Now the evening is comming to a close, on what has been a really interesting day. Since my last post I went to 4 very different talks on Raspberry PI, Myths of project management, No SQL and lastly Damien Conway on Contemporal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Topoligically Connected Quantum-Relative Parallel Spacetimes – made easy! So I got to get around very different aspects of life in the software industry.

Conways talk was no doubt the most crazy talk I have ever seen, and I don’t even want to know how much time has gone into preparing that talk. I can safely say it is the geekiest moment of the conference so far, and I am sure my brother in law who works with nuclear physics would have laughed his ass off as much as I did.

After the talks were done I went around and visited some of the stands, where especially the MongoDB stand cought my interest. I have really enjoyed working with MongoDB and I got to hear more about what they are working on, so that was brilliant. A key point for me is that they are doing full-text search in vNext, making it a lot more interesting in the search space that I recently released a whitepaper on.

The evening was then spent at the conference party, where I sat between two speakers, Steve Vinoski and Matt Heitzenroder. Matt was in the NoSQL panel that I was at earlier, and Steve is a legend for the guys in the Erlang and Riak space. So I had a really nice evening hearing about how they experience a conference, and the challanges they have.

Tomorrow I will probably be blogging a bit less I think, because I will be preparing and doing my first ever interview. I could not ask for a better opportunity as I will be talking to Scott Hanselman, which means I will start out interviewing the speaker and blogger I respect most of all.

First I decided to check out the javascript track, with a talk by Kasper Lund on Dart and performance optimizing for effecient javascript. It was a very technical talk that shortly covered some of the reasons they are building Dart and then went on to revolve around how Dart performes and especially the JavaScript it can compile into. I was hoping to ge proven wrong in some of my bad feelings about Dart, with reguard to how viable it is as a replacement for JavaScript in the mainstream world. Sadly this didn’t happen because when he was challanged on inter-op with JavaScript libraries the story is that it is hard to, but can be done. So the talk was interesting but I am still a long way from being persuaded into spending time with Dart myself.

After Kaspers talk I stayed for a talk about dynamic languages in production. It was a very energetic performance, and a fun talk for a pretty lowlevel subject. The central topic of the talk was debugging dynamic languages in a production environment. This has historically been very hard, but they have made some strides toward making it possible in Node, through the analysis of dump files and looking instrumentation of applications.

So for now it has been really interesting, but I will be hoping for more takeaways that I can use in my everyday job. I thought there would actually be more of that in this track, but it has not been the case so far..

As with most conferences GOTO started with a program talk followed by the first keynote. Today’s keynote was by Rick Falkvinge from the pirate party about “The red flags on the internet”. It was a very interesting keynote comparing some industries of today with industries that have died out because they refused to keep up with technological advances and tried to protect their own interests by limiting the interests of the public. The comparisons went back to the catholic church and governments who tried to limit the printing press, to the railroad and stage coach who  were behind the red flags act of 1865.

The red flags act said that any horseless carriage should have at least a 3 person crew, on of them walking in front of the automobile waveing a red flag. More recently a comparison was made to Polaroid and Kodak who revolutionized digital photography, but ultimately went bankrupt, arguing that they died out because they ignored technological advances and took a protectionist approach.

Falkvinge went on to make some predictions about which industries will suffer the same fate. The obvious industries being postal services, news services and telco, who are under a lot of pressure due to technological advances, making them effectively obsolute. In the more far out predictions department he predicted the demise of banking due to crypto currencies and even governments do to technological advances that allow government to be done by the public.

The overall point of the talk was that we should protect the internet as it is today, and that it is in no way a new tendency that companies and governments try to limit the publics access to information and new technology. Throwing tantrums in public to get tax payer money for protecting against some theoretical danger we are supposedly facing is a pattern we see all the time. So it is probably something we will continue to see, but it is worth being aware of.

It was fun to see a talk that I think would be pretty controversial in some places, but probably not as much at a developer conference.

Sorry but I just can’t help myself when a crazy sentence like the headline presents itself and actually makes sense. None the less it is a question I have been asking myself each year while I have been living and working in Aarhus. Every year something has kept me from going to GOTO – mostly some combination of the attendence fee and bad timing of other things I have been doing. This year I had kind of dismissed it having already gone to TechEd, so I figured my budget for conferences was spent.

Luckily I was offered to go to GOTO for free as a blogger by the kind folks at Trifork. More...

I had the pleasure of going to TechEd North America 2012 in Orlando. With a lot of interesting news comming out of Microsoft it was 5 very exciting days. While I was away I did some blogging on the company blog (in danish).

