… the readers of my blog, that a while back I got an invitation to join the Elegant Code tribe and start blogging there. I humbly accepted the invitation. Before I did I gave a lot of thought to what I would do with this blog. Would I cross-post new contents, partition the contents between the two blogs or perhaps nuke this one entirely? What I decided was that I would keep this alive and cross-post all contents.

Well, needless to say I failed with this. I started looking at cross-posting plugins for Windows Live Writer but I didn’t quite find one I liked and the one I did try did not work at all. So, fortunately I’ve only had the time to make two posts on Elegant Code, one being an introduction of myself. This means the damage is not too bad! I will bring the second post over here and for future posts I will simply manually cross-post. I’ve got a bunch of blog posts in the pipe and with a bit of luck some of them will escape my obsessive need for perfection (working on that) for my posts and actually make it into the wild soon.

As part of my blog redesign I've decided to try out using FeedBurner to monitor the use of my RSS feed. So please update your feed readers to point to my new FeedBurner RSS feed

For the past couple of months I've been wanting to give my blog a new layout. Well tonight was the night when I finally got around to it. I upgraded the layout to use a new blogger template and I also integrated the excellent DISQUS comment system.

Initially there was a problem with the images used in the template, the page that they were hosted on kept exceeding their bandwidth limit so I had to move them to my own image gallery. They should be fine now, but if you experience that some graphics sometimes doesn't get loaded please let me know.

There are still some bits and pieces that I need to work out, but all in all I'm quite pleased with the make over

Now to put some more contents on it ;)

Today I launched twitter and saw some tweets that mentioned that Jon Skeet was no longer an MVP. Jon no longer an MVP? The very same Jon that has an unchallenged amount of reputation on the user list on Stackoverflow.com, the Jon that you’ll have a hard time not coming across if you browser the popular help outlets for .net related questions? Knowing well that Jon is one of the busiest guys in the .net community, when it comes to helping others out, this came as quite the surprise to me. So I headed over to his MVP blog and he confirms that he has asked not to be reconsidered fro renewal this year.

What came as an even bigger surprise to me was the reason behind it all. Apparently he had asked his employer whether or not it would be ok for him to be renewed this year and was advised that it would not be a good idea. So his employer doesn’t want him to receive recognition for his awesome contribution to the .net community? What business is it of theirs if he gets recognition for something he does on his spare time? Turns out (I can’t say I’ve been following his career) he works for Google and this is when I got a really sad expression on my face!

Of course everything here after are purely my own speculation and conclusions, but it looks like Google didn’t want one of their employees to get a Microsoft award, doesn’t it? It’s no secret that Microsoft and Google are fierce competitors. Microsoft is trying to gain shares of the online advertisement business, a multi-billion market, while Google have started gaining shares of markets that Microsoft have been perusing for years, such as mobile devices and operating systems. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the competition is a good thing for me as a consumer and I even endorse it, but I was hoping it didn’t have an effect on the employees of said companies.

I know a lot of people in the .net community and many of them work for Microsoft. There doesn’t appear to be a problem with people at Microsoft owning Apple hardware such as laptops, iPhones and iPods, not does there appear to be a problem with them using the Google search engine instead of Bing. I hope I’m wrong about this, surly Google can’t be that restrictive when it comes to their employees choice of hardware and platforms?

I hope the people at Google wake up and have a change of heart, Jon deserves to receive recognition for his contributions to the .net community despite who he works for. It can’t have been a secret who he was, what he did and that he was an MVP when he got hired.

Jon Skeet for MVP

I thought it would be best if I broke my recent silence. I’ve not abandoned this blog, not even by a long shot. I got a couple of weeks of from work and I’ve been spending it with my family and I also started working on a MEF project that (modestly speaking) has grown quite a bit and it keeps surprising me each day with even more growth.

I’ve developing a custom model for MEF, primarily to give me a rock solid understanding of how MEF operates under the hood and believe me I’ve probably seen every single line of code in MEF at least 100 times by now.

