CodeClimber

Andrew Peters, one of the smart guys I met during my 9 month of life in New Zealand, is joining Microsoft, as member of the team that will work on the Entity Framework. I’m pretty sure that his experience building LightSpeed, a kind of lightweight ORM and domain modeling framework built by Mindscape, will help with development of the Entity Framework. Andrew is also the man behind NHaml, a custom view engine for ASP.NET MVC, a port of the popular Rail Haml view engine. My best wishes to him and to his wife Kara for the relocation...

The answer is: it depends. Flash/Flex is faster when it comes to graphic rendering, but Silverlight is faster when it comes to pure computation speed. There are two speed benchmarks for RIA application, and they both focus on UI rendering: BubbleMark: it displays many bubble floating around the screen as fastest as possible, and use the resulting frame per second as result of the test GUIMark: similar to the BubbleMark, but with more effects and animations used: vectorial images, alpha transparencies, text reflow and so on. Then another benchmark has been developed, CountingPrimes, which...

Like the drop carves the stone, Rob Conery’s tweets about his pushups convinced me to try the HundredPushups program. What is this program about: you do a startup test, with this results you start a training program. After 6 weeks of training 3 times a week you should be able to do 100 consecutive pushups. Rob also started a twitter challenge you can take part and this seems to have become the ALT.NET-ian trend of the moment: yesterday evening I did the test and I got the do 15 pushups. Next monday I’ll start week...

After dark years, seems like good things are coming out from the Italian .NET community lately: the latest one is the free eBook on Data Structures and Algorithms wrote by Granville Barnett and the Italian UGIdotNET member, Luca Del Tongo. I remember studying such things at the university, and the last time I helped a friend with his studies the books were still the same, and still based on "old" languages like C. Finally now a book covers the same important topics but with samples written in a modern object oriented language. All the algorithms of the book are available in form...

Far from me to start yet another religious war, but on the blog a friend from the Italian User Group I found a very amusing cartoon about .NET and PHP in the enterprise (made by David Betz in February 2008), so I thought it would have been funny to repost it here. The original post seems to be unreachable but when I first saw it, I read that there should be other comic strips on that topic. UPDATE: Seems like the original site is back to life, here is the second comic strip. Technorati Tags: php,asp.net,comics

If you subscribed to my blog through an RSS reader you will notice an advertisement at the bottom of this post. That’s because I’m testing the RSS Room of the The Lounge advertising network: it’s creator James Avery unveiled the RSS Room it only a few days ago and in the next weeks it will be a test period and will show only Lounge related ads. For people that are reading this post from my blog, here is how it appears on the RSS reader: I’m still tuning it in order to be less...

My friend Ivan, blogger, writer and coder extraordinaire has been interviewed on InfoQ, a main-stream enterprise development portal, about his new opensource project IronNails. Ivan started this project a few days ago because, while working on same samples for his book about IronRuby, he had this vision of a Rail like development for WPF and Silverlight applications, based on the MVC pattern. And here it is: announced on his blog (which, by the way, has a new awesome skin), published on git, and got a lot of media attention. Read the complete article here: Talking with Ivan Porto Carrero about IronNails. Congratulations Ivan! IronRuby, Ivan,...

Last year Google announced it would have released a version of Google in Maori and a few days ago, during the Maori language week, they released it. To visit the Maori version of Google there are two url. http://www.google.co.nz/intl/mi/ will take you to the Google NZ Aotearoa in the Maori language. http://www.google.com/intl/mi/ will take you to the international version of Google, in Maori. Kia Ora!! Technorati Tags: Google,Maori,Aotearoa

Seems like the Borgification of the opensource .NET community is going on: Hamilton Verissimo aka Hammett, the father of Castle, is joining Microsoft as the PM on the MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) team. Congratulation to Hammett for the achievement, and hope he has fun moving from the sunny São Paulo to rainy Redmond. The good thing is that he will continue working on Castle. How’s next? Ayende? or Scott Bellware? Technorati Tags: Hammett,Castle,Microsoft,MEF

TechCult, a famous blog about what’s going on in the Net world just published the list of the top 100 web celebrities. The standing is mainly based on how many results they have on Google. Pretty strange that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs don’t show up in this top 100, even though they influenced the web much more than Tila Tequila, Perez Hilton or  Beppe Grillo which are the top 3 web celebrities of the list. The list is full of web developers, Web2.0 startups’ founders, but only 2 from the .NET blogging space: ...

Michael Eaton started a meme with the question: How did you get started in software development? Yesterday Matt Berseth tagged me in his post, so it’s now my turn to answer the questions and tag other bloggers: How old were you when you started programming? While probably most developers started programming at the primary school, I started using computers for more than playing games at my first course at the university in ‘93, when I was 19 years old. Actually it was even the first time I turned on a x86 PC: I used to...

A few days ago, looking at the referrers to my blog, I found a reference to site I never see before: aspdotnetmvc.com. It’s a really nice content aggregator that collects anything related to ASP.NET MVC, gathering it automatically from various sources. It already helped me discover a few ASP.NET MVC related blogs I was not following. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,blogs

On Friday I’m delivering my third presentation on ASP.NET MVC in less than one month (actually the 4th because I repeated twice the one I delivered inside Avanade). This time it will be inside the 6th DotNetMarche Workshop on “Applications’ automated testing and ASP.NET MVC”. You can have a look at the agenda of the event (translated by Google). I’ll try and make everything available online after the event, especially the code samples. Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,event,dotnetmarche

One thing you might know about me is that I’m a long time user of Firefox, and than in 2004 I’ve been chosen as “as one of the top 25 most active, energetic and productive sfx community members” (read here the original post, in Italian). And now as 3 years ago I’m pushing Firefox again. Today is day of the final release of Firefox 3, and spreadfirefox is organizing the Download Day: they want to set a new world record for “most software downloads in 24 hours”. Helping is easy: just download Firefox 3 from the official page, starting...

Yesterday it was the day of the second UGIALT.NET conference in Milano: almost 40 people attending, 8 different speakers/moderators and a lot of interaction (and a free lunch courtesy of the sponsor of the event, Avanade). Many people were new to the ALT.NET thing, and to the "good design principles" as well, so we decided to try and spread the good news. With that intent the event started, after the welcome speech, with 6 lightning talks (thanks to the Welly .NET UG for the idea) on the basic concepts we would have used in the afternoon for the hands...

Yesterday I delivered the first of the 3 presentations on ASP.NET MVC I'll be delivering in less then a month. It was also my first webcast ever and I'd like to share my impressions on the presenter experience and what an attendee can do to make life easier for the presenter, thus increasing the overall experience for everybody. The biggest and probably the most obvious difference between a webcast and a in person presentation is that you (as presenter) don't have a visual feedback, you don't get to see the people that are attending the presentation: you cannot...

Yet another friend of mine is writing a book. After Keyvan with his "Professional Visual Studio Extensibility", today Ivan Porto Carrero announced his book IronRuby in Action. It will be published by Manning and, as always with them, a Early Access Preview is available. Congratulations Ivan for your first book!! IronRuby, Ivan

Spring arrived, days are getting longer and I started jogging after work again (of course, with my Nike+iPod gear). I also found out that Vito Arconzo, a .NET developer in Italy, also started running with an iPod, so I decided to set up a running challenge, and see how many .NET developers out there are using this geeky stuff. The challenge is named "Train for the UGIALT.net meeting", will start tomorrow, May 15th, and the winner will be the one that runs more kilometers in 30 days, before the UGIALT.net conference that will take place on June 14th. If you want to take...

One of the problem of having a blog with a Google PageRank higher than 3 is that you get flooded by a storm of spam. Be it comment spam or trackback spam it's a waste of server resources and, if not filtered, could fill your blog with tons of sex related links and more. Last year Subtext included a integration with Akismet, the de-facto only spam blocking service available for free on the net. But last autumn I received more than 1000 spam trackback in one day and more than 30.000 on the same day in my Italian blog...

Seems like a lot of Italian .NET blogger are making the big step of starting a blog in English: writing in a language that is not the one you use in your everyday life is not easy, but it can be a good way to improve the other language. After 2 of the founders of UGIALT.net, Marco De Sanctis, a friend and active Italian community member started blogging in English on his brand new Subtext blog: CodeMetropolis. Why an English blog? Well, honestly because I recently realized that I'm reading more English blogs than Italian...

After the "small success" of the first UGIALT.net mini conference in February, UGIALT.net is organizing another conference in June. The second UGIALT.net conference will take place on Saturday June 14th, and will take place at the offices of Avanade Italy, in the center of Milano. As for the other conference there will not be a fixed agenda, but the event will be a day-long discussion on the topics decided by the participants, probably developing a small app to focus on the various stages of the development. If you are Italian and want to know...

Two of the guys that co-founded with me the Italian UGIALT.net usergroup started blogging in English: Emanuele DelBono - Plastic/blog Claudio Maccari - TDD developer For those who read Italian they are still writing on their Italian blogs: BlogEma and Makka. blog, ugialt.net

This year it's going to be a busy spring for me: April 26th/27th: Loci - Evoluzione generativa: Aurora - an art exhibition where there I presented a short video I made with Processing (on Vimeo 2 drafts of the final video) - Porto Sant'Elpidio End of May: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC - This is a private 2h workshop I'll deliver for my colleagues at Avanade Italy - online June 14th: UGIALT.NET conference - The second conference of the the Italian ALT.NET group. Actually not a real talk, but an OpenSpace meeting......

It's not April 1st... And it's not about me... A friend of mine, a member of the Italian .NET user group, is doing the big step, and moving to Bermuda, the sunny, surfy, sharky islands in front of Florida. I did the same more than one year ago and I know how difficult it is to leave all your friends, family and completely change the way you used to do, and start a new life somewhere else, so I wish him all the best. He is blogging his experiences relocating to Bermuda,...

IOC(SM):IOC(CW):MOC(RM):MOC(MQ):TDD(NU):TDD(Mb):TDD(MS):SCC(Svn):SCC(TFS):ORM(NH):ORM(L2S):ORM(!?):XPP(++):DDD(T+):DDD(+):JSL(Jq):JSL(ext):JSL(MS):CIS(CC):CIS(TFS):GoF(++) via ALT.NET Geek Code: Should you care about these ALT.NET guys? Technorati Tag: altnet,altnetcode

Another important community member is joining Microsoft. This time is not the member of some cool opensource project, but is a very active blogger and TFS expert Lorenzo Barbieri. Today it's his last day as "free man" in his old company, and from tomorrow he will start his new career as Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Italy, and will start to go around Italy and Europe trying to push TFS to everybody. My best wishes and congratulations to Lorenzo. Hope he will not stop blogging and taking part in the community as he is doing now. Technorati...

