subliminal effect blog

Google launches a special treat just for developers

bernard@subliminaleffect.com (Bernard Wong) — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 03:13:05 GMT

Very cool - this looks like it's going to come in very handy for me. Maybe you too?

It seems the Google folks have just launched a new Code Search service at www.google.com/codesearch. They have indexed publicly accessible source code from all across the Internet. The new service then helps you find sample code and function definitions. Developers will be able to optionally use regular expressions to narrow down searches as well as further specifying restrictions upon language, license or filename. Links are provided back to the complete package of source code and the Web page associated with where it came from.

What are you waiting for, go check it out now!

Updated subliminal effect Web site design and moved the change log for the site over to here.

bernard@subliminaleffect.com (Bernard Wong) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:45:24 GMT

If you got to this blog from the subliminal effect Web site, you may have noticed that it has received a design refresh overnight.

Coincidental to this, I'm moving the ongoing log of major site updates to subliminal effect over to this blog, beginning with the entry that is before you. You can keep up-to-date with future updates, major changes, commentaries and other information about the subliminal effect site via the blog entries categorized as subliminal effect.

11 September 2006
Revised site design to utilize new background tile of black rubber bumps and then changed column, menu and breadcrumb background colors accordingly, to match.

8 September 2006
Added sub-menu support to accomodate splitting the events listings into separate pages for upcoming and past events.

2 September 2006
Added the blog section of the site.

28 August 2006
Launch of site. Basic implementation of this page, and the events, links and about pages. Initial entries in the events page for the SoCal .NET Technical Summit II and Fall Developer Connections conferences.

<listening to... pre>He - Edward Graham Lewis>

Behind the scenes of selecting session topics for the SoCal .NET Technical Summit II conference

bernard@subliminaleffect.com (Bernard Wong) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:13:18 GMT

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about selecting presenters for the upcoming SoCal .NET Technical Summit II conference and enumerated a representative sample of the kind of impeccable credentials that these premier speakers bring with them. This time around, I’d like to call out some of the sessions that you can look forward to and tell you something about the person presenting it and how the topic came about.

Let’s start with Rocky Lhotka’s sessions since it was his impressively long list of qualifications that we singled out previously. One of the omissions from the prior list is Rocky’s frequent participation at the Strategic Design Reviews of Microsoft’s Developer Division. If you haven’t heard of these previously, it is because they are strictly invitation-only, non-disclosure briefings exclusively for the absolute top tier development experts of the world.

With this highly privileged insight into Microsoft’s future directions, his own years of practical experience, and his current leadership position at the forefront of emerging technologies, Rocky’s knowledge and counsel are truly treasured commodities that are highly sought after by major corporations. I cannot reiterate how fortunate we are to have an opportunity to tap into Rocky’s observations for the mere $99 cost of admission to the conference!

So what is he going to be talking about? I’ve arranged with Rocky to put together two presentations exclusively for our conference. He’s going to kick off the architecture track with an appraisal of how far the technologies behind distributed computing have come to date and where they are heading tomorrow. Then, in the afternoon, as the keystone of the .NET 3.0 track, he’s going to provide his own personal assessment of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). With Rocky's reputation and renown and two topics like these, the sessions are sure to be packed - better reserve a seat now...

Let’s move onto Scott Stanfield’s session. I could quote to you a long list of credentials accumulated by Scott and Vertigo Software, the company that he co-founded. I could tell you that he is one of Microsoft’s Regional Directors in Northern California , that he is an ASP.NET MVP, he has spoken at TechEd, VBITS and other conferences, his company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and a whole lot more.

The most important information about Scott that you should know but doesn’t appear on his resume or string of accomplishments is that he and Vertigo are the people that Microsoft’s .NET teams call upon to build the showcases for their technologies. As such, Scott has been the key figure behind the .NET Pet Shop reference application, the ASP.NET Starter Kits, the TaskVision smart client application featured at DevDays 2003 events around the world and more.

