Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

At one time or another, we've all been asked to maintain or modify someone else's code.  On those few occasions where the code is well organized and documented, we barely notice we're working.  Coding is what we love to do and we do it.

At home, I use Subversion for source control of a small website I maintain for a client.  When I commit changes, I always enter a log message that describes the changes I made along with a comment on how long the changes took (for billing purposes).  Today, after commiting a change, I realized I had forgotten to enter a duration for the change.

MonoRail comes with a number of "helpers" that assist you in generating views for your controller's actions.  Some examples are: FormHelper, which helps you build HTML forms; URLHelper, which helps you build links to other controllers and actions;= and AjaxHelper, which helps with Ajax calls.

SRT (the company I work for) is hosting a 4-day C# Jam at our headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  SRT co-counder and Microsoft Regional Director Bill Wagner will be co-instucting with Bruce Eckel and Jamie King.  Registration is limited to 30 participants so register now to guarantee a seat.  See Bill's post with all of the details.

Seems that CodeMash has attracted the local press as well as bloggers.

Another CodeMash has come and gone.  It was another spectacular event.  While I didn't win any of the big prizes, my ticket did get pulled for a free book.  I looked around at all of the .NET books but instead settled on "Programming Python" (all 1600 pages of it!).  I visited a couple of sessions on Python and it looks like an interesting language that I'd like to learn.  Then again, I also downloaded and installed "Ruby on Rails" during Brian Sam-Bodden's "Rails: A Peek Under the Covers" session.  I'm a huge fan of MonoRail (I'll never do a webforms app again unless I absolutely have to) and wanted to see the language that provided much of the inspiration for MonoRail.

CodeMash was able to snag Scott Hanselman for this afternoon's keynote.  As Steven Smith pointed out, Scott's intro slide deck was absolutely hilarious.  His main talk on IIS7 was equally good.  It's a great talk for those of us who've always thought of IIS as simply a web server.  Scott showed us how much IIS7 has improved and should now be considered more of an application server -- for more than just Microsoft technologies (think PHP, Python, Ruby).  Very cool.

At this mornings CodeMash announcements, Josh Holmes informed us that not only did CodeMash have a 40% increase over last years attendance, but that we've sold out the Kalahari -- the first time the hotel has ever been sold out!  CodeMash is an awesome event at a great price.  Kudos and thanks to all of those who work so hard to put it together.