I was looking at blogs with reports on the MVP Summit 08 and on a post from a TFS MVP from Canberra I found this picture of one of the meeting rooms: In this little portion of the room 3 MS MVPs are using MacBookPro (highlighted with the black circles)... are MacBooks becoming one of the favorite brands of laptops for .NET developers? Technorati Tag: macbook,mvpsummit08

Last week, while working on the new features for Subtext vNext, I encountered a strange problem that never happened to me before. I was running the latest "works here" Nightly Build of ReSharper 4 (build num 767) and started getting tons of OutOfMemoryException. The problem started to happen when, after developing all the DataAccess and BusinessLogic with a TDD approach (so no UI involved), I started adding textboxes and method calls in aspx pages. So I guess the problem has something to do with handling aspx files and all the added complexity that a simple class file doesn't have....

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my friend Keyvan from Iran just published his first book with Wrox: Professional Visual Studio Extensibility. Today I got my copy of the book. I never had the need to extend Visual Studio in the past but now I'm building some tools to facilitate the migration of a large project (more than 1M lines of code) from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0, so this will really help. Thank you Keyvan for being releasing the book in time to help me with that work project.   Technorati Tag: Keyvan Nayyeri,Visual Studio,Book,VSX

A song by Jonathan Coulton, a computer programmer and self-described geek turned folk rock singer: Code Monkey. Picture by Len Seems like there quite a lot of videos for this song. via Travis Illig on twitter Humor, Song, Code Monkey

The Golden Boy of the Wellington .NET user group (aka JD) just received his MVP Award for his contributions to the ASP.NET community in Wellington and NZ: Congratulations JD!! I remember him as one of the first developers from the community I met last year back in January, when I had my first talk at the Welly UG. MVP, Wellington, New Zealand

A few years ago I developed an add-on for Community Server 2.0 to automatically submit contributions to the Community Credit website. Yesterday I finally found the time to test it with the latest version of Community Server (version 2007), I made some small changes and published it on my public code repository on Google Code. How does it work? For those who don't know what Community Credit is I suggest he goes and visit the site and the post I wrote about it more than a year ago "Get Credits for you Community involvement". The main...

Keyvan Nayyeri just announced the official release of his book about Visual Studio Extensibility, published by Wrox. This is quite a unique book since the VSX technology is new with VS2005 and is a leap forward compared to the old macro-based extensibility, but nothing has been written on this topic, yet. The book will cover all the aspects of Visual Studio Extensibility: Macro, Add-Ins, Visualizers, MSBuild, VSPackages, DSL tools, using the Shell. I also what to thank Keyvan for adding me to his acknowledgement page on the book: I would thank anyone else who helped us get this book done, both inside Wiley...

At the first MIX08 keynote we saw ScottG juggling for a fictitious job interview for Cirque du Soleil that was demoing his new recruiting tool. But at the second keynote Steve Ballmer replayed his famous Monkey Developer dance, this time for web developers. Have a look at this video recorded by one of they guys that was lucky enough to sit in of the first rows of the theater: Steve Ballmer screams “Web developers. Web developers. Web developers” Technorati Tag: MIX08,Ballmer,Monkey Developer

Just watch the MIX '08 webcast live. Tim Sneath just announced that the keynote will be webcasted live from Vegas.   The live webcast will begin at 9:30AM Pacific Time on Wednesday March 5th, which is: 5:30PM GMT (London time) 6:30PM CET (Italy, France, Spain and Germany) 11:00PM Indian Time 6:30AM, Thursday 6h Wellington For other times: TimeAndDate.com I have to make sure I get home in time for the live webcast: there will be 3 different bandwidths: 100kbps 300kbps ...

Today a new psychological condition is born: Pre Mix Envy. A new condition for developers who want to be in Vegas but can't. It was coined by Chris Hayuk, a British .NET developer and Silverlight blogger that can't go to the MIX08 event that is starting in a week in Las Vegas. I would have been to the event as well, and hear from the mouth of ScottGu all the cool announcements that they are going to make (ASP.NET MVC vNext, Silverlight 2.0, IIS7, IE8 and so on), but I guess I'll have to stay up at night and watch the...

Yesterday I went to the first conference of the recent born UGIALT.net usergroup. It was my first time at a OpenSpace conference and I really like it. We talked about ASP.NET MVC, about UnitTesting, TDD, Mocks, and also about code metrics with NDepend and SourceMonitor. I was the moderator of the session on the ASP.NET MVC framework, and was nice to see all the other bringing to the table their experiences, especially Gianluca that, for each feature of the ASP.NET MVC, made a comparison with MonoRail. We noticed that ASP.NET MVC lacks of a feature that might be interesting: the possibility to...

Community Credit Hall of Famers are those contributors whose reputation precedes them in the development community. They are developers and technology evangelists who have contributed so substantially that they become among the forces that really help the development community thrive. I just want to thank David Silverlight (for those who don't know, Microsoft Silverlight is named after him) for including me among the Community Credit members that have been awarded in 2008. And also for the kinds words that he put on the Hall of Fame page. Simone Chiaretta Simone has been active in the Development Community in some very unique...