It’s a challenge but fortunately I’ve been blessed with the ability to talk to Glenn Block, program manager of the MEF team, a couple of times and we’ve even done a couple of pairing sessions where I showed him my work and he offered some very valuable feedback and suggestions.

The idea is to place the final product in the MEFContrib project and also write a blog series on the how it was done and what hurdles that had to be done. The good thing is that I’m trying to do this in a generic fashion so others can save themselves the trouble and just build on top (or along side) of my extension.

More to come on this in a not too distant future.

Approximately three years ago, Robert wrote the first entry in his blog. Since then many more have followed and as a developer evangelist at Microsoft Sweden he’s pretty much setup never to run out of things to blog about.

Just like his co-worker Johan Lindfors, Robert spends a lot of time on the road, travelling from city to city, all around the year, brining the information to customers and partners.

Robert is also a regular co-host of the Swedish MSDN Radio podcast and author on the swedish MSDN website. You can also check out interviews, by Robert, on the swedish MSND TV section of Channel 9

What got you into blogging?

I started blogging after realizing how much other blogs helped me in my daily work. I wanted to share some of the ideas I had, and also write about solutions to different problems I stumbled upon, working as a system integrator and consultant at the time. That and being bit of a exhibitionist is what got me started.

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

Once in a while someone spins up a new comment thread on the blog and that’s always nice. I get more contact mails from the blog than comments though. I often get mails with comments and questions on the things I write about in the blog which I find a bit odd. Why not put it in a comment so more people can take part in the discussion?

What profile do you try and give your blog?

I have a very technical profile on my blog, focusing on news, tips and tricks, code examples and other useful resources - on development In general and the Microsoft platform in particular. It is also a repository for various material that I produce, like slide decks and demo code from our road shows and seminars. From time to time I write about more personal stuff, but I really don’t want to make my blog too personal (although I think I have a personal way of writing about technical stuff).

How has blogging affected the way you work?

Before I joined Microsoft blogging was mostly a personal interest. Although my employer at the time did host my blog on their site and also used my blog in marketing, I didn’t have an outspoken commitment to write blog posts as part of my work role. That changed when I joined Microsoft .

It is now part of what I do in my daily work so I can set aside time to do research and write up posts. It sometimes takes more time than you plan to write the longer, a bit meatier posts. Especially when writing about security I like to double and triple check on things before I publish.

How has blogging affected the developer community?

I think it has had an tremendous affect on the community. Blogs are now the most important way of getting information and finding ways to tackle different challenges in the daily work as a developer. It has also become an important source when looking for more deeper technical stuff, best practices and experiences from the field - as well as an enormous repository for code sharing.

I think this has speeded up the flow of knowledge through the community, as code and examples on how to accomplish new things get spread really fast. It’s also a way for the community to have a direct open dialog with people at Microsoft about specific technologies in a way that wasn’t possible before the blogs.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

Blogging has made many companies much more transparent and has led to a greater visibility in how the work is being planned and what the roadmaps looks like. Blogging has also affected software companies in a sense that bloggers in the community can raise their voices when they see things they think is not right, and the vendors listen and adjust accordingly if the reactions are strong enough.

This has changed how development frameworks and platforms evolve today, beyond the old ‘get feedback during alpha test’ way of finding out a community opinion.

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

I think blogging ideally should come from a personal interest and a wish to express yourself and share information and ideas. Corporate blogs with people hired to blog professionally tend to be quite boring where the lack of enthusiasm shines through. That said, I definitely think companies in general have lots to gain in allowing and encouraging their employees to blog I they want to.

If nurtured right it can really help the company gain visibility and also position their employees as cunning professionals in their areas.

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

Hmmm… that’s a tough one. In a near future I hope we will see Microformats being used by bloggers more and in creative ways to exchange data between blogs and various programs and services. The micro blogging trend will pass (I think so just because I don’t get it myself :-)

We will probably see even more of a mashup between traditional blogs and social networking sites.