Initially, when I first began discussions with Scott about possible topics for him to present, he was very focused upon presenting ASP.NET 2.0? I presumed that he wanted to leverage content that he already had “in the can” when Microsoft commissioned Vertigo to create the “How Do I?” series of videos for ASP.NET 2.0 that were recently published online. This was kind of timely but hey, anyone can just go ahead and download the videos now without waiting for (or even, gasp!, bothering to attend) the conference…

Since I had already lined up three interesting, in-depth ASP.NET 2.0 presentations, I countered with “Atlas”, a future ASP.NET technology. Well, it turns out that Microsoft already happens to have Vertigo putting together sample demonstrations for “Atlas”. Suddenly, the discussion that seemed at an impasse completely turns around to the serendipitous confluence where Microsoft’s premier new technology advocate will now debut a specially created session on his personal favorite selection of new ATLAS features, exclusively for your benefit. If only everything in life could turn out like this…

OK, last one for today and this blog entry. Let’s turn the spotlight on Russ Nemhauser now. Russ is an ASP.NET MVP and has worked on Web projects for major corporations including Microsoft. He has presented previously at conferences like VSLive! and Developer Connections and at user groups, locally in SoCal and out and about as a member of INETA’s speaker bureau. He is also one of the personalities behind the DotNetJunkies online community and has had articles published in several magazines.

Though Russ and I both live in Los Angeles , it seems we usually only communicate with each other via IM rather than picking up the telephone. Naturally, this was how we collaborated on the selection of his presentation topic and we settled quickly upon the ASP.NET 2.0 providers in general. Then we just tossed around some ideas to be covered tactically to flesh out the session topic some more and we were done.

As you can see, the sessions rarely ever come about the same way. Each has their own behind-the-scenes story and there is always more to the story than what you can read in the session descriptions and speaker biographies. I hope you’ve found this look behind-the-scenes of the conference interesting and perhaps will be motivated to come see the resulting sessions. I know I’m looking forward to them.

Selecting a blog engine and then getting it installed on a hosted site

bernard@subliminaleffect.com (Bernard Wong) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 08:30:23 GMT

When it came time to implement the blog component of the subliminal effect Web site that you are currently reading, I surveyed the various blog writing tools, engines and services, tried out some of these, considered writing my own, read reviews and solicited opinions from colleagues. Ultimately, I settled upon the dasBlog engine for convenience (a lot quicker to get running than to write something less functional), features (does what I needed and doesn’t do what I don’t need like implementing forums) and price (it’s difficult to argue with free).

After downloading the dasBlog Web files distribution, it was installed and running on my local server within minutes. Unfortunately, getting it to work correctly alongside the rest of the subliminal effect Web site on hosting.com’s remote server wasn’t nearly as quick or easy.

While some of my colleagues use dasBlog to implement their entire Web site, I felt this approach was unnecessarily restrictive and inflexible for what I wanted to do with subliminal effect. For my particular scenario, the setup instructions for dasBlog were to create a virtual directory (vdir) to install into (rather than the site root) and change a configuration setting for this new location accordingly. These instructions had nothing to say about the resulting issue where the blog application files were now picking up the settings in the Web.Config files located in both the blog vdir and Web site root.

Understandably, the site administrators at hosting.com couldn’t provide any application support. They will just do whatever administrative task you ask of them (as long as it is prudent from a security viewpoint). Through trial and error, we went through a few different arrangements like having the vdir created as a folder physically removed from the rest of the Web site content but that still didn’t help. Presumably, having the blog set up as its own separate Web site and domain would have worked correctly but I wanted the blog to seem to be an integral part of subliminal effect and share the same domain name.

In the end, my work around was to rewrite the Web.Config file in the root of the Web site to remove the offending global settings that were causing dasBlog to fail. Other work arounds may be possible but these seemed even more obtuse.

With this show-stopper resolved, I started to edit the supplied default blog settings in earnest and promptly ran into another issue… You can edit the default entries in the blog roll via the administrative functions provided by dasBlog but adding new entries doesn’t quite work. I think the fault lies in the XSLT transform used to insert the new entry into the OPML file that stores all the blog entries but I didn’t look into this too closely. It was much more convenient for me just to open the OPML file in this really cool XML file editor called Notepad that I had conveniently at hand. Actually, adding blog entries this way was a lot faster than using the built-in administrative function, even if it did work correctly (which it didn't).

I now have the first few blog entries written and posted. The first two of these, I also cross-posted to my former blog. dasBlog does have a cross-posting feature but so far I haven’t seen where I can selectively cross-post based upon the categories that I mark for each blog entry. For those of you who subscribe to the feed for the MSDN blogs expecting lucid developer information and insight, I am kindly sparing you from being subjected to my heirloom gourmet stuffed mushroom recipe…

Next on my to-do list with this blog is to devise a new skin that resembles the rest of the subliminal effect Web site. You may have noticed the jarring transition to and from a page of the Web site proper. Unfortunately, this appears to be a non-trivial task. I spent one night editing one of the supplied skins to approximate the look of subliminal effect. I got a fairly close match before deciding that I really should create the skin from scratch to do it properly (i.e. without the use of HTML tables for layout). Uh, you’ll see when I get this done…

Add your comments about the subliminal effects Web site here...

bernard@subliminaleffect.com (Bernard Wong) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 01:20:26 GMT

This isn't really a blog entry. It may look like one but that's not really the purpose of why it's here. This (non-)blog entry is really just abusing the originally intended purpose of real "authentic" blog entries.

