Can't Grok, Won't Grok

So, tonight I had a RCP session with @JohnnoNolan – we decided that for our topic, we would like to “File > New Project” and see what it is like to replace the default ViewEngine in ASP.NET MVC with the Spark View Engine . Why Spark View Engine? I have heard a lot of buzz about it from the developer community. Also, I heard the podcast on Hanselminutes and the notion of it all just sat right with me - there shouldn’t be such an epic battle between HTML/C# in your views. Our sole purpose in the View is to render HTML based on some model data – make it easy . RCP Session Aims Neither myself or Johnno had any real experience with Spark before the session. As a starting point, I thought it would be good to cover what I would consider to be the “basics” for views: Using variables from ViewData. Using strongly-typed model data. Using master pages. I decided to spend 1 hour before the session having a quick run-through of the install process and the basics in th...

Following on from a great three-way RCP session , wanting to keep the idea of remote programming sessions going - I’ve had another! This one was a session with a twist. There was an “Open Spaces” session planned for Saturday – sadly though, the day was cancelled. So, thanks to the marvel that is Twitter - myself, Jeremy Skinner ( @JeremySkinner ) and Mark Embling ( @splashtech ) decided (pretty much on a whim) that we will have an “Open Spaces” style RCP* session. * Still struggling to come up with a different name for this style of geek get-together.. Loose Plan Now, “Open Spaces” sessions really do rely on having, well, spaces . And since we are each sat in our home offices this proved interesting. Loosely, this is what we decided before the session: We each throw down some ideas of sessions we would like to complete (we listed these in Google Wave). We would pick the sessions we want to do as-and-when. If a session was not proving useful or productive, we wo...

Following on from my first post on “ Remote Pairing ”, last night I took part in my first coding “ménage-et-trois”, without even having other people in the room! Sara Stephens ( @SaraS85 ) and Johnno Nolan ( @JohnnoNolan ) were kind enough to join in a 3-way “remote collaborative programming” session – now I am not sure if we are to coin this or try and get it to stick, but let’s see what happens. Session Overview We pretty much used the same tools that me and Johnno used in the remote pairing session , primarily: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 (IDE) Git (Source Control) Live SharedView (Screen/Attachment Sharing) NUnit (Unit Testing Framework) GitHub (Git Repository Hosting) Skype (Voice Comms) Google Wave * (Session Planning) * Feel free to ping me on Twitter or something if you need an invite, I have some going, just drop us your email and I will get it sent (be warned it takes a LONG time). The only really difference is Skype, since...