15 Easy Ways to Screw Up Your Next User Group Talk. And, a little advice.

In college, a millennia ago, I spent a summer serving Philadelphia’s inner city children with Bart Campolo. As a leader, he was an effervescent, tireless motivator; an excellent writer as much a speaker. As he verbalized his process he forever transformed my approach to public communication.

He explained two reasons for communication. The first, information. This practical, utilitarian task comes up from time to time, but isn’t the reason the world needs excellent communicators. It simply set a level across participants. If you were successful, people knew more. It’s as simple as that.

Free C# Training for Beginners and Forgetful Experts

Last year, I sat down with my colleague and friend Daren May for to create a Microsoft Virtual Academy training series that beginner developers could use to get a solid introduction to C#, called Programming in C#.

This course steams through the myriad of C# features and concepts, giving a comprehensive survey of the topic to would-be students. It was brilliant for me to have to remember all these things that made me love C# in the first place, and a chance to introduce new developers and remind seasoned ones.

I hope you like it.

Horizontal Screen Breakpoints for Web Designers to Support

It’s difficult to create a site that looks great across browsers. The weaker web developers simply give up – supporting only a piece of the market, squandering opportunity for themselves or their customers.

But, now the ante is raised with responsive web design. Leveraging CSS media queries, developers rearrange content to accommodate the width (et al) of different screen sizes. And it’s not simply a normal site with a mobile site, too. Users are coming at you with a myriad screen sizes.

DevRadio: You’re Coding from the Wrong End! Adventures in Advanced Data Modeling

This is a combined post of part 1, 2, and three especially united for my readers. in this episode I have a lot of fun with Buck Woody who has forgotten more about Data Modeling that most of us. Listen in and take a course with the professor.

Abstract:
Jerry Nixon welcomes Sr. Technology Specialist from the Windows Azure team, Buck Woody to the show as they kick-off their 3 part series on how data applies to developers and how this ties in with Windows Azure’s service offerings. Tune in for part 1 of this 3 part series as they discuss data modeling and how this should be used first in the design process.

Most people are doing MVVM all wrong. Are you?

Model View View Model or MVVM is, without question, one of the best things to ever come out of XAML development. MVVM separates the logic necessary to interact with the data from the logic necessary to interact with the UI. Where together it makes a muddled mess, separate it makes an elegant approach that is more easily maintainable.

Technical debt

Why does maintainability matter? Maintainability is not the inverse of complexity. That’s because complexity can be controlled with good patterns like MVVM. But without good patterns, complexity is the logarithmic multiplier to headaches and troubles. I don’t mind picking up on a project that is well organized. I hate even smelling projects that have deep architectural debt.