Essentially, I was working on updating the about page of the subliminal effect Web site with some of the implementation detail about this blog section of the site (i.e., what you are reading now). I decided that logically, it would make sense to put the information that I was writing about the blog section, actually somewhere in the blog section. This way, if you become curious about how this blog is implemented while reading one of its blog entries, you are just a short link away from scratching that itch yourself. You won't need to jump out of the blog to one of the (increasingly longer) pages of the Web site proper (which also currently doesn't yet look the same — long story that we'll have to save for another time).

Then I thought, hey, I should probably provide some facility to allow the world at large to comment upon the site... But where should this go? The about page was already getting too long... Creating a new page for it on the Web site would look kind of premature, or at least until there were a few comments to fill it up more. But what about the merely days old blog that is consequently, sorely lacking content? It even has a built-in mechanism for accepting comments...

Which leads us to this (seemingly, but really isn't) blog entry that now provides a place for you to write in your comments about the subliminal effect Web site and read what others have written.

Behind the scenes of selecting speakers for the SoCal .NET Technical Summit II conference

bernard@subliminaleffect.com (Bernard Wong) — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 00:28:06 GMT

In my last blog entry announcing the upcoming SoCal .NET Technical Summit II, I wrote that it pained me greatly to just list the names of some (not even all) of the brilliant presenters that are lined up for this star studded developer conference on Saturday, September 23rd. Why all the drama and self-infliction of wounds, you may ask?

First, and most obviously, each of these speakers has accumulated such a long list of remarkable accomplishments and qualifications that it feels exceedingly miserly of me to just list their names out for brevity. I manage to only marginally re-dress this omission of speaker qualifications in my description of the conference in the Events section of my personal Web site, subliminal effect. Of course, the conference Web site also publishes the speakers’ personal biographies but these are brief and also fall short too.

To give each of this august selection of speakers their proper due would require covering a set of credentials resembling this enumeration (to pick on just one of them, Rockford Lhotka, as an example):

Author of Expert VB 2005 Business Objects, Expert C# 2005 Business Objects, Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects, Professional Visual Basic 6 Distributed Objects, Visual Basic 6.0 Business Objects, and Professional Visual Basic 5.0 Business Objects;
Co-author of Professional VB 2005 (Programmer-to-Programmer), Professional VB.NET 2003, Professional VB.NET and VB.NET Programming with the Public Beta;
Contributing author for Visual Studio Magazine;
Creator of the CSLA and CSLA.NET (Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture) frameworks;
Principal Technology Evangelist for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner;
Initial inductee as Software Legend by Microsoft;
Microsoft Regional Director;
Microsoft MVP;
INETA speaker bureau member.

I don’t even want to attempt to list all of the conferences (international and across the U.S. ) that Rocky has presented sessions and workshops at. And then there are all of the major corporations for whom Rocky has provided consulting and mentoring services. And I’m sure I’m leaving out lots of other good stuff, too.

See, that is one serious lesson in hagiography to leave unwritten when I only list the speaker’s name – I told you. Remember also, this is for just one of the speakers – there are twelve more. It is still only part of the (untold) story. Given the ample (over) qualifications of the speakers, you may think that organizing together the speakers and sessions for a developer conference like this one would be a trivial, “no-brainer” of a process…

Well, that’s not the way that I organize speakers and sessions for a developer conference though. Unlike some other developer conference organizers (who shall remain nameless – you know who you are and hopefully, you are not reading this blog entry!), I don’t just send out speaker invitations by bulk e-mail like some cattle call. I don’t just accept whomever responds. I don’t just let respondents choose whatever topics they have “in the can”.

My belief is that developer conferences should and need to be organized. An effective, organized conference agenda doesn’t just fall from the sky, or come together naturally by happenstance or, get this, by a “process” of first-come, first-serve to whomever wants to sign up as a speaker on whatever they want to talk about, for as many sessions as they want!

