ASP.NET Related Skills & Technologies

ASP.NET on MindMup

For the last few weeks I've been compiling a list of skills and technologies that have been listed in job postings in the Nashville area for ASP.NET Web Developers. As you can see in the mindmap I made with MindMup (go ahead and pan around in there, it's fun), the desired skill set for web developers these days tends to be rather meaty.

While we're actively learning and working with a good number of these technologies here at camp, it seems rather daunting to try and learn all of them in nine weeks. That's part of the reason I've decided to stay on for another three weeks for the Coder Camps "Master's Program". This will give me an extra three weeks to work on my personal project and focus on learning some of these additional skills that are in demand right now in and around Nashville.

Another part of the Masters Program is that I've been asked to help out with the new troop that came in this week. So far, they're showing a lot of potential and hard work, and I can imagine I'll be learning a lot from them. Even though I'll be spending Thanksgiving here in Texas this year, I believe the opportunity to learn and hone my skills even further will be worth it.

The Rubber Meets the Road

Fund.io Admin Dashboard

So, I'm in the 4th week here at Coder Camps. Time to post on the blog has become scarce, but we're moving forward on the Fund.io Admin Dashboard. Josh Thoyakulathu, my paired programming partner, and I have been working on a Flagged comments page that will be used by Admin users to approve or reject flagged comments from the front-end of the website.

The daily schedule we've adopted is:

• Stand-up meetings to coordinate what we've done and where we're going as a group
• Function writing practice
• Short, focused lectures
• Paired programming 

After that, we're on our own. I'm continuing to use the Pluralsight videos in addition to sites like Microsoft Developer Network & StackOverflow to fill in the gaps and as a goto for finding solutions to problems. Next up, learning how to create AJAX calls to populate our table on the fly. 

The deeper I get into this stuff, the more I realize how much actually goes on behind the scenes. Somewhere, behind all these magically delicious gadgets and gizmos of the web, are lines of code that someone wrote. My hat is off to these wizards. I hope they don't mind me standing on their shoulders.

Bugs Be Gone!

Week 3 has been all about jumping into an existing project, finding your way around the code, and making changes or tweaks in the HTML, CSS, or C# to fix bugs or make things look better. It has been great practice for troubleshooting and getting around in a big application. Visual Studio's Page Inspector tool, as well as the search function of the Solution Explorer have been a big help for me. Working together and individually, we've been able to fine tune some of the features originally built by the two previous troops.

This week I also started working on my personal project, Goalizr. Using Entity Framework code-first, I created my classes and database, and then seeded the database with some initial data for testing. My tables include Goals, Activities, and Emotions. I also needed to create some intermediary classes for GoalActivities and ActivityEmotions, so that I can associate multiple Activities to each Goal, and likewise, multiple Emotions to each Activity. We'll be busy the next few weeks creating the Fundio admin dashboard, but I want to keep working on Goalizr when I have the time so that I can have a solid application in my portfolio by the time I finish camp.

We also had a hiring day on Thursday, where recruiters and potential employers are invited to the school to conduct interviews and give us the opportunity to meet with folks in the industry face to face. I met some top-notch people from companies in the Houston area. One company, Assemble Systems, has a web application product that integrates 3D CAD drawings into an online viewer for Building Information Management. As I get closer to the end of camp, I'll definitely be looking into companies like this that combine CAD & GIS into web-based software solutions. There is some amazing new technology that's being developed right now, and I'd love to be a part of it.

On a sad note, we said goodbye to some of the graduates of one of the other troops. They were a huge help to us these last three weeks, and I wish them the best of luck on their own new career paths.

Team Web Development

As we move into week 3 of the Coder Camps ASP.NET MVC program, we're starting to put all the pieces of the stack together and begin work on our group project. The initial scope of our project was to build the admin area of the Fund.io website. Now, we have been asked to help finish testing and debugging the entire application, in addition to the admin area.

We'll be working as a collaborative development team on this project using Team Foundation Server (TFS). Some of the benefits of TFS are source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking. The farther I get into this technology, the more impressed I am with Microsoft's suite of development tools. While I've been a long-time user of Windows and Office (and a big fan of their Flight Simulator!), until now I never really saw the amazing things they've been cooking up for software developers over the years.