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

Absolutely – one of the more recent ones is a blog post I wrote about a new customer program called ‘BizSpark’ from Microsoft, aiming to help get startups that build applications on our platform up to speed by providing them with free software. Since the posting I’ve helped numerous people from different startups in Sweden to get in contact with the right people to get them into the program, which hopefully helped some of them off to a good start for their business.

Thank you Robert, for taking the time to answer my questions. Stop by Roberts blog to find out more on the things he’s passionate about.

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here

I could tell you that Rob’s a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, or I could tell you that he’s been blogging for an impressive 6 years now. I could, but wouldn’t you rather know of the cool things Rob’s been doing for the developer community?

Back in the day Rob created the Commerce Starter Kit, now know as dashCommerce and lead by Chris Cyvas of Mettle Systems, a great source of information on how to build e-Commerce applications. He also heads the team which is developing SubSonic, which is described as a “Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt” on their website or more commonly known as an open-source data access layer generator with a cool feature set :)

But that’s not all! For the past 9 months Rob’s been working on a new open source commerce application, known as the MCV Storefront. This time Rob decided to screencast the development process, starting from day 1.

It’s being built on the new ASP.NET MVC framework and Rob set out to learn TDD by bravely exposing himself to the community, fully aware that his progress would be monitored by the TDD purists. The series is an awesome project and currently stands at 25 recoded episodes and he frequently has guest appearances by experts in their fields, may times the authors of the frameworks he uses. If you want to learn ASP.NET MVC, you definitely should check it out!

What got you into blogging?

Not sure really. I liked the idea of being able to write ideas online and to also keep a "journal" of sorts. Eventually I realized that if I blogged my ideas and discoveries, I would have a really nice place to look at how I did things before- which has worked out pretty nicely. It happens pretty often where I look up an old blog post to see how I wrote a query or LINQ statement :)

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

People let me know that what I write occasionally helps them - that's pretty good motivation. I also like to write and it gives me an excuse to be creative.

What profile do you try and give your blog?

I try to entertain and inform, mostly entertain though. Writing is tough and I realize people are giving me some minutes out of their day and it better be worth it, so I pay a lot of attention to style and substance.

How has blogging affected the way you work?

A lot. I have my current job due to my blog :)

How has blogging affected the developer community?

If you're asking about my blog - hard to say really. Blogging in general, however, has been tremendously helpful to the developer community. 9 times out of 10 I find answers to technical challenges in blogs - almost never MSDN :) which I think is funny.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

It really helps them support their products, and as you can see companies like Microsoft really benefit from high profile bloggers like Dare Obasanjo, Phil Haack, and Scott Hanselman. Oh yah - and ScottGu :)

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

Absolutely. But they also need to recognize the freedom of the blogger. Microsoft is great in this regard - I can write whatever I want to write about - they're quite tolerant. You can't say that about a lot of tech companies :). If you stifle what the person is capable of writing, you sound like a mouthpiece, which is boring.

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

Bigger and more important.

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

Sure - the MVC Storefront is based on the foundation of blogging. So far it's been a very big success!

I’ve been tracking the MVC Storefront project for a long time now and it was fantastic to get the opportunity to have Rob participate in my interview series, thank you Rob!

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here

Professionally Sara’s the CodePlex evangelist, a program manager at Microsoft who is responsible for the feature development and scheduling for codeplex.com, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. She’s been a blogger for over 5 years now and for the past 16 months she’s been running a Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day series.

Knowing how to get the most out of the tools which you use in your daily work is a sure way of increasing your over all productivity. The goal of Sara’s blog is to help you get the most out of Visual Studio by sharing an endless stream of Tips & Tricks on how to perform the daily tasks in a more efficient way.

Do you, for example, know the keyboard shortcut for bringing up the Quick Watch window? Or d0 you know how to disable the “Script Debugging Disabled” warning message that you get in VS2008 when you try to debug JavaScript and script debugging is disabled in IE? Or perhaps you’ve had a need to edit your project file and couldn’t figure out how to do it from inside of Visual Studio?