My belief is that the process of speaker and session selection requires considerable planning, negotiation and coordination. Anything less than this happens because someone doesn’t know better and/or (even worse) doesn’t care to put in the effort – which really begs the questions, how and why do these people get themselves into such a critical role in the first place?

Anything less is disrespectful of the attendees - whether the conference is free or for fee (don’t forget to consider your time or opportunity cost). Anything less is also disrespectful of the speakers and disrespectful of everyone else involved in actually trying to put on a quality event. I’ve participated at conferences and observed when there are multiple sessions basically covering the same content, where the advanced session precedes the less advanced pre-requisite session, when the presenter presents exactly the same session identically as before, and worse.

So the other parts of the untold story behind each name in that raw list of conference speakers (apart from their qualifications and expertise) are:

how they came to be selected in particular;
whom else I considered, invited, wasn’t available or pleaded with;
whom has greater name recognition with potential attendees;
how we came up with or agreed upon a topic;
how that topic fits into one of the tracks or with other topics;
what other sessions are going on at the same time and before and after;
logistical details like when and how speaker are getting to SoCal or the conference hotel; and
much, much more.

Unfortunately, this blog entry has gotten rather exceedingly long already and those stories behind-the-scenes of developer conferences will have to wait for another day…

Learn from Rocky Lhotka, Bill Vaughn, Markus Egger and more, in person on September 23rd for only $79

bernard@subliminaleffect.com (Bernard Wong) — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 00:16:49 GMT

OK, it’s time to kick-off my return to the blog world. An awful lot has changed since my last entry on the old blog site but I’ll have to leave any backtracking of what has gone on since then for some other points further down the road… Let it suffice for the moment to say that there is a new Web site, subliminal effect, incorporating a new blog location base. Feel free to bookmark these and target your aggregator applications - there will be a lot more to come.

With that said and done, let me briefly introduce you to the upcoming SoCal .NET Technical Summit II, the successor to last year’s highly successful single day .NET developer conference that was put on by the local .NET user groups down here in Southern California.

I didn’t get a chance to go through all of the conference evaluation forms from last year but the attendee response was overwhelmingly positive from the random sampling that I looked through. I think it is safe to say that the central theme behind the planning for this second edition of the Summit has been to go even bigger and better in outdoing the previous year.

If you attended last year, you likely remember how much we filled the facilities of the hotel. It was awesome to see so many attendees but this success did lead to somewhat cramped circumstances at times in the presentation rooms, in the lobby, in the hallway, out the main doors… As a result, this year, the conference is moving to the much more spacious and accomodating facilities of the Hilton Irvine, across from the John Wayne-Orange County airport in Santa Ana . This location is a little more centrally situated in Southern California too.

Of course, the absolute most critical elements of any conference are the speakers and the topics they will be presenting. Once again, my primary role in helping to put this show together has been to assemble the (ahem, absolutely) stellar roster of speakers and co-ordinate the agenda of sessions that will be presented at the conference. So whom have I lined up on your behalf? How about Rocky Lhotka, Bill Vaughn, Markus Egger , Kevin McNeish, Scott Stanfield, Mickey Williams, Mark Miller, Scott Mitchell, Russ Nemhauser and more.

First, let me say how terribly painful it is for me to have to list their names so plainly in a roll call like that when I have so much that I want to tell you about each of them. Collectively, they are the authors of bestselling books, numerous magazine articles and countless code samples, tutorials, Webcasts and other crucial developer resources. They are the colleagues that I have presented alongside at developer conferences in Las Vegas , Orlando , Montreal , Nice (France ) and Holland , just in the past year.

I’ll definitely have to dedicate a few blog entries next week to call out some of them individually, detail what sessions they will be presenting and review some of their qualifications and accomplishments that led to their selection. In the meantime, you can have a look at brief write-ups of their biographies and session topics on the conference Web site.

So how much would you pay to attend a conference on Saturday, September 23rd, featuring such an internationally renowned crew of expert authorities? Before you answer, let me remind you that some of these presenters are the exact same industry luminaries that I have previously hand-picked to speak at conferences where just the price of admission alone was well over a thousand dollars! Now, how much would you pay?

Well, hang onto your hat because if you act now and register on or before Monday, Septermber 4th (Labor Day), you won’t even have to pay the regular price of $99. Yup, that’s right, the discounted early-bird registration price for the SoCal .NET Technical Summit II is just $79…

At this price, you will not find a better value for a conference like this with the opportunity to learn from such a high caliber of professional speakers. So what are you waiting for? Register today!