M R Ducks

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
-Winston Churchill

Yesterday, our instructor (and founder of Coder Camps) David Graham, promised to blow our minds... And he delivered. But somewhere nestled in our discussion on Adapters, Repository Patterns & Unit Testing, we had a great talk about failure, success, and the Entrepreneurial Spirit.

David, an admitted serial entrepreneur, shared with us his experiences trying out different business ideas and how his ability to forget the failures has helped him on his path to success. One of these, a camping goods store, had the humorous advertising campaign written on the board.

I can certainly relate to dealing with failures, as most people can. And among our troop, it seemed to be unanimous that getting over failure is a part of life, and is often a prerequisite to success.

So often, we find something or someone to blame for our failures, and let it paralyze us. It's much harder (but in the end more rewarding) to take responsibility for our failures, and learn to treat each failure as a stepping stone to success.

Week 2 Progress & Looking Ahead

Goalizr.com - Making Goals Happen

Classes continue to explore the tools and techniques used by professional web developers to build dependable and robust applications. Every night we work on homework assignments that can take up to 3 hours to complete. In the morning we review the previous night's assignment, and then move right into new material for the rest of the day.

Our class works really well together, finding solutions to problems and sharing resources to help build our skills. And, as always, the instructors and other troops are more than willing to offer help when needed. Thanks everyone! I feel like all the collaboration will give us a leg-up in our careers as web developers.

Every day has been a challenge, but also rewarding. I'm starting to get really excited about bringing all this together and start working on our class and personal projects. I've got a couple of ideas for a personal project. One is an online/mobile goal tracker app with novel features that utilize the lastest research in goal achievement. It has to be something I can get up and running (think Alpha) in the last three weeks of camp, so I'll post more information when we get closer.

Got SQL?

Day 6 we covered the nuts and bolts of SQL (often pronounced "sequel" ), which is a special-purpose programming language used for managing databases. Today (Day 7), we're going deeper into working with databases in Visual Studio and play around with Entity Framework. I say play with caution, however, as databases are a critical component of web development because they hold all the important stuff. Our instructor showed us how easy it it to delete an entire database by accident, so we're sitting on the edge of our seats for this one.

Saturday Afternoon Study Session

Going through tutorials today. This morning we built a website that would be used by a school to add and edit student information within a database. Next up: An app to present movie listings with the ability to create, read, update and delete the movie records (That's CRUD for short, by the way.)

Week 1 Recap

Here's a view of the lake behind Pearland Town Center. I've been trying to offset all the chair-time with some running in the afternoons, and this is a great place to get out into the sunshine after a long day of coding.

Today, we reviewed a lot of what we did this week, discussed our progress with the group, and came up with a schedule for the weekend. One of the prior groups' students, Andy, is going to come in tomorrow for a Q&A, and help us tackle some of the more difficult subjects. On our own, most of us are watching C# & ASP.NET videos to drill on the basics. From talking with students in the other groups, this seems to be the best way to learn the material without getting behind.

Also, we had a good discussion about the job market for web software developers, potential interview questions we should be prepared for, and how to develop a positive, problem-solving mindset that is essential to being a successful developer.

Classes, Methods & Functions Oh My!

Day 3 & 4 were crazy. Tons of material is being covered and I've never had to push myself this hard to learn something new. From extension methods to polymorphism, we've been up to our necks in code. Building our first "app" was rewarding, though. It's not completely functional, but my partner and I managed to get it fleshed out pretty good. It's a simple checklist app that will eventually let you add items to the checklist and send the list to an email address. Yesterday, we had visitors from Tsevo, a Houston based software development company, give us a presentation on some of their projects as well as answer questions about starting a career as a junior developer. Very informative, and they showed us some pretty cool examples of what's possible with the skills we're learning.

Day Two - More C# & Model Diagramming

So today we jumped into the basics of Object Oriented Programming, classes, properties and more. Our team worked on a model diagram similar to this one (my homework assignment) for Fund.io and started applying some of the programming concepts to real world applications. I was familiar with implementing a shopping cart plugin into a website, but learning to build them is quite different!