This is the sort of stuff Sara teaches you to do in her blog! By the way the answers can be fund here, here and here (in the order of the questions asked above).

Sara’s also the author of the book Microsoft Visual Studio Tips – 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity, the paper version of here blog. She generously donates all the proceeds from the book to a scholarship fund to send people from her hometown to collage, with Microsoft marching the donation!

What got you into blogging?

Back in 2003, I was driving the effort to make Visual Studio accessible to developers who are blind or have low vision. My manager at the time suggested starting a blog to share some of my accessibility knowledge. My first post was on how to do accessibility testing, which was well received. So, that was all it really took, and I was hooked. I was blogger #300ish on what would later become blogs.msdn.com.

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

Being able to share what I’m learning internally at Microsoft with the outside world. Blogging is very an effective tool for sharing knowledge. Also, I’m a very outgoing, talkative introvert, so blogging allows me to talk to my heart’s content without that “draining” feeling afterwards. =)

What profile do you try and give your blog?

Absolutely no politics or religion. My mom is Catholic, and my dad is Jewish and served on my hometown’s city council for most of my childhood. I figured if that policy worked for me growing up, it’ll work for me now. But beyond that, anything is fair game, provided there’s something that readers could benefit from it.

How has blogging affected the way you work?

There’s always the question in my head of “Should I blog this?” The question is just a part of the way I work, just like responding to email or using a mouse. It’s become second nature for me to question whether there’s a benefit to sharing this information with others.

How has blogging affected the developer community?

Personally, I think the best thing that blogging has done is given the developer community a voice to express their thoughts and feelings about Microsoft products, especially when changes are made based on that feedback.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

This question makes me wonder how many people nowadays check whether the software company has a blog when making a purchasing decision. Of course, there are numerous factors that go into deciding whether to make a purchase. But in my opinion, an active blog that is taking into account customer feedback would indicate to me a company that values its customers’ satisfaction.

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

No. I think employers should support their developers if they choose to blog and maybe even ask their developers to consider it, but “encouraging” might be taking it a single step too far. Blogging isn’t for everyone, and not everyone will be comfortable doing it. And that’s totally cool. To me, encouraging means to gently push someone in a direction that you know they will benefit from, like trying a new cuisine or studying hard for an exam. Since not everyone benefits from the same activities in the same manner, it’s best for employers to support blogging activities, and encourage their bloggers to keep going.

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

Given the rise of twitter and facebook, it will be interesting to see what happens to the amount of personal content on blogs. Maybe blogs will turn into purely How To or Do It Yourself content, like a virtual notebook that anyone is able to read, and sites like facebook become the person’s primary portal for all information, including personal info. To me at least, this is what seems to be happening with my blog. But then again, writing a daily series on your blog for 16 months makes you want to blog as little as possible outside of it. =)

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

There are way too many to share! But obviously there’s the scholarship fund. Then there was the time I blogged about what the conditions were like in my hometown immediately following Hurricane Katrina, which people still to this day thank me for doing, as (little did I know) it was their only source of info about the area. But getting back to a more developer focus, there’s the Tip of the Day which now no one should ever have to wonder “hmm, I can’t figure out what this option is supposed to do?” I could go on for hours, but fortunately it is past my bedtime.

And there you have it folk, Sara’s take on blogging! Thank you for sharing your thoughts on blogging with me. If you like Sara’s blog then why not buy a copy of her book and give it someone for Christmas? I hope Santa brings me a copy :)

Make sure to stop by her blog for a great Visual Studio Tips & Tricks resource!

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here.

If you’ve been reading up on the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework by Microsoft then I’m confident to say that you’ve probably come across Phil’s name at least once. If you haven’t you’ve not done enough research on the framework!

