Refreshed

This weekend I went to the Houston ALT.NET Open Space Conference.  It was definitely a refreshing experience.  You can check the wiki to see what went on and get summaries of the sessions (not all the sessions have summaries yet).
I started to collect a list of things to read, things to listen to, and things to watch that was recommended by anyone in any of the sessions at the conference.  If you have any other recommendations for the list, please either send them to me or edit the page and add it yourself.  A lot of the entries there still need some explanation on why people should spend their time reading, listening, or watching.
I learned a whole heckuva lot over the weekend.  What I really found though was a desire to help build the developer community here in Houston.  I saw this weekend that we could have just as stimulating a conference here in Houston as in that other big Texas city up north with all the weirdos.  We need to show everyone that Houston is a great city for software developers!
Here are some quick things that I’m going to be exploring in the coming weeks (sooner than later hopefully):

• Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (aka Prism):
• I learned that you can use Prism to build any type of application, it’s not completely tied to WPF or Silverlight.
• I’d like to see how to apply it to ASP.NET MVC or Windows Forms.
• Building complex (multiple-solution) software:
• The build is software too.
• Move away from copy/paste build scripts and towards convention based builds.
• Data Binding and Transformation:
• I’m still interested in how to do simple data binding and make it extensible.
• This is the basis for rich Windows Forms applications I think.

All in all, a great weekend.  Thank you to Ben Scheirman and his crew who organized the Houston ALT.NET Open Space Conference, and thanks to “Doc” for his expert adult supervision.  It was great seeing familiar faces and making new friends, thank you all for an awesome weekend!

Technorati Tags: altnetconf,altnethouston

Refreshing

I’m working on a personal refresh right now.  I changed the theme of this site to make it look cleaner.  I’m also signed up for the Houston ALT.NET Conference (http://houston.altnetconf.com), which is pretty exciting.  The last time I went to one of these open space conferences, it lead to a flurry of blog posts followed by a hiatus (thanks to business with school).  I’m guessing something similar will happen here.
I’ve been starting to get active on Twitter (more listening than tweeting).  My alias there is @garoyeri.  I find it to be a good way to find interesting conversations.  My Twitter client of choice (for now) is TweetDeck.  I’m going to try and post interesting links for things I’m looking at.
Code-wise, I’m thinking about a more extensible way to do object data binding for desktop applications.  For web applications, the data is refreshed once on the server-side when it hits the page, then updated by JavaScript/AJAX on the browser-side.  For something like this, AutoMapper looks like a great way to make it happen.  When dealing with desktop applications where the same data could be displayed in several places, the data binding / mapping needs to be “live” instead.  I’ll be posting more about this sooner than later.
I’ve also been looking at coding aspect of the software development process in our workgroup and have set up guidelines for our group.  I’ll write more on that too.
The StockSample I was writing about earlier got a little stale.  We’ll see if I pick that series back up or not.

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