Do you remember the scandal behind the release of www.italia.it, the website developed by IBM for 45.000.000 euro to promote the tourism in Italy? Well, a few days ago the site has been closed as the vicepremier Francesco Rutelli said back in October. And still no answers to the questions of transparency. www.italia.it

At the end of October the UGIALT.net was born in Italy (where UGI stands for User Group Italiano). Now we are organizing our first conference, on February 23th, in Brescia. In the title I say "mini" because the place in which we decided to gather is not very big, only around 10-15 people can fit into the conference room of ABSistemi. But I'm pretty sure we will end with a lot of great discussion on "good ways" of building software and for sure we will have a lot of fun watching at the CI...

Tomorrow I'm going at the first meeting organized by the Italian .NET UserGroup UGIdotNET since I came back to Italy this August, and I'm super excited about this: first I'm going to see in person on of my .NET heroes, Dino Esposito, which will talk all the morning about how to build an animated GIF using a declarative language Ajax and Silverlight development second because I'll see all the other guys of the usergroup, most of which I don't see since more than an year or so. I hope I can get to the Microsoft auditorium since these days...

I thought I already mentioned it previously, but probably the things that happened to me in the last month made me forget to mention it. But going to the point, my Belgian Kiwi friend Ivan is starting to write a book about IronRuby. Congratulations Ivan!! Technorati tags: IronRuby, Ivan, book

Hammett, founder of Castle, the father of MonoRail, went to Redmond invited by the ASP.NET MVC team, to review the new framework, and give his opinion based on his experience having built a similar framework. You can have a look at the blog post where he wrote his opinions, but I'd like to quote here the ones I feel are the most impressive: [...] surprisingly - at least to me - is how MS is approaching this framework. They are not in a rush, they are more concerned about getting it right than getting it done fast. My overall impression is that...

I just stumbled upon a video that has just been published on channel9: Ron Jacobs interviewing JB and JD of Mindscape about their domain model framework LightSpeed. Congratulations Mindscape!! At the moment I'm still (unfortunately for the last week) at the lake with hamsters powering my Internet connection, so cannot check it out, but if you have a normal Internet connection speed, go and check it out on ARCast.TV. (Too bad that Channel9 doesn't offer video encoded for the iPod format). Technorati tags: mindscape, lightspeed, arcast.tv

Unveiled by one of the founders, yesterday an ALT.NET group is born in Italy (and I'm among the 5 founding members). The main objective of the group is to organize OpenSpace meetings, to fosters exchange of experiences with tools and approaches that are not easy to find on the usual user groups. It's something very similar to the Lunches with Geeks organized by Ivan in Wellington, but unfortunately here in Milano it's not possible to gather at lunch time. What is ALT.NET has already been said many times, so I'll not quote the usual paragraph, but I'll translate here...

In 2005, Shaun Walker, founder of DotNetNuke carved the DNN logo in his Halloween pumpkin. Last year, in 2006, I carved into my pumpkin the Subtext submarine. Now with Halloween just a few days away, who is going to carve the logo of his OpenSource project into his pumpkin? Are we going to see Ayende carving his Rhino? Or Rob Conery carving the angle-bracketed DB of Subsonic? Or maybe Ivan carving the (Iron)Ruby gem? So, who's next? Technorati tags: Halloween, pumpkin, Opensource, logo

W00t.... Rob "Subsonic" Conery just joined Microsoft, and will make (more or less) Subsonic a high-level API on top of the MVC framework Phil Haack is the PM for. Seems like MS is hiring the cream of the US based .NET bloggers lately: are they kind of endorsing their contribution to the .NET space or just assimilating them? "Ai posteri l'ardua sentenza" (cit.). For the moment I just uber-happy for Rob and Phil, and for all of us .NET developer as whole: they will sure come up with something great. Technorati tags: Microsoft, Subsonic, Rob Conery

I already posted on my Italian blog last week, but I think this is great, so wanted to share here on Codeclimber:   Technorati tags: humor

Not a real censorship, like the Chinese one, but the Italian government is about to issue a new law to "organize" anything that can inform people: newspaper, magazines, public website but also private ones and blogs. In order to have a blog, if this law is really issued, its owner must be registered to the ROC (Registro degli Operatori di Comunicazione), and must have a registered journalist as "Chief Editor". I know this sounds like a joke, but it's not. Not a real law for the moment, but has been proposed in August and seems like it has been approved...

Last week I posted a screenshot of my VS pimped with the same color schema used by ScottGu and ScottHa during the MVC.NET presentation at the ALT.NET conference. I found out that it was developed by Rob Conery, which yesterday released a new version of the schema, switching back to Consolas (as I did in my personal version) and easing a bit the contrast. Download the schema on Rob's blog, and remember to change the ApplicationIdentity version=”9.0″ to version=”8.0″ if you are still using (as I'm) Visual Studio 2005. Technorati tags: Vibrant Ink, TextMate, Visual Studio, vs.settings

Tomorrow, October 17th, I'll be at Mono Day, an event organized by Novell to spread the word about this Open Source project, sponsored by Novell, that implements the .NET API and allow .NET software to run on Linux, OS X and Unix. I read the agenda and it seems that the only interesting part of the event is the last speech, by Massimiliano Mantione, developer part of the Mono core team. The rest is just promotion of Novell products and partnerships. I hope the "Mono from the source" speech will be the main part of the event, and the other only a...

