Damian Brady's Blog

Just a quick post to let you know I’ll be presenting my “Building Mobile Websites with ASP.NET MVC 3 and 4″ talk at the Qld MSDN User Group meeting on Tuesday the 21st.

Previous versions of this talk have focused mainly on MVC 3 with a nod towards MVC 4. Now that the ASP.Net team have officially launched the beta of ASP.NET MVC 4, I’ll be shifting the focus to the new version.  Out with the old and in with the new!

If you saw the version of this talk I gave at DDD Brisbane last year, don’t be scared off – it’s gone through many, many iterations since then based on the feedback I’ve received.

So if you’re in Brisbane, I’d love for you to come along.  Just RSVP on EventBrite and I’ll see you there!

I’ll be speaking at the Vic.Net User Group on Monday 23rd January.

What about? Glad you asked.  The title is “Building Mobile Websites with ASP.NET MVC 3 and 4“.

It sounds fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll be covering more than just the obvious in this talk.  In addition to actually showing how to write mobile-targeted sites in MVC 3 and 4, I’ll be discussing:

• Why it’s important to think about mobile sites, and why people aren’t,
• How smartphones actually render a desktop site and what you can do about it,
• How mobile and desktop sites can coexist beautifully, and
• Why ASP.NET MVC is the perfect technology to deliver sites that look great on any device
• What libraries and packages are available to give you the best results

So if you’re in the Melbourne area on Monday, I’d love for you to come and check it out.  Just RSVP on EventBrite and I’ll see you there.

UPDATE: The slides are now available at http://brdy.in/mobilemvc

How to be a Good TFS Master

I recently gave a talk at the Qld ALM User Group on the topic of “How to be a good TFS Master”.

Hopefully those who turned up got some great tips on how to use TFS more fully, but the main points I hoped people left with were:

Most people only use about 20-30% of the capabilities of TFS

In our experience, the majority of companies using TFS are using it for source control only.  SSW helps teams get closer to using 80 or 90% of TFS where the real advantages can be felt. There are some fairly significant infrastructure costs associated with getting to 100%, and we find most organisations don’t want to go that far.

TFS is much more than source control

In fact, if you’re using TFS purely for source control, you’re doing it wrong! You might even be better off using Git or Mercurial.  The best option (of course) is to start using TFS more fully to help you get the best out of your team.

TFS supports your Scrum process beautifully

TFS has some awesome capabilities that allow you to manage and support your entire scrum process. The integration story is compelling; allowing you to tie code changes directly to user stories, produce genuinely useful reports for your managers, and enforce your policies and coding standards allowing you to tick items off your Definition of Done without any effort.

For more information or some reminders of what I spoke about, have a look at the slides on Slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net/damovisa/how-to-be-a-good-tfs-master

Using WebcamViewer to show a webcam on your computer desktop

I went along to see Leon Bambrick and Joseph Cooney at the Queensland MSDN User Group meeting last night. The attendance was amazing – they had to open up a partition to the adjacent room and every seat was filled.

Leon and Joseph spoke about ASP.NET MVC 3 with a particular focus on the tooling around it, and delivering sites for mobile devices.

One slightly off-topic tip I did pick up was from Joseph when he needed to show his MVC site on different mobile devices. It’s a simple tip, but very effective.

Tip: To show a mobile device, use a webcam:

1. Hook up a USB webcam to your presentation laptop
2. Point the webcam at the mobile device on your desk
3. Show the webcam screen on your computer/projector (I recommend WebcamViewer)

Pretty easy, huh?

The key point for me is that using a camera pointed at an actual device gives maximum believability.

You can use an emulator or a browser with a spoofed user-agent string, but it won’t engender as much trust with the audience. In particular, using a browser or emulator with the full power of your computer behind it can make things appear nicer than they actually are; particularly when it comes to site performance and demonstrating a touch device with a mouse.

For more presentation tips, see the SSW Rules to Better Powerpoint Presentations.

Recently I gave a presentation at Ignite Brisbane where I spoke about “The Rise of Participative Software”.

You may remember me briefly talking about this topic in an earlier post, as it’s something that I’m fairly excited about.  The general idea is that most software just does exactly what the user asks.  You give it some explicit input, it gives you some output.  Participative Software is my name for software that makes suggestions and “participates” without explicit input.

Watch the video for more details.

The five minute time limit meant that I didn’t quite get my point across as well as I’d hoped.  I’d like to present the topic over 20 or 30 minutes so I can really drill down on the subject and include a bit more of a call-to-action.

As always, feedback is more than welcome – especially if you’d like to hear a 30min version!