Last night I had a great time giving a talk at the CapArea .NET user group. It was great to see and catch up with old friends, as well as meeting new people. My talk was centered around the new major release of DotNetNuke, version 6. There are a lot of new and exciting changes, and the best way to showcase them was to pull up version 6 right next to version 5 and contrast them with one another; that worked really well. I also uploaded the slides of the presentation on SlideShare for those who could not make it to the user group meeting last night but would still like... [More]

Every now an then I find myself looking for this function and somehow I always end up re-writing it over and over again. I am now posting it on my blog so I won't have to do that again. (Click into the article to get the code) [More]

MADExpo brings together the best in developer technologies with hardware hacking, student interests, and community. Keynotes, and more than 50 breakout sessions will be covering a broad array of technologies, and ongoing demonstrations of hardware hacking, from robotics to microcrontrollers, to Kinect. And when the conference is done, you can stick around and enjoy the 4th of July weekend at the beach or at one if the nearby water parks or amusement parks. What happens when you bring together software developers, hardware hackers and makers, students, and... [More]

It’s 8:15am on Sunday, October 3rd, I am at O’hare International Airport waiting to board my flight and begin the journey back home. As I sit here, I think, in admiration, of the people that made yesterday’s event a success. Their hard work and dedication is inspiring. Trust me folks, organizing such an event is NOT a piece of cake, its tough work. So with that said, I would like to personally thank all the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and other supporters that contributed to making this event happen. I had a great time at the event seeing and meeting new faces ... [More]

Today (June 12th, 2010) I had a great time presenting at NoVA CodeCamp spring edition.
The topic of my presentation was on Building Mobile App with jQTouch and jQuery. For more information you can check our my blog post from last week. [More]

Ladies and gentlemen, start your laptops… It's Hackathon-time, hosted by the Capital DotNetNuke User Group. What is a Hackaton? Hackathons are developer events with a goal of increasing developer knowledge on a specific technology aspect in a casual, collaborative environment. They are also designed to encourage participation by people who are not familiar with the technology, basically providing them with an immersive quick start. Hackathon Events are: built around a single programming concept (for example: DotNetNuke MVP Pattern) encourage participat... [More]

The other day I had to sort a list by a datetime field. Given that this was an ASP.NET project, the easiest way that comes to mind to do that is to just sort the data on the server side, using LINQ, by writing a Comparer Class, or some other custom sort routine. Unfortunately for me those options were not available to me because: Collection I needed to sort was coming from an “black box” API, and one which I had no access to. Furthermore, even though they provided a Sort method on collections, it wasn’t working. LINQ was out of the question because the applic... [More]

On March 2nd, 2010 I will be speaking at the Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals about the new Visual Studio 2010 IDE and the *goodness* it brings to .NET developers across the globe. I am really excited to be doing this talk at CMAP because I have never spoken at this User Group, and secondly because I get to share some exciting new features of VS2010 with the audience. I hope you can make it there; here is the abstract: A Sneak Peek of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Rumor has it that Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is riding the nex... [More]

That’s right folks, it is time for another MSDN roadshow, this time focus on Windows Azure. The first events will take place next week, kicking off with Richmond on March 3rd. Read on for dates, locations, and registration links. [More]

First, a big thank you to all the 70+ people who came out to CapArea.NET to watch this presentation. I hope that you enjoyed the event as much as I did. I posted the presentation slides on SlideShare for your viewing pleasure. I also posted them on my SkyDrive account along with the code samples; you can download them by clicking the folder icon below:     Finally, I do appreciate feedback, good and/or bad. Please feel free to let me know how I can improve on both this presentation as well as on my presentation skills using the comments section below. ... [More]

In the past 4 weeks I have given the Mash-Up Your DotNetNuke Using RESTful APIs presentation at the following three user groups: 10/21 - Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG) 10/28 - Frederick MD .NET User Group (FREDNUG) 11/10 - Orlando DotNetNuke User Group (ODUG) Needless to say it has been a very busy couple of weeks, but I truly enjoyed speaking at each of them and will certainly consider doing it again. The topic was also popular and well received by many, so much so that Will Strohl of ODUG wrote a very flattering blog post about the event in Or... [More]

Earlier this year I decided to switch Blog platform partly in an attempt to force myself to learn something new. I chose BlogEngine.NET. I chose it over anything else in the blog-app-sphere because it is open source, and appeared to be amongst the most popular and mature. It also met my #1 requirement that it had to be based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Soon after installing BlogEngine though, I realized that none of the included themes inspired me all that much. They all looked *ok*, but none looked quite complete to me.  A search for BlogEngine themes lead... [More]

I am pretty sure you’ve done this at some point in your professional life too, you checked the “Remember Password” checkbox when creating a network share. This, of course, saves you the hassle and the time to enter the password each time you accessed that network share, but what if your domain/network account password changes? As it turns out, there is no user friendly navigation shortcut to the “Windows Key Manager” (or if there is, I could not find it). That being said, there is a handy Command you can run under a Command Prompt as f... [More]