10 Most Recent Articles

Growing stronger by stretching yourself

Monday, January 25, 2010

Author: Michael Knopf

Developers (good and bad) can grow stronger by stretching themselves and learning new ideas and approaches. Even if they ultimately don’t use something new directly, the act of learning it can sharpen them in positive ways.

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Programming :

There is never only “one right way” to develop something

Monday, January 25, 2010

Author: Michael Knopf

There is never only “one right way” to develop something. As an opening interview question I sometimes ask people to sort an array of numbers in the most efficient way they can. Most people don’t do well with it. This is usually not because they don’t know sort algorithms, but rather because they never think to ask the scenarios and requirements behind it – which is critical to understanding the most efficient way to do it

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Programming :

The Least I Can Do: Designing Applications People Can Actually Use

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Author: Michael Knopf

If you design applications that anyone in the world, other then yourself, will use then you really need to be thinking about usability during the entire development process. Some of you (hopefully) have heard of Steve Krug, the author of Don't Make Me Think. This is a great video of a talk Steve gave that covers The Least We Can Do to create usuable software.

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Programming : Project Management :

Creating a Weather Map using the Bing Silverlight Map SDK and WeatherBug

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Author: Michael Knopf

Bing has release a Maps SDK for use in your Silverlight projects. In this white paper we will cover how to use the SDK to display weather conditions for cities across the United States. The real-time weather data will be retrieved using the WeatherBug API and shown on the map. We will animate the weather conditions (a glowing sun for Sunny conditions, a raining cloud for Rain, etc...) and cover some core concepts along the way, specifically use of a Controller mechanism in your Silverlight projects, parsing XML into your own data model that can be returned from a Web Service, and of course getting up to speed with the Bing Maps SDK for Silverlight.

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C# Coding : Distributed Applications : Object Relational Mapping (ORM) : Programming : Silverlight : Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) :

Silverlight Straight Talk: The Awesomeness, Disadvantages, and Difficulties in Silverlight

Monday, September 07, 2009

Author: Michael Knopf

Building Silverlight application takes time, effort, patients, and tools (yes, you have to have some tools). In this post we will cover: where to get the necessities and some useful additional tools, as well as straight talk about the awesomeness, disadvantages, and difficulties of building Silverlight applications. We will also cover the basics of XAML, referencing and using related assemblies, and the how Expression Blend and Visual Studio make it all happen.

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C# Coding : Code Camp - South Florida : Code Camp - Tampa : Distributed Applications : Object Relational Mapping (ORM) : Silverlight : Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) :

Building Real-World Data-Driven Silverlight Applications

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Author: Michael Knopf

In this post we will cover Silverlight from start to finish; including architecting, coding, testing, and deploying real-world Silverlight apps. We will also discuss security, its limitations, and what you need to know to secure your application and WCF services and deploy them to IIS.

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Code Camp - Jax : Code Camp - Tampa : Database Design & Coding : Distributed Applications : Object Relational Mapping (ORM) : Silverlight : Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) :

Upgrading From Silverlight 2 to Silverlight 3 Breaks Existing WCF Service References

Monday, July 13, 2009

Author: Michael Knopf

I've been working for several months on a Silverlight project and decided to upgraded from Silverlight 2 to Silverlight 3. The installs of the Toolkit and Visual Studio SDK's went well as did the upgrade to the project, however once the upgrade was done I compiled the project and was promptly smacked in the face with 182 compilation errors, 4 of which were Error 6 Custom tool error: Failed to generate code for the service reference 'Your Service Ref Name Here'. Please check other error and warning messages for details. 'Path to your Service Ref Resources File Here' and the rest were the typical cannot find, are you missing an assembly reference?

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Silverlight : Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) :

Learning Fatigue, Sustainable Pace, and a Programmers Death March

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Author: Michael Knopf

Have you ever been at the gym, running on a treadmill, while the guy next to you (who is in much better shape I might add) is not only running faster than you but appears to be doing it with ease. You adjust your speed trying keep up, it works for awhile and you feel good about it, but eventually fatigue sets in and you find it increasingly more difficult to stay on pace. Eventually you have to slow down to something thats "sustainable", something you can keep up for your entire workout. Learning (and working) can, and often is, just like this.

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Code Camp - Jax : Programming : Project Management :

Preparing for technical job interviews

Friday, March 27, 2009

Author: Michael Knopf

At some time in your career you will need to interview for a job, if you own your own consulting firm then you are most likely interviewing for jobs on a weekly basis (by pitching clients to contract you for work). Preparing for technical job interviews requires a great deal of research, work, and most of all patience. This article provides a list of questions and answers that I fielded while interviewing for senior level software development positions, it is a collection of my experiences during 17 different job interviews with 10 companies including NASA (who offered me a job)...

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ASP.NET : C# Coding : Career Management : Code Camp - Jax : Code Camp - Orlando : Code Camp - Tampa : Design Patterns : Distributed Applications : Model View Controller (MVC) : Object Relational Mapping (ORM) : Silverlight : Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) :

What's the Difference Between the GET and POST HTTP Request Methods

Friday, November 14, 2008

The GET method appends name/value pairs to the URL, allowing you to retrieve a resource representation. The big issue with this is that the length of a URL is limited (roughly 3000 char) resulting in data loss should you have to much stuff in the Form, so this method only works if there is a small number of parameters. What does this mean for me? Read more and find out...

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ASP.NET : Distributed Applications :

Michael Knopf

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