Reading what Fowler and Palermo say about organizing an ALT.NET Conference my mind wandered back to the short chats Ivan Porto Carrero is organizing since mid-May at lunch time in Wellington: the Lunch with Geeks. AltNetConf's are open spaces conferences where DotNetters get together to discuss how to build better .Net software. They are held every Tuesday at midday at Syn Bar, in Bond Street, and, even if there is a rough topic of the day, they are kind of short OpenSpaces, and the usual topics, thanks to Ivan and the guys from MindScape (which are among the regular attendants), are usually about "alternative...

One of the thing that excited me from last week videos about the ASP.NET MVC framework is the amazing color schema that both ScottHa and ScottGu had on their Visual Studio: I sent an email and Scott was soo kind to answer me back with the VS schema. Looking on the net I found that the color schema was "developed" by John "DLR" Lam, porting to Visual Studio the Vibrant Ink theme for TextMate. Later Rob "SubSonic" Conery tweaked it, changed the black to shade of gray, and replaced Consolas with Monaco. Since I'm, as Jeff "CodingHorror" Atwood, a fan...

In Italy they just started broadcasting the first season of Heros, and a few bloggers of the local .NET usergroup took a personality test: Which 'Hero' are you? And I am: The same "hero" as Mr. President: does this mean something? Technorati tags: Heros

This is about a meeting I'm organizing in Italy, in the Alps near the border with Swiss, under the Mt Disgrazia,  in the Gerli/Porro hut at 6500 ft. The agenda is: 1 hour climb uphill to reach the hut lucullian lunch, based on Pizzoccheri, herbs pasta and polenta short trek (1 1/2 hours) till the beginning of the glacier (for the ones who feel like doing it) 40 minutes walk downhill All interleaved with rests and tech talk This is an Italian event, but anyone that happens to be around Milano this weekend can...

Blogging engines don't allow a quick way to change categories, or to add tags to many posts at the same time, so managing your old posts can be a lengthy process. A friend of mine, Marco De Sanctis, had to add tags to all his old posts and to reorganize the categories of his blog, so he built a small tool that retrieves all the posts via MetaWeblog API, and allow to select many posts, and add tags or categories in batch. More information about this wonderful tool, named "Blog Manager", on Marco's blog: A tool to manage your blog categories and Technorati...

After coming back from my long weekend in Barcelona I finally uploaded the slides and demos of the presentation I held two weeks ago at the XeDotNet user group meeting about Developing Vista Sidebar Gadgets. The presentation and the demos take you step by step in the creation of a Vista Sidebar Gadget, starting from a basic gadget to a full-blown localized gadget, with settings, flyout and undocked view: basic gadget adding transparent background adding a Settings page adding the Undocked view adding a Flyout getting ready for localization Since I used a Mac, the main presentation is Keynote format,...

After Scott Hanselman, Peli, Alex James and a lot more other active community member and opensource developers, also Phil Haack, founder of Subtext, is going to join Microsoft as Senior Program Manager in the ASP.NET team, and will be working on a MVC framework for a future version of ASP.NET. Congratulations Phil: two big achievements in just one year. Now, when is Microsoft coming to me for a job in the ASP.NET team as well? Technorati tags: Phil Haack, Microsoft, ASP.NET, aspnetmvc

I just came back from the post-event dinner, and here some picture of the presentation on Vista Gadgets running on a MacBook.     Not many people attended the presentation: too close to the end of the summer season, and probably not many people likes Vista. But I think this evening I showed some good reasons why developing Vista Sidebar Gadgets matters. I received some good questions from the elite that listened to my 2 hours long presentation, some of which are still unanswered. I promise I'll look for some answers and post them on my...

Tomorrow evening I'm going to do a presentation about Developing Gadgets for the Vista Sidebar at the XeDotNET user group in Venice. What are Sidebar Gadgets Why developing Sidebar Gadgets Structure of a Gadget How to develop a Gadget (with 6 demos) Tips&Tricks And since my laptop cannot run Vista, I'll do the presentation using my wife's MacBook, running Vista inside Parallels. If you are interested in coming, you can register here: the presentation is in Mestre, on Friday September 16th starting from 7:30pm. Next week I'll upload the slides (in Italian) and the demos. Technorati tags: sidebar, gadget, vista

Last week the UGIdotNET community blog portal migrated to Subtext, and yesterday, another Italian .NET blogger, Michele Locuratolo, C# MVP and co-founder of a regional .NET UG (dotnetside), moved from Community Server to SubText. Seems like he had a few issues exporting his blog from CommunityServer to BlogML, so he had to transform the DB schema from CS to Subtext manually. Happy blogging Mighel! Technorati tags: Subtext, UGIdotNET

 goes to   After GeeksWithBlogs, also UGIdotNET, the Italian .NET user group, migrated from .Text to Subtext. Andrea, the president of the user group, waited for the week of "Ferragosto" when almost all the Italians are on holiday, to minimize the down time of the blog portal. The first comments are positive, users like the new RichTextEditor, or the possibility to close the comments after N days, or to use Akismet to filter the spam. A lot of the very old skins are not available on Subtext, so most the personal blogs changed their skin, and I'm happy to see that most have them have...

