I am happy to announce that Lextrico will be running Udi Dahan’s 3 Day Enterprise 
Development with NServiceBus course in Melbourne between the 7th and 9th of November 2011. The course will be delivered by Mark Harris and myself and will run at Karstens Training facility in Queen St Melbourne. Morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea are all catered for and included in the registration cost which is now open here.
Look forward to seeing you there!
I will be speaking at the September meeting of the alt.Net User group about Task Based user interfaces, their benefits and how explicitly modelled code can make the job easier, more manageable and lead to systems that leave the business in control. I will also discuss how this approach can leverage alternative patterns to MVVM and work hand in hand with messaging.
I started a series of posts on this topic recently if you are interested in a preview of the subject matter. You can register here.
Most developers spend a lot of time learning. Who can claim an entire lifetime career invested in a single language, or platform?…VB6 to C# to TSQL to JavaScript to Ruby and so on. Sure there are plenty of professions that don’t necessitate quite the same level of time investment in learning the tools of a ‘craft’, but if you stand still you should expect to go nowhere.
I have worked with lots of different types over the years and developers are no different to
most, there will always be people at work who think they are simply ‘entitled’, owed a sweet ride; some think their employers owe it to them, others think their colleagues do and in society some think their government does. Lately with the whole Windows 8, Silverlight / WPF ‘will they’, ‘wont they’ deliberations in the developer community, there has been some resentful noises emanating from developers who feel left behind by Microsoft who have gone as far to express fear for their careers and encouraged others to follow suit. I find this staggering, lacking self belief, lazy and in some cases cynical attention seeking rabble rousing.
I have invested plenty in WPF but when it comes down to it, if I have to learn something new because there is simply something better?…then I welcome the education. Perhaps had I been ahead of my time I might have incited a riot when VB6 was outmoded by .NET 1.0, instead I chose to see it as an opportunity, at the time I was faced with either moving on to Java, Swing AWT , JSP and J2EE or to .NET, WinForms, ASP.Net and all the wonderment of web services and remoting (tongue firmly plated in cheek).
Personally I don’t believe Microsoft is about to abandon XAML but if they do then I will treat it as an opportunity and expect that history will show me not to be alone.
