SOApitstop.com

SOAPitStop Finally Moves to a real community engine!

Wed, 28 Jun 2007 00:06:00 EST

That is right, believe it or not I finally took the advice of many (Marshall Harisson, Clemens Vasters, and many more) and updated my site to use a real community engine. I recently updated the site to use community server 2007. Special thanks to Rob Howard and the Telligent folks, they are very friendly to community folks and MVPs! That means my blog has moved to http://soapitstop.com/blogs/soageek/rss.aspx for the RSS and http://soapitstop.com/blogs/soageek/default.aspx for the HTML.

If you subscribe to my blog please update your URL and please start to post comments. If you're really a SOA nut and you are interested in starting a blog let me know. Community server allows me to host 100 blogs and I built the new site to support more SOAPitSTop bloggers. Just register and send me an email that you'd like to start blogging with me. We'll start developing a really sweet SOA community before you know it!

South Florida Code Camp '07: What a great turnout in Miramar!

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 07:27:00 EST

The south florida code camp at Devry University in Miramar was a great success. I hope everyone enjoyed it and learned a thing or two. Based on some of the conversations I had with attendees following my sessions I think everyone was very pleased. I personally was very happy to see a solid turnout for both of my sessions. The first session "20 Tips Every Developer Should Know about the CLR" had people sitting on the floor and spilling out of the sides. Based on the reviews that were turned in everyone was pleased with the material and almost everyone managed to stay awake. I obviously say that with 'toungue in cheek' but honestly a deep dive into the CLR at 8:30 am is difficult for even the hard core developers. If you missed any of the concepts go ahead and download the slides from the downloads section here on SOAPitStop.com

My second session titled 'Supporting Application Offline Mode using WCF' also seemed to go very well. This was a new session that I hadn't given to a live audience before so there's still some bugs to work out but I think everyone got a good feel for what was available in terms of Queue based development and WCF's netMsmqBinding. We unfortunately ran out of time for the last section which would have probably interested many of the attendees as it gives a sneak peak at what's to come with WCF and app offline mode for the compact framework as well as some non WCF approaches if you're just not ready to leap into .NET 3.0 yet. If you were at the session and want to see those last 6 slides you can download the deck in the downloads section.

I truly enjoyed myself at this code camp and hope everyone else did as well. I look forward to hearing from you if you have any questions or comments on my sessions/materials. Thanks Again!

Supporting Offline Application Mode with WCF: Download Slides
Code from WCF Session: Download Zip

20 Tips Every Developer Should Know About the CLR: Download Slides
Code from CLR Session: Download Zip

If you have any questions or comments please drop me an email at tom.fuller@soapitstop.com

Atlanta Code Camp '07: Kicking off the CodeCamp Season Right!

Wed, 23 Jan 2007 20:55:00 EST

I really had an awesome time up in Atlanta, GA last weekend for the 2007 Atlanta Code Camp. It's exciting to get the code camp season started again (that's right there's actually a season :). I attended the event last year and I am amazed at the progress the planners made in every aspect of the event. Jim Wooley, Brendan Schwartz, Doug Turnure, and everyone else in that area involved in planning the event ... BRAVO! I presented two sessions and I think they were well received. The first talk was about best practices for designing reusable services. This was a packed room and I thought everyone there was very engaged and interested in the topic of developing web services that can last. My second session took me a bit deeper into the internals of the CLR. The session titled '20 Tips Every Developer Should Know About The CLR' is basically a tribute to the CLR via C# book by Jeff Richter. I also crossed paths with a few other Wintellect guys while I was in Atlanta and I have to say I was impressed by the number of technologists that were passionate about the deep technical topics like the .NET CLR, advanced debugging, and many others.

I also enjoyed all of the conversations I had with the speakers and the Microsofties that came to the event. There were quite a few of you that I had never met and I really enjoyed our conversations. Lewis Curtis, Kelly Jerden, Alan Griver, and many more. I hope to see you guys again soon. Who knows, maybe you'll make it down for the Ft. Lauderdale code camp in February. Thanks again Atlanta ... I'll definately be back! The following are the links for the session slides:

Best Practices for Designing Reusable Services: Download Slides
20 Tips Every Developer Should Know About the CLR: Download Slides
Code from CLR Session: Download Zip

If you have any questions or comments please drop me an email at tom.fuller@soapitstop.com

Tampa Vista Launch Debrief

Wed, 23 Jan 2007 20:34:00 EST

The Vista launch event in Tampa was a blast! After some hard work and preparation by my outstanding partner Jeff Barnes and I, our 30 minute talk went great at the Vista launch. We managed to get in and talk about the workflow designer and the versatility of the WCF endpoints. I think the general feedback was good and developers were excited to get their hands on the demo when it becomes available. I also had the pleasure of speaking with a couple of Microsoft customers after the event. I am always impressed by the broad scenarios that developers start to envision for these technologies and WCF with WF will be no exception based on the conversations I was having.

