirmed.
Neil Robinson: Neil describes himself as passionate about using the right technology to drive business forward.
Kevin Harrington: Looks like Kevin had some initial trouble confirming his attendance but I think he’s coming now.
Mark Sharp: Mark designs and runs a number of websites for myself and for other people and organisations
Andrea Giammarchi: Andrea’s profile says JavaScript Ninja and both PHP/ECMAScript Certified Engineer

We are being encouraged to “live blog” the event.

Please come armed with all of your thoughts, opinions and questions for the Bing team. This meet-up is about everyone getting the chance to have their say. We’ll make sure you’re able to live blog during the event

So, I’ll be armed with my laptop (for tweeting) and HTC Touch Pro (for video, if appropriate) and will try and ask as many questions as possible and get as much information out to the real-time web as I can. My personal angle will be one of technology. For example:

How Bing are pushing use of the Bing API and Bing developer centre.
What are they doing to ensure information is available to the real-time web as quickly as possible.

Please let me know if you have any questions that you’d like asked and I’ll do my best to ask them. You can do this in a number of ways. During the event the hashtag in use will be #meetbing. Prior to the event I’d suggest people maybe use #askbing. Failing that you can contact me directly or leave a comment on this blog post.

Live Mesh – my experience

Phil Leggetter — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:52:22 +0000

I think that Live Mesh will be really useful. I think it provides great benefit to individual users, such as myself, and has great potential to be used by software solution developers. I’m presently using it to synchronise some files that I want to backup and be available wherever I am.

I originally had a lot of web files being synchronised, around 700MB, but the synchronisation was taking ages and killing my CPU. CPU was sitting at 100% and there was no sign of things completing. I think it was having a problem with the volume of small files.

To summarise: it’s a great product with bags of potential but something needs to be done to reduce the CPU usage when dealing with the synchronisation of a large volume of small files.