Ivan, the Belgian .NET developer and member of the Wellington.NET user group just moved his blog from DasBlog to Subtext. He is a very smart guy, with lot of interesting opinions about development, not only .NET but also Ruby and other "cool" languages, so if are not already subscribed to his blog I encourage you to do so. He also decided to stop developing nBlogr, his own blogging engine: it's always sad when someone decides to stop developing his own project for lack of time. Hopefully Ivan will contribute to Subtext, and with the plugin framework we are adding to Poseidon, he will...

A few weeks ago I received a message from Valentina Baraldi, the Italian Country Manager of LinkLift, asking me if I wanted to take part in the beta testing of their Text Links. At the moment they are hitting the Italian, German and Spanish markets, but they are delivering Text Links also in other languages (English, French, Polish and Portuguese) Text links are a new way to monetize your blog, that should be more targeted then Google AdSense: the most famous company that delivers these kinds of links is text-link-ads. So I decided to give it a try since at the moment...

I just got back home from the SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, which turned out to be quite a nice event: lots of coders, lots of Mac and Linux, a few .NET developers, free food, free drinks, free Internet wireless connectivity. Nice chats with the other .NET developers, mainly about the "usual" topics: ORM, dynamic languages, Reflector (which I finally decided to install). I also helped Ivan migrate his blog to Subtext, importing all his old posts from DasBlog using Ayende procedure, only to discover at the end that his hosting control panel cannot change the .NET runtime, so we rolled back to migration, and wait...

Tomorrow I'll be at SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, the NZ version of the US SuperHappyDevHouse held monthly in the SF bay area. I still haven't grasped what it is about, so I just report the "official" description: SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa is inspired by SuperHappyDevHouse, a monthly hackathon event in the US, combining serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. The whole thing is about rapid development, ad-hoc collaboration and cross pollination. Hardcore coders, l33t hax0r, passionate designers, and other types that enjoy software and technology development will be at home in the SuperHappyDevHouse. This is...

Today the Firefox marketing team released some marketing material to promote the next release of Firefox 3, codename Gran Paradiso, but I think they didn't get the real meaning of the reference to Gran Paradiso. According to Wikipedia: "Gran Paradiso" (trans. "Great Paradise"), like other Firefox development names, is an actual place; in this case the highest mountain group in the Graian Alps. With the release of version 3.0 alpha 1 on December 8, 2006, it adopted the "Gran Paradiso" codename. And also according to all codenames in the history of...

Seems like Connected Ventures, the company behind Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker is taking the Friday's afternoon to the next level. Here is what they produced... Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo

Scott Hanselman started this "meme" a few days ago, then Nic jumped in, so why not joining and tell you my 4 life changing gadgets? They both agree on GPS, iPod and DVR being their life changing gadgets: I don't have a TV (nor a DVR), and only watch movies or a few TV series, and I use GPS only when going trekking or doing mountaineering, so I cannot say that a DVR and the GPS are among my life changing gadgets. Cellphone: a friend of mine in Italy wrote a post about why the cellphone changed his life...

I just found two interesting articles by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on the ZDNET Hardware blog: Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user Three more things that the Linux community doesn’t get The second article is a follow-up of the first one, triggered by the tons of comments from people in the Linux community still going on not understanding. The author tries to answer the following question: Why is it that the average computer user still chooses to spend hundreds of dollars on Windows or Mac when there are countless Linux alternatives that they...

Looking at Digg page on Microsoft I just found an interesting article written on One Microsoft Way, the column about Microsoft on ArsTechnica. The article, titled  "A good question: Where ARE the Microsoft fanboys?" is an answer to another article written on Information Week a few days before: Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion? Fanboy: A person who is completely loyal to a game or company regardless of if they suck or not.[urbandictionary] Fanboy is a term used to describe an individual ... who is utterly devoted to a single fannish subject, or to a single point...

The guys at Mindscape just started a series of video blog posts: BrainDump. Every now and then they will be interviewing a member of the .NET development community in New Zealand. Last week they knocked at my door, and I was very pleased to be part of the first episode of their BrainDump, speaking about my involvement with Subtext and my last project, the CCNET monitor gadget for Vista. Watch the video here: BrainDump #1 - Simone Chiaretta Now I understand how Phil Haack felt when he was interviewed at Mix07.Being interviewed is not easy at all: you make plans...

Following David Silverlight's suggestion I just took the The Ultimate Star Wars Personality Test, and it turned out that I am:

I just came back home from a very intersting meeting of the Wellington user group:Ivan Porto Carrero (as you can guess by the name, he is not a kiwi, but comes from the land of beer, Belgium) spoke about his blogging engine: nBlogr It's a blogging engine built using castle, base4.net and prototype. It's still in an early alpha phase but given the simplicity and the extensibility of the code and architecture I saw at the presentations, I think it can become a good .NET blogging engine in the future, if Ivan goes one builiding and maintaing it. If you...