The following are the links for the session slides and of course http://dinnernow.net.

Building Connected Applications with Windows Vista: Download Slides
Go To DinnerNow.NET: CLICK HERE

If you have any questions or comments please drop me an email at tom.fuller@soapitstop.com

The Tampa Vista Launch is right around the corner (1/18) and guess what, there are freebies!

Tue, 9 Jan 2007 08:25:00 EST

Microsoft recently announced the big giveaway for the launch event and it's a sweet one! They are giving away a free copy of Microsoft Office Pro 2007. If you haven't registered yet ... what are you waiting for? Register here!

If you have any questions or comments please drop me an email at tom.fuller@soapitstop.com

Congratulations Vinay on getting Visual C# MVP

Tue, 2 Jan 2007 22:34:00 EST

I just saw the announcement on Vinay Ahuja's blog about recieving the 2007 MVP award in the Visual C# group. What a great move by Microsoft to award Vinay, he is as dedicated a community influential as I know. He has a great understanding of many different aspects of development including Visual Studio Integration, C# language features, and many more. What great timing too, now you can come to the MVP Summit in March! Congrats again Vinay on a much deserved award, I look forward to catching you at some of the upcoming code camps through the southeast US.

If you have any questions or comments please drop me an email at tom.fuller@soapitstop.com

Become part of a 'network' of bloggers.

Tue, 2 Jan 2007 08:09:00 EST

I am guessing that I'm not the only one that uses the start of the new year as a time to get caught up on a lot of back logged blog reading. Well, as I was doing that this year I found an interesting site that will let you share your OPML blog feeds list and then it'll give you some very interesting reports to look at. For example, you can take your list of blogfeeds and get a report of people who have lists that closely compare to yours. The site is http://share.opml.org

This is another one of those interesting community-oriented sites that gets better when more people find it so at the risk of sounding like a chain letter publisher ... pass this on to at least ten of your blogging friends or you will have horrible luck this year and you will end up stuck working on development projects that have to use outdated technology :) All kidding aside, this is a really cool way to find blog feeds that you may have missed and at the same time you can find people that you have something in common with. I don't know how some of these people keep up with so many blog feeds (Andrew Connell gets the blue ribbon for 359 blog feeds, if even half of those get a post every day he must end up spending a couple of hours just managing it ... yikes).

If you're afraid it will take you forever to figure out how to do this trust me it couldn't be easier. Just follow these steps:

1. Export your OPML blogfeed from your RSS reader (in my case I used Outlook 2007 but it'll work from Outlook 2003 as well)
2. Go to http://share.opml.org and create your account (don't worry it's only 3 fields (name, email, password)
3. Go to the upload your blog list section
4. Have fun running reports and discovering all kinds of blog feeds you didn't know about

Something else that's inspiring, go take a look at how many people are subscribed to Scott Guthrie's blog. That shows me what consistent valuable blogging can do, I don't know how many folks blog more regularly than him and I think his subscriber list reflects that. A completely opposite example would be my reader list, I have 4 subscribers (1 of which is me :), I guess that's what happens when you go into a blogging blackhole for 6 months. Oh well, I'm back on the horse now. I hope some of you find this site interesting and participate. Have a great start to the new year!

If you have any questions or comments please drop me an email at tom.fuller@soapitstop.com

SOAPitStop.com Gets A New Year's Facelift!

Mon, 1 Jan 2007 15:33:22 EST

New years day and I wasn't all that interested in watching the bowl games so I sat down and posted all of the articles that have been stacking up on my desk at home. Sort of a nerdy spring cleaning :) I added some new sections and posted around 50 new articles that I've been looking at throughout 2006. I hope you find something you enjoy.

I also decided to give my blog a little bit of help. I added a year filter and I moved my older blog entries out of my basic rss feed. This should speed things up some and get the older less interesting posts out of everyone's face. I also decided to take my Outlook opml blog feeds list and build a quick XSL to display it. As you are probably noticing I've been following a lot more blogs than this page was showing.

I'm working on some other interesting things here in early 2007 so keep my blog feed in your favorite reader. I'll be speaking at the Vista Launch, I'll be presenting at the Atlanta Code Camp and the Ft. Lauderdale Code Camp, I'll be up in Jacksonville on January 30th for their local Vista Launch and I have some interesting ideas for articles. 2007 is kicking off with a bang!!!

If you have any questions or comments please drop me an email at tom.fuller@soapitstop.com