After some time blogging at Clearscreen I've decided to stop writing (and not writing) here and,  following the current trend, start a new adventure on my own at www.josefcobonnin.com.

I would like to think the new Mad about .NET will be a much more interesting place where I will not repeat some of the mistakes done here, unfortunately the blogger will be the same, therefore I guess I will need to continue learning along the way :)

I want to thank Clearscreen and Miguel Jimenez for his support and patience during my time here.

Regards,

Jose.

Around one month ago the Comando Tomate interviewed me at the Microsoft facilities "La Finca", thanks to this interview I was able to explain what the projects of Baleares on .NET are and what I do at Ineta Spain.

If you want to know more just take a look (Spanish).

March, 28th we celebrated the anniversary of Baleares on .NET.

I would really like to thank all the speakers for coming to such important event for us Eladio Rincón, Juan Manuel Servera, Rodrigo Corral, David Cervigón, Miguel Jiménez and David Salgado.

All of them made possible to host what at the end was an incredible day, I hope they enjoyed as much as I did and that they come to visit us again in a near future.

You can see some of the photos we took here.

The 28th, March the .NUG Baleares on .NET celebrates its first anniversary doing a big launch event. You can see the agenda below:

09:00 - 09:30 Register

09:30 - 10:00 Presentation

10:00 - 11:00 Windows Server 2008 - David Cervigón, Microsoft.

11:00 - 12:00 Agile Methodologies with TFS 2008 - Rodrigo Corral, PlainConcepts.

12:00 - 12:30 Coffee Break

12:30 - 13:30 SQL Server 2008 - Eladio Rincón, SolidQuality Mentors.

13:30 - 14:30 ADO.NET Framework Entity - Jose Fco Bonnin, Payvision.

14:30 - 15:30 Free time to Lunch

15:30 - 16:30 ADO.NET Data Services - Juan Manuel Servera, Babtec.

16:30 - 17:30 Emotional Design and Advanced User Experiences with Silverlight y WPF - Miguel Jiménez, Ilitia.

17:30 - 18:30 Advanced Debugging - David Salgado, Microsoft.

Visit http://www.baleareson.net/communitylaunch for more information.

Finally, it seems I will be able to attend to several sessions of the TechDays in Madrid. If you want to join me, you will be more than welcome.

Here is my agenda.

Agenda: 26/02
-----------------------------
14:00 - 14:30 (Sala Mónaco): Hands-On Lab. Visual Studio: Práctica de Desarrollo Dirigido por Pruebas (TDD, Test-Driven Development). Colabora: Danysoft
15:00 - 15:45 (Sala Madrid): Entity Framework a fondo
16:25 - 16:55 (Auditorio EXPO): Optimización de rendimiento en SQL Server 2008
16:45 - 17:30 (Sala Amsterdam): Hands-On Lab. SQL Server 2008: novedades para Desarrolladores de Bases de Datos
17:30 - 18:15 (Sala Amsterdam): Hands-On Lab. SQL Server 2008: novedades de Business Intelligence
18:00 - 19:00 (Sala París): WCF a fondo
Agenda: 27/02
-----------------------------
09:45 - 11:00 (Sala Roma): SQL Server 2008: Aplicaciones de Misión Crítica sobre Plataformas de Datos fiables.
12:30 - 13:15 (Area Visual Studio): Pregunta al Experto: 10 Errores más comunes al usar Team Foundation Server
15:40 - 16:20 (Sala Berlín): ALM: Scrum y Team Sytem en la vida real. Presenta: Rodrigo Corral. Plain Concepts
16:30 - 18:00 (Auditorio A): Sesión plenaria
Gran Final The Evolution {Game}, con Inma del Moral
20 Años de Innovación, con Rosa Garcia, Presidenta Microsoft Iberica
Mesa redonda con líderes del Sector
18:00 - 19:00 (Auditorio A): Steve Ballmer en directo desde Los Angeles (California, EE.UU)
19:00 - 24:00 (Auditorio A): {The Evolution Party}.Gran Fiesta de celebración del 20 Aniversario de Microsoft en España.

My last post was related to the answers we received to basic questions we do when somebody applies for a job in our company.

I shared a couple of them I've found funny or curious, obviously I never would reveal the author of the answers.

My intention was just to show the weird answers you can receive, like one who answered to "what is Managed Execution?" saying he only works as freelance and specifying the price per hour.

I never intended to laugh about the people itself, I know how hard can be to look for a job, but just about the rarity of the answers. The prove of this is that among the answers provided, there was one of a current employee and he didn't see any problem I published on the web.

Our company is a bit special for this kind of things, we are very self-critics and we apply the humor to our daily work with things like hanging with full name the most stupid errors in our intranet, forcing the ones who break more often the builds to bring a handmade dessert, etc.

The thing is that I received one comment saying the post was not very ethical. In my opinion it was totally misinterpreted, but if one person thought that, it's possible there is more people thinking in the same way, as I said this was far away from my intention.

Therefore I decided to simply delete the post.