Nic, an active .NET blogger and developer is leaving Wellington, after his company decided to "to axe 40 jobs in capital" (no, this is not really true, as Nic himself explain). So he is going to Madison and then taking a sabbatical year (or 2 or 3 or 4 or forever). I'm a bit sad about that, since Nic is the one that hosted me in his house when I arrived in Wellington back in January, helped me discovering Wellington, helped me when I had problems with my laptop and had to reinstall it, and convinced me to move to a...

Yet Another Subtext Blogger: Dave Transom, web developer and web standard evangelist from Auckland has just moved his blog from Blogger to Subtext. Welcome to the Subtext world, and compliments to your webdesigner for the awesome skin: maybe you can share it with us on the Subtext Skin site. The question is: when are Nic and Leonie going to move from dasBlog to Subtext? Technorati tags: Subtext

Igor Damiani, a very active community member, yesterday made a very brave choice, well, 2 choices: he left the safe place which was the UGIdotNET community, and moved to his own domain he decided to install the engine on his own server, and since he never worked with web apps, but only with winforms and T-SQL that is a very brave thing And he did the right choice because he installed Subtext with (almost) no help: which means that the installation procedure is dumb proof Unfortunately he lost all of his previous contents because...

Working on both "real", personal and opensource project sometimes I've to face the problem of managing different visual studio settings based on the project I'm working on. For my personal projects I like a certain tab and curly brace configuration, for Subtext I've to use another convention, and from my real job I've to use yet another configuration. After a few weeks of struggling I decided to adopt the Subtext settings even for my personal projects, but I cannot do it for my job, because that settings have been already used for years: so, every time I've to change type...

Microsoft communities just released to the world a public beta version of Tagspace: Tagspace* is a social bookmarking service for software professionals** that encourages sound sleep and sweet dreams by enabling you to be better informed, better connected, and more productive. The more you use Tagspace, the more you'll wonder how you survived for so long in the cramped quarters of your Web browser's Favorites folder.Source: Introducing Microsoft Tagspace Is it just another del.icio.us clone or will it really have something more "software professionals oriented" as said by Korby Parnell, a product manager in the Microsoft.com Community Technologies Team? Along with tagspace...

Reporting the release to the public of MS Silverlight (codename WPF/E) I was wondering if that product has been named after David Silverlight, creator of many community websites like Community Credit. I heard that Microsoft has just started an extremely high reward system for very active community leaders, and that WPF/E is the first reward issued with that system. David is reporting a conversation he had with Bill Gates: To be honest, I didn't really believe him when told me about actually meeting Bill Gates a few months back to discuss some really high honor, but anyway it's a awesome honor for...

UPDATE: The latest version of CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar is v0.9.5: read more about it on the CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar v0.9.5 release notes. I'm using CruiseControl.NET both at work and for Subtext, and since I'm using Vista I wanted to look at my servers states inside the Vista Sidebar. Last October Ruslan Trifonov built a Vista Sidebar Gadget for Cruise Control.NET, but I didn't like it mainly because it connects to a custom web service he built on purpose, instead of using the REST-like API provided inside CC.NET. So I decided to give the Vista Sidebar Gadget development a try, and I built...

Yesterday I was wondering about the origin of the name "Silverlight". Today I got the answer I was looking for, on the Starbucks .NET Developer blog: Microsoft Silverlight - What an Honor!!! The article reports the reason of why WPF/E has been named "Silverlight"... worth reading

Before heading to Queenstown and Wanaka for Easter, I subscribed to a few blogs by .NET Wellington developers. They are all written by people working for the same company: Mindscape. Mindblog: the company's official blog jb's blog: Jeremy Boyd blog, MS MVP and Regional Director Andrew Peter's blog: quite obviously, the blog of Andrew Peters JD's blog: John-Daniel Trask blog, '06 NZ.NET blog of the year At the moment they are all focused on promoting the Vista Sidebar Gadgets, with some cool gadget released. Great contents, but I've 2 things to point out: Wordpress?? aren't you all .NET...

Apple and EMI just announced that the iTunes store will be selling EMI music in AAC format without DRM. Jobs already expressed his feelings about DRM a few months ago, and now, with the partnership of EMI he made his (and probably everyone except Microsoft ) dream come true. You can read a a full coverage of the press announcement on Word of Apple website or its transcript on AppleInsider, and also the official EMI and Apple press releases. What is it going to happen starting from next May: Singles (of EMI artists) will be sold in an AAC double quality DRM-Free...

Do you want to go from Madison, WI, USA to Milano? Why don't you have a swim across the Ocean? Sounds silly? Well, these are the directions that Google Map is suggestions to go from any place in the US to any place in Europe. And they also estimate that you are going to take 30 days to swim the 3500 miles from Long Wharf NY, to Le Havre. This means that you have to swim without rest for 30 days at around 7,8 km/h (which is the same speed of the 100m swimming male Olympic record) Below is a screenshot,...

Just found a Programmer Personality Test, based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, should tell you which kind of programmer you are. So, I am a: Doer High level Solo programmer liBeral  

One of the latest trend is the inclusion inside operating systems of some kind of visually enhanced desktops: Vista has Aero, the OS X has Exposé and all the nice animations of the desktop, and some projects (like Beryl or Compiz) are adding the same (and even more "extreme") features to Linux distributions. Luigi is using Ubuntu as his main laptop and he filmed the graphic effects he can handle with his 256Mb RAM, 6 years old laptop (he is running Compiz).  Another very nice example of a Linux 3D Desktop is Beryl, a fork of Compiz (thanks...