As you might expect Azure and Windows Metro style design were the big topics of the conference. With Azure finally taking a direction that I think makes it interesting, and Windows 8 in general looking like the next milestone for Microsoft it was really good.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the first ANUG lightning talk this wednesday. It was a fun to dive into the subtle differences between Nancy, ServiceStack and WebAPI. As with everything else – it is always more fun when you win the battle of course :)

The demo and slides are available at dotnetnerd.dk/talks/webapi.zip - along with a small sample of using type providers in F# for building a WebAPI service.

Later this month on the 25th I will be speaking along with two other speakers about webframeworks at an ANUG meeting. The frameworks covered are ServiceStack, Nancy and WebAPI where I will cover the latter.

While I have been preparing my eye cought a new feature in F#, which I think is one of the first really good stories for F# that makes sence outside akademia and science. Type Providers give us a way to access data sources that provide its own metadata, and this fits nicely with building WebAPI services.

On a current project I have decided to use NancyFx for services that expose data to the client via Ajax. The solution already uses Umbraco for CMS capabilities and everything is wired up using Castle Windsor for DI.

From the start I was hoping to just install the nuget packages for hosting in an ASP.NET application and for bootstrapping with Windsor. As it turned out neither worked in my case.
Getting Nancy to run alongside an existing site is pretty well documented, so that went pretty smoothly, once I gave up on the package and just followed the documentation.

More...

Prelude

The last year I have been posting more or less the same blogposts here and at blog.vertica.dk – but my plan is to stop that going forward. I have been asked to do more blogging in Danish, and that fits pretty well with the fact that I have been postponing making a decision on which blog to stick with, since I don’t care much for the cross posting. So going forward this blog will be kept in English and It will contain the topics that are either micro-posts or a bit off topic for what I do at Vertica. So lets get started!

Mini-Profiler colliding with Umbraco

For some time I have been using the MVC-Mini-Profiler, to get a quick look at how my pages perform during development. The good thing about the mini-profiler is that it is so light weight, requires little setup and it is a lot less intrusive than most profiling tools.

In spite of its name the profiler works just fine with regular ASP.NET websites and applications, however I did run into a little twist when using it with Umbraco, which is what I want to share today.

To get started using  mini-profiler you simply add the nuget package to your project, and do the regular setup with adding scripts and calling start and stop methods on the profiler.  If you run your site now, nothing will happen that is visible to the naked eye – doh!

The solution

If you take a look at the DOM by using your favorite browsers developer-tools/firebug you will see that some container elements have been added to the page but with no content. This is because the elements are loaded asynchronously, but as the tab in your developer-tool that shows network traffic shows the call to mini-profiler-results returns a 404.

So as you may have guessed by now if you are used to working with Umbraco, you also need to add the mini-profiler-results to the umbracoReservedUrls in the web.config making it look something like this:

<add key="umbracoReservedUrls" value="~/config/splashes/booting.aspx,~/install/default.aspx,~/config/splashes/noNodes.aspx,~/mini-profiler-results" />

Now if you run the site, you should get the profiler box in the top-left corner of the site, and you are ready to go hunting for performance bottlenecks.

So, the time has come to look back on the year that has passed, and reflect a bit. I am usually more focused on making plans than writing history books, but once in a while it can be beneficial to take a look at what you have been doing, so you can make better conscious choices in the future. I do tend to get lost in all my little projects, so sometimes it is a nice reminder to look back and get some ideas of why the year went by so fast.

So what were the more interesting parts of my year? Well, I

• Built MiniMe, which has had > 370 downloads since july and a couple of contributors.
• Blogged here and on blog.vertica.dk – writing 18 blog posts total. Getting a pat on the shoulder as blogger of the year at Vertica, along with another good colleague.
• Hosted an ANUG code camp on IronRuby.
• Did a ANUG podcast about the NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook.
• Played around with a bunch of technologies, and found use for some of them at work – doing faceted search with MongoDB and KnockoutJS as one of the more exciting solutions.
• Did hobby projects to fool around with WebMatrix, MVC3 and Entity Framework.
• Read a handfull of books on webdevelopment rangeing from Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial to Dependency Injection in .NET.
• Attended HTML5 fasttrack, Commerce Server Training and a bunch of ANUG and Trifork events and code camps.
• Was SEEE certified – mostly getting to know why not to use it.
• Helped win the e-commerce award for start-ups in Denmark – which I actually worked on last year.
• My first Windows Phone 7 app Blue Orb Player just turned one year and has been installed from marketplace > 285 times.

At work it has been a pretty versatile year, where I have had some consultant tasks, worked with Windows CE and Silverlight as well as the more regular ASP.NET projects - where BD, Bolia and Trollbeads have taken up the most of my time. I can only hope that 2012 will be just as exciting and with HTML5, devices and more client driven solutions shaping up to become important themes, I will probably have as much fun as I did this year.

Merry xmas and happy new year everyone :)