I initiated this blog one year ago with the intention to write basically about .NET. I started very enthusiastic and having clear that I didn't want to write just about which products come out or what other blogger said before. But reviewing the posts of this past year I've figured out that I've not been as prolific as I would like and that some of my posts really suck. I mean, I already knew it but when you see the numbers is when you face the truth (I only reached an average of 3 posts per month). I guess that sometimes one does not have time enough and/or just does not find the right inspiration, in any case below you can see my top 10 list of posts based on the web visits received. Obviously the "post competition" is not fair, since the oldest the post is the more possibilities has to be visited, but doesn't really matter.

By the way, I don't understand why the number one received this amazing amount of web visits, who knows what people expected to find when searching how to hook a keyboard and mouse ;)

Let's see what comes out in 2008.

Today I was reading a few articles about the Web 2.0 and I don't know how, I've found this funny song and after listen it I could not avoid blogging about it

Sometimes it's impressing the amount of time I can waste in Internet while I try to do other things I don't like ...

In the last TTT we had a session to discuss about several things regarding the .NET User Groups and one of the subjects was the MSDN forums.

Microsoft told us that they were investing some efforts to improve the Spanish MSDN forums and immediately after that we talked about the local forums each .NUG has in their sites. The idea proposed was to remove the local forums and to support the MSDN forums, this would benefit the developer community since instead of having microsites we can sum our efforts to have a centralized help site.

In Baleares on .NET we thought that the best was to have our own forums in order to provide better assistance to our community, we wanted to be sure that the .NET developers of Baleares had answers to their questions. Because of that some "volunteers" are monitoring the forums to provide solutions, but as the community grows we can give less support and the idea to post the questions to bigger communities does not seem to be a bad idea.

I must say that I'm not 100% convinced yet that this is best solution for our community, since I trust the "closeness" concept we tried to offer and that had good results until now.

Anyway I've decided to give a try and to introduce progressively some of the MSDN forums in order our users know them. I wanted not only to insert a simple link to the MSDN forums, but to display some of the posts in our website in line with the current appearance. 

To do it, we can save lot of time taking profit of the Community Server platform to add the latest posts in our home page in the same way the Recent Post List appears. If we take a look about how CS displays the recent posts, we can see that it uses the control IndexPostList, which basically consists of display the results of a search done when the page inits. Below you can see the code the guys from CS use:

   1: List<IndexPost> recentPosts = CSCache.Get("HomePageSearch-" + CurrentCSContext.User.RoleKey) as List<IndexPost>;

   2: if (recentPosts == null)

   3: {

   4:     SearchQuery query = new SearchQuery();

   5:     query.StartDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10);

   6:     query.EndDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);

   7:     query.PageSize = 5;

   8:  

   9:     recentPosts = CSSearch.Search(query).Posts;

  10:     CSCache.Insert("HomePageSearch-" + CurrentCSContext.User.RoleKey, recentPosts, CSCache.MinuteFactor * 5);

  11: }

  12: RecentPostList.DataSource = recentPosts;

It doesn't seem too complicated, basically we need to introduce a new IndexPostList control in the main page and set the DataSource property with our own List of IndexPost. All the MSDN ES forums allow to syndicate the content, this means that we can access it via RSS. The easiest way to do this with .NET is to use a XmlTextReader and read the contents inside a DataSet.

As you can see in the code below we also make use of the XslCompiledTransform, this is done because the feeds contain two comments elements, even if they have different namespaces the ReadXml method of the dataset will throw an exception, since it will consider both of them as the same column. I got the idea to use to Transform from the next post, where the author got into the same troubles when loading two "comments" elements from the feed.

   1: XslCompiledTransform rssTransform = new XslCompiledTransform();

   2: rssTransform.Load(xsltPath);

   3:  

   4:  

   5: using (XmlTextReader xmlTextReader = new XmlTextReader(feeds[i].Url))

   6: {

   7:     using (StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter())

   8:     {

   9:         XPathDocument rssXPath = new System.Xml.XPath.XPathDocument(xmlTextReader);

  10:         rssTransform.Transform(rssXPath, null, stringWriter);

  11:  

  12:         DataSet ds = new DataSet();

  13:         using (System.IO.StringReader reader = new System.IO.StringReader(stringWriter.ToString()))

  14:         {

  15:             ds.ReadXml(reader);

  16:         }

  17:  

  18:         DataTable dt = ds.Tables["item"];

  19:         int maxItems = feeds[i].MaxItems;

  20:         DateTime maxDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(feeds[i].MaxDays * -1);

  21:         for (int idx = 0; idx < maxItems && idx < dt.Rows.Count; idx++)

  22:         {

  23:             DateTime postDate = DateTime.Parse((string)dt.Rows[idx]["date"]);

  24:  

  25:             if (postDate >= maxDate)

  26:             {

  27:                 IndexPost post = new IndexPost();

  28:                 post.ApplicationKey = feeds[i].Name;

  29:                 post.ApplicationType = ApplicationType.Forum;

  30:                 post.ApplicationUrl = feeds[i].Url;

  31:                 post.FormattedBody = (string)dt.Rows[idx]["description"];

  32:                 post.PostDate = postDate;

  33:                 post.SectionName = feeds[i].Name;

  34:                 post.Title = (string)dt.Rows[idx]["title"];

  35:                 post.Url = (string)dt.Rows[idx]["link"];

  36:                 post.UserName = (string)dt.Rows[idx]["creator"];