Exactly what I'm saying: if your browser doesn't have en-US inside the preferred languages you cannot see the Window Live Writer Gallery. And having something with en is not enough because I had en-NZ and was not working too. The quick fix is to add en-US to the languages. Thanks to Scott for the suggestion

The Italian government just released the new site to present Italy to the World: www.italia.it It was developed by IBM, at the cost of 45.000.000 euro (90.000.000 NZ$) of public money, and they took 3 years to build it. As someone said, the most expensive website ever built in the world. Being a public utility website it's amazing to see that it is not accessible (as WAI) but you need to download a few software and browse to specific sections of the site. Also, if you have a look at the code, you don't see DIVs, but just a lot of giant TABLEs. It's...

InformationWeek has a nice article titled: How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers It's a long 6 printed pages article, not read it completely, but at page 2 there is nice chart with 9 points that an OpenSource project should have in order to be a winner. Ayende also wrote a nice blog entry about it. I'm trying to evaluate Subtext using that metrics (and giving points from 0 to 5): A thriving community: we have just 4-5 core dev and a few contrib. But all the main contributors are very committed and a lot of discussion...

Telligent just released the new Licensing Guide for Community Server 2007. The new Community Server 2007, new name for the CS v3.0, has a lot of new features. Above all there is a new dynamic theme engine named Chameleon, that makes the development of new skins more easy than with the previous version. It should also allow non tech person to change the appearance of the site with a sort of WYSIWYG editor for themes. But is post is not about the new features of CS 3.0, but is about the new licensing (here the complete PDF): basically the free license will enforce only...

Yesterday afternoon I delivered my first speech in English: NHibernate in 8 minutes during the Lightining session at the Wellington .NET user group meeting. I hope my English was not too bad, and that I managed in making a brief overview of the power of NHibernate. If you attended my presentation, please write a comment about it, and also if you would like to listen to a more detailed presentation of NHibernate. For the moment you can download the slides and the demo of the Lightning presentation.

Probably not everybody knows that Subtext can automatically notify Community Credits whenever someone posts an entry or an article on his blog. Thanks to Web API provided by Community Credits avid bloggers can earn point immediately without having to go to the Submit Point page and waiting for the approval of Community Credits moderators. You will receive 500 points for each blog post, and 5000 points for each article (story using ST naming) This feature exists since version 1.9.0, but it has never been advertised and explained as it should have been . The configuration is very easy: just open the...

Another major .NET blogger enters Subtext club: Ayende, THE NHibernate man (of course after Janky ) has just moved his blog from DasBlog to Subtext. On his post he explains his migration, and all the configuration changes he made so that Subtext handles the url the same way that DasBlog did. A very good overview of the BlogML import process from DasBlog to Subtext... probably after that post we will make a few changes to the import procedure to make the whole process easier.

This post is not about a concert of a Metallica cover band, the announcement of the next event for the local .NET user group in Wellington. As all years, the first event is a lightning event, which means that there will be a lot of short 5-10 minutes talks on different topics: IIS 7, Ajax, CruiseControl.NET, NHibernate, Windows Home Server, Team System customisation, Telecom processes, and maybe a few more. I'll take part in the event, not only as spectator, but also as speaker: I'll talk about NHibernate, an API that "relieve the developer from 95 percent of common data persistence related...

After a lot of strange things happened at various post and custom office in Italy, I finally received in New Zealand the prizes I won last year taking part in the Community Credit website competition: Yoda shaped backpack Darth Vader as Potato Head the "50 Jobs worse than yours" stomach ache virus plush toy (I won a set of carnivore plants seeds, but since here in NZ they are a bit paranoid about anything that can contaminate the native plants and animals, we decided...

Are you an active technical blogger? Or do you speak at CodeCamp presentations or do you help other people with .NET related problems? Then you are good candidate to win the stupid prizes that Community Credit gives out to "Smart People". I announced that site on my Italian blog back in May 06, and I was accused to have dropped the .NET Italian community productivity. So, if you want to win some of the stupid prizes, have a look at the accepted contributions, and start submitting your contributions.

This afternoon (Italian time) I'll be speaking at small code camp organized by the local user group DotNetMarche in Ancona, Italy. The name of the meeting is: "Sviluppare applicazioni 'migliori': CruiseControl.NET & NHibernate" (in English "How to build better software: CruiseControl.NET & NHibernate"). Here is the link to the meeting agenda. My session, titled "CruiseControl.NET in a real world project" will be an brief introduction to Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.NET. Then I'll show what I think are the Best Practices for successfully implementing a CI process on a real world project using as example the "pretty sweet" implementation I did for Subtext. I'll translate all the PPT slides...

Finally I made it: starting from today, December 11st, 2006, almost 2 years after my first blog post on my Italian blog, I've got an English blog, too... Why did I choose to have a blog written in English? Because I'm moving to Wellington, NZ in less than a month and I'm taking part in the global .NET community. Also, last April I saw this post from Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood about creating one's own personal brand, and since I'm a free climber I decided to go with CodeClimber: a good mix of the 2 things I like the most. If you want...