Anith Gopal

The latest episode of the Community Megaphone Podcast is up! In this episode, Dane and I bring back guest #2 (and frequent guest host) Joel Cochran, for a conversation on MVVM, WPF, Blend, and of course Joel’s new book. Joel shares his manifesto for practical MVVM, and his philosophy of how he approaches this popular pattern for WPF and Silverlight development.

For those who don’t subscribe, here’s my local editorial for the MSDN Flash newsletter for Mid-Atlantic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh124658.aspx In this issue, I talk about my favorite announcements from MIX11 , the announcement of speakers and sessions for MADExpo , and more! You can subscribe to the MSDN Flash here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa570311.aspx

Overview This is the second installment in an ongoing series of my experiences developing for Windows Phone 7.  I am calling them issues because “episodes” sound a lot like a video series, “parts” would signify a predetermined beginning and end, and “issue” has a nice double entendre .  These are, after all, issues I hit while writing my own application and hopefully an area you won’t after reading this.   If you missed the first issue you can read it here .

Most of the developer talk around Windows Azure seems to be focused on .NET-based applications.  However, Azure is open to running all sorts of different application platforms.

My teammates and I have decided to kick off the new year with a new Firestarter based totally on Silverlight and Windows 7! Like all Firestarters the day will be designed around taking you from the beginning steps of the platform up through more advanced topics.  This event is totally free, open to all east coast developers and will include over six hours of content and free lunch!  Why should I attend? Windows 7 and Silverlight make for a fantastic platform to build and deploy applications.

ASP.NET MVC 3 offers new facilities for easy dependency injection in various parts of the application that you might want to implement yourself.  Brad Wilson discusses the new features in an extensive series of posts .  In the Beta version and beyond, the way you do this is by creating a class that implements IDependencyResolver and serves as an adapter to the IoC container of your choice. I happen to like StructureMap as an IoC container so I thought I ‘d wire it up for use in ASP.NET MVC 3.  IDependencyResolver isn’t exactly a complex interface to implement but being the properly lazy developer that I am I thought I’d look around on the web to see if anyone had already offered up an implementation for StructureMap.  I found a few different blog posts that all had pretty much the same code (such as Brandon Satrom’s ) so I grabbed it and dropped it into my application.  I then tried to have one of my controllers pulled from the container and .

Winter weather has set in here in Seattle which means much less outdoor playtime for me.  I guess that means it’s time to get back to blogging!  I have a few topics in mind that I’m going to try to crank out over the next few days.  We’ll see how that goes.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Entity Framework Firestarter event in New York City on September 27, 2010 !  Special thanks goes out to the event’s speakers Julie Lerman , Stephen Bohlen , and Rachel Appel for assembling and delivering all of the day’s content! The recordings and content from the event are now available! NYC Entity Framework Firestarter Content   Title Speaker Content Links Session 1 It’s Time To Look At Entity Framework Julie Lerman Video Recording Presentation Slides Session 2 What’s New In Entity Framework 4 Stephen Bohlen Video Recording Presentation Slides Session 3 RAD Development With Entity Framework Rachel Appel Video Recording Presentation Slides Session 4 Getting Started With POCOs in Entity Framework 4 Julie Lerman Video Recording Presentation Slides Code Demo Session 5 Disconnected Strategies for ASP.NET and Services Julie Lerman Video Recording Presentation Slides Code Demo 1 Code Demo 2 Session 6 Writing Testable/Maintainable Applications with Entity Framework Julie Lerman & Stephen Bohlen Video Recording Presentation Slides Code Demo NYC Entity Framework Firestarter Speaker Info Julie Lerman’s Blog Follow Julie on Twitter Stephen Bohlen’s Blog Follow Stephen on Twitter Rachel Appel’s Blog Follow Rachel on Twitter Entity Framework Links & Resources Here are some links to useful information on the Entity Framework: ADO.NET Entity Framework Reference on MSDN Entity Framework Overview Entity Framework Resources Entity Framework 4 Firestarter: That’s a Wrap! (Stephen provides his analysis on EF.)

IoC containers are awesome and I use them in all my non-trivial projects.  However, there’s an interesting caveat when it comes to using IoC containers that isn’t totally obvious: don’t get domain entities straight from the container.

Here’s the whole gang (or most of ‘em) participating in the Southern Maryland GiveCamp this weekend: Click the photo for the larger version.

Do you have a great idea for a Birds of a Feather session for Tech·Ed this year? The call is open, and you can submit your ideas here . The earlier you get your ideas in, the more time you’ll have to take over the world…I mean, get great discussion going on why YOUR BoF is the one that should make the cut

Your humble Developer Evangelist (stop laughing, I am humble, really) will be in Richmond this Wednesday for the first stop on our Q3 MSDN Roadshow tour , featuring Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Since we’re going to be in town, and since, as the saying goes “fish gotta swim, geeks gotta eat,” I thought it would be a great opportunity to call an impromptu Geek Dinner