Saturday, October 31, 2015

Dotnetrocks, a comment, and a mug

On September 24th of last month I got an email from Richard Campbell of DotNetRocks fame that said the following:
Thanks Mark - we read your comment on the show! Send your mailing address to me at richard@pwop.com and we'll send you a mug!
 

My reply to Richard's email was, "This has made my day! ...on a related note, in my day job, I moved to a corporate .Net team about 3 months ago and have been doing C# MVC 5 development utilizing KnockoutJS and a host of other open-source JavaScript frameworks and am loving it! Thanks again as I have been a long-time listener since the early days (in which I remember working in the 1.0 framework)!"
 

If you have not listened to the podcast called .Net Rocks, regardless if you are a .Net developer or not, it is worth your time. They interview and speak on various topics dealing with what is new and innovative in not only the Microsoft space, but other technologies. At the beginning of each show, one listener comment is read on air and that person who authored the comment is sent a .Net Rocks coffee mug. Franky, these are really coveted among .Net programmers who are fans of the show.



The show number in which the comment was read was #1201 and was published on October 7th, 2015.
 

Here is the comment that got read on the show:
Another great shows guys. What was interesting to me in the show was the discussion of the "new Microsoft' with its consideration of other OSs such as Linux. I just read an article that dealt with the relevance of Microsoft being an Open Source company. In short my understanding of the article is that Microsoft is too late to the Open Source ecosystem to make any significant difference in both its marketing reach as well as effect. While I thought the article made salient points such as, "The reason, ultimately, comes down to community," one must not dismiss the large number of MS .Net developers that are both active and adding to the body of both .Net as well as open source frameworks. As a former .Net dev, which has been working in Java and open source technologies for the past 8 years, one thing I well remember is the care of MS with it's developer community. Also, given that Visual Studio 2015 will be including bower and npm as first class package management systems as well as JavaScript as first-class citizens in its ecosystem, it is still too early to consider it "irrelevant." Finally, remember that MS has always been about it's "developers, developers, developers!”

Saturday, August 29, 2015

C# Test for Except And Intersect

I needed to compare two Lists in C# in order to form a new List by comparing the Lists, adding the common elements to the new List, and then adding new elements to the new List. I thought it good to share and perhaps garner some feedback. Here is the NUnit test:

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Cognitive Management (Learn New Skills Faster) - Kathy Sierra (Serious Pony) keynote

Kathy Sierra from her keynote at the Fluent - The Web Platform 2015 Conference. More on this later once I get more from A to C :-)


Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Code.org Repeat Until Loop

The repeat until code block
The “repeat until” block gave many of the students a challenge last week. Just looking at the block it is easy to see how they were confused. We will be using puzzle 15 of 20 in this example of the “repeat until” block located at http://studio.code.org/hoc/15.1
Here the steps in the repeat block are repeated until you get to the sunflower. Here is what is what is happening in the repeat until block above:
  1. Did you get the sunflower?
    1. If not, move forward a step and go to number 2 below.
    2. If yes, then you are finished so get out of the "repeat block" and eat that sunflower!
  2. Is there a path to the right of me?
    1. If yes, turn right.
  3. Go back to number 1 and "repeat" the steps.
1. Chris Bosh, NBA star of the Miami Heat, explains this code block at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2hdlhDYICw.

The above section can be used as a handout to the class.

When a student successfully runs puzzle 15 and they select the Show Code button in the popup, here is the code that is displayed:











Here is a section from some JavaScript code that I created to simulate the repeat block:


















Here is how that would look for each step on the maze:














I have created a JavaScript example that can be run that simulates a right turn at every 2 steps. Here is the text outcome of the file:
One step forward....
Is there a path to my right?
No path to the right.
One step forward....
Is there a path to my right?
****************
Yes! Turn right.
****************
One step forward....
Is there a path to my right?
No path to the right.
One step forward....
Is there a path to my right?
****************
Yes! Turn right.
****************
One step forward....
Is there a path to my right?
No path to the right.
One step forward....
Is there a path to my right?
No path to the right.
****************
****************
You made it!
****************
****************