Phil join Microsoft little more than a year ago as  a senior program manager, responsible for the ASP.NET MVC framework project. He’s managed to get an impressive 7 (!) years of blogging behind him and is still going strong – a prime candidate for this interview series.

On his spare time he leads the development of the popular blogging platform Subtext, which is based on a fork of the .TEXT blogging platform source code (you can read more about the forking here). Of course Phil powers his own blog using subtext and if I ever do get the opportunity to host my own blog I will definitely be trying it out, until then blogspot will just have to do ;)

What got you into blogging?

Originally, blogging was just a way to keep friends back home in Alaska (as well as those in Los Angeles) up to speed with what I was up to and as a way of keeping my coding skills sharp. I started a simple classic ASP blog back in 2001, but it wasn’t until when ASP.NET came out that I really got into blogging in a big way. That was when I discovered .TEXT. By then, I was really passionate about software and wanted to share that passion with others.

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

Commenters and other bloggers, mostly. I love getting insightful interesting feedback from commenters as well as responses from other bloggers to the things I write about. It really creates this feeling that I’m part of a larger community of like minded developers all striving to move the craft forward and better ourselves. I love hearing stories about how someone tried to solve a difficult problem and found a blog post of mine that helped them through it.

Of course, even without other people reading my blog, I’d probably still write because I enjoy the process of writing. It often helps me to cement my thinking on topics and the act of explaining something often helps one to really grok it.

What profile do you try and give your blog?

My blog covers software development and technology in general, though I obviously tend to focus on .NET and ASP.NET topics. I try to keep a light tone in which I don’t take myself, nor the topics I write about, too seriously. After all, it’s not life or death matter we deal with on a day to day basis. I do share personal items and other issues of broader interest once in a while.

How has blogging affected the way you work?

As I work on items I’m constantly thinking of a blogging angle. “Oh, is that interesting enough to write about? Would this be unfamiliar to many? Can I make it interesting?” I kind of get obnoxious about it where I have too many ideas and I don’t know what to write next. On the flip side, when I’m stuck on a problem, or learning some new technology, I can usually find blog posts that provide very good coverage.

How has blogging affected the developer community?

I think it’s had a tremendous impact. Whenever I’m searching for answers on how to perform a particular task with code, I almost always find the answer in a blog post, not in official documentation etc... It’s created a culture of sharing that is really valuable in that we all lift each other up and make our jobs better for it.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

I don’t think software companies realize just how much they gain from blogging. Sure, there are many companies who use it as a marketing tool or a way to interact with customers, and that’s great. But companies are also deriving value from the fact that these blogs are helping to train their developers in learning new technologies and solving difficult tasks that might have taken many hours of research to figure out.

Note that reading a blog post is no substitute for actually trying things out and gaining experience with techniques and technologies, but it can often provide the nugget of information that gets you over the hump on a particular problem you’re trying to solve when you just need to get it working.Of course that productivity gain is slightly offset by the time spent just reading blogs at work. ;)

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

Yes. Absolutely. Writing code is not the only important task that developers do in their jobs. They need to be able to write and communicate well. Blogging helps that. Also, many employers often have small development teams. Blogging and feeling a part of a larger community is a morale boost. At least it was for me. Not to mention all the other benefits I mentioned earlier. I would never force anyone to blog, but encouraging it is well worth it.

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

I hate trying to predict the future because I’m always wrong. ;)

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

Just recently I was learning more about jQuery plugins and found many examples on blogs on how to integrate various plugins together.

Blogging has definitely affected the evolution of the ASP.NET MVC framework. We have several feedback avenues, forums, blogs, emails, stack overflow. Of these, I think blogging tends to be most impactful in the sense that when someone takes the time to blog an issue, they generally have spent more time thinking about the problem than a quick forum post. So very often, a forum post is a question that’s easily answered, while a blog post seems more likely to point out a flaw that needs addressing.

Thank you to Phil for helping me out with this interview. Check out his blog at haacked.com for a great source of information about the ASP.NET MVC framework and other developer related material.

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here