Using Layer Diagrams – Keeping your MVVM code from turning into spaghetti

Raleigh Code Camp 2013 is wrapping up this afternoon. The venue and the crowd was phenomenal. I really enjoyed presenting “Using Layer Diagrams – Keeping your MVVM code from turning into spaghetti”. Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation.

John Sonmez, Our Keynote Speaker, made my day by accepting my request to attend my presentation. It was awesome to have him in the audience and to get feedback from him!

I did not get the time to complete the raffle at the end of the presentation. But the folks who won the raffle should be getting an email from me with instructions to download their free license of CodeDemo (Professional).

The presentation slides can be downloaded from here : download.

 

 

NCDevCon 2013 Schedule

NCDevCon 2013 (tentative) session schedule is up. The topics seem quite interesting and varied : From “Web Penetration and Hacking Tools” (David Epler) to “Better UI/UX with Bootstrap : A Developer’s Primer” (Steve Keator) to “Getting Control of Your Asynchronous JavaScript” (Bucky Schwarz).

I am picking the sessions to attend.  Looks like I will be able attend around 11 sessions in 2 days, if that is all I do while I am there. Sometimes, there are good reasons to not attend a session :

  1. The conferences are for networking as well as for learning. If I strike an interesting conversation with someone, I will not hesitate to skip a session.
  2. Sometimes, an impromptu group discussion sparks wonderful ideas and accelerate a thought process in a way which is unlikely to happen in a one-way presentation. If I am in such a discussion, I will gladly forego the opportunity to attend the next session.
  3. A follow-on discussion after a session, either with the presenter or with other attendee(s) may derail my planned schedule.

Here is my pick of sessions (click the picture to enlarge):

NCDevCon 2013 Schedule

Green highlights are the sessions I don’t want to miss.

Red/pink highlights are the sessions I will most likely not attend due to one of these reasons :

  1. I have no interest in the topic.
  2. I already know the subject to the extent that attending a (seemingly) introductory session is not a valuable use of my time. After all, I can only attend one session out of five in a time-slot.
  3. The session description is too vague for me to make a decision at the moment and there is another session in that timeslot that I am very keen on attending.

Yellow highlights are the sessions that I can’t make up my mind on. Any recommendations?

Which sessions are you attending?

 

DQS – Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012

TRINUG – Data SIG, July 2013

SQL Server Data Quality Services (DQS) is a knowledge-driven data quality product. DQS enables you to build a knowledge base and use it to perform a variety of critical data quality tasks, including correction, enrichment, standardization, and de-duplication of your data.

Get Your Windows 8 Start Menu Back With Pokki

I like the new Windows 8 experience. Start screen with live tiles is awesome. But I have been missing the Start Menu when I am on the desktop. There are plenty of rumours that Microsoft will bring back the Start Menu in the next version of Windows – Windows Blue. Until then, you can use one of many third party utilities for that functionality – ClassicShell, Start8 and Pokki.

I started using Pokki. And I love it. It feels like my world is whole again. Pokki is free.

If you want to do what I did, after installing it, open settings

and make these changes: